No Such Thing as Empty

John Cage: A Mycological Foray by John Cage et al.

Atelier Éditions, 2020,

$55.00 (2 volumes, slipcovered).

WE FOUND nothing in our early days of mushroom hunting, nothing poisonous and nothing edible, certainly none of the morels my sister promised grew plentifully in the woods near our mother’s house, plump and ready for the taking. Inexperienced as we were, we had gone thinking it would be an easy business, that their distinctive many-creviced caps would surely stand out amidst the poplar roots where she had been told to look. But the leaf litter registered as a dull brown monotony, and as we walked I found my eyes drawn, despite myself, to flashier sights: new shoots, or bright frills of lichen, or the occasional squirrel that darted through the undergrowth, acorn clutched in teeth, at the sound of our steps. Later we would read that expert foragers followed practice regimens, staring at honeycomb patterns or mushroom figurines so as to