Mushrooms & Bananas

[Mark Kohut]

I vote that P did not know re the mushrooms, wanted to present them as
"really growing" within GR.

A---and, I cannot read Osbie this way. I'll make the case if necessary but
others may want to chime in first.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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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