Mushroom At The End Of The World Quotes

She did not know yet how sometimes people keep parts of themselves hidden and secret, sometimes wicked and unkind parts, but often brave or wild or colorful parts, cunning or powerful or even marvelous, beautiful parts, just locked up away at the bottom of their hearts. They do this because they are afraid of the world and of being stared at, or relied upon to do feats of bravery or boldness. And all of those brave and wild and cunning and marvelous and beautiful parts they hid away and left in the dark to grow strange mushrooms—and yes, sometimes those wicked and unkind parts, too—end up in their shadow.

Oh, man," says Dum. "That would have been so awesome. Can you imagine? Boom!" He mimes a mushroom cloud. "Moo!" Dee gives him a long-suffering look. "You´re such a child. You can´t just waste a nuke like that. You gotta figure out a way to control the trajectory so that when the bomb goes off, it shoots the radioactive cows into your enemies.

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.

Is is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves - socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the US government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religion dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.

Everyone knows how to cook parasols—you soak them in milk, then dip them in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them until they're brown as chops. You can do the same thing with a panther amanita that smells of nuts, but people don't pick amanitas. They divide mushrooms into poisonous and edible, and the guidebooks discuss the features that allow you to tell the difference—as if there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms. No mushroom book separates them into beautiful and ugly, fragrant and stinking, nice to touch and nasty, or those that induce sin and those that absolve it. People see what they want to see, and in the end they get what they want—clear, but false divisions. Meanwhile, in the world of mushrooms, nothing is certain.

As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma.

But a smell shivered him awake. It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close. The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear. The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel. A shadow moved. It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow...

The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditisation more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

When Magnus looked at Imasu, he saw Imasu had dropped his head into his hands. "Er," Magnus said. "Are you quite all right?" "I was simply overcome," Imasu said in a faint voice. Magnus preened slightly. "Ah. Well." "By how awful that was," Imasu said. Magnus blinked. "Pardon?" "I can't live a lie any longer!" Imasu burst out. "I have tried to be encouraging. Dignitaries of the town have been sent to me, asking me to plead with you to stop. My own sainted mother begged me, with tears in her eyes - " "It isn't as bad as all that - " "Yes, it is!" It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. "It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavor now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in the lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. The townspeople believe that you and I are performing arcane magic rituals - " "Well, that one was rather a good guess," Magnus remarked. " - using the skull of an elephant, an improbably large mushroom, and one of your very peculiar hats!" "Or not," said Magnus. "Furthermore, my hats are extraordinary." "I will not argue with that." Imasu scrubbed a hand through his thick black hair, which curled and clung to his fingers like inky vines. "Look, I know that I was wrong. I saw a handsome man, thought that it would not hurt to talk a little about music and strike up a common interest, but I don't deserve this. You are going to get stoned in the town square, and if I have to listen to you play again, I will drown myself in the lake." "Oh," said Magnus, and he began to grin. "I wouldn't. I hear there is a dreadful monster living in that lake." Imasu seemed to still be brooding about Magnus's charango playing, a subject that Magnus had lost all interest in. "I believe the world will end with a noise like the noise you make!" "Interesting," said Magnus, and he threw his charango out the window. "Magnus!" "I believe that music and I have gone as far as we can go together," Magnus said. "A true artiste knows when to surrender." "I can't believe you did that!" Magnus waved a hand airily. "I know, it is heartbreaking, but sometimes one must shut one's ears to the pleas of the muse." "I just meant that those are expensive and I heard a crunch.

But what is "public property" if not an oxymoron?

Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human.

It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human.

As a result, a worldwide grand total of twenty-six websites in early 1993 mushroomed into more than 10,000 sites by August 1995, then exploded into several million by the end of 1998.6

Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

Imagining the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources. Such techniques have segregated humans and policed identities, obscuring collaborative survival. The concept of the Anthropocene both evokes this bundle of aspirations, which one might call the modern human conceit, and raises the hope that we might muddle beyond it. Can we live inside this regime of the human and still exceed it?

To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light. But how does one tell the life of the forest? We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans. Yet we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant? Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how substance hunters recognize other living beings as persons, that is protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight. Talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine wellbeing without them. We trample over them for our advancement. We forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible we need other kinds of stories, including adventures of landscapes.

Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization.

The narrow hallway was lined with framed photographs while the far end was dominated by a faux movie poster for Gone with the Wind starring Ronald Reagan sweeping Margaret Thatcher off her feet while a mushroom cloud bloomed behind them. She promised to follow him to the end of the world. He promised to organise it.

following in the footsteps of Marx, twentieth-century students of capitalism internalized progress to see only one powerful current at a time, ignoring the rest.

Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment.

That would have been so awesome. Can you imagine? Boom!” He mimes a mushroom cloud. “Moo!

In its secular forms, then, this cosmological politics exceeds Christianity; to be an American, you must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird – white dove – which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood. But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. Little Red-Cap

Life lines are entangled: candy cane and matsutake; matsutake and its host trees; host trees and herbs, mosses, insects, soil bacteria, and forest animals; heaving bumps and mushroom pickers. Matsutake pickers are alert to life lines in the forest; searching with all the senses creates this alertness. It is a form of forest knowledge and appreciation without the completeness of classification. Instead, searching brings us to the liveliness of beings experienced as subjects rather than objects.

Finns have a deep and abiding love of their country’s forests and lakes. In July Finland is one of the world’s most relaxing, joyful places to be – a reason Finns traditionally have not been big travellers. After the long winter, why miss the best their country has to offer? Finns head en masse for the mökki (summer cottage) from midsummer until the end of the July holidays. Most Finns of any age could forage in a forest for an hour at the right time of year and emerge with a feast of fresh berries, wild mushrooms and probably a fish or two. City-dwelling Finns are far more in touch with nature than most of their European equivalents.

At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dying there.

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

There were a few civilized details, like chairs that looked as though they had been purloined from more modern and elegant domiciles- a red velvet recliner, for instance, which would have been far more at home at Mr. Darling's club than in a cave. Wherever did that come from? Wendy wondered. But the rest of the furniture consisted primarily of things like barrels cut in half with moss for cushions, and the stumps of trees with hastily hammered-on backs. Enormous mushrooms made for tables. Some of the lanterns were fungus as well- softly glowing bluish-green "flowers" that spread in delicate clumps just below the ceiling. "John would just have a field day with those, I'm certain," Wendy said with a smile. One large barrel was placed under the end of a hollowed-out root to collect rainwater. There were shelves and nooks for the few possessions considered precious by the Lost Boys: piles of gold coins, interesting animal skeletons, shiny crystals, captivating burrs and seedpods. Also more strange detritus of the civilized world: a hinge, a pipe, a knob from a drawer, a spanner, and even a pocket watch.

I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan. Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.

Some rapture Christians go further and actually yearn for nuclear war because they interpret it as the ‘Armageddon’ which, according to their bizarre but disturbingly popular interpretation of the book of Revelation, will hasten the Second Coming. I cannot improve on Sam Harris’s chilling comment, in his Letter to a Christian Nation:   It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Why would you, the werecats, have been entrusted with this information? Because, I would guess, we have always been friends of the Riders and friends of the dragons…We are the watchers. The listeners. The wanderers. We walk alone in the dark places of the world, and we remember what is and what has been. Solembum’s gaze shifted away. Understand this, Eragon. None of us have been happy with the situation. We long debated whether it would cause more harm than good to pass on this information should the moment arise. In the end, the decision was mine, and I decided to tell you, for it seemed you needed all the help you could get. Make of it what you will. “But what am I supposed to do?” said Eragon. “How am I supposed to find the Rock of Kuthian?” That I cannot say. “Then what use is the information? I might as well have never heard it.” Solembum blinked, once. There is one other thing I can tell you. It may mean nothing, but perhaps it can show you the way. “What? What is it?” If you but wait, I will tell you. When I first met you in Teirm, I had a strange feeling that you ought to have the book Domia abr Wyrda. It took me time to arrange it, but it was I who was responsible for Jeod giving the book to you. Then the werecat lifted his other paw and, after a cursory examination, began to lick it. “Have you gotten any other strange feelings in the past few months?” asked Eragon. Only the urge to eat a small red mushroom, but it passed quickly enough.

