Week 2: Fungi as Riddles – On the Material and Symbolic Character of Truffles, Fungal Networks, and Lichen
Welcome to Week 2 of our exploration of Entangled Life. This week, we’re going to continue to think about how fungi, for Sheldrake, are perplexing but transformative figures that challenge both scientific thinking and conventional understandings of life, existence, and social relations broadly conceived (our relations with each other, the natural world, and other organisms). Focusing on Chapters 1-3 (“A Lure,” “Living Labyrinths,” and “The Intimacy of Strangers”), we’ll consider how fungi, especially lichens, do this transformational work in Entangled Life by posing often unsolvable dilemmas and by operating on multiple levels – on the material level of biological processes and on symbolic levels typically associated with philosophy, poetry, art, and literature. Sheldrake is looking not only at fungi itself but also what they stand for and exemplify. With what UC Santa Cruz Professor of Literature and environmental humanist Hannah Cole calls a “double gesture,” Sheldrake demonstrates how fungi offer both material and immaterial insights that can, at one level, uphold scientific conventions, and at another, undermine or challenge them. As she puts it, “it’s as though he wants to convince the scientist in us, but he also wants to alienate the scientist in us and be a bit polemical.” We’ll hear more from Hannah Cole as well as Professors Brenda Hillman (Poetry) and Laurie Palmer (Art) who will help us understand the nuances of fungi’s simultaneous material and symbolic role in Entangled Life and the scope of their transformative effects.
“Reading for Fungi”: Attending to Riddles, Embracing Uncertainty
To examine this double gesture in Entangled Life, we can draw on an analytical approach Hannah Cole calls “reading for fungi.” In a recent article about fungi and fungal rot in the 1949 novel The Kingdom of this World by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, Cole advocates for this radical form of reading that, for her, is “a way of getting at the roots of the plantation system” in this historical novel set during the Haitian Revolution. Cole’s method, which centers fungi and attends to their fundamental relationship to plants and to the cycles of life and death in the colonial plantations of revolutionary Haiti, encapsulates Sheldrake’s material and symbolic approach to his subject in Entangled Life. As she explains when I asked her about this technique, “I think reading for fungi is a kind of symbiotic practice … one that perceives organisms as at once material and symbolic and also embedded in literary discourses, narrative discourses, soils, microclimates, systems, and biomes. And I think reading for fungi is a provocation that asks us to recenter fungi [and understand it in a layered, entangled way].”
It is certainly the way Sheldrake approaches his exploration of truffles, fungal networks, and lichens in the early part of his book. Truffles, “the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi,” have a basic dilemma: they are trapped in underground habitats but, like every other fruiting body, they must disperse their spores in order to reproduce and survive. Their “solution,” as Sheldrake puts it, “is to smell”: “Truffles must be pungent enough for their scent to penetrate the layers of soil and enter the air, distinctive enough for an animal to take note amid the ambient smellscape, and delicious enough for that animal to seek it out, dig it up, and eat it. Every visual disadvantage that truffles face–being entombed in the soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted–they make up for with smell” (26).
Truffles have developed an “allure” that Sheldrake notes is “the outcome of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary entanglement with animal tastes,” but how to understand our connection with them and their chemical signaling remains uncertain and ambiguous. “How,” he asks, “should we understand these spheres of more-than-communication?” In Sheldrake’s typical investigative mode, he goes down to the level of the organism to try to get as close to it as he can to explore this conundrum of communication, “running after a dog hot on the trail of a truffle and burying [his] face in the soil” (26).
Despite his truffle-hunting search, he doesn’t find a clear answer. The “chemical basis of truffles’ allure remains uncertain” and questions persist about how they both signal to each other as hyphae and to their partner trees, which are both necessary for reproduction and life. This uncertainty doesn’t simply remain a question about biological processes for Sheldrake, though; instead, it becomes a symbolic dilemma about narrative, language, metaphor, and how to “talk about fungal communication.” As a scientist, Sheldrake isn’t supposed to consider that nonhuman organisms might have intention or communicate in a deliberate way (and neither are we), but, as he says, “no matter how hard I tried to reduce the truffle to an automaton, it kept springing to life in my mind” (41).
