The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (39 page)

Matsiman navigates the possibilities as well as the problems of precarity. Precarity means not being able to plan. But it also stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available. To live well with others, we
need to use all our senses, even if it means feeling around in the duff. Matsiman’s own words about noticing, from his matsutake website, seem particularly apt. “Who is Matsiman?” he asks. “Anyone who loves hunting, learning, understanding, protecting, educating others, and respects matsutake mushroom and its habitat is matsiman. Those of us who can’t get enough understanding, constantly trying to determine what caused this or that to happen, or not happen. We are not limited to nationality, gender, education, or age group. Anyone can be a matsiman.” Matsiman calls up a latent commons of matsutake lovers. What holds his imagined matsipeople together is the pleasure of noticing.

Although I have devoted most of this book to living beings, it is useful to remember the dead. The dead, too, are part of social worlds. Lu-Min Vaario nudged me in this direction when she showed me slides of matsutake hyphae (the stringlike cells of fungal bodies) gathering around bits of charcoal. Although matsutake is known for its relations with living trees, it can get some nutrients from dead ones too, her research showed.
²
This finding inspired her to begin a research project on matsutake’s “good neighbors,” both living and dead. Here charcoal joins living trees, fungi, and soil microbes. She investigates how neighborliness—that is, social relations across differences of both vitality and species—is essential to good living.
³

Dr. Vaario has thought a lot about neighborliness in this meaning—mutuality across difference—for humans as well. Although she was born and first educated in China, her research has spanned many important sites of matsutake science, and she has had to work across both hidden and overt national conventions in building neighborly matsutake studies. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the influential laboratory of Kazuo Suzuki at the University of Tokyo. It was there that she first tested matsutake’s ability as a saprobe, an eater of the dead, which she hoped might lead to cultivation techniques. (While the hyphae do grow on nonliving materials, no one has yet seen a mushroom produced from mycelia without a live host.) When she took a research position in China, she was thrilled by the chance to explore a different matsutake landscape, yet frustrated at the lack of understanding of her research. A few years later, she married and followed her Finnish husband to his country, where she received funding to pursue the “good neighbors” research through the Finnish Forest Research Institute. The
study of neighborliness turns difference into a resource for collaboration. Imagining the interactions among roots, hyphae, charcoal, and bacteria—as well as among Chinese, Japanese, and Finnish scientists—is as good a way as any to refigure our understanding of survival as a collaborative project.

Dr. Vaario is lucky to have received research funding, since, as an itinerant scientist, she has no institutional job security. The problem of living without a regular job is keener for those without advanced degrees. Consider Tiia, who lives in the Finnish countryside above the Arctic Circle. On the way to her place, she showed me the corner where the unemployed hang out, drinking and waiting for a government check. Since cheap foods became available from the European Union, she complained, farming in northern Finland has closed down, and there are no other jobs. But she is enterprising. She cofounded a cooperative marketing outlet for local products, including jams made from local berries, wooden crafts, knitted scarves—and matsutake. She learned about matsutake from a traveling seminar that showed people how to identify and pick, and she is waiting for a good year to find more. She is also interested in the possibilities of matsutake tourism.

Others in her area have trained themselves as nature guides, taking urban visitors into the woods for sports and hobbies, including mushroom picking.
⁴
I had the chance to pick with one exuberant young man, who promised he would be the “king of matsutake” next good year. He had learned mushrooms in a class; this was not traditional heritage. It represented a hope for him, an opening, an enthusiasm on which he would ride should a rising tide arrive. If the mushrooms came, he said, he would pick all night with lights. Matsutake were his dream not just for getting by, but for getting by with verve.

Here again is that edge, both inside and outside capitalism. When a new commodity chain arrives, this man grasps it not through industrial discipline but through personal talents—and as one of many precarious possibilities. On the one hand, this
is
capitalism; everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is shaped by the rhythms of the Finnish countryside, with its mixture of silent deprivations and enthusiasms to improve. Any commodity that moves downstream along that chain will have to be disembedded from those con
nections in a messy process of translation. There is room here for imagining other worlds.
⁵

Imagining other worlds was very much on the mind of the satoyama advocates I met in Japan. I think particularly of Tanaka-san, who, like Tiia, had put together a display center for local natural products and crafts. Unlike Tiia, however, he was not concerned with making a living. He was comfortably retired, and this was his own land. His personal nature center is an attempt to build a culture of care for satoyama landscapes and a gift to neighbors and visitors. In his town, he said, children had started going to school on a bus; now that they did not walk to school, they hardly went outside. He brought children to his land to show them how to notice the forest—and to play. We walked through the forest’s special places, which he hoped the children, too, might discover: here two trees (and of different species!) have grown together, knotted into a single trunk; here some crumbling Buddhist statues emerged from the brush when he cleaned it back; here a natural stone split in two reminds him of a woman. He took us to see the pines he was caring for, which otherwise would die from pine wilt disease, now rampant in this area. The treatment is expensive, and his wife does not approve of the cost. But this is his commitment to the forest.

