Editor’s Notes

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand.

Robin & Leila

The Mother Tree

In about 1877, before the orchard was an orchard, someone planted an elm tree in the center of the far meadow. It was common practice for early American farmers, from colonial times on, to plant shade trees throughout their fields to provide respite for work horse teams and pastured animals. When my grandfather transformed our farm into an orchard in 1911, planting blocks of apple and pear trees, he left the elm and many of the other shade trees standing; they towered above the steady lines of fruit trees like guardians. When I was sixteen, the tree was about a hundred years old. For hours the tree held my attention as I tried to capture the mystery of it, to draw its likeness with a twig dipped in ink, following the lines of branch and trunk with my eyes. When the drawing was finished, I framed it within in an ivory-colored mat and gave it to my mother.  She hung it on a wall in an upstairs room. Years later, when she could no longer climb the stairs and moved her bedroom to the first floor, she hung the drawing there. When she died I took the drawing of the tree and hung it on the wall in my study.

I don’t remember why I set out to draw the old elm, or what I was thinking when I drew it. The drawing has a lonely feel which was probably how I felt at the time. The tree held my attention because of what was not known, could not be known, or understood, because of all the questions that circled without answers, not even formulated yet as questions, because there was a feeling, an affinity, a pull, the desire to look again and again, a tug at the heart, or a sudden rip of fear. The tree was a mystery.

In 1997, the scientist, Suzanne Simard, published her first article on tree communication in the journal Nature. The article, which caused an immediate sensation, identified the ways trees in a forest make use of vast underground fungal networks, called mycorrhizae, to trade nutrients.

Her discovery was quickly dubbed the “wood-wide web,” and set in motion years of subsequent research. Now, in a recent book titled Finding the Mother Tree, Dr. Simard details the ways in which these fungal networks do much more than serve as conduits to exchange carbon and photosynthates; they facilitate inter-tree communication. Yes, what used to be considered in the realm of fantasy has now been scientifically proven by researchers like Dr. Simard who spent years labeling trees with radioactive isotopes—trees demonstrate intelligence and tree behavior has cognitive qualities. The word intelligence comes from the Latin verb intellegere, meaning to perceive and comprehend. Yes, I used the right word–trees exhibit intelligence, they demonstrate perception, learning and memory. Trees communicate by sending chemical signals through a fungal network, and these signals, which are created by ions cascading across fungal membranes are not unlike the neurotransmitters that operate in a human brain. Trees relay messages back and forth that include defense signals to warn one another of potential danger. At times they shuttle allelochemicals or poisons through the network if an unwanted tree intruder enters the forest. Perhaps the most stunning of Simard’s discoveries is that elder trees in a forest, what Simard calls “Mother Trees,” are able to recognize tree neighbors that are genetically related, are kin, and they can send more or less resources to their kin, either favoring or disfavoring them.

When I finished reading Simard’s new book, I swiveled around in my chair to stare at my old drawing of the elm, the “mother tree” on our farm that I had drawn so many years earlier. What holds our attention is important even when we don’t understand why. And even if we may never fully understand.

It is May as I write this and here in New England the trees are leafing out again, green and luminous. We bring you our latest issue, curated around the theme of “hold.” When we sent out the call for this issue, as usual we meant for our call to be a spark and a launch rather than a directive. We had anticipated that we might receive some pieces on the theme of holding on, of perseverance during dark times, the months of living through this pandemic. To our surprise and delight, we received a powerful celebration of speculation, of the power of what holds our attention, whether it is the paranormal, a re-imagined memory of fear, or the mystery of a garden.

Welcome to issue #5: HOLD.

Leila Philip, May 20, 2021

Simard, S., Perry, D., Jones, M. et al. “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field.” Nature 388, 579–582 (1997).

Simard, S. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Knopf, 2021. 

Editor’s Comments

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand. —Robin  &  Leila

Living temporarily in a tiny cabin adjacent to my home in Iowa, this would not be my first choice of a dwelling if not for my current circumstances. The two-room cabin, less spacious than many motel rooms, is appointed with floor-to-ceiling knotty pine paneling throughout and features a kitchen with no cabinets and a dorm fridge. A flimsy privacy screen provides the only barrier between the kitchen, toilet and bathtub. The cabin belongs to my neighbors who live in a stately Victorian-era home with Tiffany stained glass windows, the house once owned by the son of a 19th-century lumber baron. Now I find myself unable to enter my own home, stuck instead in the cabin that was once home to the carriage driver of the lumber baron’s son.  

For months my wife Margie and I had been successful in keeping Covid at bay in our household, though our efforts were complicated by a change in my employment. At the end of February, I signed a contract for a new position in New York City, where I was born. At any other time, the thought of moving back to New York would have thrilled me, and it did for about two weeks. The plan was for me to move there and for us to make frequent visits back and forth. Margie and our daughters weren’t going to move as our eldest daughter was about to enter her senior year in high school and in normal times we love Iowa City and our home there. As New York became the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., the thought of moving there suddenly seemed like the worst life decision ever. New Yorkers who could afford to flee, fled. When my new dean and I spoke, he told me of the view of the morgue truck parked across the street from his office. He, an avowed Brooklynite, fled the city, too.

