The Elf of Plants: the Mycorrhizal Movement in Dickinson and Plath
The Elf of Plants: the Mycorrhizal Movement in Dickinson and Plath
One of Emily Dickinson’s recycled envelopes, dating to around 1874, is made of brown paper, the vertical and horizontal milling marks still visible in its texture. She has tilted it on its edge, so that the draft she has pencilled onto it is in a diamond shape - a wilful refusal to be constrained by convention, even when working on a text that was probably intended for her eyes only. The poem is set out like this:
the
Mushroom
is the Elf
of Plants -
At Evening
it is not -
At morning - in a truffled
Hut
It stop opon a spot
As if it tarried always
And yet its’ whole career
Is shorter than a
Snake’s delay
And fleeter
Than a
+
tare -
We now know that mushrooms do indeed tarry always, in mycorrhizal networks underground, and that the things we call “mushrooms” and “toadstools” are merely the fruiting bodies of long-lived, often massive organisms. Some of them engage in complex symbiotic relationships with plants, including trees, and act like a subterranean communication system within woodlands. “Mycelium,” writes the mycological expert Merlin Sheldrake, “describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing, but as a process - an exploratory, irregular tendency.”
Fungi are the pagans and heretics of the natural world: neither plants nor animals, refusing to photosynthesise, eschewing vascular systems, thriving amid nuclear fallout, bending human minds. They are heterodox tares growing amongst the conservative wheat. The Biblical serpent might have thought them suitable ephemeral landmarks beside which to “delay”, and enticing fruits to offer. Their presence is insidious. They live on our skin, between our toes, up our noses. The tendency of fungal hyphae to explore beneath the soil by trial and error, erupting from it only to reproduce, is an analogy for underground resistance movements, and for subterranean systems of knowledge. It is a model for the way Partisans defeated Mussolini, wise-women communicated their knowledge of herbalism, midwifery and abortion, feminists won enough hearts and minds to gain the vote, and the “#metoo” movement gathered momentum before reaching its moral crescendo. It is also a very precise symbol for the way poems form in the creative human consciousness (and even unconscious) before - often quite suddenly - they explode into being: mushrooms of the mind.
*
Some eighty-six years later, Sylvia Plath published her own poem inspired by mushrooms, and like Dickinson, she began with the sudden revelation of the fruiting bodies by the first light of morning, but in the first-person collective voice of the mushrooms: “Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly // Our toes, our noses / Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air.” Her poem emphasises the paradox of their softness and their extraordinary upward-thrusting force. The Shaggy Cap mushroom, Coprinus comatus, a deliciously soft edible species which deliquesces into spore-bearing ink when it decays, is capable of pushing up paving stones when it is emerging: “Soft fists insist on / Heaving the needles, / The leafy bedding, // Even the paving.”
Plath’s poem has often been read as an extended metaphor for the mycelial spread of the women’s liberation movement throughout the 1960s: women who are “Perfectly voiceless”, who “Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow”, who have been accustomed to being “Bland mannered, asking / Little or nothing”, have found a way to “Widen the crannies / shoulder through holes”. It should be noted that in building this metaphor, her understanding of the natural history of fungi is also impeccable, and her choice of comparison quite possibly influenced by Emily Dickinson. Her mushroom uprising multiplies - “So many of us! / So many of us!” - an irresistible horde of “Nudgers and shovers”, “meek” and “edible”, but ready “by morning” to “Inherit the earth” - embodiments of the patience, fortitude and irresistible progress of the quiet ones vaunted by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Our foot’s in the door,” Plath’s mushrooms affirm prosaically as her poem ends. That inexorable appendage would not have been able to intrude so far had it not been for the fact that the walls and paving of the temple of patriarchy had already been thoroughly undermined and intertwined by the mycelia of a women’s revolution.
*
Dickinson re-drafted ‘The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants’ repeatedly. In its final form, the stanzas are set out in their orthodox rhythmic units, as the poem would ultimately be published:
“The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants -
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot
As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay -
And fleeter than a Tare -”
But there is nothing orthodox about the poem’s development, as Dickinson piles up metaphors in praise of the mushroom’s inexorable capacity for hidden growth and sudden manifestation above the earth:
“’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler -
The Germ of Alibi -
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie -
I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit -
This surreptitious Scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.
Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn -
Had Nature an Apostate -
That Mushroom - it is Him!”
