Neil Gaiman’s Mushroom Hunters was written for The Universe in Verse - an evening of poetry April 24, 2017, a collaboration between Blogger, writer and cultural critic, Maria Popova, the astrophysicist and writer Jana Levin and the Academy of American Poets. The connection to Earth here is Bag Ladies throughout time who wander the Earth, fascinated by it and engaged in it.
The poem was read by performance artist, Amanda Palmer, Gaiman’s wife
Popova introduces the poem as an ode to humanity’s unheralded originators of the scientific method.
The poem is an act of diplomacy from poetry to science and also from a male writer to women scientists. It could be said to be cross-disciplinary in that it examines science and gender through a poetic lens. Gaiman’s poem is a direct nod to the late, great Ursula. K. Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin 1989) which itself draws on Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier bag theory of Human Evolution (Fisher 1979) as a cross-disciplinary lens – evolution through a speculative fiction perspective.
“Before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home” (Le Guin 1989 pg. 167)
However, Carrier-Bag Theory takes on a life of its own. It begins to describe a trans-disciplinary approach, a methodology, which resonates epistemologically and ontologically with new materialist thinking. See in particular Donna Haraway (2016) on Le Guin for further gatherings on the Bag Lady Theory.
Le Guin, Haraway and Gaiman offer an alternative to a Heroic /Tragic myth of the hard sciences and technology through the bag lady/carrier bag avoiding the linear, progressive, rigid, killing arrow.
The bag-lady practice requires “putting unexpected partners and irreducible details into a frayed, porous carrier bag” creating “messy tales to use for retelling, or reseeding, possibilities for getting on now” (Haraway, 2016, pg. 119).
THE MUSHROOM HUNTERS by Neil Gaiman
Science, as you know, my little one, is the study of the nature and behaviour of the universe. It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.
In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run, to hurdle blindly into the unknown, and then to find their way back home when lost with a slain antelope to carry between them. Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.
The women, who did not need to run down prey, had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them left at the thorn bush and across the scree and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree, because sometimes there are mushrooms.
Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools, The first tool of all was a sling for the baby to keep our hands free and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in, the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers. Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.
And sometimes men chased the beasts into the deep woods, and never came back.
Some mushrooms will kill you, while some will show you gods and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify. Others will kill us if we eat them raw, and kill us again if we cook them once, but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away, and then boil them once more, and pour the water away, only then can we eat them safely. Observe.
Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts, and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.
Observe everything.
And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk and watch the world, and see what they observe. And some of them would thrive and lick their lips, While others clutched their stomachs and expired. So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.
The tools we make to build our lives: our clothes, our food, our path home… all these things we base on observation, on experiment, on measurement, on truth.
And science, you remember, is the study of the nature and behaviour of the universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.
The race continues. An early scientist drew beasts upon the walls of caves to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.
The men go running on after beasts.
The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs. They are carrying their babies in the slings they made, freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.
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