Jelly Fungus

I was supposed to be in the Finger Lakes with a group of artists interested in the idea of attunement, but now we meet on zoom. Instead of listening to moss, we talk about the weather, how it is affecting us, in Canada, and New York, Wyoming, and Vermont. We gaze into the strangeness of each other’s faces and talk about our irritation with humidity and the respite of wind. We make movements to alleviate the cranial tension induced by the screen. We try to disrupt the sound hierarchy of zoom. We write notes and letters. We write long lists of questions, like who will survive in America? And what would it be like to date a lichen? We make do.

We each held an object up to our camera, close enough to obscure everything but the grainiest bits of its expanse, an exercise in color field painting. Plastic pastels translucent enough for the light to pass through, making rectangles lavender, orange, green. I hold up a green glass bottle and the screen where my torso is melting into a vessel of watery marks. Someone’s yellow highlighter looks like lemon candy skies, with a dot of green flash where the camera on light is.

Collaged writing: weather systems: orange: green: swan: boundary: hunt

In the pandemic, I was visited by an alter-ego, a mushroom, a Clitocybe gibba, whom I named Evangel. In between my fantasy of decomposition, the internet of the forest floor expanded, my companion in proliferation, excess, communication, spore-adic entombment, of syntax, and my gender rampant xbyotic romance, writer, dissemination.

The tub, with its double faucets, one barely usable, the other a relic from an earlier iteration of decrepit green glass, ceramic, black sheened tile. In my seafoam green-walled vessel, I soak off the day's wear. The genre of my pandemic writing is bathtub literati, like my friend jenny calls me, I write, read, and occasionally take calls from the tub. Chronic illness and my own sensate need to relocate my body in submersion, to surround the form with water, heavy and voluminous, to exchange the atmosphere for density, and compression.

I am a soft shell person (painter), a Cancer, whose outer and inner homes tend toward disintegration.

I’d like to soak this writing through with golden boy showers, piss translucent and warm, overflowing in the shallow bowls of my sentences, a light breaking through. Yellow pushing to the surface of cornflower blues, French blues, and lavender. Moments of black and brown smears, bloopy and lovely.

Satrys, multiples, fudgy lines, and fingers in lyric horse-human hybrids.

I have a repeating elegiac hypochondria whenever resting my head against the bathtub’s green tile border, elegies to mourn the accumulated minor insanities that make up my consciousness, those slips into the irrational linings, and fungal infections, the over proliferations, the inflammations, that seem to flare when I consider those hosts of microbial beings which might come to join the other yeasts on my scalp. My body is one prone to fungus, I know this through the experience of shared weather systems. Armpits, mouth, inner ear, hairline, beneath the breast, the pubic folds, all share similar ecologies of fungal precarity. The top of the head feels congruent with the soles of the feet, both tender planes of reach, one below and rooted, spreading, the other that thin membrane between the mind and sky.

In his essay on Jasper Johns, John Cage mentions Leonardo’s (only by first name) idea that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere. Painting makes air compress upon bodies, you have to paint what is around the body with the same weight as the body itself, I mean the two—the enclosed and the surrounding, need each other in order to exist. Painted space presses in on painted bodies, and the emergent boundaries neither hold within nor without, rather they are in the process of meeting, in perpetuity. Sometimes the space might be held by an outline, but in the bristling of stroke next to stroke, it is always present.

Same essay by Cage quoted by Anne Boyer in her book on cancer: “A painting is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence, all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history.”

I find myself easily awed by in-person paintings, again. I linger for many minutes in front of a large Rubens hunting scene at the Met, The Wolf and Fox Hunt (1616). I would have once walked by, bored by the unhinged machoism of the piles of enraged wolves, their fear and adrenaline contrived by the setting the hunters and Rubens have created, a narrow stage play of domination. Now I am nearly laid out by the size of the painting, I feel like a visitor from the 17^th century, who has never seen such a large canvas, who has never watched a movie, and is now seeing a sculpture in movement, a sculptural image for the first time. The figures and their enormity, hunters cloaked in voluminous fabric, one wearing funny pantaloons navy with grey velvet overlay, wealthy men on their horses and a lady onlooker, the men seeking the spectacle of sport in the anguish of the wolves, and foxes underfoot, the hunting dogs sinking their teeth into the fur hides. Supposedly Rubens painted the pelts himself, rendering the mottled coats luminous and thick. Much of the painting was completed in his workshop. The Wolf and Fox Hunt was the first of many lucrative hunting scenes on canvas that Rubens’ sold. He adapted the traditional form of hunting tapestries to the more inexpensive material of canvas.

(relation of painting to tapestry, a passing thought, canvas still has a weave, a warp and weft, the image is on top, the image is not quite woven, as it is built in tapestry. In tapestry, the image emerges laterally, in painting, it is visible through layering)

I can feel the layers of muscle and fat tissue in the light shifting on the animal skins, the silkiness of the horses’ tail, made more fluid by the contrast of the short fur on its back.

At his best, Rubens is a muscular painter, a painter of inner structures and of cartilage.

Painting as naked self-obfuscation is non-narrative, it admits of every painting’s non-narrative qualities. It is painting as material, and as presence alone. The shadow on the hunter’s ruddy calf. The movement of the pink clouds. It also means that every painting, without knowing it, presents a total view of the moment of its making, and preserves its naked pigments into the material of the now.

On the importance of material history:

1616 narrative: Flemish baroque, Descartes, Galileo, slavery, natural philosophy, polymaths, world eternal, witch trials, Pocahontas, empire, cargo.

