John Cage and Mushroom X
As one progresses further into the alien labyrinth of the mycological kingdom, the “non-logic” of mycelium begins to influence and overtake your own human thought processes. In the advanced stages of Mycelium Teleology this results in a peculiar type of thought known as Mushroom Thinking.
A classic example of Mushroom Thinking can be found in the life and work of John Cage.
The general entrance (or path) that John Cage took into this area of the mycological kingdom, is through its shear taxonomic scale. More specifically John Cage took the literal path of wandering through the actual forest looking for actual mushrooms of any variety at all. Both of these paths are an example of what we have referred to elsewhere as the fourteen thousand epiphanies.
A tension becomes evident here between John Cage’s fascination of the taxonomic order—that is the representation of real entities by science—and the indeterminate experience of the forest itself. We can see this tension play out in two related anecdotes.
1. In 1954 wandering about in the forest near Stony Point, NY John Cage mistakenly ate the poisonous hellebore plant thinking that it was skunk cabbage. He became deathly ill, was rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped. He claims that had he been delayed by 15 minutes he would have died.
2. This failure of taxonomy leading to a near-death experience seems to have increased his interest in taxonomy and in 1959 John Cage won five million lire on an Italian gameshow by answering correctly a series of questions about mushrooms. In a remarkable moment he recited from memory, in alphabetical order, all 24 names of the white spored Agaricus.
And yet it is clear from his musical composition that, despite John Cage’s pseudo-academic interest in the brute taxonomical representation of mushrooms, he valued the indeterminacy of mushrooms far above the certainties of taxonomy.
Our reliance upon knowledge claims make the certainties of taxonomy tautological; that is, they become self-sufficient and hallucinatory. By knowing just how phantasmagoric the construction of our knowledge claims are, we may assume that any real entity may very probably elude our knowledge claims.
One of the greatest taxonomic blunders of western science took place when mushrooms were determined, by no less a figure than Aristotle, to be of the plant kingdom. We have only now, some 2300 years later, discovered that this is not the case. Mushrooms and plants, though they share a great deal of genetic material and are often symbiotic, have radically separate kingdoms; eg: mushrooms do not rely upon photosynthesis, plants do not typically eat meat. Based upon the new-formed chasm of what else we do not know about mushrooms, we may conclude that we now live in the emergent era of mushroom x.
In the life and work of John Cage mushroom x became a guiding figure. Though John Cage referred to his mushroom fascination as a “hobby,” it is clear in retrospect that this hobby was something more of a practice. Mycological indeterminacy as practice is the tension arising between the taxonomic study of mushrooms and the indeterminate encounters with real mushrooms in a real forest. He sums up the indeterminacy of these encounters with his concise translation of a Basho haiku:
And yet the study of taxonomy was necessary here because John Cage sought out mushrooms in order to cook and eat them. This was a practice that John Cage began at a very young age in the forests above Carmel California, when, not having enough money to feed himself, he discovered that he could find mushrooms to eat in the woods and fields. He pursued this practice and study for the rest of his life, often cooking up foraged mushrooms for friends and eventually teaching mycology at NYU and forming the NY Mycological Society.
An obvious example of mushroom x in the work of John Cage is the musical piece Indeterminacy. This work consists of a stack of very short mushroom stories that are selected and read at random with subsequent random musical interludes. No one performance of Indeterminacy is ever the same. It should be noted that this piece in particular and the notion of indeterminacy in general was inspired also by the ancient Chinese divination text The I Ching—more on this text soon.
Likewise we can use mushroom x to read John Cage’s most famous work: the notorious 4’33”. Here John Cage deploys Duchamp’s concept of the readymade in order to explode the orthodoxy of classical music as such. The four minutes and 33 seconds of not-playing-the-piano that make up this piece allows for a whole host of other sounds to pop up like mushrooms in the auditorium. Coughing, human rustling, a passing siren, each arise randomly to fulfill the “music” of the composition.
John Cage criticized classical music’s sameness. Classical music creates a self-sufficient world in which it does not have to change; it is maximalist and overdetermined; one might conclude that classical music, in its institutional form, is taxonomic in the extreme. All variables have been reduced to one static and unchanging mode: eg Vivaldi. By contrast 4’33” underdetermines music.
Mushroom x has become music x.
If we maintain this basic structure and pan out beyond the time-scale of the Anthropocene a strange relationship begins to emerge. If, as Mycelium Teleology proposes, the human brain has been engineered by mycelium, then human culture is the sum of that engineering. At this time-scale human culture and mycelium are related, as if in a mirror, so that where mycelium is decentralized, indeterminate and potentially deathless, human culture is the same. From this view the mushroom and the human are equally mirrored; the individual mushroom and the individual human erupt into life, for the briefest of moments, to shed their spores into the ecosystem, distributing the potential for the continuation of the mycelium/culture. From this time-scale all thinking is mushroom thinking.
John Cage, with his own practice of mushroom thinking, operates as a kind of cipher in betwixt mycelium and culture. The spores that John Cage has released into the world have found soil and have become their own decentralized part of the cultural ecosystem.
Late in his life he wrote this in his journal: “Often I go into the woods thinking, after all these years, I ought finally to be bored with fungi. But coming upon just any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again.”
