Mushrooms & Bananas

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On the question whether the banana breakfast - in general: the farming 
on the roof - is a good counter-cultural "Fuck Death!", or in itself 
just an artificial and synthetic strategy of death-orientated survival.

On pp. 92-93, Katje  just entered the scene, it says: "She's alone in 
the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie Feel, who's out in 
the kitchen doing something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from 
up on the roof. They have shiny red-orange cups with raised patches of 
whitish-gray veil. Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings 
her to glance in a doorway at his boyish fussing with the /Amanita 
muscaria/ (for it is this peculiar relative of poisonous Destroying 
Angel that claims Osbie's attention, or what passes with him for 
attention)---flash him a smile she means to be friendly, but which to 
Osbie seems terribly worldly, sophisticated, wicked."

Thing just is that in the case of Amanita muscaria (dt. "Fliegenpilz"), 
in contrary to the magic mushrooms of the psilocybin type, it's not 
possible to cultivate it in artificial surroundings. According to my 
knowledge, you cannot grow these mushrooms in greenhouses or boxes! They 
can only grow in conjunction with a living tree. "Amanita cultivation in 
a lab environment has always been a frustrating prospect due to the 
symbiotic relationship of this mushroom to its host trees, most of which 
are Birch trees that occur naturally in the wild. But if one has the 
right host trees in their area, and resides in the proper temperate zone 
or elevation, one can try and simply take a few dried or fresh caps that 
are in sporination (fully flattened or upturning with longitudinal tears 
along the striations), crush them up thoroughly, and mix the crushed 
pieces into the top soil. See if it will take. If one doesn’t want to 
make the initial investment of the caps simply chop up the stems from 
sporinating specimens, which will naturally have collected some of the 
falling spores, and mix with the soil" 
(amanita-shop.com/amanita-cultivation). So what you need is a garden, a 
greenhouse on the roof won't do it.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  Did Pynchon know about the 
impossibility to grow Amanita muscaria the way he describes it and 
thought "Hey, a little magic realism cannot do any harm". If so, the 
whole  farming on the roof motif, including the initial banana 
breakfast, could indeed be read as basically positive. It's so very 
counter-cultural and "Fuck Death!" that it even makes Amanita muscaria 
grow without any birch or pine tree around ... But if Pynchon actually 
knew about the impossibility, a reading along the lines of Laura's 
skepticism regarding the motif of good nature in Pynchon would also make 
sense. Then the cultivation appears be another example of war ridden 
science going beyond the zero by practicing something which appeared 
(and still appears) to be impossible. What fits this reading is the fact 
that the effects of Amanita muscaria are actually not so much 
psychedelic yet deliriant, dissociative and sedative-hypnotic. Via the 
early use by Siberian shamans the mushroom is associated with the north. 
Not exactly the direction of the sky Pynchon favors in terms of his 
cultural cosmology.

Does Osbie Feel - "He leads her to a back room fitted out with 
telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with 
maps, schedules, /An Introduction to Modern Herero/, corporate 
histories, spools of recording wire"  (p. 536) - somehow represent 
Pynchon himself?


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