Psathyrella (Score Follower)

"Psathyrella" was premiered by John Solari on February 17, 2024 in the Cady Room at University of Michigan as part of my senior recital "Long Enough, Leaves."

David Arora, in his 1979 book Mushrooms Demystified, writes that “few fleshy fungi have less to offer the average mushroom hunter not to mention the average human being - than the Psathyrellas.” At the time, he might not have been wrong: he describes the genus as a uniform, boring set of mushrooms with nothing interesting to show us. But, In 2005, a new species of mushroom was discovered which defied our understanding: Psathyrella aquatica. Classical understanding was that mushrooms could not grow underwater, but when a team of researchers accidentally stumbled into this species growing in a river in Oregon, that understanding was broken.
"Psathyrella” and its accompanying poem are written in reverence to the mystery and beauty of the natural world, and have served me as reminders of how complex our world is. The two are works about finding wonder in places where you might’ve stopped looking.

A full pearl moon rests
in deep, blue-black night
flanked by pinprick stars whose family
is drowned by the moth-magnets lining the street.
The clouds aren’t thick enough tonight
to drown the moon, but
they’re there. Thousands of clouds
in rank formation separated by the barest
of black rivers carving paths between them,
stained-glass windows to the world beyond.
They march silently, giving the moon
moments in the ragged spotlight.
When it shows itself in the cracks, I stare.

"Few fleshy fungi have less to offer
The tree of life has a lot of work to do
and every now and then,
it doesn’t have the time it needs
to work out a second draft—

"the average mushroom hunter—
not to mention the average human being—
To me, it’s a miracle that
when I look at the moon, I can see its craters
with my naked eye. It’s a miracle
to me that something so far away can hold
such unimaginable majesty, and
when I look for long enough, I sometimes imagine
another miracle: that the moon is looking back at me,
and it can see the craters of my face.

"than the Psathyrellas.
There are no Psathyrella on the moon.
But who knows? We’ve found them once before
where we knew that we couldn’t.
Those frustrating theory-breakers,
cracking rocky riverbed soil,
carving their own vexing spotlight.
"They constitute an immense,
"monotonous, and metagrobolizing multitude—"
—but even first drafts,
when written by as unwieldy a system as this,
are worth exploring.