Refusing to ignore or resolve this contradiction, the dilemma of the truffle’s “allure” leads Sheldrake to meditate on the binary we often use to describe and understand nonhuman (or more-than-human) communication: “the inanimate behavior of preprogrammed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived human experience on the other” (41). While the first position risks objectifying a living organism, turning it into an inert other that is wholly separate from us and lacks a sensory life, the other risks anthropomorphizing a living organism that is different from us, projecting human qualities onto it and only grasping its sensory life in human terms. Neither pole quite reflects what is going on with truffles or us. As Sheldrake explains, “the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways,” and, when it comes to us, we need metaphors to imagine and investigate truffles and their sensory reality, even as the language we use to describe them and their chemical aromas, from the “cut grass” of Cis-3-hexenol to the “sweaty mango” of oxane, is imprecise, laden with human bias, and risks altering what we’re trying to understand and explain (41, 44).
“Reading for fungi” and centering fungi doesn’t miraculously jettison us out of human language and perception and its attendant problems and limitations, as both Cole and Sheldrake remind us. While Cole insists that we can only “center fungi using our own human apparatuses and ways of knowing,” Sheldrake asks this question: if “biological realities are never black-and-white,” then “why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world–our investigative tools–be so?” (42). Perhaps, he suggests, we need a more nuanced approach. According to Sheldrake, we should be transparent, cognizant, and perhaps even unapologetic about the fact that we (scientists included) use and need narratives, metaphors, and categories to understand the world; at the same time, we should consider broadening and thinking more carefully about the concepts, narratives, and categories we use, especially when we face obstacles to understanding, such as with truffle communication: “Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system? Are we able to do this without smothering other life-forms with prejudice and innuendo?” (42). With the truffle as both a biological and symbolic riddle, Sheldrake demonstrates that it’s certainly worth the try.
When Sheldrake turns to fungal, or mycelial, networks in his next chapter, “Living Labyrinths,” the issue of fungal problem solving and communication becomes even more complex and ambiguous, partly due to the decentralized and dynamic nature of fungal networks that continuously branch and reform in the soil in response to various stimuli. Unlike us, fungal networks can “pass through two doors at once.” When they face two different paths, they “don’t have to choose one or the other,” Sheldrake explains; instead, “they can branch and take both routes.” Fungal networks, then, are coordinated but each part is doing something different and responding to different stimuli at once. As Sheldrake tells us he’s forced to admit, they are somehow implausibly both “singular” and “plural” (44). It is a complex puzzle that transforms the way we typically conceive of organisms, shifting from grasping them as containable, knowable “things” to dynamic, sprawling “processes.”
Sheldrake explains that another reason they are puzzling to us is that scientists aren’t studying basic fungal biology. While we know that mycelial networks branch and can solve mazes and complex routing problems via electrical signaling, we don’t know exactly how they do this or what to call it. He asks: “how does one part of a mycelial network ‘know’ what is happening in a distant part of the network? Mycelium sprawls, yet must somehow be able to stay in touch–with itself” (48-49). Does this fungal coordination translate to a “form of cognition”? “Can we,” Sheldrake continues, “think of their behavior as intelligent? If other organisms’ intelligence didn’t look like ours, then how might it appear? Would we even notice it?” (65). These “living labyrinths” of mycelial networks are puzzles that are difficult to parse, and, like truffles, they raise similar categorical problems and potential blindspots, largely because we think so narrowly about what counts as communication and intelligence. While Sheldrake approaches his exploration of truffles and lichens with equal parts scientific rigor and aesthetic wonder, he doesn’t, in the final instance, dwell in the uncertainty of mycelial networks; instead, he registers a quiet, but clear protest at the current state of fungal knowledge: “a sophisticated understanding of mycelium is yet to emerge. We are standing at the entrance to one of the oldest of life’s labyrinths” (69).
