by Sophie Strand
featured image Hilma Af Klint Adulthood
The forest is densely particulate – with mildew, with spores, with mothdust from wing beats, with water molecules, with slow ropes of sunlight strained and frayed through the pine needles. A ghost pipe glistens against the shadows, still in curled supplication to the Russala mycelia that feeds her spectral body. Nearby the underground fungi of the Russala fruits: the waxy red mushroom wears a hat of bleached leaves it has pushed up from under. I think of the “parasitic relationship” between the ghost pipe and its fungal partner. I think of all the strands of mycelium pooling and looping below my feet. Kissing into elm trees. Sucking in sugar and dispensing minerals. Always hand holding. Always interrogative, inter-species, constituting a lovemaking that doesn’t strictly belong to just the fungi or plants or trees or bacteria involved.
When a being that is constituted by a mutualism mates with another being constituted by a mutualism how many beings are making love? How many species create a reproductive event? How many “I”s does it take to have an erotic experience? The feminist in me wants to say one. But the erotic, dumfounded animist in me knows it takes almost a 100 trillion bacterial cells. It takes the anarchic fusion that generated my very cells: the endosymbiotic theory demonstrates that originally separate prokaryotic organelles fused to create our building block eukaryotic cells. And if my lust, my corporeal compulsion to touch and fuse and kiss, is, in part, catalyzed by a hormonal impulse to reproduce, than I must also include the virus that taught my body how to reproduce with a placenta: over 200 million years an ancient retrovirus taught us how to create the proteins that develop wombs. Wombs may be human. But they are also plural. They are also viral.
The world is plush with love. Anarchic love that wears no face. Love that bites and pricks and explodes morphologies. Love that turns our own bodies into a meshwork of molecular eroticisms. Love that needs no nuclear couple.
When I was very young, I gravitated toward love stories. And when a story seemed impoverished of love, I wove it back in, often with a thread of transspecies queerness. This tendency to try to honor the intimate entanglements that I knew constituted a “character” better than any sterile individuality, led me to write truly outrageous fanfiction as a teen. Stealing onto my parent’s desktop I would take my favorite YA novels and create a compost heap of crossdressing, queerness, and interspecies relations. Secretly I amassed a following of devoted readers on an ancient fanfiction platform. I sent these obscene romances to my other friends via our prehistoric AOL accounts.
Fanfiction is as old as storytelling. In fact, evolution itself as a constant remixing of materials and patterns, is a kind of ecological fanfiction. Variations on older themes. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are “interpretations” of earlier texts and histories. The Arthurian myths as circulated during the age of troubadours, were basically a biodiversity of fanfictions. Lancelot, the famous adulterous knight, is actually a late addition to the legends. Like a prehistoric mitochondria fusing with a plastid to create a proto-human cell, Lancelot waltzed horizontally into the genetic material of the Round Table, quickly becoming its romantic lead while having only very recently been an alien intruder.
As the survivor of early childhood abuse, I knew somewhere below language that my worship of romance and love wasn’t precious or cute. It was an act of radical survival. It was an act of defiance. I would not have my sensuality destroyed. I would not have my faith in romance extinguished. But I also knew that my favorite love stories would never be normal. As someone with chronic illness, with a haunted nervous system, I knew that I did not represent a normal romantic protagonist. Heteronormative romances never felt, wild, anguished, ecstatic, or plural enough to hold all my different stories. As Octavia Butler famously advised, “Sometimes you have to write yourself in.” I think of that retrovirus teaching our bodies how to grow the placentas that would gestate future storytellers. Sometimes you have to write yourself a womb in order to give birth to yourself. Sometimes you have to write yourself into another body. An ecosystem of bodies.
Sometimes the love story gets told by chemicals and archaea and fungal hyphae and trophic waves and rainstorms. Mostly it happens on scales both too microscopic and too macroscopic for a single human to observe its erotic sweep.
The important thing to remember is that there is no main character in a love story. Like the fungi that connects different species of trees and endophytes and grasses and myco-heterotrophs, it is hard to tell where the love “lives”. It doesn’t dwell. It moves. It flows.
Since the pandemic began, over two years ago, I can count the times I’ve been touched. It is a frighteningly small number. And then, like a pre-teen girl, I can come in and retell the story. I can write myself into a bigger story. I have been touched by woodchucks and rattlesnakes. I have breathed in phlox pollen and exhaled carbon that was sucked into a blackbear’s moist nose. I have mellowed inside river water. Photons directly from the sun have inscribed my eyes with luminous, wordless sonnets. My eardrums have been pressed by the high, clean scream of the hawk.
I have not been inside a love story. I have been a love story: my very body, a clamorous, complicated interplay of beings disagreeing, singing, swooning, and melting together. I don’t know where the love goes. But I know that every time I breathe out, it overflows.
About the author
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
