Mushrooms & Bananas

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I don't think anyone can dispute that Pynchon equates Nature with Good, and fucking with Nature as Bad. But then one can quibble with what constitutes fucking with Nature: small farming, rooftop cultivations? Doesn't seem likely. But those rooftop bananas are unnaturally large. And the mushrooms - Osbie Feels' pharmaceutical plants - also, are apparently unnatural. I'm on the fence, despite my previous posts, over whether it's meant as magical realism or hints of a darker don't-fuck-with-nature variety. I don't think there's anything wrong - this is Pynchon! - in reading both simultaneously. But I lean towards the darker view.

I see GR as Pynchon's attempt to find that point - zero point, point of no return, Brennschluss - where the Cold War was set in motion. He knew, of course, that he'd have to go back much earlier. In GR, it's already too late. In ATD and M&D he digs deeper. I can't offhand think of any examples, but it seems to me that in ATD, he's presenting alternate routes that might have been taken - Tesla, the Quaternions - Mark K., can you help here? Even in Bleeding Edge, there's at least a vision of what might have been.

I don't see any such alternate-path moments in GR. It's strictly about things that DID happen. He's bringing in chemistry to present a whole 'nother level of fucking with Nature - at the molecular level - and it hangs like a cloud over everything (well, for me, anyway). 

Laura

-----Original Message-----

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen 

Sent: Mar 30, 2016 5:14 AM

To: pynchon -l 

Subject: Mushrooms & Bananas




  
    
  
  
    

    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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