Lichens as “Living Riddles”: Symbiosis, Poetry, and Metaphor
If truffles and mycelial networks are material and symbolic puzzles, lichens are even more so. “Lichens,” Sheldrake writes, “are living riddles” (71). Covering 8% of the earth’s surface and growing in diverse forms, colors, and places, they are extremophiles that can survive in space, within rock, in the Arctic, in arid deserts, and more. Living longer than most organisms, they can dehydrate and enter states of “suspended animation” in extreme conditions and rehydrate and continue to live when conditions improve, sparking speculations about lichen “immortality” and whether they can really “die” as other forms of life do (84-5). Originally thought to be single organisms, scientists since the mid-late 19th century have gradually expanded our understanding of lichens as organisms made up of a parasitic fungus and algae host to the now prevailing view that they are symbiotic, mutualistic organisms composed of dynamic relations of fungi, algae, bacteria, and yeast that, together, sing a “metabolic song” that none could sing alone, as Sheldrake poetically describes (87). Sheldrake walks us through this scientific history of lichens, explaining how these material discoveries have “provoked fierce debate about what constitutes an autonomous individual” and challenged conventional scientific thinking at every turn. Even now, the more we know about them, “the stranger they seem,” and, as he puts it, they continue to “confuse our concept of identity and force us to question where one organism stops and another begins” – a reality that has had profound material as well as symbolic effects (71). Lichens are multiplicities that are less products of their individual parts and more relations and exchanges between these parts. Perhaps even more so than truffles and mycelial networks, they challenge binaristic thinking, especially when it comes to the concept of bounded individualism that underwrites our understanding of living organisms and to the narratives we tell about the origins of life.
Lichens’ effects on scientific norms and our understanding of material life, especially its origins, cannot be overstated. Lichens, Sheldrake notes, “quickly grew into a biological principle,” becoming a “gateway organism to the idea of symbiosis” that revolutionized the theory of evolution. That lichens evolved to cooperate showed that evolution was not only a matter of competition and conflict but also collaboration. Moreover, they evolved to bring together different organisms in what Sheldrake calls “inter-kingdom collaboration,” further challenging previous understandings of evolution: that organisms and species diverge rather than converge. Lichens, Sheldrake suggests, led American biologist, Lynn Margulis, to her controversial but now accepted theory of endosymbiosis that “rewrote the history of life” in its claim that all eukaryotic life arose when a single-celled organism “engulfed a bacterium, which continued to live symbiotically inside it” (80-1). Mitochondria in our cells are “descendants of these bacteria,” plant chloroplasts are “descendants of photosynthetic bacteria,” and all complex life that followed was a result not of competition and divergence but a long history of what Margulis calls the “intimacy of strangers” (81). While lichens don’t fully replicate this origin story, they are a verse in the same “song” that challenges our understanding of living organisms, and, by extension, life on multiple levels, from the material and scientific to the symbolic.
Lichens, then, should be grasped not only as scientific subjects but also lyrical, aesthetic, and philosophical subjects that lead us to existential questions about our own lives and how we relate to each other and the world around us. As Sheldrake recounts the story of lichens’ revolutionary role in the history of science, he also weaves in metaphorical descriptions of lichens, such as their “metabolic song,” situates them as symbols, and cites poets, like Brenda Hillman and Drew Milne, who depict and meditate on lichens in their work. I spoke with Brenda Hillman who has a long-standing interest in lichens and includes them in her 2018 book, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days. For her, although lichen species mostly exist in their own kingdom in the biological world, they might be considered metaphorically, and, as metaphors, they stand for many things, from marginalized but important lives to silent witnesses of human atrocity that will outlive scenes of devastation. She speaks to the capacious character of lichens’ symbolism in “Day 1,” a poem Sheldrake also cites in Entangled Life:
“Some people think lichen looks dead but it is alive in its
dismantling. Some call it moss. It doesn’t matter what you
call it. Anything so radical & ordinary stands for something.”