When the witches respond to Macbeth’s questioning by vanishing into thin air in the third scene of Shakespeare’s play, Banquo turns to his friend and says, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them. Whither are they vanished?” Mushrooms, like witches, have this quality of appearing and vanishing “Into the air, and what seemed corporal / Melted, as breath into the wind”. Dickinson’s mushroom becomes the archetypal vision of the trickster, the “Juggler” from the Tarot pack, the “Apostate” (she toyed with “Iscariot”), and as such, no doubt, it has her full approval. Its foot, too, is in the door.
*
We can be sure that Dickinson approves of the mushroom’s apostasy from the normal dogmas of the natural world, partly because her own faith resisted doctrinal formulae, and more specifically because her idea of the “Apostate” is reinforced in other poems by her approving references to witches and witchcraft. We should note in passing that Dickinson lived in the state where the Salem witch trials had reached their vindictive end almost two hundred years earlier, and that not long after Dickinson’s death, her family acquired one of the first ever mass-produced souvenir citrus spoons, commemorating that baleful bicentenary. She also lived at a time when spiritualism was not only in vogue, but had the assent of prominent public figures, including the wife of the President of the United States, and this new movement defied scientific and ecclesiastical structures. It also paradoxically empowered women, since their traditional, patriarchally-defined traits, including their supposed passivity, made them uniquely qualified to be mediums. Spiritualism may have had its roots in some of the traditions which were demonised as “witchcraft”, but it had gained a veneer of legitimacy because of this. Witchcraft, by comparison, had always been underground: a mycelial network of forbidden knowledge and belief. Two single stanza poems from late in her life tell us in no uncertain terms where Dickinson’s sympathies lay:
“Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day -”
She found, for instance, that mushroom in her poem, and she kept the Sabbath by staying at home and listening to the Bobolinks in the garden. Witchcraft is embedded not in the spectacular or the ritualistic, but in a quiet, everyday, unassuming spirituality. And:
“Witchcraft has not a pedigree,
‘Tis early as our Breath,
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death - ”
In Dickinson’s later poems, witchcraft is a metaphor the calling of the poet, and the work of witchcraft is the slow mycorrhizal genesis of a poem in her brain. It precedes her and it will outlive her, but her poem is its brief, fleeting manifestation - its fruiting body. Most of its work takes place underground, scarcely observed in its early stages even by the poet. Out of these meek, humble, surreptitious origins in the humus of the poet’s unconscious, something strange, arcane and spectacular emerges. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Dickinson wrote to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and we know, from a poem about the way she was “enchanted” by the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it gave her access to “a Divine insanity”, like “Tomes of solid Witchcraft”. But a poem itself has its origins in a quiet, mouldering exploration.
*
I am writing this at a moment in Australian political history when it looks as though a resounding blow may be dealt to the culture of impunity in the political establishment, specifically as it relates to the acceptance and enabling of sexual abuse in parliament. It is now becoming clear that a mycelial movement has reached a point of critical mass, and it is beginning to erupt. Women in parliament, who have long been expected to keep silent about having been raped or assaulted, have forged connections with each other, and are speaking out. Our prime-minister’s position looks increasingly tenuous as his integrity is thrown into question. Forced onto the defensive, he has blundered into pronouncements which suggest that he is only capable of understanding how rape affects a woman if he considers how it might affect his own daughter. His tone has become petulant, and he feigns a righteousness inconsistent with his previous indifference to the culture of abuse. Unknown to him, the fungal hyphae of truth have undermined his assurance. The paving has been shoved aside, and suddenly, the survivors of abuse are raising a chorus: “So many of us! / So many of us!”
The mycelial connection exists not just between individuals or within the poet’s mind. It transcends time, connecting Dickinson with Plath in its beautiful intertextual web. It descends deeper into history, embracing women who hung from gibbets or were consumed by flames. It feels its way upwards to the present, its tentative fingers transforming into battering rams. It resists erasure, subtly transforming whole landscapes of history, as the underground expansion of fairy-ring fungus is visible from the air as a darker arc of turf. Emily Dickinson saw this truth, and scribbled it on another envelope:
“Long Years apart - can make no
Breach a second cannot fill -
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell -
The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand -”
The poet reaches back through time into the fire which burned the witch. She has turned to ash long ago, and been blown away by the wind - ephemeral in body as the mushroom and its spores. But that is only superficial. Ninety-nine percent of the growth is underground, its girth slowly encompassing the world. The spell is not invalidated. The “meek” are ready to inherit.
