SOMA | The Meme Dump
Levon heads over to the portable toilet and opens it. The latrine has been hollowed out and converted into a mushroom nursery.
Wooden growbeds are stacked neatly from floor to ceiling. The beds are overflowing with clusters of dazzling red mushrooms.
Levon photographs himself posing with the tray of mushrooms. He considers sending the picture to June, but he shies away. He picks the largest mushroom clusters and uses the front of his baggy tshirt as a basket.
Levon pokes his phone again. A recording of American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna begins to play in Levon's headphones. Mckenna is describing the relationship between psychedelic mushrooms and human evolution: his socalled “Stoned Ape Theory.”
TERENCE McKENNA
People without plants are in a state of potential neurosis, a state of existential wanting. Part of the Western dilemma is the sense of abandonment that has followed the termination of our symbiotic relationship with plants.
Levon carries his mushrooms away from the farm, towards the blue vastness of Lake Ontario.
TERENCE McKENNA
I think what evolutionary biologists have missed in looking at the emergence of humans out of the primate Philogium is, generally speaking, the mutagenic influence of foods. The fact that, due to a spreading dryness in the environment, a fruiteating arboreal primate evolved into a packhunting creature of the grasslands with an omnivorous diet… Clearly some unique factor had to be present in the evolutionary situation that was capable of kindling this transformation.