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!
Alright, so many friends of mine irl will have heard me offhandedly remark “That’s Scavenger Politics!” in some conversations. When asked, I’ll probably have said roughly what it is and that I’ve been working on a longer essay about it. Well, that work has ballooned into a very long essay that still isn’t finished, but I wanted to get some of these ideas out there anyway, so here’s a quick breakdown and a manifesto (?) of sorts. In discussions about topics such as climate resilience, collapse, and enabling new freedoms of remaining, one of the frequent hurdles I’ve found that keeps people from engaging with these ideas in an earnest and practical way is that they run so squarely counter to the prevailing ideas of human and societal progress that many find it hard to let go of these structuring narratives. In an attempt to forge new ways of thinking about how we engage with the world as its inhabitants, I propose the figure of the scavenger as programmatic for life upon this gentle, damaged, and hurtling planet. This figure can hopefully bridge the gap between collapse oriented climate doom and new ways of coexisting with one another in the world. The scavenger puts into question many relations we see as fixed and rigid, it pops up throughout history and throughout the natural world as a mode of living that enables new life, but that also enables itself. This is a piece of the puzzle toward developing a theory of what I’ve called “The Mycelial Society” in the front of this blog. It’s just a sketch for now. There’s more to come but for now I humbly offer this salvage.
Today we’re talking about some hot takes regarding gender that I think should become more talked about positions for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. These opinions are frequently found in conservatives and people who generally don’t like us queers very much. Instead of rejecting some of these claims, I think we should build on them instead. We cannot prove the patriarchs wrong. We will always be an affront to them and appeasing them will never grant us true autonomy.
I write think a lot about speculative fiction and how we might be able to imagine a future together, especially in the difficult times we are in right now. I’ve been working on a larger essay that goes more into detail about the political (anarchist) response to societal collapse that incorporates a lot of different frameworks, but today I want to spend some time talking about some of my new favorite books.
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.