Matt takes some time to settle himself before he speaks. When he does, he shares an anecdote about how Julie had written a book for him to have after she was gone, and she titled it, The Shortest Longest Romance: An Epic Love and Loss Story. He loses it here, then slowly composes himself and keeps going. He explains that in the book, he was surprised to find that near the end of the story—their story—Julie had included a chapter on how she hoped Matt would always have love in his life. She encouraged him to be honest and kind to what she called his “grief girlfriends”—the rebound girlfriends, the women he’ll date as he heals. Don’t mislead them, she wrote. Maybe you can get something from each other. She followed this with a charming and hilarious dating profile that Matt could use to find his grief girlfriends, and then she got more serious. She wrote the most achingly beautiful love letter in the form of another dating profile that Matt could use to find the person he’d end up with for good. She talked about his quirks, his devotion, their steamy sex life, the incredible family she inherited (and that, presumably, this new woman would inherit), and what an amazing father he’d be. She knew this, she wrote, because they got to be parents together—though in utero and for only a matter of months. The people in the crowd are simultaneously crying and laughing by the time Matt finishes reading. Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story. We all think it ends there, but then Matt says that he feels it’s only fair that Julie have love wherever she is too. So in that spirit, he says, he’s written her a dating profile for heaven. There are a few chuckles, although they’re hesitant at first. Is this too morbid? But no, it’s exactly what Julie would have wanted, I think. It’s out-there and uncomfortable and funny and sad, and soon everyone is laugh-sobbing with abandon. She hates mushrooms, Matt has written to her heavenly beau, don’t serve her anything with mushrooms. And If there’s a Trader Joe’s, and she says that she wants to work there, be supportive. You’ll also get great discounts. He goes on to talk about how Julie rebelled against death in many ways, but primarily by what Matt liked to call “doing kindnesses” for others, leaving the world a better place than she found it. He doesn’t enumerate them, but I know what they are—and the recipients of her kindnesses all speak about them anyway.

The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a two-dimensional color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional color sphere to represent all the ways in which one color could bleed into another. She hadn’t wanted to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the trail, until she found the mushroom with a roasted-coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk, which reminded her of chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in the woods rang each of these notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the compound were five different flower smells in the neighborhood of daisy, which itself was close to sun-dried goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn’t this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she would end up smelling every smell there was, the way her eyes had already seen every color on the color wheel.

It’s obvious now that the end of man won’t be signaled with mushroom clouds, an alien invasion, or a meteor, but with silence. Only silence, long and unceasing.

The end of the world, prophesied and feared for millennia, conjures images of fireballs plummeting toward earth, mushroom clouds obliterating cities, and pandemics sweeping the globe.

So, is the modern era one of mindless slaughter, war and oppression, typified by the trenches of World War One, the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the gory manias of Hitler and Stalin? Or is it an era of peace, epitomised by the trenches never dug in South America, the mushroom clouds that never appeared over Moscow and New York, and the serene visages of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King? The answer is a matter of timing. It is sobering to realise how often our view of the past is distorted by events of the last few years. If this chapter had been written in 1945 or 1962, it would probably have been much more glum. Since it was written in 2014, it takes a relatively buoyant approach to modern history. To satisfy both optimists and pessimists, we may conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other. History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.

Задача неустойчивого выживания помогает нам увидеть, что тут не так. Шаткость - состояние, в котором мы сознаем нашу уязвимость. Чтобы выжить, нам нужна помощь, в помощь - всегда действие другого, намеренное или нет. Если я вывихну лодыжку, крепкая палка поможет мне ходить, и я приму ее содействие. И вот уж я - подвижное соприкосновение, женщина-с-палкой. С трудом представляю себе испытание, с каким могла бы справиться без помощи других - людей или предметов. Лишь бесцеремонная привилегированность позволяет нам вообразить - вопреки фактам, - будто нам по силам выживать в одиночку. Если выживание всегда связано с другими, оно - неизбежно - неопределенно и зависит от преобразований "я-и-другой". Наши сотрудничества меняют нас - и внутри вида, и между видами. Важнейшее для жизни на Земле происходит именно в этих преобразованиях, а не в каскадах решений, принятых изолированными индивидуумами. Не стратегии экспансии и завоевания нужно нам искать, а истории, развивающиеся во взаимных смешениях.

Вероятно, как и самим выжившим в войне, нам необходимо говорить - и говорить до тех пор, пока мы вместе с нашими историями о смерти, близости к ней и незаслуженной жизни не окажемся в силах выстоять перед трудностями настоящего. Именно прислушиваясь к какафонии смутных историй, мы, наверное, сможем нащупать самые большие свои надежды на выживание в прекарных, шатких условиях

Если поддаться грибному притяжению, мацутакэ способны отправить нас в пространство любопытства, которое, на мой взгляд, есть первое условие совместного выживания в смутные времена. Вот как представлено такое испытание в одной радикальной брошюре: "Призрак, которого многие стараются не замечать, есть простое понимание: мир не будет "спасен". [...] Если мы не верим в некую общемировую революционную фигуру, значит, обязаны жить (как, на самом деле, и должны были всегда) в настоящем".

Я считаю, что лишь признание нынешней неясности как всепланетной позволит нам осознать, что таково положение дел в нашем мире. .... Постичь мозаичность и непредсказуемость, связанные с нашим текущим положением, можно, заново открыв врата воображения.

