'All These Jolts of Beauty'

Once I interviewed a mycologist who, before his lecture, removed a yellow mushroom from an oak tree in front of the hall where he was speaking and munched on it while he spoke. A few years later the writer Paul Metcalf, author of Genoa (1965), swore me to secrecy before revealing his daughter’s favorite mushroom-hunting locales in the Berkshires. Then I interviewed Mikhail Iossel, the Soviet émigré writer, author of the story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life (1991), who introduced me to the Russian mushroom subculture. And I knew I could always get my late brother to laugh when I reminded him of the time John Cage, composer and mushroom enthusiast, almost killed himself by consuming dubious fungus (sounds like the name of a minor Roman emperor).

Mushrooms are among the foods I detested as a kid and enjoy as an adult. For this near-vegetarian, they’re meat-like and savory. Our backyard must be a spore magnet. Parts of the lawn are covered with brown, white and yellow mushrooms, some in dense clusters that resemble catcher’s mitts. I remember marveling as a kid at how quickly mushrooms would appear in the lawn after a spring rain.

 

I periodically get via email Culture.pl, the newsletter of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland. The latest issue arrived Thursday and includes an interview with Cecylia Uklańska-Pusz, a lecturer at Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences. Her academic interests include medicinal mushrooms: “Of the approximately 4,000 species of edible large-fruited mushrooms in the world,” she says, “about 700 have medicinal properties!” She’s very serious, a porcini partisan:

 

“I believe that mushrooms should be eaten as often as possible. Of course, there are some people who do not benefit from mushrooms due to their sensitive digestive systems and intestinal hypersensitivity. Mushrooms are sometimes described as difficult to digest because of the chitin content, which is a water-insoluble complex polysaccharide found in the cell walls of all mushrooms. However, chitin from mushrooms works similarly to the dietary fibre found in fruits and vegetables, which is essential in our diet!”

 

Published in the November issue of The New Criterion is one of A.M. Juster’s finest poems, “Harbingers”:

 

“Mushrooms abruptly grew last spring

upon the grizzled bark of trees

that wore uneasy crowns.

 

“Big meaty caps, aswirl with browns,

grays, ambers, and mahoganies,

stirred dreams of foraging—

 

“brief dreams like lives of fireflies

or summer joy, dismissible

as almost desecration,

 

“since all these jolts of beauty call

us to untimely exaltation

just as the graceful dies.”