Attunement: Form in Motion

To nurture and protect even small fragments of liveability, we must get
to know the lives of others, human and nonhuman. The Anthropocene collates projects of erasure, and we forget that we need companions. What might it take to bring us back into remembrance?¹

I use the word ‘attunement’ in this essay to refer to attempts to get to know, through alignment, how others express themselves in the world. I’m particularly interested in forms of alignment that refuse Cartesian dreams of minds in contact. Getting to know living beings other than humans has been blocked by scholars’ desires to ‘talk’ with those beings, or at least to make Enlightenment kinds of meaning and value together with them. Yet, there are other ways in which living beings express themselves, and instead of expecting them to meet our standards of communication and status, we can expand our own repertoires of listening and attending.

For many animals, and most plants and fungi, what I will call ‘form’ is an essential expression of being. Consider a tree: the shape of its trunk and branches tells its life story—of sun or shady neighbours, of seasonal rains, diseases, fungal companions, herbivory, or human pruning. With warmth and rain and sun, new branches grow quickly and spread widely; in the shade, they straighten or curve toward the light).² But shape is not enough. Colour, texture, turgidity, sound, and smell (or, more broadly, chemical sensitivities) are also elements of what I am calling ‘form’.
‘Form’ is in quotation marks here as a reminder of the specificity
of this use, which exceeds shape.

Form, in this sense, often comes into itself through motion. For animals such as humans, form coalesces in our movements, as we rise and sleep, walk and ride, talk and read. This feature of human lives—coming into form whether as habitus or in abrupt change—has something in common with the life expressions of other beings. Here, I draw on mycologist Alan Rayner’s book, ‘Degrees of Freedom’, in which he argues that the patterns created by fungal growth resemble the everyday patterns of human activity. The delineations traced by mycelia (the bodies of fungi, which take the form of threads in wood or soil) indicate where they are finding food, where substrates recommend themselves, and where explorations peter out. Human traces of activity show related features of our livelihoods.³ Recognition of human commonality can lead our attention to these expressions of life-making—in attunement to form. Indeed,
form in motion is also relevant to plants and fungi, which redistribute themselves and their progeny across space in ways that tell us how
lives are being made.

In a former mining area in Denmark, now a nature reserve called Søby Brunkulslejer, artist and theorist Elaine Gan and I spent several years, sporadically, getting to know the form of roots and fungi, working together as mycorrhiza).⁴ Søby has a long anthropogenic history involving Bronze Age deforestation and annual burning in the making of sandy heathlands. Yet, below the sand is something rather older: a thick layer of lignite (soft brown coal). Dug out by hand during World War II and increasingly with machines through the 1960s, the mining of brown coal and the pumping of groundwater stopped in 1970, leaving behind a ‘lunar landscape’. The sand dug up for brown coal now lies in great loose heaps called ‘sand tips’, which can be thirty meters high. The holes left behind turned into acidic lakes as the water returned.

Amazingly, trees have grown across these sandy ruins: first, through tree-planting programs mandated by the state; and, more recently, through the spread of trees on their own.⁵ Gan and I were interested in this regrowth: What allowed trees to take hold in what first appeared as a barren wasteland? Why did some kinds of trees not only survive but also spread while others did not? Our investigation of form offered answers
to these questions: the trees that flourished were those that could best collect water and nutrients—with the assistance of mycorrhizal fungi.

‘Mycorrhiza’ (both singular and collective singular) refers to the joint organs made by fungi and tree roots, with benefits to each. Fungi gather water and nutrients for the trees, and they eat carbohydrates produced by the trees’ photosynthesis. The forms we investigated were ectomycorrhiza—root-fungal symbioses in which fungal cells wrap around roots that have specially developed to reach for them. Plant and fungus coproduce these structures to exchange water, nutrients, and carbohydrates. Ectomycorrhiza are forms that emerge only in the relation between organisms—they require both fungi and plant roots. Trees have other kinds of roots as well (for example, for exploration), and the roots that specialize in working with fungi wither and die if no fungal relationship develops. This, then, is a classic example of mutualism and is relatively well known. What was unusual about our project was our attempt to understand this symbiosis through the natural history
of form.