Неопределенность, бесплановая природа времени пугает, однако благодаря мышлению в понятиях прекарности делается очевидным: неопределенность-то и делает жизнь возможной. Единственная причина, почему все это звучит странно, - в том, что большинство из нас выросло в грезах о модернизации и прогрессе. Эти рамки выделяют те черты настоящего, которые могут вести к будущему. [...] Понятие прогресса, относящееся к положению вещей в целом, ныне встречается редко, и даже модернизация ХХ века уже воспринимается как архаика. Но их категории - всегда с нами. Мы ежедневно представляем себе образы прогресса: демократия, рост, наука, перспективы. С чего нам ожидать, что экономика будет расти, а науки - развиваться? [...] Тем не менее современная человеческая спесь - не единственный план создания миров: мы окружены множеством творящих миров проектов - и человеческих, и нет. ... Миры возникают и такими способами - и благодаря им мы учимся смотреть и по сторонам, а не исключительно вперед.

In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.

First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue.

women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man.

Tracking matsutake through the journeys of nematodes allows me to return to my questions about telling the adventures of landscapes, this time with a thesis. First, rather than limit our analyses to one creature at a time (including humans), or even one relationship, if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being.

Twentieth-century scholarship, advancing the modern human conceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds.

contamination, that is, transformation through encounter.

The sustainability of nature, he said, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that human work that also brings out our humanity.

Interspecies relations draw evolution back into history because they depend on the contingencies of encounter. They do not form an internally self-replicating system. Instead, interspecies encounters are always events, “things that happen,” the units of history. Events can lead to relatively stable situations, but they cannot be counted on in the way self-replicating units can; they are always framed by contingency and time. History plays havoc with scalability. The only way to create scalability is to repress change and encounter

This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our lives inside; instead, it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets.

Outside, it had begun to rain. Over the steam of my milky coffee, I looked out the window to see umbrellas popping open on the sidewalk, some red or colorfully patterned, but mostly black. They looked like mushrooms sprouting on a log. Soon I would be down there, with all of those people-- I felt, bathetically, a spike of warmth for every person in the world. My body ached, but I felt strong. Maybe it was finally getting over the jetlag, or maybe it was feeling as if I had finally gone to the end of my loneliness, gone to its furthest expanse. I finished my coffee. I dressed for the day.

The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and realized that the emperor had no clothes.

Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.

During the drive to the forest with Hiro, memory gets personal. He points out the window, “That’s Roy’s matsutake hunting place; over there it’s Henry’s special spot.” Only later do I realize that both Roy and Henry are deceased. But they live on in Hiro’s map of the forest, recalled every time he passes their spots. Hiro teaches younger people how to hunt for mushrooms, and with the skill comes the memory.

Rather than redemption, matsutake- forest revitalization picks through the heap of alienation.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes— the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons— and the elusive autumn aroma.

disturbance refers to an open-ended range of unsettling phenomena.

Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction.

Translation, in Shiho Satsuka’s sense, is the drawing of one world-making project into another.

The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters.

Descriptive means site-specific, that is, attuned to indeterminate encounters and thus nonscalable.

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

It was nighttime when she awoke. The boy’s whimpering had stopped; all you could hear was the engine of the bus and the snoring of passengers. Makina could never be sure of what she’d dreamed, in the same way that she couldn’t be sure a place was where the map said it was until she’d gotten there, but she had the feeling she’d dreamed of lost cities: literally, lost cities inside other lost cities, all ambulating over an impenetrable surface. She looked out at the country mushrooming on the other side of the glass. She knew what it contained, its colors, the penury and the opulence, hazy memories of a less cynical time, villages emptied of men. But on contemplating the tense stillness of the night, the darkness dotted here and there with sparks, on sensing that insidious silence, she wondered, vaguely, what the hell might be festering out there: what grows and what rots when you’re looking the other way. What’s going to appear? she whispered to herself, pretending that as soon as they passed that lamppost, or that one, or that one, she’d see what it was that had been going on in the shadows. Maybe a whole slew of new things, maybe even some good things; or maybe not. Not even in make-believe did she get her hopes up too high.

Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really important exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom-and-money trophies as extensions– proofs, as it were– of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing "mushroom fever," that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again.

Yet fungal eating is often generous; it makes worlds for others.

Japanese general trading companies offered loans, technical assistance, and trade agreements to firms from other countries, which cut logs to Japanese specifications

these conglomerates, the zaibatsu, were coordinated by finance capital, not production:

keiretsu “enterprise groups.”8

The putting-out system transferred less profitable manufacturing sectors and older technologies to South Korea, clearing the way for Japanese businesses to upgrade.

summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysia mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II.27