from Nonna

 

Suggesting an undisclosed interior, the enormous white mound seems heavy and coiled. Then, it unspools and grows into a smooth hill, framed by rocks and moss. In Wisconsin one can see many little cemeteries. They sit near highways and county roads, or in small towns, behind motels, deep inside of wooded parks. Here is a cemetery, like this, planted with evergreens and a small stand of faded markers. Dig and dig and dig. Brush away the last bits of dirt from the lid. Pry the box open: there is that coiled white mound asleep. It is purring. Any photograph taken here would catch it stalking between the shadows of the fir trees or pines: pale and becoming a nonna, a hand, an octopus, a gland, a beam of light. Sometimes it is a hawk perched on top of a rabbit, or it is a group of robins huddled under a bush. I can undress and slip into white lingerie, become a haunted picture, shrink down, or coil in a giant heap: “While in a real living being the plastic anatomy is developed in all directions, in the observations here described only the visible portions are finished and brought into view . . .” I am “overproduced,” or I am leaking, or I am a “stalk-like” appendage pushed through a curtain, like a fish pushing against a current, waving and waving, a mere face or a faceless robe. But, my trunk, not yet complete, is a muck still unformed, but drawn toward a form, as little yellow birds are pulled toward fields of yellow flowers, or “It is true that in the shadow of the curtains we find stalk-like projections and connections for the forms and faces, but we never find such organs and parts as would be found in living organisms as necessary supplements.” A solid organic mass, a “primitive ground substance,” as in a finger and its arm, or rather a soft muddy plain and a bunch of white crocuses made of paint. What sputum, what cum, what seaside waste, it has its feet in soft vegetables eating up the air and sun:

The flat white viscous material, visible to the eye, puts forth excrescences and projections of an elementary character, resembling leaves. This process is not, indeed, more wonderful than the replacement of the head of an annelid worm, after it has been twelve times cut off, or the new formations in planarians, crustaceans, and salamanders.

So, I am moving behind and between the headstones and the mausoleums, the dilapidated greenhouse, and under the shaggy firs, dressed in my white teddy, perched on my white talons: an enormous annelid worm.

 

Here is a white fungus. Mushrooms, as ghosts do, appear. One day, nothing, and the next a stepladder of mushrooms is scaling a trunk. Here, this fungus is smooth to touch. It is spongy, and when pressed, it snaps. Here, on this wooded path, is a large fungus, unfolding its wings by the river. It bends its edges upwards, and in its center is a brown eye. It is enormous. An enormous white mound.

 

Recall that, contrary to Georgiana Houghton, spiritualist Rev. John Beattie believed that the spirits photographed were not the spirits of the deceased, but mere copies molded from an unknown substance: “These substances when condensed exert powerful chemical force; and the energy thrown off from them strikes the plate with an impact equal to that of strong solar light.” The “substances,” he says, “are taken up by invisible intelligent beings and moulded into shapes, like clay in the hand of the artist, which shapes, when exposed through a lens, can be photographed . . .” They are “manifestations,” not pictures, he claims. They must be understood as “a process of growth.”

 

The mushroom is smooth and soft to the touch, almost damp feeling. Substances can appear on a forest floor or in the frame of the photograph. Missing children, lost spouses, armies of people loved and gone: here is a building, white and wet. It is a car—a Corvette, El Camino, or a limousine—made of fungus. It is a spongy train growing up from the ground, white and spotted brown. It breaks open and sends its spores over ferns, across lawns and rivers, onto rocks and into a maple trunk’s dark bark. On the backs or undersides are the gills. Rub your fingers over the bottom to touch the gills.

The fungus can overtake inert bodies. Through the fungus, we can become information or nutrition. Last summer, I came around a corner by the river, onto a little path along a big lawn with maple trees and catalpas and cottonwoods and oaks. It had been raining and raining an unprecedented rain, because, of course, the air holds more of its water now. So much rain had fallen that parts of the city were submerged. Photographs and videos appeared online of dim flooded basements, of disused refrigerators and cardboard boxes half covered in water. And here on this tree-filled lawn was a massive bloom of mushrooms. Thousands, it seemed, of white capped mushrooms. Arthur Doyle in Sir Nigel offers this woodcut relief: “For the rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. . . . The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and color never matched before—scarlet and mauve and liver and black.” When I returned a few days later, the mushrooms had all vanished. Weather and mushrooms. Weather and Houghton’s spirits: “November days are not favourable for photography. . . . the weather was absolutely too dark to do anything.” The spirit-mushrooms are barometric. Their undersides are covered with gills. They sprout for the camera, and they disappear.