Working in the hills formed by the tipped-out sand, Gan and I found a plethora of root tips wrapped with fungi just a few centimetres under the surface. Elsewhere, researchers have found more mycorrhizalisation in brown coal sand tips than in surrounding forests (brown coal fragments may help fungi gather at least water if not carbon).⁶ At Søby, we were offered a privileged way to appreciate form, because the sand tips are loose and friable. Small fragments of brown coal are mixed with the sand, but there is comparatively little recent organic material or clay. This meant we could shake off and wash away the material surrounding the roots fairly easily, revealing their shapes and colours. (When I tried this same exercise in organic clayey soils, the soil clotted around the roots, and even the gentlest washing broke off the tips, after which, form was impossible to grasp.)

Meanwhile, we found that although several kinds of trees, including various pines, birches, spruce, and even a few oaks and beeches, have found their way to the former mines at Søby, only lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) has colonized the remaining open sand tips with any success. This meant we could get to know almost all the roots we met in the open sand as belonging to lodgepoles, the better to compare them with roots from more diverse, overgrown sites.

Mycorrhiza are a form that neither root nor fungus has without the other. The magic of our work was exploring that form. Different trees
and different fungi made different forms, and we were delighted to get
to know them that way. Many humanists recoil from taxonomic names for fear of their abstract authority, but for us, meeting up with names and lives was wrapped together. To get to know roots and fungi, to practice mycorrhizal attunement, we dug, scraped, buried our hands in dirt, crawled, and lay flat on the ground to gently uncover the city threading through the coal-laden sand. We followed roots, washed them, and laid them out to sketch and photograph. We watched them with magnifying lenses and stereomicroscopes; we looked them up in atlases and scientific reports. We learned their official names, and we tried to describe them. We wanted to know how they expressed themselves,
how they manoeuvred in the world. This was a matter of attuning ourselves to form.

What did we find? After some practice, it became easier to differentiate Søby’s broadleaf and conifer trees by encountering their underground parts. Søby’s conifers, mainly pines and spruce, have rigid brown roots. The broadleafs, mainly birches and oaks, have flexible, pliant roots (the birch roots were light tan, while the oak roots were red). Pine and spruce were also easy to distinguish. Pine roots respond to being wrapped by fungi by dividing into neat ‘Y’ shapes. When we saw that dichotomous branching, we knew we were handling pine. Spruce roots, in contrast, respond to fungal wrapping with what we called a ‘feather’ shape, that
is, a central stem with short branches coming off on both sides.

These qualities and shapes are specific to each type of tree and
common to root wrappings by all kinds of fungi. The real excitement
for us, however, emerged in trying to learn how the fungi change root shapes: different fungi make different forms in their interactions with roots. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi, and they are ephemeral. How could we learn the names and habits of fungi without fruiting bodies (which was the case most of the time)? The presence of a fruiting body does not mean much about the range of fungi living with roots underneath it. There may be many species of fungi living on a single
root, and some fungi species never fruit at all—and certainly not
when we want them to.

Gan’s and my passion for following mycorrhizal form derived from our desire to get to know these fungi without requiring them to fruit. We sought attunement with their customary way of being: attunement with their attunements. After all, the dynamics of life below the surface matter most for questions of succession, competition, and much more. Form could show us who we were working with—and we could follow form
to ecological questions about the dynamics of interspecies life on a
former mine.

As we touched, sketched, and photographed, we invented our own
names for the shapes of mycorrhiza. The ‘pompoms’ we found, we associated with a small, black Inocybe. The tightly gathered ‘prickly roots’ appeared under Rhizopogon deer truffles. Russula seemed to produce ‘white eggs’. But our greatest excitement was saved for two widely cosmopolitan and promiscuous species, Paxillus involutus and Pisolithus arhizus—as ubiquitous as any fungi, not only in the Søby sand tips but also in other human-disturbed places across the Northern Hemisphere. These were good subjects and not solely because the mushrooms were everywhere on the sand tips. They also underwent seasonal transformations that produced extraordinary blooms of fresh mycorrhiza right under the surface. This development was so unexpected and revealing that we called it ‘jackpot’. Searching for jackpot became almost an obsession. Any fungus on a pine root can produce a brown Y, but in jackpot formations, the exuberance of form was impossible to miss.
Who knew that such rich bounty rested just beneath our feet?

