What the Fungus Said (Doubly misleading perhaps, for it was not the fungus speaking for itself, but the fungus as mouthpiece for the Dirt, the Empire of Decay and Ruin, the Principle of Evil – I didn’t know what to call it, or should it be them? Secondly I am not mad. I do not hallucinate. I did not actually hear the fungus speak. Nevertheless the message of the fungus is as plain to me as if it were actually speaking.)
ME: Unclean thing! What are you? I conjure you to speak.
THE FUNGUS: For a long time we feared that you would never descend to join us. Now that you have, you are welcome and we doubt that you will ever bring yourself to leave us.
ME: Unclean spirit, I call on you again to speak your name. (The silkily tressed fungus writhes on its bed of decayed carpet fibre. It is heavy with spores and reluctant to speak. Nevertheless at length it speaks.)
THE FUNGUS: My name is legion.
ME: Hello then, Legion.
THE FUNGUS: Foolish woman! The meaning of ‘legion’ is that we are one and yet also many, and therefore it is difficult for us to speak our true name. But you may call us Master. At least you will learn to do so.
ME: Ha ha! You’ll feel the imprint of my heel upon your back for this insolence. Ha ha! Why, you are only a little stain of mildew! My foaming carpet-cleanser will have you out in a jiffy.
THE FUNGUS: Only a little stain of mildew perhaps, yet a similar stain on your heart would kill you. In any event, small white spot though we are, we have been elected to speak to you on behalf of dust, fermentation, dry rot, iron mould, the moth, grease, understains, soot, flies, dandruff, fluff, excrement, bedbugs, mites, rising damp, draught, rust, stale odours, cockroaches, scorch marks, rattles, creaks, bangs, cracks, kettle scale, leaks, rips, mice, rats, scratches – in short, the whole grimoire. Oh, and as to your much vaunted foaming carpet-cleanser, where do you think that I found the moisture that I need to feed on, if not from your last attempt to clean the carpet with that stuff?
ME: If I were not bored witless, I should not be speaking to you. Nothing can possibly be more trivial than an unhoovered carpet.
THE FUNGUS: You think that because we are small we are trivial? Look around you, please.
(I look and I see the mites reverently making wide circles round the fungus and behind the fungus the iridescent blue of a dead fly’s carapace and beyond that the forest set out in clumps of red and green, the tips of its foliage in places discolouring to black and white, and gleaming within the forest brilliantly faceted lumps of grit, and far away on the coastline I can just make out a dustball lurching towards landfall, and beyond that … beyond that the whispering of the fungus tells me what I cannot see with my own eyes …)
THE FUNGUS (continuing): Where can you go? My empire is tiny but vast. Far beyond your eyeline lies the true horizon which is the skirting board – it is stained, and invisible insects eat out its heart within. Above it your bravely papered walls are mottling. You see, this house is your prison; it will be your tomb.
ME: I can repaper the wall.
THE FUNGUS: You could. You could even repaper the whole house, I suppose, but it is hopeless. All is falling into decay. Even as we talk the dust is falling, the damp is gaining its ascendancy over the fabrics, a thread is giving way and as it gives way the cushion spills out its stuffing which trickles on to the floor and drifts over to join our dark army. Your whole house weeps for you. Trickles of moisture, coal dust, kapok. And even if you could bring yourself to abandon your duties as a housewife and you fled the house, what then? It is worse outside; it is just more grime and dog-shit and torn newspapers. You can walk for the rest of your life without ever coming near to crossing out of the frontiers of the Empire of the Dirt. Go, foolish woman, to the Gobi Desert and see the dust swarms gathered in their armies and cities. Of what avail are you and your (broken) Hoover and your detergents against our master? Go if you must to the deserts of the Gobi and acknowledge the mastery of the Lord of the Dust.
(Far in the distance a bell rings.)
ME: I must go. Not to the Gobi, but someone is calling me.
THE FUNGUS: You have our permission to leave. We regret that there are no guides available to show you the way out of the forest. Oh – and don’t please think of your departure as an escape. You carry the seeds of your own decay within you. Sooner or later you must come to dust. You will call us Master. In the meantime you may call us Mucor.
ME: I will have you out, Mucor!
I spit on Mucor, so that for a moment my enemy is trapped in my gleaming glob of spittle like a fly in amber. Then I take a hankie from my sleeve and begin to rub furiously. A few spores drift off, but it is useless. The bell rings again. I drop my hankie and my eyes turn to run through the forest, without thinking of which direction they are travelling in.
As the eyes travel they reflect. The forest is thickly populated. What shall explain its wild proliferation of breeds and forms? It was a Victorian anthropologist, I believe, who maintained that ‘Dirt is matter out of place.’ A thoroughly Victorian and anthropocentric notion, that. Where should dirt be if not on the carpet? Is it not man with his civilizing and cleansing theories the creature who is out of place here? And, to take the argument a little further, is dirt any less dirt when it is in its place in the belly of the Hoover or the dustbin’s sack?
No, as far as the carpet is concerned, its Decay of Species by Means of Natural Failure, or the Elimination of Unfavoured Types in the Race towards Extinction has yet to be written.
The bell rang again. I cast around seeking to determine from which direction the sound is coming and seeking also to distance myself from the loathsome Mucor – and even in my terror-stricken flight I do not cease to reflect on the scientific problems that the existence of such a jungle will naturally pose to an inquiring mind. For instance one may well conceive that in another and larger world a struggle for survival has imposed a certain discipline of form. Here it is quite otherwise and what the traveller sees is precisely the breakdown of organic forms, all constraint and symmetry being thrown aside. And just as the uniquely twisted skeletal frames of the dust-towers evade conventional scientific terminology, so also human reason is powerless to explain the sequence of events down here. Here everything is totally determined by chance and insignificance, and everything all around lies in a disorder that is repugnant to man. It is for this reason that this jungle has had few explorers. Here nothing is ever repeated; nothing is a consequence of anything. And yet, and yet … who will not marvel at the antiquity and grandeur of this world for so long veiled from human eyes? I feel a certain unease of the spirit, hard to give name to. It is perhaps because all around me in everything I see things moving towards rest and inertia that I too would like to rest. A great lassitude comes over me. To stay lying on this draughty dirty carpet … To close my eyes … To surrender my body to the maggots …
The bell rings again. It is the third time that the bell has rung. I rise, as from the bottom of some deep black pool. I pull myself up. I stagger half-fainting to the door and pull it open. It is Mrs Yeats.