Merlin Sheldrake on fungi, creativity, and the queerness of nature.
Merlin Sheldrake on fungi, creativity, and the queerness of nature.
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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Poetry Off the Shelf: A Stone Worth Addressing
Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today: "A Stone Worth Addressing." About 500 million years ago, life was teeming in water, in oceans and freshwater and rivers and lakes. Land, unless you were an extremophile or a microbe, was not the place to be. With no growth to provide shade or retain and release moisture, the temperature fluctuated wildly, making for a scorched earth. But the reason some of these plant ancestors—algae—still wanted to try their luck on land was that oxygen and light were abundant there, unfiltered by the soupy layer which was their home. Only these algae had none of the parts they needed to make it there. No roots to dig for water. No leaves to metabolize sunlight. No flowers. No fruit. No wood. But slowly, over a period of tens of millions of years, they not only developed a way—they became the basis for the living world we now know to exist, for every land animal, including ourselves. But how? By doing something biologists long believed didn't happen, couldn't happen in nature. They collaborated. Plants took up partnerships with fungi, who would strike out into the soil and find water for them, until these plants could grow roots of their own. And in return, the algae would synthesize sunlight to supply these fungi with sugar and fats. This is just one of the many stories the biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake tells in his book Entangled Life. It's a book about how fungi stitch the world together—not just plants and animals and rocks, sunlight and soil, but even life and death, in total defiance of category and separation. It's in this spirit that I'm talking to Merlin Sheldrake, not a poet, but a scientist who borrows generously from poetry to show us the world around and underneath us. We stitched together our conversation from our separate places, me in my closet in Brooklyn, he in the converted chapel in London where he lives. And when I sat down with him, I wanted to start with yet another of his entanglements.
Helena de Groot: So, I will get to fungi in a second, but you're a musician too, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, I do play.
Helena de Groot: And do you have, like, a schedule where you're, like, you wake up and first thing you practice the piano or the accordion? Or, like, how does music fit into your life sort of practically?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, I think of it as a sort of bodily function, you know? I was brought up playing music, it was just something a human did. It's nothing special, it's just part of life. And of course, it is very special. But the way that I think about it is just like: I eat and I sleep and I walk and I play music. It's something one does. And I have my grandmother's grand piano here, and I love playing that, and I have another piano in the kitchen, and I'm just very excited to have more time to dig in.
Helena de Groot: Well, since you're talking about being raised with music and that being such a normal part of your life, I also wanted to ask you about being raised with nature and if that was a part of your life, you know? Like, can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up and how nature figured into that?
Merlin Sheldrake: I grew up on the edge of Hampstead Heath in London, which is a thousand acres of quite wild park. And when you're in the middle of the Heath, it doesn't really feel like you're in a city at all. It feels like quite a beautiful part of the countryside. And my father's a biologist and a naturalist, and a great student of the living world, and would spend a lot of time with me and my brother outside, would encourage us to take an interest in the many lives unfolding around us, and to ask questions about the living world. So, it was a huge part of my life, actually. And we kept tadpoles at home, we had pets, we spent time in the garden—and all in the spirit of fun and play. I think that's really important.
Helena de Groot: Yeah. You know, one thing that I find so interesting when you see kids in nature is that they have not, on the whole, developed fear for bugs or stuff. You know what I mean? That they don't think that they're gross, but that they think, like, "Ooh, they're cool. Here, let me have one walk on my hand and look at it closely," you know? And in your book Entangled Life, you describe your field research in Panama. So, you're feeling your way down a tree trunk into the spongy debris by the roots, and you write, "A tarantula scuttled off and I knelt." So, my question—to me, this would be so terrifying. That would be the end of field research. And so I'm wondering, like, what is your relationship to fear when it comes to what you may encounter in the natural world? I mean, you know, the reason I bring up childhood is, has your lack of fear just been unbroken?