If narrative history (and painting) is the memory of the state (Howard Zinn), it is the history of material, natural and visual, of the non-boundary between bodies and surroundings, of microbes and illnesses, which are living histories.

Growing together, across much of the land now called the United States, are two plants, both medicine, one the antidote for the other. Stinging Nettle is an herb rich in nourishment for the body, a cleansing tonic when taken as a diuretic, it is rich in iron, an antihistamine, and anti-inflammatory. But in its raw state, it can cause a painful, smarting skin rash and hives. Almost always where the nettles grow, the buoyant and soft green jewelweed can be found in abundant colonies. Its hollow stem contains an almost aloe-like sticky, foaming gel perfect for soothing nettle stings and other itchy rashes, like those caused by poison ivy.

I gather both nettle and jewelweed in Wissahickon park near my new apartment, on Lenni-Lenape land. I make a slushy of the jewelweed in my blender to freeze into ice cubes for summer-long treatments.

Green always appears transparent to me, permeable, and made of light. Even when I try to mix it in oils, it only sings with colors that keep open one doorway into translucence. The strangeness of green mixed with opacity verges on sickness, bruising. All color comes from light, but green especially is made visible, chlorophyllic absorption, a plant’s survival and sustenance rely on green, on the interaction of green and light.

Irritants + Salve

Plants make possible the understanding of the vitality of difference. But even antidotes and inflammations grow in common soil. I think the delineation of nature and culture much the same. The impulse of natural history to make nominal the visible (Foucault) is of course, the imposition of language. But the natural was never the virginal, meaning, what is nature and what is culture is a boundary belonging to neither, a kind of imaginary meeting of body and space.

Botany is the beginning of poetry. Or in plants, exist the form which I call language, and color. In Mycology is the beginning of painting. Language is material, it is cellular units and organic systems, it is death and decay. It is emergence and growth.

The first time I saw orange coral fungi, I thought of orange marmalade, jelly fingers, waxy sebaceous plugs, and sea anemones. Their neon orange pigment was like nothing in nature that I knew existed, it looked bracing and synthetic, like pop art orange, or California ab-ex orange. That fluorescent orange is actually an earth tone, as much as umber, or siena, or brown pink, that from compost, orange flares of jelly fungus are born. Coiling, rasping earth tones.

The range of colors in fungi are fleshy like bodies, humans, thick and white, or pink and brights, coral, reds, toadstool oranges, these living paintings.

The Italian physician Francesco Valenti Serini (1795-1862) was troubled by the many patients he saw poisoned by mushrooms they foraged. His solution was to craft in clay, replicas of all the mushrooms of the Senese countryside, to catalog them, and use them as props to educate the region on those poisonous, neutral, good to eat. A collection of objects, a guide. In the Natural History Museum in Siena, their awkward, colorful, abundant forms fill the walls of a gallery.

Scrawled in the blank lower third of Cy Twombly’s 1974 Natural History I, Mushrooms, are the words: LEDA and SWAN. A drawn scribbly swan’s neck rises up between two drawings of mushrooms and segments of Giuliano Bugiardini’s copy of Leonardo’s Leda. Twombly’s swan is a single worm plume between the drawn fungi and collaged paintings. One mushroom on the left is concave, the other turgid and swollen with delicate ruffles, a morel. Fruiting fungal bodies stand in for the strange eroticism of the Leda myth, the animal penetration of the human, in some tellings Zeus as swan rapes Leda, in others the swan seduces and they fuck. In one version of the myth, Leda has sex with her husband earlier in the night before the swan, the first coitus to ripen her fertility. More fruit.

My therapist and I come to the suggestion that the Leda and Swan myth is an exchange of energies, and that like Jung, all sex is an opportunity for transmutation.

I have a Leda dream: I am in my painting, the swan is there, a thicket, it offers me its wing which I take and turn over, examining its chromatic whiteness against the dense overlays of green.

In Da Vinci’s version, of which only a drawing and several plant studies remain, Leda’s sculpted body tromps through a mass of vegetation, marsh marigolds, and wood anemone, Star of Bethlehem, brambles. Plants are part of the seduction here, forming colonies of dark greens around the winged and naked figures. All the plants reference annunciation/Christian/virgin birth imagery, just in case anyone thought that a myth about a girl getting fucked by a swan was somehow more perverse than a penetration by the divine by other means…

Painting is not for the morally sound, it is for the corrupted, the already too fascinated by texture, and sex. For deviants, those fixated on seduction without follow through. I’m totally seduced by the weirdness of the Leda paintings, they make me squirm, and turn me on at the same time, not because they represent a sexual experience, but because they pour on the weirdness of image and metaphor, they make a lurch toward a forbidden unspoken. They are creepy when taken seriously by Rubens or Cezanne, or laughable, like the Victorian version by Gerome where a maternal Leda welcomes her hoard of rosey babies led in the water by the swan-daddy.

They are unconscious reproductions of mythologies that I should be focused on defying, but maybe to defy the myth of Leda is to open it up, to loosen its gravity.

Interruption of the arousal only frustrates it further.

A reminder: Fungi have thousands of sexes.

A recurrent fantasy: A self-burial, up to the shoulders, in soil, to feel awake for a return to the earth, to be surrounded by the colors of the ground, to feel the clay form to the body, wet, workable, enclosed. To intercept the fungal messengers en route to root systems, to send out signals of my own living decay.