When I was 12 or 13, the enormity of the universe caved in on me and broke me, my Catholicism experiencing a crisis of faith, and I’d hold on to shreds, partly assimilation in my Catholic school, partly the hope that when I die there was something. Meeting a grandfather I never knew, all the things we dream of when we dream of a Heaven.
As I creep through forests and hills, ambling along for tiny symbiotic life; as I meander my way through Underland; as I think about what I know and don’t know about the universe … it all occurs to me that the universe continues on without us, as I once feared, but that life on Earth carries on with us.
Some parts of it will be fine, even electric with life. The fungi below our soils consuming while giving back, entwined at times in trees and other plant life, or animal life, or cow shit, will survive. The bacteria will survive. The small and mighty and hardy will survive, clinging on to rocks and soil and whatever else for a few billion more years until we are left hot and inhospitable and partly consumed.
Some weeks ago I found the YouTube account MycoLyco. He did something simple, yet so … alive, in its own way. He clipped a synthesizer to mushrooms and they sang. But so too did inanimate rocks. Plant music isn’t new, but it’s deeply embeddeed in strange corners of our musical heritage. Compositions by life that isn’t just not an human but not an animal at all has not an otherworldy quality not in the sense of extraterrestrial, but of realms we have access to but no understanding. A parallel third dimension. Our bodies are part of it, but not contained within it.
I asked the conductor of this strange orchestra, Noah, about his works. “I started growing cordyceps when the pandemic started because there are some studies showing it may help with Covid,” he wrote me. Cordyceps are a fungus sometimes called “Catepillar fungus,” and I know this not through a deep well of knowledge of mycology, but because I tapped into the world of Google. “I was growing them in my music studio with a bunch of synths so it seemed like the next logical step.”
Using a Eurorack modular synthesizer, he coaxes mushrooms to give out some ethereal and otherworldy sounds. “All I know for sure is that the impedance is changing,” he says. “I suspect nutrient and water transport play a roll.”
Fungi occupy a strange place in our world, more closely related to animals than plants, living a subterranean life often before fruiting bodies — mushrooms — come out to spread to new places. Of course, not all fungi make mushrooms. Some make mold. Some make illness. Some make nutritious non-mushroom treats like the vegetarian meat substitute known as Quorn, derived from the microfungus Fusarium venenatum.
When we die and let our bodies naturally decay and give ourselves back to the Earth, we give ourselves over to the world of the fungi. If you buy into the wild beliefs of Terence McKenna, some of those fruits — namely the Psilocybin psychedelic species — give us not strange reactions to alkaloids, but access to the confusing world beyond our perception, a gateway. It’s hard not to think it under its spell at the time. Or so I’ve heard. Back in the real world, for sure, our perceptions change and deviate from our mean, new channels opened, sort of like the channels underground wormed through by massive fungal networks.
Our afterlife is giving ourselves back to the Earth. Our flesh is eaten by bacteria and fungus and worms and insects and other life. It’s given back to the soil that nurtured us. The nutrients we take in of plants and animals are often an afterlife of a small part of it. It’s all the circle of life. Our bodies nurture the ground, when they aren’t encased and embalmed.
When I die, several decades from now, bury me in a simple wooden coffin and give me back. Or cover me with flesh eating beetles who return me wholly to Earth. Or let the hyenas or pigs feast and let my bones be ground and gone.
The calcium in them, down the line, might become a rock. A semi-permanent resting place for my atoms, the rest scattered into a nirvanic state of subsumption and scatter. Maybe it’s not the Heaven I wanted, but parts of me go on.
We are the afterlife of supernova, surrounded by particles rearranged in massive explosions that, when the violence settles down — if you can call something like that violent, which seems more interpersonal — new things are formed. New stars which beget new planets, which all march to an end and if you believe some scientists, begin to tunnel through and become new realities, parts of us making whole new universes.
All the things we were are but a few decades in a picture that stretches back 13.8 billion years. Our sun wasn’t born then. Our stars weren’t born yet. Our galaxy was barely on the horizon. Like in biblical stories, there was a vast sort of darkness, swept away by newly emboldened galaxies converting neutral to ionic hydrogen, making the skies in the universe as clear as can be in the Epoch of Reionization. There was a splendor to see, though we’ll never know if there was anything to see it.
Our death as a planet will be the beginning of strange shifts for outer worlds like Titan, who may have a narrow span to flourish and create life if they haven’t already. Then the sun will recede to its newest iteration and our worlds will be hard to detect from far away, but our atoms survive. Or at least their building blocks. We won’t forge anything new — the Sun isn’t bound for a supernova — but we’ll have a final resting place, of sorts. New worlds will be born for trillions of years.
In the meantime, we should nurture and nourish our world and let it survive and thrive, let ourselves thrive and survive as caretakers of the world to the end of its natural life. Sure, climate change won’t kill everything, but it will kill many things, many we cherish, many we don’t see, that sort of obscure otherworld.
Let’s submit ourselves to a more positive story. Let’s let our atoms go to a sort of Heaven. Let’s not turn this place into Hell. Let’s be kind to each other and to our Earth, give back maybe more than we put in, or at least more than we’ve taken away.
Let’s be divine ourselves, even if there is no other divinity than the cycle of the universe.
This is beautiful. Thank you for it.