One of Emily Dickinson’s recycled envelopes, dating to around 1874, is made of brown paper, the vertical and horizontal milling marks still visible in its texture. She has tilted it on its edge, so that the draft she has pencilled onto it is in a diamond shape - a wilful refusal to be constrained by convention, even when working on a text that was probably intended for her eyes only. The poem is set out like this:
the
Mushroom
is the Elf
of Plants -
At Evening
it is not -
At morning - in a truffled
Hut
It stop opon a spot
As if it tarried always
And yet its’ whole career
Is shorter than a
Snake’s delay
And fleeter
Than a
+
tare -
We now know that mushrooms do indeed tarry always, in mycorrhizal networks underground, and that the things we call “mushrooms” and “toadstools” are merely the fruiting bodies of long-lived, often massive organisms. Some of them engage in complex symbiotic relationships with plants, including trees, and act like a subterranean communication system within woodlands. “Mycelium,” writes the mycological expert Merlin Sheldrake, “describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing, but as a process - an exploratory, irregular tendency.”
Fungi are the pagans and heretics of the natural world: neither plants nor animals, refusing to photosynthesise, eschewing vascular systems, thriving amid nuclear fallout, bending human minds. They are heterodox tares growing amongst the conservative wheat. The Biblical serpent might have thought them suitable ephemeral landmarks beside which to “delay”, and enticing fruits to offer. Their presence is insidious. They live on our skin, between our toes, up our noses. The tendency of fungal hyphae to explore beneath the soil by trial and error, erupting from it only to reproduce, is an analogy for underground resistance movements, and for subterranean systems of knowledge. It is a model for the way Partisans defeated Mussolini, wise-women communicated their knowledge of herbalism, midwifery and abortion, feminists won enough hearts and minds to gain the vote, and the “#metoo” movement gathered momentum before reaching its moral crescendo. It is also a very precise symbol for the way poems form in the creative human consciousness (and even unconscious) before - often quite suddenly - they explode into being: mushrooms of the mind.
*
Some eighty-six years later, Sylvia Plath published her own poem inspired by mushrooms, and like Dickinson, she began with the sudden revelation of the fruiting bodies by the first light of morning, but in the first-person collective voice of the mushrooms: “Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly // Our toes, our noses / Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air.” Her poem emphasises the paradox of their softness and their extraordinary upward-thrusting force. The Shaggy Cap mushroom, Coprinus comatus, a deliciously soft edible species which deliquesces into spore-bearing ink when it decays, is capable of pushing up paving stones when it is emerging: “Soft fists insist on / Heaving the needles, / The leafy bedding, // Even the paving.”
Plath’s poem has often been read as an extended metaphor for the mycelial spread of the women’s liberation movement throughout the 1960s: women who are “Perfectly voiceless”, who “Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow”, who have been accustomed to being “Bland mannered, asking / Little or nothing”, have found a way to “Widen the crannies / shoulder through holes”. It should be noted that in building this metaphor, her understanding of the natural history of fungi is also impeccable, and her choice of comparison quite possibly influenced by Emily Dickinson. Her mushroom uprising multiplies - “So many of us! / So many of us!” - an irresistible horde of “Nudgers and shovers”, “meek” and “edible”, but ready “by morning” to “Inherit the earth” - embodiments of the patience, fortitude and irresistible progress of the quiet ones vaunted by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Our foot’s in the door,” Plath’s mushrooms affirm prosaically as her poem ends. That inexorable appendage would not have been able to intrude so far had it not been for the fact that the walls and paving of the temple of patriarchy had already been thoroughly undermined and intertwined by the mycelia of a women’s revolution.
*
Dickinson re-drafted ‘The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants’ repeatedly. In its final form, the stanzas are set out in their orthodox rhythmic units, as the poem would ultimately be published:
“The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants -
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot
As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay -
And fleeter than a Tare -”
But there is nothing orthodox about the poem’s development, as Dickinson piles up metaphors in praise of the mushroom’s inexorable capacity for hidden growth and sudden manifestation above the earth:
“’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler -
The Germ of Alibi -
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie -
I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit -
This surreptitious Scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.
Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn -
Had Nature an Apostate -
That Mushroom - it is Him!”
