Having recently had a birthday, I decided to spoil myself, and so I bought a copy of John Cage: A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms.

It’s a two volume boxed set, one of them a kind of scrapbook about Cage and his mushroom interests, with photographs of him, often walking in the woods collecting fungi, also pictures of some of the mushroom-related things he collected. Also the text of Mushrooms et Varitiones, which is frankly very hard work.

The other ‘volume’ is a reproduction of The Mushroom Book, a legendary limited edition that he did in the early 70s with Lois Long, illustrator, and Alexander H. Smith, botanist. It’s not so much a book as a set of unbound lithographs, with some more abstruse Cage texts.

Together they make a fine thing, and I do fear spilling coffee or red wine or even mushroom ketchup over them. Cage had his own mushroom ketchup recipe: you probably knew that.

Of course, I was not surprised to find that Cage was a walker, especially in the woods, especially looking for mushrooms, but one thing I didn’t know was that he suffered from arthiritis. I feel his pain, as well as my own. That was why he adopted a Macrobiotic diet to help cure it. It probably worked as well as anything else does. (Don't get me started).

There’s also a partial transcript of a 1983 interview Cage did on Canadian radio, in which the interviewer is trying to get him to talk about 'sacred' mushrooms. He didn’t have much time for that. He said, ‘I don’t think in those terms. Nothing is more sacred than any other thing. We should wash our dishes and brush our teeth and forget about one thing being sacred and another thing not.

‘I don’t have a favorite mushroom – I just like the one I have.”

This guy was GOOD!!

As for me, I continue to walk, often with a more or less painful arthritic knee, and lately as I walk, I look at mushrooms, photograph them, and then when I get home, using a couple of books and an online source or two, with much hesitation and head scratching, I try to identify them.

The one above, I believe, is Exidia glandulosa (though it could be Exidia plana), black jelly fungus, sometimes declared to be edible, but you wouldn’t, would you?

Of course I wouldn’t need to do all this research if John Cage was walking with me. And you know sometimes, in a sense, he is.