Here, Hillman gestures to the way lichen is often miscategorized and defies categorization, but she also speaks to a kind of politics of “dismantling” that lichens represent. As living organisms that dissolve rock, or have the potential to dismantle fundamental structures of life and, by extension, society, their revolutionary potential is even greater. They may look “dead” and unthreatening but, all along, they are “alive” and “dismantling” the very thing we take to be so solid and immutable. In this way, lichens are models for political life and organization, but the poem does not limit them to this; it’s just one example of the many things they can “stan[d] for.”
Hillman sees resonances between her own interest in lichens’ metaphorical possibility and Sheldrake’s. In our interview, she pointed to a passage from Entangled Life that she wrote in her journal, “Lichens are small biospheres that include both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic organisms, thus combining the Earth’s main metabolic processes. Lichens are in some sense, micro-planets, worlds writ small” (83). For Hillman, “this is an example of Sheldrake’s great metaphorizing capacity. It may seem a little extreme to say this, that lichens are micro-planets, but it’s true.” She finds kinship in the way Sheldrake includes various discourses in Entangled Life, weaving the history of science with metaphor and combining realist narratives with mystical and spiritual ones. She appreciates the way he reveals that fungi and their implications have been ignored. As she explains, “in my work, there is a layered discovery that poetry is ignored, lichen is ignored, the connectedness between people is ignored, and the way that boundaries don’t really exist is ignored. There are so many things that are ignored in our isolationist society.” Lichens, for both Hillman and Sheldrake, remind us to notice and rethink what we often take for granted. We are all more intimately connected than we think and our conventional understanding of ourselves as separate, bounded individuals is a fiction that doesn’t correspond with biological reality. Like lichens, we are composite bodies, or “holobionts,” that are in symbiotic relation with many different organisms, from fungi to bacteria, that we depend on to survive. Quoting a famous paper on symbiosis, Sheldrake declares, “there have never been individuals … we are all lichens” (92). For Hillman, lichens are certainly models for living: “lichen is a gorgeous thing, and it has taught me how to live. Sheldrake has reminded me of those ways, because of the way he explains their interconnectedness.”
Attending to Lichens: Relationality, Resistance, and Art
While this declaration that “we are all lichens” certainly aligns with Hillman’s poetry, it is even more explicit in artist Laurie Palmer’s work. In her 2023 conceptual art project and book, The Lichen Museum, she asserts that one of her aims is to “lichenize humans” without anthropomorphizing them. It’s a “delicate balance” that Sheldrake is also trying to strike in his discussion of truffles and other fungi throughout his book (91). Palmer builds on much of the same research that we see in Entangled Life, and she thinks about them in similar ways: “lichens are such an amazing paradigm in so many ways, and there’s so much to their story that is fascinating but there isn’t that much that people know.” Like Sheldrake, she brings awareness to both the science and symbolic potential of lichens, but The Lichen Museum goes further in advocating for the social and political potential of lichens as models for living in a more “relational,” or ethical, way. While Sheldrake sees life as fundamentally “entangled,” Palmer sees it as fundamentally “relational,” which highlights connection and dynamic exchange even more so than Sheldrake’s concept of entanglement. Regardless, both emphasize how this reality of biological life challenges assumptions about bounded individualism and, as Palmer explains, “what constitutes an individual organism as well as … what being in relation might mean” (26). Both seek to center fungi and challenge the conventional human/nature hierarchy that often conditions the ways we study, or, in Palmer’s words, “attend to” lichens and the natural world. In Palmer’s view, Sheldrake’s project is a humbling one: “I think that what Sheldrake is doing with the enormous capacities of fungi is to humble humans in relation to the capacities of these amazing beings.”
