SUNDAY BREAKFAST

I guess this ends our three-day fungi-cycle with the mushrooms cooked and on a plate. But as I sit down to my fried mushrooms, does it occur to me that I might be eating an alien lifeform? It didn’t until McKenna put in his dime’s-worth (see last Friday.) The point might also be raised as to how we humans are pretty much incapable of comprehending any being that isn’t approximately the same size as – and moving at a similar metabolic velocity to – ourselves. Once, in a short story called Big Trouble On The Monkey Planet (included in the anthology Zones of Chaos) I postulated a character called Qua/D/Thrrof, who was the discursive focus of a being, essentially a form of highly intelligent yeast, about nine thousand miles long and one molecule thick, but that humans were totally unable to recognize as life. The same might just apply to mushrooms. It’s quite possible that fungi could have thought processes of a deep and profound superiority but, because they move at the same speed as very old trees, we could never conceive them as such. Tolkein kinda scratched the surface of this with the Ents, but only in the most minimal manner. Or maybe the ‘shrooms really are just breakfast after all.

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The secret number is still 42