Mushrooms & Bananas

[David Morris]

The source of the banana's soil is, for me, a clear message that they are
the magic life-product of many years of offal, discard and decay, as
opposed to some miracle of engineering.  That distinction is a bedrock of
Pynchon's GR mythology.

"...Rossettis’ who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical
plants up on the roof (a tradition young Osbie Feel has lately revived), a
few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning, as
fragments of peculiar and frosts, but most returning, as fragments of
peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of
prize Wes-sex Saddleback sows quartered there by Throsp’s successor, and
dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later
tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or
that sensitive epicurean—all got scumbled together, eventually, by the
knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black
topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas."

Anything that can so clearly tell Death to fuck off has GOT to be good!

David Morris

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:43 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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