My name is Lea Jane Aphrodite
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This is my little corner of the internet where I write about things I care about. This includes essays, poetry and fiction about the things that move me. Frequent themes are mycology, language, critical technology & ecology, collapse, anarchism, the Dao, queer activism, and how we may find better, more authentic ways of navigating our entangled lives.
If you want to now what specifically is occupying my time at the moment, check out my “Now” page. If you want to check out my past projects, check out my “Then” page.
But what the hell even is a mycelialism? What’s a hypha? Am I insulting everyone who stumbles across this page? Let me explain!
I believe we are a mycelial culture. That means that much like how fungi interweave with many plants in mycorrhizal connections, so we as humans are intimately woven into mutualistic networks.
In a mycorrhizal association, the fungus colonizes the host plant’s root tissues, either intracellularly as in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or extracellularly as in ectomycorrhizal fungi. The association is normally mutualistic. In particular species, or in particular circumstances, mycorrhizae may have a parasitic association with host plants. 1
Mycelial networks are made up of individual strands of hyphae2 that probe and explore the world around them and send feedback into the mycelial system as a whole so that it can react to its surroundings.
That’s what we are. Human hypha in the mycelial commune.
So what’s a mycelialism then? They are those moments where we encounter these mutualistic weaves. They are usually brief and spontaneous. A momentary unification of threads into one pulsating node where you can feel the thriving world around you. These mycelialisms happen all the time. And we can make them happen more.
That’s mainly what I am interested in exploring. The interwoven nature of our social and material realities. I’d be happy to explore it with you!
Listen I really wish I had the shitty guitar skills to turn this one into a weird early Bob Dylan type folk song. It’s getting harder to write these consistently between the other writing I’m doing on other projects, but I’m still going to try to stay with it. This poem is mainly about getting lost, both alone and together. Whether that’s physical, metaphysical, in oneself, or in someone else is for you to decide.
Two weeks into the year, fifty more to go. I hope whoever reads this had a nice start to the year. I’m in disbelief that I’ve actually stuck with this little routine for this long, even if its only a fraction of the book (We haven’t even gotten out of the Beautiful Rat Sunset era yet). This might be the one I’m most unsure about so far, to be honest, even if it riffs nicely off the imagery of the song. I think of this one as a bit of a modern Orpheus/Eurydice situation, but the aftermath. This is another one of those cases where I can hear a song in the lines. Hiding in there, sung with that oh so characteristic JD cadence.
We’re back up to date! 13 days, 13 poems. I got confused because one night I didn’t really sleep and forgot to write one. But we’re back on schedule. This one I will leave more or less unexplained and I’ll let you feel this one for yourself. I’ve been having a lot of fun coming up with titles for these poems and it lets me use words I know that I would never really use in my everyday life and I think that’s really neat.
Today is big amalgamation of influences. First of all, this isn’t an original poem, this is a translation. It’s up to you how you interpret which parts of the work are my own, but this is a translation of one of my favorite “history poems” by Bertold Brecht about the creation of the Dao De Jing. This was a lot of fun and a lot of my interests really flow together in this little work (the Mountain Goats, German poetry of the left, daoism, translation, etc.). The meter feels quite unintuitive to write in in English, but it flows really well when its being read aloud. So I encourage you to do that, or maybe I’ll record my own version. I will also attach the original German poem in the footnotes. For a quick translation, without giving it time to rest and reviewing it properly, I’m quite happy about this. In keeping the strange rhyme scheme intact, I think I sacrifice some of the simple language of Brecht’s original that makes him such a people’s poet, although I don’t think it’s so bad as to be deviating from that goal.