When the witches respond to Macbeth’s questioning by vanishing into thin air in the third scene of Shakespeare’s play, Banquo turns to his friend and says, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them. Whither are they vanished?” Mushrooms, like witches, have this quality of appearing and vanishing “Into the air, and what seemed corporal / Melted, as breath into the wind”. Dickinson’s mushroom becomes the archetypal vision of the trickster, the “Juggler” from the Tarot pack, the “Apostate” (she toyed with “Iscariot”), and as such, no doubt, it has her full approval. Its foot, too, is in the door.
*
We can be sure that Dickinson approves of the mushroom’s apostasy from the normal dogmas of the natural world, partly because her own faith resisted doctrinal formulae, and more specifically because her idea of the “Apostate” is reinforced in other poems by her approving references to witches and witchcraft. We should note in passing that Dickinson lived in the state where the Salem witch trials had reached their vindictive end almost two hundred years earlier, and that not long after Dickinson’s death, her family acquired one of the first ever mass-produced souvenir citrus spoons, commemorating that baleful bicentenary. She also lived at a time when spiritualism was not only in vogue, but had the assent of prominent public figures, including the wife of the President of the United States, and this new movement defied scientific and ecclesiastical structures. It also paradoxically empowered women, since their traditional, patriarchally-defined traits, including their supposed passivity, made them uniquely qualified to be mediums. Spiritualism may have had its roots in some of the traditions which were demonised as “witchcraft”, but it had gained a veneer of legitimacy because of this. Witchcraft, by comparison, had always been underground: a mycelial network of forbidden knowledge and belief. Two single stanza poems from late in her life tell us in no uncertain terms where Dickinson’s sympathies lay:
“Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day -”
She found, for instance, that mushroom in her poem, and she kept the Sabbath by staying at home and listening to the Bobolinks in the garden. Witchcraft is embedded not in the spectacular or the ritualistic, but in a quiet, everyday, unassuming spirituality. And:
“Witchcraft has not a pedigree,
‘Tis early as our Breath,
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death - ”
In Dickinson’s later poems, witchcraft is a metaphor the calling of the poet, and the work of witchcraft is the slow mycorrhizal genesis of a poem in her brain. It precedes her and it will outlive her, but her poem is its brief, fleeting manifestation - its fruiting body. Most of its work takes place underground, scarcely observed in its early stages even by the poet. Out of these meek, humble, surreptitious origins in the humus of the poet’s unconscious, something strange, arcane and spectacular emerges. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Dickinson wrote to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and we know, from a poem about the way she was “enchanted” by the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it gave her access to “a Divine insanity”, like “Tomes of solid Witchcraft”. But a poem itself has its origins in a quiet, mouldering exploration.
*
I am writing this at a moment in Australian political history when it looks as though a resounding blow may be dealt to the culture of impunity in the political establishment, specifically as it relates to the acceptance and enabling of sexual abuse in parliament. It is now becoming clear that a mycelial movement has reached a point of critical mass, and it is beginning to erupt. Women in parliament, who have long been expected to keep silent about having been raped or assaulted, have forged connections with each other, and are speaking out. Our prime-minister’s position looks increasingly tenuous as his integrity is thrown into question. Forced onto the defensive, he has blundered into pronouncements which suggest that he is only capable of understanding how rape affects a woman if he considers how it might affect his own daughter. His tone has become petulant, and he feigns a righteousness inconsistent with his previous indifference to the culture of abuse. Unknown to him, the fungal hyphae of truth have undermined his assurance. The paving has been shoved aside, and suddenly, the survivors of abuse are raising a chorus: “So many of us! / So many of us!”
The mycelial connection exists not just between individuals or within the poet’s mind. It transcends time, connecting Dickinson with Plath in its beautiful intertextual web. It descends deeper into history, embracing women who hung from gibbets or were consumed by flames. It feels its way upwards to the present, its tentative fingers transforming into battering rams. It resists erasure, subtly transforming whole landscapes of history, as the underground expansion of fairy-ring fungus is visible from the air as a darker arc of turf. Emily Dickinson saw this truth, and scribbled it on another envelope:
“Long Years apart - can make no
Breach a second cannot fill -
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell -
The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand -”
The poet reaches back through time into the fire which burned the witch. She has turned to ash long ago, and been blown away by the wind - ephemeral in body as the mushroom and its spores. But that is only superficial. Ninety-nine percent of the growth is underground, its girth slowly encompassing the world. The spell is not invalidated. The “meek” are ready to inherit.
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