Before my move to Brooklyn, I quarantined in an old farmhouse in an upstate town with the quaint name of Cuddebackville. Owned by cousins of mine, the house was hardly ever occupied. The last time I had visited was thirty years earlier, but the house had barely changed, except the evidence of its long-neglect was visible everywhere. Still the house felt familiar and welcoming, to me at least, though Margie, who accompanied me on the drive, hated it. For me, my younger self roamed through the halls and I welcomed seeing him again. For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening. Our one foray to a nearby park was like parting a jeering mob. Every few feet along the mile-long dirt road that led to the park, signs were tacked on nearly every tree, informing us that we were being watched and that we had better not step off the path. The entrance sign to the park was pocked with bullet holes. As in many small towns, outsiders are looked on with suspicion in Cuddebackville, though I was protected by my whiteness and the last name of my cousins. They had owned the house since 1963, and I used their names as my password every time I encountered someone who required such a password, say, walking along the defunct railroad bed near the house. Margie, a woman of color, did not want to stick around such dwellings where passwords were needed, and which might not even work for her. And who could blame her? I, too, would never have spent a minute in the place had I not previously spent five months there in my early twenties.  

My new dwelling in Brooklyn was faculty housing, which my dean warned me I shouldn’t get too excited about. Faculty housing and student housing were one and the same, and the three bedrooms of my three-bedroom apartment were labeled “A,” “B” and “C,” replete with 70s modular furniture and bass thumping sophomores across the hall, my closest neighbors. Still, three bedrooms in New York seemed wildly spacious, and by the time I moved in, things were improving in Brooklyn. The streets were lively and the vast majority of people I encountered wore masks, unlike in Iowa, where all summer I had encountered maskless men and women with their game faces on, plowing through the aisles of grocery stores. Nor did I require any passwords to walk freely.  

Over the months, the epicenters of the pandemic flipped. During my time in Brooklyn, positivity rates kept declining to the point at which they were at 1%. At the same time, Iowa, which never had a mask order or any coordinated government effort to stop the pandemic, started spiking to the point at which the positivity rate was 50%. I wondered, along with the rest of the country, whether to risk traveling from one dwelling to another over Thanksgiving. It turned out I had little choice.  

Margie’s unit in Internal medicine at The University of Iowa Hospital had been converted entirely to a Covid unit, and she had just come on her shift as a nurse when, before she had a chance to fully protect herself, she had to save a patient whose clogged lungs were drowning him. A couple of days later I received a call from her. “Mahal,” she said, which means “Dear” in Tagalog, what we call one another, “I tested positive.”  

A utilitarian antique phone, nothing fancy, hangs in my new dwelling: a black box with a simple earpiece dangling from a hook, but no dial. The point of this phone was simply to be summoned. The dead rarely command, as it turns out, though I’m sure that on some occasions, in some figurative way, they do. I admit to once or twice having picked up the receiver, with the tiniest of wild expectations of hearing the drunken voice of the lumber baron’s son, or the voice of my long-dead mother, or the man who killed himself in this cabin a dozen years ago, commanding in the manner of the first words ever spoken on a phone, “Robin, come here; I want you.” Still, it’s the living whose voices we are most often called to heed. It’s why I’m here, for the time being at least.  

Robin Hemley
December 15, 2020

Editor’s Comments

Given the gravity of this moment, we will take a pause from our usual practice of individual speculations on issues relevant to the issue at hand and offer the following comments.
—Leila & Robin

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Speculative Nonfiction will be donating all submission fees collected from issue #3 to the NAACP and The Movement for Black Lives. For the remainder of 2020, we will waive the submission fee for any writer who makes a financial contribution to one of these organizations working for racial justice.  

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The theme of erasure seemed a logical choice after our issue on “What history teaches.” Still, we could never have known just how fitting it would seem given the global pandemic and uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd. When we were thinking of the notion of erasure, we were not thinking, exclusively, about the erasures of history, about empires and individuals, about colonial and racist power structures that attempt(ed) to erase or succeeded in erasing the lives of individuals and peoples. We were not thinking exclusively about the erasures caused by disease, by wars and famines. We were not thinking exclusively about the massive erasures of bio-diversity, happening in real time from environmental degradation and rapid climate change. We were not thinking exclusively about the tendency to see no evil when evil persists all around us, erasures of conscience. We were not thinking exclusively of the technique of erasure, employed by some of the writers in this volume, of taking an existing text and erasing words around it to create a new text.

As with all our themes, we envision them broadly, as thoughtful invitations and provocations to investigate, experiment, invent, and of course, speculate around our theme.  