Under jackpot conditions, Paxillus wrapped around partner tree roots
to create masses of swollen white root tips, as thick as cherry blossoms. In the surrounding soil, it also produced thick white ropes and strands
of mycelia (the thick ones are ‘rhizomorphs’ because they look like roots, ‘rhizo’). Dipping our hands into the sand around Paxillus in jackpot conditions, white skeins and threads of mycelia turned up everywhere. One extraordinary ‘everywhere’ was around small pieces of brown coal embedded in the sand. White, weblike threads coated brown coal pieces as if they were a treasure, and perhaps they were, as a source of water and pooled nutrients for both tree and fungus.

In contrast, Pisolithus in jackpot offered a brilliant range of yellows. Mycorrhizal root tips matted together in flat greenish-yellow fuzzy weaves. Bright yellow ropes and strands of mycelia spiralled into the sand. Instead of wrapping pieces of brown coal, Pisolithus found its way inside them. Breaking open a brown coal fragment often revealed a patch of yellow strands. It was thrilling to glimpse this vivid colour amidst the sand’s greys and tans. I found myself stalking crumbling cliff sides, searching for a flash of yellow, an extension of the Pisolithus fungal body. Each time I opened a brown coal fragment to reveal the yellow living in its heart, it stopped my breath.

Through these forms, Paxillus involutus and Pisolithus arhizus each collect water and nutrients, stretching between coal and tree. Fungi cannot make sugar from the sun in the way that plants do; instead, they draw sugars from the roots of plants (we, too, depend on plants for our carbohydrates). The nets of mycelia and rhizomorph cover much more territory than the roots of any tree—they stretch beyond the roots to draw water and nutrients into the tree-fungus system, not discriminating between us versus them. The essential minerals for the plant’s health—so hard to find in desert-like conditions such as sand tips—are provided by fungi. Both Paxillus and Pisolithus are famous for their tolerance of toxic conditions. They are survivors who help others survive.

Crawling and covered with sand, our team tried to bring ourselves inside the ‘will’ of this system of stretching and sharing. We were particularly excited to stumble upon relations between Paxillus and Pisolithus and brown coal. Paxillus wrapped itself around fragments, coating them. Pisolithus squirmed into tiny cracks, finding its way inside. Each of these habits made the tokens of human destruction and abandonment—that is, the tiny chunks of brown coal—into resources. Each brought brown coal fragments into the root-and-fungus network. As Pisolithus rhizomorphs grew, we imagined, layers of brown coal split just slightly more, allowing more water to make its way inside. Small gaps became larger; each layer yawned open a little wider, and the brown coal became increasingly porous and layered. As rhizomorphs penetrate, the brown coal continues to soften and split, transforming into something more like soil. Fungi begin the process of turning abandoned mines into places where
plants can live again.

We went back, again and again, to acquaint ourselves with these
forms. Indeed, the stories of form told here are rarely found in textbooks or scientific papers. Neither ecologists nor mycologists have been particularly interested in mycorrhizal form. A single laboratory in Germany has published an atlas,⁷ but the author has generally focused
on obscure fungi rather than the cosmopolitan ones a natural history observer is most likely to encounter. The natural history matters. Indeed, I might argue that attention to form, as described here, is an Anthropocene art, just coming into being. As such, it places itself firmly in the much-neglected terrain between the arts and sciences, where human and nonhuman historiographies meet. We need these practices
of observation to establish the lifeways and histories of nonhuman beings; we need attunement. If we want to know the possibilities of the worlds we can make together, we need to follow them as they express themselves through form.

At Søby, Gan and I asked questions about what grew on the former mine’s sand tips. Why did lodgepole pine do so well, even as other tree species failed? Compared to its typical native growth pattern in North America, the lodgepole extended its repertoire in this part of Denmark, growing
so fast and furiously that it not only covered the sand dunes but was also ready to topple over, top-heavy, after about forty years. It seems likely that fungal partners make this weedy success possible. Watching what happens just under the surface is key to this dynamic. This is a story of form—and only through attunements of the sort we have been
describing can we begin to learn about it.

The Anthropocene is a time for the renewal of attention to multiple historiographies, human and nonhuman, disciplined and feral, terrifying and restorative. Without such revived study, humans risk destroying everything we love. Luckily, other living beings have not given up—they are making histories within and despite industrial disturbances. Watching pines take over an old mine brings us to a site where all kinds of histories and life-making projects matter. Attunements help us watch. Form acquaints us with those other ways of life that will ultimately
either sustain the human species or kill it off.