Letters to Agnes
Text and photographic essay, 2017 Letters to Agnes is a series of letters to filmmaker Agnes Varda. Begun whilst she was still alive, the letters are ongoing and consider acts of looking, gleaning and filmmaking.
Extract from Letter 2
…
… Eduard, the two-star Michelin chef who appears
in your film was taught to glean by his grandparents.
He takes great pride in picking herbs from the
hills on his way to work – bunches of savoury to
flavour his dishes.
No division between economy and excellence.
Nothing self-conscious about taking something
for free or getting dirt on his hands.
I can’t find anything out about how ants foraged in
Cornwall might be packaged and sent to Birmingham.
Do you think they’re vacuum packed, or polystyrene-sealed?
And what’s the likely hourly wage for ant foraging?
Apart from roadside blackberries and apples,
I have only foraged once - with my friend Fraya,
who grew up in Inverness.
A few months ago, I took a trip to visit her
at her family home and we went on a walk in the
forest right next to the cul-de-sac in which her
mum lives. Fraya knows a lot about plants –
a lot more than me - and she leads us through the
woods pointing out particular lichen, berries and
trees along the way. As our walk continues I can
sense a tightening of her eyes and I realise that she
has shifted from a soft grazing glance to a focused
scanning.
She is hunting for something.
When I ask her what she is looking for
she murmurs, chanterelle mushrooms.
Shortly afterwards we approach a gathering
of Birch trees and after a brief silence she
announces the presence of a single mushroom
at the base of one of the trees.
Led by the loud yellow glint on closer
inspection we find a whole little troop of
chanterelles hidden in the shade under
autumnal leaf fall. It starts to rain but we
continue foraging, treading very carefully
and turning over the damp leaves as we go.
It feels wrong to leave any mushrooms
in the dark.
After a timeless amount of time,
we head home, the mushroom
harvest weighing down the inside of a
woollen hat.
“A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings; between all its life cycles and their different timescales ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day.” (Berger, p.3)
Back at Fraya’s Mum’s house we cook
them with fresh thyme and eat them with toast.
Fraya is a musician and composer and I ask
her if she knows that John Cage was an
enthusiastic mycologist. She does not.
Another train journey: this one with mushrooms
in my stomach for company. As I travel further
and further away from the forest, I send her some
links to John Cage’s mushroom activities.
I don’t need to look out of the window to sense
the landscape as it vanishes into darkness, I feel
the darkness in me.
When I get home I look at the links myself. They include John Cage winning a contest on Italian TV with his mushroom knowledge; how he first came across mushrooms in Carmel, USA (when he was twenty, had no money and nothing to eat); an inscription in a book of chess from Marcel Duchamp to Cage (‘Dear John look out: yet another poisonous mushroom’) and an interview in German and English (sound only, no picture) in which it seems John Cage is simultaneously cooking and talking about mushrooms.