Prompted

From May 20, 2007
Compare and contrast the nutritional mode of a fungus with your own nutritional mode.

I am (a process of) becoming full and growing empty. I don’t know much about (the digestive processes of) a fungus, the nutritional modalities, that is rhizomatic, it seems, occurring beneath the surface of everything, but then that is the nature of decay.

They say that things would not grow without fungi, that the world would be full of trees, that there would be a world without topsoil if fungi didn’t exist and break down the matter into smaller and smaller pieces, still nutrient dense. They like porous dark places to grow and sprout the signposts of where they are, a homing device, medicinal and poisonous.

I decay, I am part of (the process of) decay. But let me start again
(I have always had a hard time beginning things en pointe, rather, dancing around a subject, topic, theme, with it, its hand sweaty and slipping in mine but clinging nonetheless. We make imperfect ellipses around the room together, become familiar with the rhythm and flow of our partner and, after much practice, we fall into each other, a tango, a ballroom glide.

It is a process. And of processes, they are looping and continual, a mouth latching onto a tail and forming not a closed loop, but a movement, the motion of an act, the synthesis of it and its reverberating effects.

The process is not stagnant, nor is it alone, lonely, sitting in a room eating donut after pizza after can of fizzy soda pop. The process is about things that have come before and the things that will follow.

decay, from de cadere, from falling

I feed, I nurture myself through nutrients that I have in my environment. I ingest my environment, take it into my body and through membranes, passing through all my walls and barriers into the innermost space of me, which is not to say my innermost self.

I am a first order consumer, and second and third. I devastate swathes of land with my desire that arises not from some evolutionary obligation to desire, but from a programmed response, an interruption in the flow of that which is me at my most basic hereditary levels. But let me not say that advertisements and heavily processed foods are the GM to my O.

But I am dancing again, my subject is me and how I compare to a fungus, that is nutrition, nutrient, nutritious, nurture, what is the root of the wood, what is its process.

nurture, nutrient, nourishing, from nutrire, to feed, to cherish

Again, dancing. I eat, taking things into my mouth and they descend into a pool of bile, acidic stomach juices that help decompose what my chewing, in a rush, was not able to accomplish with its potent mix of grinding force and saliva to degrade the cellular structure of the food to a point of rupture. I un-compose things with my mouth, the strawberry in the field exists in a different state in my mouth, which varies from its state in my stomach and gut. I extrude the seeds, some things cannot be planted here. But what of the state it exists in my cells, the vitamin C, the antioxidants, this process of exchange and change, the un-composing and re-configuring. I consume, I suppose, consumption, the sumptuous feast in my mouth I scream for it when I am all acid, when I’ve grown stagnant and closed off to the process. I have forgotten how to be separate. Convivial, this life binding force, but even the plant you took and your shining fungus on a hill, you think you don’t consume, sprouting out of the ground, your leggy stalk slick and moist from the birth and that umbrella of gills spreading and breathing, spreading and reproducing by spore, how asexual of you. You and fern beneath it all, consuming, decomposing, taking things in and transforming them as if a mouth and anus was all you needed to perform your magic tricks. Your mouth is everywhere.

This act.

This process.

We dance. I smell it, swallow its pheromones and close myself off to everything but the feel of the phantom rolling in my mouth and telling me how fresh, how much nitrogen and sun and minerals and water. It speaks to me in ways that I don’t understand, but I am a process, so how much am I suppose to understand about a tomato that is everything that came before it and and holds the promise of everything that has yet to be.

I ingest the phantom, I fondle the thing itself in my fingertips and note its skin, the red-orange deepened by the flesh it covers, highly saturated wet color, screaming poison and temptation, calling on me to consume it. We decompose each other, unraveling in breath and descending to a different space, I take from it, freely and spit out the parts I don’t need. This wasn’t some manifesto, not divine providence that unto me dominion over the tomato. We have cultivated each other.

It is so certain in what it is, embracing everything that it is. Under each opportunity it has to grow, it is an edible piece of fruit that calls to be eaten so it can reproduce. The scientists have taken its genes and spliced in pest management genes and growth genes and minimal sun and water genes, but for all the meddling, the tomato has asserted itself as tomato, not GMO. It has asserted itself in that other creatures, given the choice between it and its franken-counterpart, will choose tomato.

It will be consumed it essence and flesh.

The process. The act. I consume. I un-compose and rearrange, reject and accept. I am everything that has come before me.

I decay.)