Merlin Sheldrake: I think there's fear of various kinds. I don't have much fear of creatures, meeting creatures. I think maybe this could have been being brought up in England, which is a very safe place to be outside. I spent my summers since I was tiny on the west coast of Canada, where there are certainly orcas and whales and wolves and bears and eagles, but it's otherwise quite a safe place. There aren't snakes, or poisonous spiders are extremely rare. There aren't too many insects, there's no scorpions. You can roll around in the forest with bare feet and not feel afraid, even though there are some larger animals around—but they're shy and they don't really want to bother you. When I was in Panama, it was different. There were some very poisonous snakes—they're "sit-and-wait" predators. So, when you walk past, if they see something moving, they pounce, 'cause they eat small mammals. So you'd have to get into the habit of tapping. I spend all my time on the ground with my hands in the soil, kneeling, sitting. And so you had to get used to tapping the ground before you sat down, so that any snakes would slither off and spiders would leave. And so initially that was a little intimidating. And there was a little bit of fear. And killer bees as well that can cause you great trouble. And so there was some fear. But after a while it became a bit like when I'm in London and I pay attention to crossing the road—you know, traffic is hugely dangerous when you're in London, and it becomes a hazard that one accepts as part of one's day, part of one's contract with the place. You sign up to be there and you sign up to the hazards of the place. And so in London, I'm used to traffic, and in the Panamanian rainforest, I was used to snakes and spiders and I would take the necessary precautions and never had a trouble or any problem. So, I think it's a bit like that. We live with so many dangerous things, on the whole, in our lives, and we normalize them. And we have to, really, to get on with our lives.
Helena de Groot: This is so true. Yes. As a committed jaywalker in New York, I have to make my own snap decisions about [whether] it's safe or not and take a calculated risk. When in your life did you become intrigued by fungi, and then how did you make the decision to commit to them, you know, to really make that your thing?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, so I became increasingly interested in fungi. And I was interested in animals and plants, and remain interested in animals and plants as well, and bacteria and other microbes. But fungi always had something special. They have great power, a great power to transform matter from one state into another. And I was amazed at composting—taking buckets of kitchen waste out into the garden, and then, months later, shoveling what becomes soil into the flowerbeds. It seemed like a miracle, and it really still does. And that sort of led me into inquiring about microbes and fungi that can transform the living world, and from there on I became increasingly fascinated. My formal study began when I was at university and when I was doing my PhD. And I think that was a real commitment moment. It's like, "OK, I want to study fungi. I want to study, in particular, the fungi that form relationships with plants, form very sophisticated trading relationships with plants, and really underlie much of the regenerative capacity of the living world." And that was a big commitment moment, because PhDs are commitments, and I was going to double down on the subject and these creatures and see what I could learn from them and learn about them. And once you get started on the fungal inquiries, you start slithering helplessly down a very slippery slope. I watched so many people do it, and I'm doing it myself. We're all sort of sliding helplessly down the slope, like arm over leg, head over ass, and just sort of giggling, and it's like a really funny kids party.
Helena de Groot: I once heard a story about a guy who studied bugs professionally, and he was so frustrated and irritated that mammals and birds, you know, like cute animals or animals that we can sort of anthropomorphize at will, that they got all the research money, that they got all the research papers, that they got all the public interest—not bugs. And I'm wondering what that's like in your field. Like, I just wonder, is there a kind of—among mycologists, is there a kind of underdog mentality, like that all of us are like, "actually, we're the cool kids because we study the less studied thing?" What is sort of the distribution of resources, and how does that make you, as a cohort, feel?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, good question. Especially because so much of fungal life is about distributing and redistributing resources. So, on the whole, the big picture is that fungi are a kingdom of life without—they haven't had a kingdom's worth of attention. So relative to animals or plants, which are also kingdoms of life, the same kind of level of category, they are seriously understudied, seriously underfunded. So fungal researchers in general feel that fungi should be studied more, they should feature in educational curricula—at the moment they barely feature, and when they do feature, they feature as agents of death or decay or disease—that they should feature much more in grant-awarding bodies, and that people with fungal expertise should be on grant-awarding committees. So on. So, there's a big systemic kind of bias against fungi, and part of that's because they were only designated to be a kingdom of life, their own kingdom of life in the late ’60s. So, it took them a long time to win their taxonomic independence. And that meant that there's just less time, less institutional energy and hours. So that's the big picture. Fungi are neglected relative to animals and plants. And most fungal biologists are aware of that, and would happily talk about that. But within the fungal world, there are certain areas that are much better funded. Medical mycology on the whole is much better funded than other areas, even though medical mycology is funded so much less than other areas of medicine. So, for example, there's no vaccine against a fungal disease, which is wild given that fungal diseases are a big problem, and an increasingly big problem. There's only four classes of antifungal drugs developed, and we're quickly making those less effective by overapplying fungicides. So even though mycologists would say, "Well, medical mycology is well-funded," medical mycology would say, "Well, look, compared to other aspects of medicine, we're not," which would be true. Some other areas are well-funded—like yeast are quite well-funded, 'cause they're so useful in industry, and also because they're very tractable genetic systems, so people use them as model organisms for all sorts of experiments. So, it's very patchy even within the fungal world.