In our interview, she talks more about her appreciation for Sheldrake’s book and discusses ways their projects converge and diverge. Pointing to his layered approach, at once personal, scientific, metaphorical, and philosophical, she admires the way Entangled Life builds “fundamental philosophical questioning” on scientific explanation. One such example is Sheldrake’s discussion of lichens’ “fondness for rock” and how this metaphorical description works to explain the science and poetics of lichens’ role as a transformational bridge between life and nonlife. As Sheldrake explains, “lichens’ fondness for rock has changed the face of the planet and continues to do so … lichens mine minerals from rock and when they die and decompose … [they] give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living … lichens are go-betweens that inhabit the boundary dividing life and nonlife” (75). Reflecting on this example, Palmer extols his openness to using and discussing metaphor in science: “he writes so beautifully about metaphor in science and with so much permission and openness to the fact that scientists use metaphor. He uses metaphor but also brings attention to it, saying from the start that he had to use his imagination to enter into this world … he doesn’t just ride over the issues of metaphor and anthropomorphism, but he talks about it with this openness that makes it okay.”
While Palmer finds inspiration in Sheldrake’s discussion of metaphor and imagination, something she also focuses on in The Lichen Museum, she notes a key difference in how they understand the human “use” of fungi, which brings into view both a political distinction and difference in scope between their projects. As she explains, “I feel like a lot of Sheldrake’s book has to do with how humans use fungi, or could use fungi, and I feel like that sort of easy relation to use value is something that I was trying to critique in The Lichen Museum, even though lichens, of course, are used, were used, have been used in all of these ways … Part of my interest in them is explicitly about how they resist that, how they are [resistant figures that refuse to be farmed or cultivated]. So that feels like a political difference that I find productive and interesting, but I also recognize that what Sheldrake is doing is a much broader field, the whole field of fungi, as opposed to zeroing in on this one sort of esoteric kind of relationship of lichens.”
We will end here with this interesting point from Palmer that provokes further discussion: What gets left out or obscured in Sheldrake’s attempt to take on the entirety of fungi’s entanglements? Does focusing on the multiple riddles of fungi and their various layers of understanding preclude thinking about their political potential? Or is this just an issue that Sheldrake is not interested in or leaves for others to take on? Either way, Sheldrake’s focus on fungi as layered figures, as both material and symbolic riddles that need to be untangled, studied, and attended to, requires us to slow down, take a closer look, ask questions, and join the discussion.
Here’s to keeping the conversation going …
– Laura
THI Deep Read Faculty Lead
Joining the Community Conversation
We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts this week. What do you think about this final political point that Laurie Palmer is making? Are you reading Sheldrake’s take on fungi and human “use” in this way? Have you noticed any political blindspots or missed political opportunities in Entangled Life? If so, do you think this is intentional or unintentional, and why?
What do you think about Sheldrake’s conception of fungi (here truffles, mycelial networks, and lichen) as “riddles”? How does his description of the ways that lichens challenge conventional science open up new possibilities for thinking about individuality, identity, and coexistence? Why do you think Sheldrake approaches fungi and the issues they raise as riddles? Do you think it’s an accessible way to understand fungi and their implications?
How are you experiencing Sheldrake’s combination of scientific narrative with other, more symbolic discourses–poetic, philosophical, literary, etc? Which approaches feel most illuminating for you? Where are you having “a-ha” moments as you read Entangled Life–in the scientific narrative, the philosophical reflections, or the way these approaches work together?
Why do you think Sheldrake cites poets like Brenda Hillman, and what do you think Sheldrake might be demonstrating about the relationship between science and poetry?
Three major challenges in this section of the book are to rethink what counts as communication, cognition, and individualism. How do you feel about Sheldrake’s invitation to rethink these concepts and categories?
Finally, are you finding Hannah Cole’s conception of “reading for fungi” helpful for your understanding of Entangled Life? Might this mode of reading be applied more generally?
We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts, reflections, and ideas below!