Tanaka-san had built a small hut on the hillside, and he served tea to Shiho Satsuka and me while we sat looking down through the trees. The hut was full of curious things he had found in the forest, from lacquered conks to unusual wild fruits. After a while, his brother-in-law, a forest worker, came by, and he told us stories of how the forest was once logged by lowering trees down wires. This was before the mountain was left to brushy regrowth. Tanaka-san’s family had lived in the area for five generations, working in the mountains, but he became a public servant, serving at the post office. He used the lump sum from his retirement to buy the land. Despite the expense, he feels that working in the forest has a good influence on him. It makes him no money, but the forest’s ability to inspire visitors means a lot. Reinvigorating people’s sense of nature, he said, makes a world worth living. If matsutake appeared, this would be an unexpected gift.

Without meaning to, most of us learn to ignore the multispecies worlds around us. Projects for rebuilding curiosity, like that of Tanaka-san, are
essential work for living with others. It helps, of course, to have adequate funds and time. But that is not the only way to be curious.

I first met Xiaomei when she was nine and her mother worked at a rural hotel where Michael Hathaway and I stayed in central Yunnan. She was brave, charming, and clever—and she loved to show us things. Her parents had a good relationship with one of the matsutake bosses, who owned the hotel, and her family sometimes went up into the mountains, where they looked for mushrooms and picnicked. Once Michael and I went along, and Xiaomei and I became distracted by tiny wild strawberries with a taste so intense that I closed my eyes when they went into my mouth. Xiaomei then ran around gathering red-topped
Russula
, worthless but beautiful things. Xiaomei’s enthusiasm was contagious, and I loved them too.

The next time I came, two years later, I was pleased to see she had not lost her sense of the deliciousness of life. She dragged Michael and me to see vegetable gardens along the road, and then further into the uncultivated verges where the wild plants of disturbed places grow. This was the latent commons of weeds, the “vacant places” of progress narratives, so often imagined as without value. Yet it was full of interest for us. We stuffed ourselves with berries from the brambles and searched for tiny mushrooms. We followed goat trails and examined flowers. She explained what everything was and how people used it. It was just the kind of curiosity Tanaka-san wanted to nurture in his town’s children. Multispecies living depends on it.

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.

Spore Trail

The Further Adventures of a Mushroom

O
NE OF THE STRANGEST PROJECTS OF PRIVATIZATION
and commodification in the early twentieth-first century has been the movement to commoditize scholarship. Two versions have been surprisingly powerful. In Europe, administrators demand assessment exercises that reduce the work of scholars to a number, a sum total for a life of intellectual exchange. In the United States, scholars are asked to become entrepreneurs, producing ourselves as brands and seeking stardom from the very first days of our studies, when we know nothing. Both projects seem to me bizarre—and suffocating. By privatizing what is necessarily collaborative work, these projects aim to strangle the life out of scholarship.

Anyone who cares about ideas is forced, then, to create scenes that exceed or escape “professionalization,” that is, the surveillance techniques of privatization. This means designing research that requires playgroups and collaborative clusters: not congeries of individuals calculating costs and benefits, but rather scholarship that emerges through its collaborations. Thinking through mushrooms, once again, can help.

What if we imagined intellectual life as a peasant woodland, a source of many useful products emerging in unintentional design? The image calls up its opposites: In assessment exercises, intellectual life is a plantation; in scholarly entrepreneurship, intellectual life is pure theft, the private appropriation of communal products. Neither is appealing. Consider, instead, the pleasures of the woodland. There are many useful products there, from berries and mushrooms to firewood, wild vegetables, medicinal herbs, and even timber. A forager can chose what to gather and can make use of the woodland’s patches of unexpected bounty. But the woodland requires continuing work, not to make it a garden but rather to keep it open and available for an array of species. Human coppicing, grazing, and fire maintain this architecture; other species gather to make it their own. For intellectual work, this seems just right. Work in common creates the possibilities of particular feats of individual scholarship. To encourage the unknown potential of scholarly advances—like the unexpected bounty of a nest of mushrooms—requires sustaining the common work of the intellectual woodland.

In this spirit, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group—the group that made my matsutake research possible—has tried to build playful collaborations into our individual and collective work. This has not been simple; pressures to privatize worm their way into every scholar’s life. The tempo of collaboration is necessarily sporadic. But we have coppiced and burned, and our common intellectual woodland flourishes.

This means, too, that the intellectual equivalents of forest products have become available to each of us as gatherers. This book is just one harvest of those products. It is not the last: a woodland draws us again and again to its shifting treasures. If there is one mushroom, might there yet be more? This book opens a series of forays to our matsutake woodland. There will be more, to China, to trace commerce, and to Japan, to follow cosmopolitan science. Consider the further adventures in these companion volumes:

In China, exuberance about global trade has transformed even the most remote villages, creating a “rural China” with transnational trade at its heart. Matsutake is the ideal vehicle to follow this development. Michael Hathaway’s “Emerging Matsutake Worlds” traces the making of distinctive paths for global commerce in Yunnan. The book explores
conflicting transnational pressures of conservation and commerce—as seen, for example, in the hard-to-explain presence of pesticides on Chinese mushrooms—showing how particular places, including matsutake forests, develop within global connections. One surprising finding is the importance of ethnic entrepreneurship: in both Tibetan and Yi areas, pickers and village-based dealers work within ethnic circuits. Hathaway examines both the cosmopolitan character and the traditionalist preoccupations of the new ethnic aspirations promoted by matsutake.