Helena de Groot: Huh. OK, I wanna ask you—of course, this is a poetry podcast, so I will ask you about language and metaphor and writing. But before we do, I just wanna sit with the actual research for a minute. And I wanted to start with the mycelium and with lichen, both of which you describe not as a thing, but as a process. And so I was just wondering: What is, or what are, the specific discoveries or moments that led you to that quite radical conclusion?
Merlin Sheldrake: I think that when I'm talking about fungi and mycelium and lichens as processes, I'm also talking about all lifeforms as processes, right? And life itself as a process. And in those chapters, I'm talking about them, and I think they illustrate this very well. But I really do think that all lifeforms are processes. Like you, like me, like the cells—the matter that makes up my body today is different matter from the matter that made up my body a few years ago. So, we're kind of fields of stability through which matter is passing. And all lifeforms are like that. And I think that's a really powerful way of thinking, because it builds a time axis into the living world. And it leads us into, I think, a more organic kind of philosophy, philosophy that perhaps is more fitting to the living world. Rather than thinking of ourselves and other bodies as stuff, that we are winding, branching processes, guided by our past and lured by our futures. So anyways—to answer your question, I was thinking about processual philosophies, processual biology more generally, you know, and there is a body of scholarship and thoughts devoted to this subject, and it's been around for a long time.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher is sort of as one of the founding figures in process, though no doubt there were many before him.
Helena de Groot: Oh, really? Is that because Heraclitus, is he the one who doesn't step in the same river twice?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, you can't step in the same river twice. And so that's one of the founding maxims of modern process thought, you know. So, we ourselves are like rivers and the matter is flowing through us, but we remain in our shape. So, we're more like, from this perspective, we're more like a kind of a whirlpool, like a stable whirlpool in a river than we are like a rock in that river. So, the more I was spending time with fungi, the more I thought that they've just made this very clear, that they made this processual perspective extremely clear. In the case of lichens, because they're a symbiotic organism. They arise out of the relationship between fungi, algae, bacteria. So, the relationships are processes, you know? Relationships aren't things. And so if you think about the process of that relationship, it also makes the understanding of the relationship more exciting, because it's not just that relationship is like this, or like, where one partner gives the X to the other partner, and the other partner gives Y to the first partner. It's a process, which means you can see it as this dynamic negotiation unfolding in time, subject to change and revision, and so on. And so I think it's a much more lively picture of the living world, a lively picture of these relationships and the agents that form them. And to finish this, one really sort of powerful thing that changes when you start to take on this process view—and that is, if you take a substance view, which you might think of as a kind of counterbalance to the process view. So, the substance view would be like, "OK, everything is made of stuff, stable stuff." So, when you boil it all down, you find units of stable stuff. And then with the process view, you boil it all down, you find unceasing flux. And sometimes it's helpful to take on one or the other of the lenses. Ultimately, we need both. And ultimately, I think it comes down to one of these, it's a very venerable dichotomy between chaos and order, between flux and habit, or creativity and habit. And we need both forces in our lives, you know? And sometimes you get trapped in the flux, trapped and dizzy with flux, and then it helps to come back to find some kind of regular habits, some routine, something that can ground you and hold you stable. Sometimes we get trapped in values of habit and calcified modes of thought, and then it's helpful to play a wrong note, do something completely different, throw yourself out of that, catapult yourself into novelty to get out of that. And certainly, I find that my health, my state of being, depends on these forces being in some kind of balance.
Helena de Groot: That's so interesting. I mean, it also makes me think about cognition. Because you're talking about a river, and a river has a way of finding the way of least resistance and the way. . . the fastest way from high to low, I suppose. So, is that cognition though? You know, maybe not. So, mycelium does something similar where it doesn't have a fixed shape. It sort of makes up its shape as it goes along, literally, depending on what kind of resources are around, what kind of things are around that they don't wanna be close to. And that shape is constantly changing. So, when you're confronted with a decision-making organism—an organism that decides, "let me go here now," "let me not go there now"—what is your conclusion about cognition? Like, how do you see cognition? How do you think about the intelligence of mycelium?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, it's a really good question, and something that's being debated and discussed a lot at the moment. And the cognitive sciences arose placing the human mind and ultimately the human brain at the center of their inquiry, because humans are making the inquiry, and we're interested in ourselves—over-interested in ourselves sometimes, sometimes distracted utterly by our narcissism—so many of the tests for intelligence, many of the frameworks that were used, were ones that made sense for studying human intelligence and human cognition, but maybe not for other types of organisms. So, we ended up in a situation where there's a kind of league table of intelligence, with humans at the very top and other animals, say primates that look like us, generally on the whole look like us, a bit lower down and so on, other higher animals and onwards and downwards. And so what's changed now is that, yeah, researchers are starting to think of this much more as a kind of spectrum, where the question is not "is an organism intelligent, yes or no," but more, what kinds of intelligent behaviors do we see here? And some of those intelligent behaviors might be the ability to make decisions, the ability to change one's behavior in response to changes in one's surroundings, the ability to solve problems. And of course, all organisms live in different kinds of contexts, and they've evolved to solve different problems, they've evolved to confront different kinds of decisions. So, what might be intelligent behavior for a plant or a fungus might not register as intelligent behavior for a human, because we just are in such a different context, and we solve different problems than they do. And we'd be useless at solving the kind of problems that they solve on a moment-to-moment basis. So by their standards, we'd be total morons. There are things that we can agree on, we'd be able to agree on, and that's why I think these frameworks are helpful, like decision-making or adapting to changes in the environment or solving problems, because then you can boil it down, and it's easier to see things from the perspective of the organism you're trying to understand.
