Prologue Autumn Aroma

Takamato ridge, crowded with expanding caps, filling up, thriving— the wonder of autumn aroma.

— From the eighth- century Japanese poetry collection Man- nyo Shu

WhAt do you do when your world StArtS to FAll apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mush- rooms pull me back into my senses, not just— like flowers— through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

Terrors, of course, there are, and not just for me. The world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is

Elusive life, Oregon. Matsutake caps emerge

in the ruin of an industrial forest.

2 Prologue

no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disap- pear with the next economic crisis. And it’s not just that I might fear a spurt of new disasters: I find myself without the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why. Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious— even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid- twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end.

This book tells of my travels with mushrooms to explore indetermi- nacy and the conditions of precarity, that is, life without the promise of stability. I’ve read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thou- sands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms.1 These are not the mushrooms I follow, but they make my point: the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift— and a guide— when the controlled world we thought we had fails.

While I can’t offer you mushrooms, I hope you will follow me to savor the “autumn aroma” praised in the poem that begins my pro- logue. This is the smell of matsutake, a group of aromatic wild mush- rooms much valued in Japan. Matsutake is loved as a marker of the au- tumn season. The smell evokes sadness in the loss of summer’s easy riches, but it also calls up the sharp intensity and heightened sensibili- ties of autumn. Such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads me into common life without guarantees. This book is not a critique of the dreams of mod- ernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenge of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going. If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collabora- tive survival in precarious times.

Here’s how a radical pamphlet put the challenge:

The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realisation— the world will not be “saved.” . . . If we don’t believe in a global revolutionary fu- ture, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present.2

autumn aroma 3

When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a mat- sutake mushroom.3

Grasping the atom was the culmination of human dreams of con- trolling nature. It was also the beginning of those dreams’ undoing. The bomb at Hiroshima changed things. Suddenly, we became aware that humans could destroy the livability of the planet— whether intention- ally or otherwise. This awareness only increased as we learned about pol- lution, mass extinction, and climate change. One half of current precar- ity is the fate of the earth: what kinds of human disturbances can we live with? Despite talk of sustainability, how much chance do we have for passing a habitable environment to our multispecies descendants?

Hiroshima’s bomb also opened the door to the other half of today’s precarity: the surprising contradictions of postwar development. After the war, the promises of modernization, backed by American bombs, seemed bright. Everyone was to benefit. The direction of the future was well known; but is it now? On the one hand, no place in the world is untouched by that global political economy built from the postwar development ap- paratus. On the other, even as the promises of development still beckon, we seem to have lost the means. Modernization was supposed to fill the world— both communist and capitalist— with jobs, and not just any jobs but “standard employment” with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a “regular job.”I want someone to help me write 250 word a reflection paper for an article, the article in the Attachments, i need it in MLA format.