[An Exquisite Corpse1]
Humans use words. Mushrooms use mycelia. Who’s to say which is better? This is why we have infused each copy with spores.
If you’re reading this, the psychedelics have already entered your bloodstream. Get ready.
The language of our nervous system, the solar system, any system. We don’t hear it? Can you hear the earth burning? The shrieks of languages travailing across species like migrants from another destroyed solar system. The voices of the non-human neighbours pleading to billion deaf ears. Betrayed by alphabets, the language killed by a deficit in the bank of vocabulary. Do you speak/understand the language of the planet?
And if you’re not fluent in Disregulated Polysystem, if sometimes these days it seems impossible to believe reason, attention, goodwill, a ‘decent ear’ should be enough to turn so much noise to signal, well then: what’s the strangest living thing you can love and listen to? Stranded between ice and melt, with January sheeted over sidewalks and March shaking the treetops, maybe you think of lichens, moss; if moss, then tardigrades; if tardigrades, then irritated bears who also suffer from unsettled weather. If bears? then skunk cabbage, which heats itself inside a fruitful mire. Red-hulled stinking food. Saying in its own way, come here—come soon.
Listening gathers silence and casts light into the countless corners of an ever-connecting web. We coalesce at the intersections like dew drops, each our own glimmer until we all become a single shine. Until we are all water and sunlight and rainbow refractions, myriad reflections we only sometimes believe.
Below us, we know, is a darkness we cannot fathom, a hollow our refractions cannot touch. But it’s always been there.
The rain ends and the worms squirm forth, singing. Like orpiment wine, the sun spills across the field; the tender brush unfurl to tap into the light, decussate leaves bobbing up eastward. This is the force of change. No one gets what they want—except us, and we want a happy ending.
So go, sip at the new sun. Listen for what you’ve always missed. Thousands of years ago, human hands traced ochred animals along Chauvet’s stone, painting the slope of a snout, the hunch of shoulders. Let your fingertips sink into warm clay, and know that it is not too late to begin again.
1. Exquisite Corpse is a storytelling game, invented by French Surrealists in the 1920s, wherein each participant adds a single line after having seen only the previous line. The title refers to a line from one of the game’s first incarnations: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (“The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”)