In 1938, nine months before the start of World War Two, poet W.H. Auden wrote the poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” whose subject, in part, was the painting by Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, painted in 1555. In the painting, we see a mountainous landscape on what seems an ordinary sunny day. A farmer plows a field with his horse in the foreground, his head bent to the earth while another man farther away seems to be idly looking up in the sky. Farther still, a fisher is busily tending to his lines. A merchant ship heads out of the bay, its sails billowing on this apparently windy day. Between the fisherman and the ship, and easily overlooked, a pair of legs seem to scissor kick, caught a moment before the entire body is submerged. We know the story of Icarus and why he fell, but Brueghel has imagined (in a very Dutch context) the moment of his falling. Once we notice those legs, we know why that one man is scanning the skies, that something unusual in the sky has attracted his attention – one minute it was there, something falling rapidly, was it human? Where did it disappear? The man at the plow noticed nothing and the same for the fisherman, or if they did, if the fisherman heard the splash, he must have determined that it didn’t concern him. And what of the people safely aboard the merchant ship.  As Auden speculates, that “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

The fact that we do not always directly see the suffering of others does not erase their suffering or our collective responsibility to respond. For hundreds of years, Black lives have been sacrificed to make this country “great.” The fact of Black people being murdered is not new, but the recent awakening of a majority of this country to that shameful fact is something novel. As artists, we often imagine the seemingly impossible. As artists, we are open to imagining the world differently. Sailing calmly on should no longer be an option. 

Robin Hemley
Leila Philip

June 25, 2020

Note: The editors wish to thank Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole for their permission to use images of their individual works and an excerpt from their beautiful collaborative project, Human Archipelago. For more on this project, see Madigan Haley’s essay “Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black” in Speculations on the Field.

Of Curses and Beauty: The Memoirs of Mario Praz

by Robin Hemley

Speculative Book Reviews

Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read.  We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.

We hope to publish several each issue.  Typically, we imagine these reviews to be no longer than 1000 words.  We'll be accepting reviews starting with our next submission period.

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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 277 pp.)

“Every person I’ve known in my life, and I’d venture to include as well, all those on earth I have not been acquainted with, carry with them a curse.  My good fortune is in having known from an early age, the manifestation if not the exact reasons for my curse. The vast assemblage of humanity, by contrast, know very little of their own particular curses and spend the better part of their lives attempting to untangle curse from blessing, much like the unfortunate protagonist of James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” the curse in his case being that he let his life slip by unacted upon.” 

So might begin this curious and ultimately moving memoir by the Italian Art historian and Literary critic, Mario Praz. An unvarnished and overt memoir would have been painful and/or too mundane for him to write, as he had previously written one of the most eccentric memoirs ever written, The House of Life, a memoir told through the possessions with which he filled his apartment in Rome. But if he had been coaxed to write another memoir, perhaps he would have found a little fascination with the attitude of others towards him, that nearly everyone in Italian society considered him portava iella, a jinx.  Known by some as “L’Anglista,” for his vast knowledge of English literature, he was most famous in academic circles worldwide for his 1933 groundbreaking study of Romanticism, “The Romantic Agony,” and for his exquisite sense of interior design, as demonstrated in his work, " An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau."  But in Rome, among friends, foes, and acquaintances, he was known as L’Innominabile” “the Unmentionable,” an irredeemable carrier of misfortune whose presence always brought some measure of disaster. When Maria Callas lost her voice during a performance at the Teatro dell’Opera of Bellini’s Norma, she found grim satisfaction upon learning that Professor Praz had been in the audience.  If he approached an acquaintance at a restaurant or café, as he did once the famous Zambrano sisters, Maria and Ariceli, they’d cower quietly, in direct opposition to their vibrant natures, until he moved on. 

How much did this perception weigh on him: otherwise sane and intelligent people certain he carried evil with him, all because of a congenital limp ( a sure sign of the devil)?  How did the almost gothic fascination others had with accursedness determine his scholarly fascination with the Romantics whom he blasted as immoral and decadent in their obsessions with beauty and horror. Or conversely, his own appreciation of beautiful exteriors?  Beginning his Romantic Agony with a chapter on Medusa, how much did he see himself reflected in her, his own ability to alter the life of anyone in his presence?  An Anxiety with no possibility of escape is the main theme of the Gothic tales, he wrote.  Describing these anxieties and resisting them was in some fashion his life’s work.  In surrounding himself with beautiful objects that carried memories of his life for him, he created one memoir.  In writing about the Romantics and their free-floating anxieties that sought expression in the supernatural, he wrote in a sense another “covert autobiography” (as John Russell called The House of Life in an article in The New York Times shortly after Praz’ death in 1982). 

The missing fork of this trident of memoirs is the one he might have written perhaps titled, The Anxiety Catcher or The Unmentionable: A Memoir or Of Curses and Beauty.   

Let’s say this curious book exists, though only in manuscript form, typed a year before Praz’ death. If you go looking for this book you might or might not find it, but you will certainly find him, or at least one branch of his autobiography at the Mario Praz Museum, brimming with the furnishings and books that soothed his restless and often lonely existence.  Perhaps hidden in a secret compartment of a burnished cherrywood desk with ebony accents on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, Of Curses and Beauty is kept, admired and reread by the museum’s docents, but otherwise kept under wraps, the true nature of Mario Praz jealously guarded. While we are unable at this juncture to properly review it, we eagerly await its discovery and eventual publication.