The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the Artist’s Task in Trying Times

By Maria Popova

Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the Artist’s Task in Trying Times

Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”

In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.

Doris Lessing

In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:

Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…

But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.

In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare (“It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.”), she adds:

We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

She distills the essence of our task in troubled times:

The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil.

[…]

There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.

Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing’s time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in:

Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, tres, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, tress, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.

Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real “the possibility of a madman in a position of power,” she holds up a clarifying mirror:

We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, “Oh for God’s sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.” Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.

Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman’s hand on the button:

The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.

Art by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in “the pleasurable luxury of despair,” or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that “produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy” — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage:

Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission.

[…]

We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.

Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating “as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice,” she prophecies the age of Substack:

People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.

If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible.

BP

The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianny Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling

By Maria Popova

The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianny Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling

I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. “The Air Vendor” was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing.

Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy — my parents among them — had finally torn down Bulgaria’s forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like “happiness,” “health,” and “love.”

I read “The Air Vendor” over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920–April 14, 1980).

Gianni Rodari in his classroom

I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician.

But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (“books written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one’s studies than a hundred years of school,” he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower.

Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak’s insight that great stories have “the shape of music.”

Having worked as an elementary school teacher since was only a teenager, having watched his country’s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking.

One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers — a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis:

If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.

Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas.

Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy (public library), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.

Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.

Noting that he is making no “attempt to establish a fully fledged ‘theory of the fantastic,’ with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,” that he is not seeking “a complete theory of the imagination and invention,” Rodari offers:

I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. “All possible uses of words for all people” — this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.

Not unlike the “grammar of animacy” needed for rewilding our relationship to the natural world, a grammar of fantasy allows us to animate our inner world with the natural wildness of the imagination. And, like all grammar, it is built of words and the reactions between them in the laboratory of the mind. Rodari considers the process:

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen’s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water’s depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.

The word stone itself dislodges fragments of his own past, and he is suddenly transported to a stony sanctuary on the cliffs of an Alpine lake he used to bike to with his violin and his friend Amadeo, who always wore a long blue coat through which the outline of his own violin could be seen. They would “sit in a cool portico, drinking white wine and talking about Kant” — and already we have a story sparked by a single word.

Observing that he has invented many stories starting with just a single word, Rodari writes:

Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time… The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.

At the center of his grammar of fantasy, however, are not individual words but an embodiment of the combinatorial nature of creativity he calls the fantastic binomial — the felicitous combination of two contextually distant words that becomes a prompt for storytelling by requiring you to invent a shared context and a conversation between. “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf half-whispers in the only surviving recording of her voice. Through the fantastic binomial, we become the authors of that belonging and make language not a vehicle of information but an instrument of the imagination. Rodari describes the fertility of these fantastical word-pairings:

One electrical pole is not enough to cause a spark; it takes two. The single word “acts” only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.

[…]

A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.

The fantastic binomial creates a kind of riddle — to figure out how these two words can belong together — and riddles are a classic element of the fairy tale. Rodari considers why they are so compelling to children:

[Riddles] represent the concentrated, almost emblematic form of their experience of conquering reality. For a child, the world is full of mysterious objects, incomprehensible events, and indecipherable figures. Their own presence in the world is a mystery to be clarified, a riddle to be solved, and they circle around it with direct or indirect questions. Knowledge often occurs in the form of surprise.

It may be that the most deadening effect of growing up is our incremental preference for certainty over surprise, which ends up keeping us a safe distance from alive — life, after all, is an experiment that continually confounds our hypotheses, and it is on the hubris that we know more than life does that we most regularly break our own hearts.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print

Noting that an active imagination is just as essential for making art as it is for making scientific discoveries and making daily decisions in even the most mundane regions of life, Rodari insists that “the creative function” belongs equally to all of us, that all human beings “have the same aptitude for creativity, with whatever differences exist between humans in this domain revealing themselves to be largely a product of social and cultural factors.” He considers the defining features of the creative mindset:

“Creativity” is… thinking that is capable of continuously breaking the patterns of experience. A “creative” mind is one that is always on the move; always asking questions; always discovering problems where others find satisfactory answers; completely comfortable in fluid situations where others sense danger; capable of making autonomous and independent judgements (even independent from parents, teachers, and society); and one that rejects everything that is codified, preferring to reshape objects and concepts without allowing itself to be hindered and inhibited by conformism. All of these qualities manifest themselves in the creative process. And this process — listen up! listen up! — always has a playful character, even if we are dealing with “strict mathematics.”

Echoing Einstein — “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” he reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” — Rodari adds:

The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions.

[…]

Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement — in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer… They’re in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.

In the remainder of the book, Rodari goes on to explore the importance of turning mistakes into catalysts for invention and pathways toward deeper truths, of telling stories that break taboos in order to liberate us from the social hypocrisies of conditioned shame, of “deforming” existing words into fantastical new ones in order to “make words more productive” by bending and broadening the possibilities within them so that we may bend and broaden the possibilities within ourselves — something of which the word marginalian is an example, and something children do naturally as a form of play, but which has the serious consequence of encouraging nonconformity in them.

Complement The Grammar of Fantasy with Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga on play and the making of civilization and Maurice Sendak on storytelling and creativity, then revisit Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fantasy.

Illustrations by Matthew Forsythe courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

BP

The Majesty of Mountains and the Mountains of the Mind

By Maria Popova

Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living entities, sovereign and staggering. I remember the first time I saw a mountain from an airplane — forests miniaturized to moss, rivers to capillaries, the Earth crumpled like a first draft. It is a sublime sight in the proper sense of the word — transcendent yet strangely terrifying in its vantage so unnatural to an earthbound biped, so deliriously and disquietingly godly.

