TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, INNIT

 About half a mile up the hill from where I live there’s a sort of public, not quite 

orchard, by which I mean there are a few apple trees apparently growing wild, and 

when they bear fruit nobody’s going to stop you walking in and taking a few apples.

 

So I was up bright and early and was out before the binmen came, and walked up, and there was not a single apple to be found – neither on the trees nor on the ground.  Gotta say I’m not totally in touch with the cycles of apple production but I thought I found a lot this time last year.

 

Still, an early walk is never to be despised and there was still some nature to be seen, if not of the malus variety.

 

There were spider webs in the apple trees:

 

Mushrooms on the ground:

 

And cats.  Yes, there are always cats.

THE MUSHROOM WALK

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.

THE SAME OLD NOT THE SAME OLD

I recently came across a quotation, which may be familiar to everybody else but it’s new to me, from John Burroughs’ Signs and Seasons: ‘The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed.’

This seems to be the equivalent of saying you can’t walk on the same water twice, and I absolutely agree with that.

Above is a path, perhaps a gennell, perhaps a snickett, depending on which bit of England you come from, and I walk down it pretty much every day.  As far as I can tell it doesn’t have a name. 

I always see a few pigeons perching on the fences beside the path, and sometimes I see a skulking cat or two, and sometimes I see evidence that a cat got among the pigeons. Nature, don’t you love it?  I suppose I’d feel better if the cats actually ate the pigeons as opposed to just killing them, but cats, I know, don't care about my feelings,

On the path I encounter  people once in a while and words are occasionally exchanged but mostly we don’t make eye contact and keep silent, which seems to suit everybody.  

The other day I was walking up the slope and a young couple were walking behind me and arguing, and I heard him say, 'So it’s ok for you to talk to me like that but I can’t talk to you like that, is that right?’

And the girl said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you like anything.’  
This seemed a moment of transcendent Zen.

Sometimes there are big mushrooms growing in the grass alongside the path:

And sometimes there are fungi that are not just big but monstrous (that ruler’s  15 inches long).  

I wish I had the wisdom to know whether or not they’re edible, which may be just another way of saying I wish I was John Cage.

WALKING WITH WELLS

My dad was in many ways an odd man (that's not him in the picture above).  We did a lot of walking together, and we talked, though I think he did most of the talking.  And one of his oddnesses was that he was absolutely sure he knew things even when he didn’t. 

When I started reading “grown up” books he encouraged me read HG Wells’ The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, though I don’t  know if he’d read them himself.  And he also told me about The History of Mr Polly which he said was a book about a man who grew poisonous mushrooms in his cellar and killed his wife with them.  This sounds like a perfectly reasonable premise for a book but it’s not what happens in The History of Mr. Polly, which I only read very recently.

It's possible that he meant a short story by Wells, titled “The Purple Pileus,” about a hapless and unhappily-married  shopkeeper named Coombes.

Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence, but of everybody else’s, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling’s Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pinewoods and out of sight and sound of human inhabitation.

In the woods Coombes finds what he thinks are poisonous mushrooms, and eats them in an attempt to kill himself, but he doesn’t die.  He’s transformed into a masterful and confident man, and his wife falls in love with him again.  So again, not at all as described by dad.

So yes, I’ve been walking again and it does seem that here in Los Angeles we’re still in fungus/mushroom season.  These, not especially lovely specimens, are in Culver City:

This is in East Hollywood, fungus thriving as it coexists with a traffic cone:

And when I got home, there was this waiting for me.

Fans of cacti may recognize that that the plant in the pot is a cardon, or “false saguaro,”  but what, I hear you say, are those two pale yellowish nubbins down at the bottom of the pot?  They are these things:

Arguably this is an indication that I’ve been overwatering my cardon.  I've been trying not to, of course, but we know it happens.  Anyway, the next day they looked like this:

Using the online “Myokey fungus identifier” it seems they could be one of 150 or so different mushrooms including amanita.  So then I did a reverse image search which suggested it might be this: 

In fact that’s mochi ice cream, but even so I don’t want to risk eating it.

