Mushrooms & Bananas

[Mark Kohut]

Thanks Laura for the vote of confidence and as Jack Benny famously said,
"I'm thinking, I'm thinking".
Right now I'll let others show me the answer so I don't have to figure it
out.

Go List!



On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:43 PM, <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
>
>
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>     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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