Mountains of the Mind. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

Even from ground level, mountains overwhelm our creaturely frames of reference, confuse our intuitions of scale and perspective, belie the illusion of stability with which we walk through the world. Mary and Percy Shelley, crossing Europe on foot and on mule in their runaway love, one of them with a sprained ankle and the other pregnant, could barely comprehend the Alps when they first emerged from the horizon. “This immensity staggers the imagination,” they wrote in their joint journal, “and so far surpasses all conception that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they are indeed mountains.”

A generation later and a landmass over, the explorer John Charles Frémont (January 21, 1813–July 13, 1890) set out for the American West, fabled land of peril and promise, his eye most keenly fixed on the continent’s most majestic mountain: the Rockies, “of which so much had been said that was doubtful and contradictory.”

In the last year of his twenties, a decade after he was expelled from college for skipping class to roam the marshy forests of Charleston and a decade before he narrowly lost the presidential election by being too overtly feminist and abolitionist, Frémont traveled hundreds of river miles and traversed a thousand miles of prairie to bow at the foot of the Rockies. He gasped:

Though these snow mountains are not the Alps, they have their own character of grandeur and magnificence, and doubtless will find pens and pencils to do them justice.

And so he did. Frémont spent a decade recounting the fourteen-month adventure in his Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (public domain), replete with lyrical renderings of nature and its feeling-tones that no photograph could ever capture. (This is why Instagram will never make poets obsolete.)

“View of Nature in Ascending Regions” by Levi Walter Yaggy from Geographical Portfolio, 1893. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In an exultant entry from the 10th of August, after a night so cold his water froze, Frémont writes:

The air at sunrise is clear and pure, and the morning extremely cold, but beautiful. A lofty snowy peak of the mountain is glittering in the first rays of the sun, which have not yet reached us. The long mountain wall to the east, rising two thousand feet abruptly from the plain, behind which we see the peaks, is still dark, and cuts clear against the glowing sky. A fog, just risen from the river, lies along the base of the mountain… The scenery becomes hourly more interesting and grand, and the view here is truly magnificent; but, indeed, it needs something to repay the long prairie journey of a thousand miles. The sun has shot above the wall, and makes a magical change. The whole valley is glowing and bright, and all the mountain peaks are gleaming like silver.

Yet over and over the beauty keeps exceeding itself in a living reminder that nature’s imagination is always greater than our own, for we are part of the imagined:

Winding our way up a long ravine, we came unexpectedly in view of a most beautiful lake, set like a gem in the mountains. The sheet of water lay transversely across the direction we had been pursuing; and, descending the steep, rocky ridge, where it was necessary to lead our horses, we followed its banks to the southern extremity. Here a view of the utmost magnificence and grandeur burst upon our eyes. With nothing between us and their feet to lessen the effect of the whole height, a grand bed of snow-capped mountains rose before us, pile upon pile, glowing in the bright light of an August day. Immediately below them lay the lake, between two ridges, covered with dark pines, which swept down from the main chain to the spot where we stood. Here, where the lake glittered in the open sunlight, its banks of yellow sand and the light foliage of aspen groves contrasted well with the gloomy pines… Proceeding a little further, we came suddenly upon the outlet of the lake, where it found its way through a narrow passage between low hills. Dark pines which overhung the stream, and masses of rock, where the water foamed along, gave it much romantic beauty.

Having so rendered the romance of the mountain with a poet’s sensibility, Frémont returns abruptly to science — our other language for reverencing reality — when his most valuable instrument shatters during the outlet crossing:

The current was very swift, and the water cold, and of a crystal purity. In crossing this stream, I met with a great misfortune in having my barometer broken. It was the only one. A great part of the interest of the journey for me was in the exploration of these mountains, of which so much had been said that was doubtful and contradictory; and now their snowy peaks rose majestically before me, and the only means of giving them authentically to science, the object of my anxious solicitude by night and day, was destroyed. We had brought this barometer in safety a thousand miles, and broke it almost among the snow of the mountains. The loss was felt by the whole camp — all had seen my anxiety, and aided me in preserving it. The height of these mountains, considered by many hunters and traders the highest in the whole range, had been a theme of constant discussion among them; and all had looked forward with pleasure to the moment when the instrument, which they believed to be as true as the sun, should stand upon the summits, and decide their disputes. Their grief was only inferior to my own.

But in that singular way nature has of lifting the spirits by quieting the self, Frémont soon transcended the all-consuming smallness of his personal disappointment by returning to the grandeur around him, of which he too was a part. He began seeing not just the variousness of the mountain’s beauties but their interdependence. A century after Alexander van Humboldt observed while roaming another mountain that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” thus formulating the modern conception of nature half a century before the word ecology was coined, Frémont writes:

We heard the roar, and had a glimpse of a waterfall as we rode along, and, crossing in our way two fine streams, tributary to the Colorado, in about two hours’ ride we reached the top of the first row or range of the mountains. Here, again, a view of the most romantic beauty met our eyes. It seemed as if, from the vast expanse of uninteresting prairie we had passed over, Nature had collected all her beauties together in one chosen place. We were overlooking a deep valley, which was entirely occupied by three lakes, and from the brink to the surrounding ridges rose precipitously five hundred and a thousand feet, covered with the dark green of the balsam pine, relieved on the border of the lake with the light foliage of the aspen. They all communicated with each other.

Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything

Couple with Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s classic meditation on mountains, then revisit Darwin’s exultant account of his spiritual experience atop a mountain and pioneering plant ecologist Edith Clements’s drawings of Rocky Mountain flowers.

BP

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

By Maria Popova

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.

“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.

Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.

Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.

Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

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