October 11, 2021
Before we get to today’s musings, here is an urgent request (and please share the information.)
With the grocery shelf shortages, please remember NOT to buy WIC marked items. (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) I think we used to call them food stamps.) The people who use WIC benefits to get their food are not allowed to switch to other brands or types. When those items are gone (usually labeled on the shelves) people go hungry.
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Mushrooms
by Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)
Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly
Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
Yes, this poem was actually used by the Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom, a program of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Oklahoma State Department of Education to teach about mushrooms. (Ref.) Together with an instruction page on the biology of mushrooms and how they grow.
No, this poem is not really all about mushrooms. Some see it as a gender metaphor, a feminist allegory about the fate of women kept small in a misogynist world, asking little or nothing. Others see it as veiled description of the fate of immigrants.
“… it was really about immigrants making their surreptitious way into a country. Hence ‘Nobody sees us’ because of their movement by night, or ‘We diet on water’ which suggests their impoverished state. The choice of vegetable is witty as these people are a ‘mush’ in the cabins through which they travel and the places they will have to secretly live in.
Plath herself is an immigrant to Britain. But it doesn’t matter if she did or didn’t mean this, the point is that mushrooms seem metaphorical for, for example, women’s rights and many other issues regarding the powerful and the powerless.”
Judge for yourselves…
Here is a lovely analysis of the poem by a biologist and poet who tries to give weight to the voices of nature as much as those of women who might try to be seen through the lens of the verses. Worth a short read.
All photographs were taken last week in my immediate vicinity. Fall has arrived.
Music today is recommended by no other than the scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Here is the link to their work and playlist when trying to figure out the effects of psilocybin (shrooms!) on patients living with depression.(carefully tailored to ascent, peak, descent of the experience.) I chose the Gorecki piece since I’ve always liked it. I think Sylvia Plath would have approved.
Carl Wolfsohn
Illuminating! Thank you. (Today, Republicans in Oklahoma would ban this poem.)
Sara Lee Silberman
Interestingly suggestive poem, and what mushroom treasures in your “immediate vicinity!” [Wondering if other walkers in that vicinity noticed all those specimens, or did it in fact require an eye as good as yours???]
Susan Wladaver-Morgan
Wonderful, as always. I’ve got quite a collection of mushrooms thriving among my blueberry bushes.
Your post reminded me of this poem that a friend posted a couple of yers ago:
THE MUSHROOM HUNTERS
by Neil Gaiman
Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.
In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurtle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.
The women, who did not need to run down prey,
had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them
left at the thorn bush and across the scree
and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,
because sometimes there are mushrooms.
Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools,
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.
And sometimes men chased the beasts
into the deep woods,
and never came back.
Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.
Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts,
and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.
Observe everything.
And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.
The tools we make to build our lives:
our clothes, our food, our path home…
all these things we base on observation,
on experiment, on measurement, on truth.
And science, you remember, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe,
based on observation, experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.
The race continues. An early scientist
drew beasts upon the walls of caves
to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms
and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.
The men go running on after beasts.
The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.