So, I think from this point of view, almost every living creature has some degree of intelligence, because every creature has to solve certain problems associated with living. That's what evolution has done, is led to all these remarkable beings who are able to continue living by sensing the environment and responding in an appropriate way, sometimes more appropriate than others. So, I think that it shouldn't be scary or controversial to think about fungi as displaying intelligent behaviors, nor plants or even bacteria. They just look very different from ours, usually. And I think the living world becomes a much more interesting place when you take that view. So, I study with a group I work with, we're looking at information processing within the mycorrhizal fungal networks. We can see them in these remarkable trading relationships with plants, we can see them rooting material around themselves, resolving complex tradeoffs, exploring a heterogeneous environment. They're regulating these complex fluxes and we don't really understand how they're doing it, you know, but we can see them doing it.
And so there's data streams flowing in there, they're paying attention to data streams like temperature, pressure, any number of chemicals. And they're integrating these data streams, but they don't have a brain to do that. They don't have a place where they do that integration. And they're kind of, it's distributed all around them. And this is puzzling for cerebrocentric organisms like us.
Helena de Groot: I don't know if this is an OK question to ask, but what about creativity? Because, you know, you talked about solving problems, right? These are organisms that are trying to solve problems about resources, about whatever the heterogeneous environment around them, and their own drive to stay alive. Humans, of course, have that too. You know, we're trying to solve problems of: "I'm hungry, I need to eat. How do I go about getting that food?" But we're also creative for no good reason other than that it feels good. You know, it feels good sometimes to play a piece of music, or it feels good to dance, or to express yourself in a poem. And I'm wondering if you can think about, say, mycelium being creative in that way.
Merlin Sheldrake: I think so. I mean, I think you can think about life being a creative process. Think about—if you look at the broad picture of life over the last four billion years, you see these efflorescences, these pulses of novelty. So you have these big efflorescences and then cataclysmic events, extinction events, where almost everything is wiped out. And then it begins, there's a huge bottleneck and then everything radiates out in this great efflorescence of possibility and form and behavior. And then, bam, it comes back down. And this has happened five times. Five times life has rebounded, re-sprouted, if you like, from these severe bottlenecks. And each time we've ended up in some quite different places. And that, for me, really does look like a creative process. Evolution isn't just leading to everything staying as it was. It's leading to greater diversity and greater complexity. And when you look at the lives of an individual organism, I think if everyone is improvising through time. I love playing jazz and so jazz for me is just a metaphor I reach for all the time. But I learned a lot about improvisation from this form, this art. And when one's improvising, you're improvising within constraints. You know, you have a whole load of constraints that are there. And some of those constraints give you technical skill and some of those constraints are just limits. But then you're working within a field of possibility. And so we're improvising our whole lives. Here we are in this conversation improvising right now. We all do it. We're constantly improvising. And so if we're all constantly improvising and you look around and see animals, like they're improvising too. They can't predict what's gonna happen that day, what they're gonna encounter in the garden. So they're responding fluidly, dynamically, to unpredictable changes. And again, constrained by the constraints that they have, but with the degrees of freedom they have to respond as well. And I think what makes all these kinds of creatures different are the different constraints and different degrees of freedom. And so I think that it goes all the way down. I think it happens in plants and fungi and bacteria. I think everyone's improvising through time. And improvisation requires some kind of—the novelty in our response, the unpredictability in our response, is something that we might think of as creativity. And where that comes from is a very big question that's confounded people for a very long time. But I think that the novelty, the unpredictability, the factor of surprise in how we move forward into our degrees of freedom, constrained by our past, constrained by our habits. So if you then think about that in the lifetime of one organism, then you think about the community of organisms, ecosystem of organisms, and then a whole biosphere, then you end up in a very creative living world, an improvisational living world. And a living world, which is a game like jazz, involves lots of players responding to each other. No one's doing this alone. So that's where I end up. And I like that account. It makes me feel like we're all participating in this together, that we're all involved, that we can all listen to each other, we can learn from each other, we can contribute to this ever-evolving, remarkable, remarkable show.