WALKING UNCAGED

There are many days when I wish that John Cage was still with us, for his compositions and his philosophy, and on a day like today, his mycological skills.

         Cage was a mushroom hunter, an activity that requires a fair bit of walking, and he wrote in a somewhat ironic piece published as “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” “I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published.” 

He even taught a class in mushroom identification at the New School in New York which involved taking the class, on foraging expeditions, walking through the woods, but (the school decreed) only those woods accessible on public transport. 

Cage has been on my mind because recently as I’ve walked around LA (a city which has scarcely seen a trickle of rain for the last several months), I keep seeing mushrooms and fungi growing in very unexpected places.  Such as here on somebody’s lawn in Larchmont:

I suppose in this case the lawn has been watered perhaps overwatered through this long dry spell, and so perfect mushroom conditions have been created.

I suppose this must apply in the case below too, in Sawtelle, though this isn’t somebody’s garden but one of those little strips of grass between the road and the sidewalk. I didn’t notice a sprinkler system but I guess there must be one.  And in fact that mushroom was even bigger than it looks in the photo.

And today, on my way to the dentist, I saw this (there were a couple of other very small, less impressive specimens nearby):

Since they’re growing out of a tree I don’t suppose they rely on watering, and the patch of ground the tree did look very dry, though that’s not to say it doesn’t get watered from time to time.  I wish John Cage, or someone, had been there to identify the fungus.  My best guess, from doing a reverse image search, is that it might be a Rhizina undulata, but I wouldn't want to put money on it.

Did you know that in 1959 Cage won $10,000 on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia (Double or Nothing) by giving the 24 names of the white-spored Agaricus as described in Atkinson’s Studies of American Fungi.”  Not just that, he listed them in alphabetical order,” which makes him a bit of a show- off, but when you’ve got the knowledge, why not flaunt it?  He used the prize money to buy a piano and a Volkswagen bus Merce Cunningham's dance company.  It wasn’t the sixties, but it was close.  In 1969 Cunningham produced a dance piece titled Walkaround Time.

          Want to see an ancient picture of the Hollywood Walker, somewhere in Scotland, posing with an Amanita muscaria (and his ex-wife)?  Of course you do.

THE XMAS WALKER

One of the things about walking in my neighbourhood immediately after Christmas is that you see more walkers than usual.  I suspect part of it may be that people have relatives staying with them and don’t know what else to do with them.  Some no doubt think it’s a good for the soul to take a walk at least once a year.  Maybe the odd one has got a new puppy for Christmas and is swiftly realizing what a terrible responsibility that is.

However, my unscientific observation is that this year there were far fewer walkers than usual.  And a man who had acquired a new camera lens for Christmas pretty much had the streets to himself, which was fine but just a little surprising.

Of course Christmas decorations persist for a while after Christmas  – not sure if that Santa is breaking into that upstairs window or breaking out:

And just because a Santa is small that doesn’t mean he isn’t security conscious:

 This presiding demon stays in place whatever the season:

But the spirit of good cheer is not universal.  This sign appears on the door of the last house before you get to one of the entrances to Griffith Park, and you can understand the guy’s sentiments whatever the time of year:

And you can never quite escape the John Cage influence, nor would I want to.  Whereas he had mycological expeditions that involved walking deep into the woods, I found these beauties by the side of the road, just a few hundred yards from my own front door. 

I took a couple home, tried to identify them, couldn’t altogether, though I suspected they might be the evocatively named Funeral Bells, and even if they weren’t, and even though I’m generally all in favor of Cagean chance operations, I really didn’t want to take a chance on these.  I left them where they were.  Next day walking the same route I saw they were half eaten, though not sure by what – possibly one of the new, though unseen, puppies.

But I think the best thing seen while walking over the holidays was this electronic keyboard left out for the garbage men.  And I wonder what the story was there.  Had Santa brought a brand new one, or had the owner made a resolution, 2016 will be a year without electronic keyboards?