(BREAK)
Helena de Groot: I'd like to move over to language, writing, and metaphor. And I was wondering if we can start that by having you read a little excerpt from your book. So on page 21 and 22—and before you read, can you set it up a little bit?
Merlin Sheldrake: Sure. I was participating in a study looking at the effects of LSD on the problem-solving abilities of scientists, engineers, mathematicians. And we had to talk about a work-related problem that we wanted to wrestle with in this psychedelic state. My way of thinking about it was that we had these knots that we were trying to untie, and dipping the knots in LSD might help us loosen them. At least that was how the study was set up. So, yeah, I was in the hospital, nurses had given me the LSD, I was having a lovely time just being looked after in a sort of safe place, and just enjoying the experience. And at some point, my assistant—everyone had an assistant with them to help, basically to remind them to start thinking about their work-related problem at some point, because it wasn't the first thing on my mind—so I was like, "Oh, my work-related problem. OK, I should start thinking about my work-related problem." And anyways, what I was trying to wrestle with was the ways that plants and mycorrhizal fungi are interacting, and in particular, a certain type of plant that has lost the ability to photosynthesize. So, it doesn't have leaves, it doesn't have green color, it makes its living by connecting to mycorrhizal fungi, which themselves are connected to at least one other green plant, photosynthesizing plant. And so these ghost plants, as they're called, they acquire their nutrients from other plants, through a shared fungal connection. Anyways, I was very interested in these plants and how they were relating to the fungi. And so I was just trying to—when they asked me to think about my work-related problem, I just cast my mind into the soil, and I just tried to imagine what it would actually be like to be in the soil. And of course, I didn't stand a chance of imagining what it would actually be like to be in the soil. But it certainly helped to jolt me out of the many of my governing assumptions about soil life and to sort of feel the wildness of what it must be to spend time there and to be a creature there.
Helena de Groot: Do you wanna read the excerpt?
Merlin Sheldrake: "I lay on the hospital bed with my eyes closed and wondered what
it was like to be a fungus. I found myself underground, surrounded by growing tips surging across one another. Schools of globular animals grazing—plant roots and their hustle—the Wild West of the soil—all those bandits, brigands, loners, crapshooters. The soil was a horizonless external gut—digestion and salvage everywhere—flocks of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge—chemical weather systems—subterranean highways—slimy infective embrace—seething intimate contact on all sides. As I followed a fungal hypha into a cavernous root, I was struck by the sanctuary it offered. Very few
other types of fungi were present; certainly no worms or insects. There was less bustle and hassle. It was a haven I could imagine paying for. Perhaps that was what the blue flowers offered the fungi in return for their nutritional support? Shelter from the storm.
I make no claims about the factual validity of these visions. They are at best plausible and at worst delirious nonsense. Not even wrong."
Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's true. That's important to include. It is important to include, because my question is actually about that. Yeah, what I think is so interesting about those two lines that you added, you know, "I make no claims about the factual validity of these visions. They are at best plausible, at worst delirious nonsense. Not even wrong." I think it's so important because, throughout your book, you're masterful at using metaphor. And just in this little passage: “. . . the wild west of soil, all those bandits, brigands, loners, crapshooters," then "the soil as a horizonless gut." There are bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge. There are highways. There's just a lot of different images, that each image gives you a new understanding of some of the qualities of these organisms or of that environment below the ground. And so I'm wondering how you got comfortable with metaphor, and how you got to be so wild. Like, what were your examples? What were you reading? Or did you have any mentors?
Like how did you come to be so creative with simile and metaphor?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, it's a good question. And actually in this passage, it's a little embarrassing in the sense that there's quite—when you say it like that, I'm like, "Oh God, there's so many—so many different images all crammed together." And I realized that I deliberately did this in this passage to have that density, to cast your mind around. You know, it's disorienting because I wanted it to be disorienting, because it is a disorienting experience. But a dear friend who's a writer, Edward St Aubyn, he was very helpful. I talked to him and he said: "Pay attention to the stability of your metaphors." And I took this, really, to heart. So I find it easier to create by making a big mess and then tidying it up afterwards, rather than trying to edit myself as I make things. So I went around stabilizing most of the metaphors in the book—well, at least doing my best to stabilize them, bearing in mind that given that. . .
Helena de Groot: You're tripping here, this is also another. . . (LAUGHS)
Merlin Sheldrake: Here I didn't stabilize them. So, you have that sense of rolling around from place to place, like from world to world, from perspective to perspective. And when you arrive in one image from the other image, it seems unfamiliar because you've come at it from the side, from an unusual angle. So, to answer your question—a lot by trial and error, but also by reading and by talking, and by talking to people who are good with words, and by reading the words of people who are amazing with words, and by really thinking about metaphors as something vitally important and fundamental to everything that we do as linguistic creatures. And one of the reasons I think like that is that I'm married to a poet called Erin Robinsong, and she thinks a lot and talks a lot about metaphors, as many poets do. And one of the things she said about metaphor, which I find so helpful, is that she talks about how the poetry often happens at this kind of the bleeding edge, the evolving edge of language, and that much of what we think of as kind of stable language, or language that—unpoetic language, perhaps you might say—was once metaphorical in many cases, and so many idioms were once metaphors that were used poetically. And over time, with repeated use, they stabilize, a bit like the Cliffs of Dover in England are made out of compressed seashells. Each one of those little particles used to be a living creature, but now it's sort of compressed into the very ground we walk on. The ground of the language you walk on is kind of made up of all of these sort of fossilized metaphors—but at the edges of language, you have these very lively metaphors, which you can tell are metaphors because they are seen to you, they're noticeable to you. So, I like this a lot. It makes metaphor really fundamental to language, whether or not we think we're using a metaphor at that given moment. And I think metaphors are also really important because they reveal something about our worlds. There's an astonishing scholar who I read at a university called Barbara Duden, and she was a historian, a historian of medicine, and she was studying women's experience of their bodies in the 17th century. And these women, the poor women in rural Germany, they didn't write, they didn't leave any archival evidence themselves. The only evidence of them and their experience is written by a man, a male doctor called Dr. Stork. And it was at a time — so Barbara Duden is doing this work and it's very skillfully done. So, at this time, the doctors wouldn't touch their female patients' bodies. The women would describe their pain, they would describe what was wrong with them, and that would be all that the doctor would go on. And given that, the women had to evolve a very rich language of pain, because that's what was treated. So, the better you could describe your pain, the better the doctor could meet you where you were. And, of course, this all happened through metaphors and analogy. So, Barbara Duden, the modern scholar, she is reading the doctor's accounts of the women's descriptions of their pain and reading across their metaphors to learn something about their life. Because every metaphor tells you—if the pain in your stomach feels like a boulder that's been stitched into your stomach, with the soft edge that's been by the river, the front or something like that —you can tell something about the person's life because it involved boulders and rivers and exposure to that. So, every metaphor is ventilated with an aspect of the person's world. And in this book, Barbara Duden uses them explicitly to try and access the experiences of these undocumented lives of these women. And it's very moving and very beautiful and got me thinking about metaphors as something where you're always likening something to something else. And so I like them in the sense as well, where it's a way of building intimacy with a reader or as a reader, building intimacy with a writer.
Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating story that you tell about this researcher Barbara Duden, because in this case, these women's lives literally depended on their expansive use of metaphor, which for most of us is luckily not the case. And it made me think of this Wittgenstein adage: "The limits of our language are the limits of our world." And I found that so true in your book, you know? And there's this one researcher, Spribille, am I pronouncing it right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Spribille.
Helena de Groot: Who discovers at some point that there's one specific metaphor that actually helps him understand the fungi that he's studying. So, can you tell me that story, like, how metaphor became, actually, a way into his subject for him?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yes. So Toby was studying—well, he's a brilliant researcher into lichens, these symbiotic organisms formed when a fungus and sometimes an alga, or sometimes bacterium, or both alga and bacterium come together and create an organism that doesn't exist within any of the constituent members. And lichens have always posed a puzzle to biologists, because they are places where, you know, normally as evolution happens, lineages are thought of as diverging from each other. So, humans and chimps and bonobos and gorillas at some point shared a common ancestor, but at some point diverged and now live quite different lives. So, the evolutionary tree metaphor is one of the branches of a tree. They branch into twigs, twigs branch into further twigs, and the species are the leaves on the twigs of the tree of life. And in lichens, it works a bit differently, because you have branches, distant branches of the tree that have come together, they've grown together and fused inseparably into a new lineage. And so that's really puzzling and has led to all sorts of category confusions within biology and people studying lichens. And so Toby has found that, studying carefully who's living with who and how stable these relationships are, he found a third partner in a well-studied lichen that had escaped decades of painstaking scrutiny. And other people had seen these organisms living within the lichen, but they'd believed in a paradigm where the lichen consisted of two partners—two partners only—the fungus and the alga. So, the extra fungi that were in there, the different types of fungus that was in there, that must be a contaminant, or it must be some unstable infection, or like just transient association. And Toby just kept seeing it again and again and again, and eventually was able to demonstrate that they are a stable third partner in the symbiosis. And he uses this metaphor of, he spoke about a paper called "Queer Theory for Lichens." And in this paper, the author talks about how helpful queer theory is in understanding these relationships because these relationships don't fit into neatly prescribed categories. Their identity is a question rather than an answer in advance. And the only way to learn about these relationships that you see in front of you is to pay attention to what they're actually doing, rather than to bring your received category and to apply it to the world and try and shoehorn everything into that category. And I think the queer theory approach makes a lot of sense for the whole of the living world. Life is so queer, life is so category-melting and defying and fluid, and identity is so negotiated and fluid in the living world. And there are so many very different ways of even understanding that yeah, I think Toby's point can be generalized.
Helena de Groot: There's a different Toby, Toby Keers, who at some point exclaims quite exasperatedly his frustration with having to always resort to metaphor or use this clunky technology that we have that is language. And he says. . .
Merlin Sheldrake: It's a she, this Toby is a she.
Helena de Groot: Oh, it's she!
Merlin Sheldrake: The other Toby is a he, this one's a she.
Helena de Groot: Thank you. OK, so she says, "I'd really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon." And I thought that it was so interesting because there's this other scientist, this evolutionary biologist called Richard Lewontin, who says, "I'm sorry, no, it's impossible to do the work of science without using metaphor, because almost the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings. We're gonna need that leap of language." And I'm just—in that sort of debate between the uses and limits of language, when did you feel in the writing of this book that you came up most painfully against the limits of language?
Merlin Sheldrake: I think when coming up against the limits of language, whether I encountered that as pain or excitement depends on my mood on that day. And whether that's like an invitation to step up and engage in the art of writing, or whether that's like banging your head against a wall or knocking on a door which it refuses to open. But I agree with Richard Lewontin that we have to use metaphor and analogy in the sciences, partly because so many of the phenomena that we're studying are so remote, they're so out of the ordinary for us, that we need to give ourselves some narrative aids to get into those worlds and perspectives. And partly because we need them to organize thoughts and creative thinking, that we need to—just like a sculptor would create an armature from wire on which they would build their clay form. We need these metaphors and analogies to create those armatures that we can use to support our creative engagement and our inquiries of any sort, scientific included. So, for me, the question would be trying not to get stuck—given that the metaphor and analogy is not an option, the problem for me would be getting stuck within one narrative, or we don't have a balanced narrative diet, you know, and we're just stuck in one story. And you see that all the time in some branches of the sciences, particularly in the study of symbiotic relationships, 'cause the symbiotic relationships form a kind of prism through which our own social values are dispersed. In the history of the study of symbiosis, you can see these changing metaphors to understand these relationships. And it's . . .
Helena de Groot: Yeah, it starts with master and slave, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Master and slave, the relationship between men and women, the relationship between different nations, it changes. And meanwhile, the organisms that we're talking about, they're getting on with their lives, relating. And here we are, just throwing all these stories at them and using these stories, using these organisms to justify our own social worlds at that given moment. And naturalizing—I mean, naturalize our behavior by pointing to an example in the living world and saying, "Look, it happens in the living world, it must be natural. So that means we can keep doing what we're doing." So, the key is for me remembering when we're using a metaphor or analogy that we're using a metaphor or analogy, and making sure that we can change that lens if it's not generating helpful questions and answers in a given inquiry, that we can get trapped in these narrative corners. And I think the most frustrating times for me was when I would get trapped in these narrative corners and wouldn't be able to see the way out. Normally, what would happen is that I'd have to change my lens, I'd have to change my frame, I'd have to find a new angle to approach the question from. And when I did that, there'd be a sense of great relief and, a kind of classic sort of creative frustration, which is rewarded when successful with a kind of sense of relief and gratitude. So that, you know, usually the creative process is a mixture of those kind of a-ha moments and teeth-grinding frustration.
Helena de Groot: And what's a metaphor that you got stuck in, you think?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, one that I got stuck in was thinking about fungal mycelium as like threads, like the cobweb, the spiderweb, the web, the threads, the strings, ropes, like any kind of tie. And I think the knotting and the tying, that's super helpful for understanding mycelium as well. But where that metaphor breaks down is that it leads us to forget about the space within these fungal cells. So, these are tubes, within which rivers of cellular fluid are flowing. And that's kind of the whole point of these networks, is that they're tubes within which stuff is flowing, they're transport networks. So, the thread or string or rope or web analogies would invisibilize that flux within the network. And so that's, I think, a really good example for me, where, OK, sometimes it's helpful to use the web thread, no kind of weaving type perspective, it helps me to think about the architecture of the network, the topology of the network, all the crossings and the tangles, and the tips and the edges. But when I wanted to think about the fluxes within the network, then I'd have to change the metaphor and go into like, to think about the contents of the network itself.
Helena de Groot: Wow, this is so interesting. Because when you say web, when you were like, yeah, the metaphor that I got stuck in was the metaphor of the web and the threads. To me, reading your book, those didn't even strike me as a metaphor, because it just seems factual, it just seems—but you make me see that, like, there's no such thing as purely factual, like, every fact is cast in language, and every language choice is a human approximation of reality. Like, it never is the thing.
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, I mean, up to a point. And I think this is something that—yeah, this is a big old, a big old pit of inquiry for sure. But I think the threads and string and knots are still super helpful. I love tying knots and untying knots, and I have done since I was a child, and tying and untying knots was a helpful part of understanding mycelium and leading me through the process of writing the book too, so I would never throw that out. And so it's just an example of how we need to have these metaphors or analogies in some kind of dynamic balance without becoming fully, full-time inhabitants of one only.
Helena de Groot: That reminds me of what you said at the beginning, that we're always a balance between our habits and our flux, that sometimes we become too much like the stone, and we have to remind ourselves that we're more like the whirlpool again, and maybe change it up a little. That is so applicable to life. Which brings me to my last question. Did you share drafts of your manuscript with your wife, the poet Erin Robinsong? And if so, like, what was that conversation like? What was it like to be married to a poet and writing this incredibly poetic book? How did you collaborate on this, if you did?
Merlin Sheldrake: It's a good question. And she definitely—I showed Erin drafts, and she was hugely helpful. And whenever I write something, I show drafts, and if she writes something, she shows me drafts. And we're very used to relating in that way. We had a long-distance relationship for a while, and we would, the way we would be together is through writing to each other. So, we've got a kind of writerly—at least writing is a way that we connect. But it was fantastically helpful and always is. She sees things I'm blind to and always has. It always feels that she has some way of improving whatever's there in front of her. We have a project that we've been working on more recently together which was a kind of workshop experience, really, that we co-led. And it involved an exercise where we would invite people to go into the area around us and find—let's say, a thing, we start off as being, you start find a thing, it could be a stone, it could be a pine needle, it could be a huge tree, it could be a cloud, it could be the sun, it could be the sea, it could be a wave of the sea, it could be a drop of the wave of the sea. And write something to this job of experience that you've encountered, the stone, the sea, the pine needle. But rather than talk about this entity, talk to it, use the second person rather than the third person. And Erin had written a whole collection based on this, so she had some really helpful tip—like, look, this might feel a bit awkward, it might feel a bit strange. If you're stuck, what can really help is compliments, like, "Oh, you look really great today." She had all these great tips to help people get into the swing of it, because, you know, to overcome the slight awkwardness of writing, addressing the stone as a you, you know, and people would have very powerful experiences. And with this simple, but I think very powerful, transformation of the third person that the second person does, is it recognizes that the entity that you're addressing is a locus of experience. And that we objectify so much, so readily, the living world and the beings in it. That to do this subtle shift, simple, but subtle, powerful shift can really lead us into a new kind of feeling of being alive and surrounded by other beings. So, it was a poetic exercise; it was also a scientific exercise, 'cause, well, it was coming out of the study of relationships in the living world, that everything is relating the whole time, we're living in a world of togetherness. And so we're living in a world of communication because everything's got to communicate in order to manage its togetherness, you know, so how can we participate in that somehow? How can we open our ears, open our minds, and it's—no, it's not like the stone's going to understand our human language, at least that wasn't our assumption. It's more that we can start to behave in a way as if humans weren't the only organisms worth addressing.
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Helena de Groot: Merlin Sheldrake is the author of the New York Times bestseller Entangled Life, which won the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize, and was translated into 32 languages. Besides being a writer, he's a research associate of Oxford University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and works closely with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and the Fungi Foundation. Merlyn is also the presenter of Fungi: Web of Life, a giant screen documentary narrated by Björk. To find out more about his book, his music, or the hot sauce he ferments, check out his website, merlinsheldrake.com. To find out more about his wife, the poet Erin Robinsong, check out her website, erinrobinsong.org. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off The Shelf. Thank you for listening.