What Entanglement Always Seems to Hide

Or, why I still long for shelter from the storm.

Photo by Prometheus 🔥 on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been turned off by individualism. I’ve always taken it as a given (rather than an aim or an achievement) that I’ve been culturally formatted to exist as an atomized individual. When I learned to think more deeply about subjectivity, I was immediately drawn toward ideas that erode that sense of atomized, isolated, individualism. I was drawn toward ideas that made me feel connected, and held, that gave me a sense of belonging: ideas that made me feel like less of an alien in the world. These ideas felt better, and true in ways that were deeper than my immediate experience. 

The fact of our networked realities, and established knowledge about the evolution of life on earth, all teach us that everything is interconnected. But most of us don’t feel this way. Or, at least, it often takes work to feel this way. We live in a modern world that’s been stripped of the commons. Many of us live social lives sealed off from people who aren’t our own age, or social class, or race, and beings who aren’t our own species. Increasingly, more and more people live embodied social lives that feel atomized and isolated. For many, the deepest connections we have are sustained via the digital. Friendships stop feeling real. We might know, intellectually, that all things are interconnected. But it might not feel like we are connected to much at all.

Entanglement is a newer name, a sexier name, for interconnection. But it differs in key ways. An interconnection might need to be made or chosen. An entanglement is a situation, a fact. Entanglement has become one of the primary words for reinforcing discursively what we know: that there is nothing to which we aren’t bound in some way, despite what might feel true in our immediate experience. It’s a name for a wake up call, or a shock of recognition, that can also push back against existential loneliness, isolation, or solipsism. It expresses something true, obvious, necessary, crucial. It pushes beyond the subjective atomizations and enclosures that western history built for us.

Like all concepts, however, entanglement has its own expressive limits. There are things that every concept hides. When we start to explore the edges of any concept or theory, it’s only natural to ask questions about where the concept might break, fall apart, or cease to apply.

One thing that entanglement always seems to hide from me, when I go looking for it, is solitude. This is something other than loneliness, or atomization. It’s a certain kind of aloneness that isn’t dependent upon individualism. It’s a certain kind of disconnection, perhaps: a bird flying solo across the sky, a honey bee floating on the breeze toward a flower. In solitude I rarely feel alone, and I often feel keenly connected to the more than human world. I can hear the birds singing outside of my window, and the wind rustling up the leaves on the trees. But in solitude something in my social space goes quiet, or feels distant. I get shelter from a certain kind of storm. I’ve never really understood what solitude, and my recurring hunger for it, has to do with entanglement. It sometimes feels—in an entangled world—like an impossibility.

Lately, though, I’ve been reading through Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, for research I’m doing on the fungal dimensions of underworlds. Sheldrake’s visions of fungal dimensions have made me think differently about solitude and entanglement. 

Entanglement and Exclusion

One of the books that made me start asking questions about entanglement—and its conceptual limits—was Eva Haifa Giraud’s What Comes After Entanglement? Giraud recognizes the importance of “narratives of entanglement.” They’ve been essential, she notes, in reinforcing the fact that humans only ever become human in and through our relationships with other (more than human) entities. These narratives have also been essential in “implicating human activities in ecologically damaging situations,” and in “calling for more responsible relations to be forged with other species, environments, and communities.” So, Giraud isn’t denying the importance of entanglement as a term of discourse.

What she has questions about are some of the ethical implications of entanglement. Or, perhaps better put, she questions some of the ethical and political assumptions that people often make about entanglement. She is critical, especially, of the view that entanglement is a good in and of itself. 

Giraud points to what she calls the “paradox of relationality”; that being in relation, and stressing the importance of our bonds with others, often means that we then begin to struggle “to accommodate things that are resistant to being in relation, including forms of politics that actively oppose particular relations.” To think of being in relation, or our conditions of entanglement, as inherently good means that we often lose the ability to value exclusion. 

Recognizing that in a world where “belonging” has become an important political catch-phrase, Giraud emphasizes that exclusion is not simply something that oppressive or marginalizing systems do. All politics—including pluralistic politics—need to “contest certain relations” in order to create alternative spaces where the desired politics and relations can thrive. As she puts it, the political potential of exclusion lies “precisely in the purposeful way it destroys particular entanglements in order to create space for alternatives.” Feminist and antiracist politics have clearly required certain forms of exclusion, as she notes. There are bad ideas, and bad forms of relation. 

Giraud’s book really made me think critically about the extent to which I’d been thinking of entanglement as inherently good. And it made me think seriously about the value of destroying, or disconnecting from, particular forms of entanglement. Solitude isn’t necessarily politically important, in the way that feminist and antiracist politics are. But, of course, the ability to demand that I be left alone (that my desire to disconnect be respected) can often support these kinds of politics in a very practical way. And solitude is, I think, spiritually and psychically important. The erosion of our spiritual or psychic states can have detrimental political effects. In sum, I think that solitude is a form of disconnection or exclusion that’s socially and politically important. And it’s a form of disconnection that—it’s always seemed to me—is excised from the relationally intense utopian registers of entanglement. 

Shelter from the Storm

Merlin Sheldrake, if you aren’t already familiar with him, is a biologist with a PhD in tropical ecology and perhaps one of the most famous mycologists in the world right now. His book on fungi, Entangled Life, is probably—in my view—the most engaging and wonderful thing you can read about fungi, if you’re not a mycologist. It feels, to me, like it’s been written by someone wizard-like. I’m sure that mycologists love it, too. But perhaps it takes a little something more for a fungi book to be magical, for them. What do I know about mycologists?

Entanglement is obviously central, for Sheldrake, as the title of his book would indicate. But entanglement isn’t an inherently good, or utopian, condition in his analysis. It’s simply a fact. And it’s a fact that fungal dimensions make especially obvious. Fungi are singular-plural forms of life that are defined in relation to one another. They are branching beings. And they are so endemic to, and essential in, our lives, they clearly illuminate our human entanglements with the more than human world. But Sheldrake acknowledges the ambivalence of entanglements: the fact that symbiotic relations can range from mutualistic to parasitic. 

Early in the book, as Sheldrake is recounting his own shifting perspectives on fungi (how he learned to think more like fungi, and less like a human), he narrates the insight he gained during an LSD trip as he sought to experience life as a fungus. I love this description of his vision so much, I’ll just quote it in full:

“I found myself underground, surrounded by growing tips surging across one another. Schools of gobular animals grazing—plant roots and their hustle—the Wild West of the soil—all those bandits, brigands, loners, crapshooters. The soil was a horizonless external gut—digestion and salvage everywhere—flocks of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge—chemical weather systems—subterranean highways—slimy infective embrace—seething contact on all sides. As I followed a fungal hypha into a cavernous root, I was struck by the sanctuary it offered. Very few other types fungi were present; certainly no worms or insects. There was less bustle and hassle. It was a haven I could imagine paying for.” It was, “a shelter from the storm.”

First of all, I love the poetry of this vision. I love how visceral it feels, even just to read a description of the experience. I love the way that he makes the soil come alive, and the way that he illuminates its busyness: a horizonless gut, a subterranean highway with seeing contact on all sides! How intense. It’s lovely, as well, with its surfing flocks of bacteria. But ultimately, this world of intense contact contrasts with this conjured image of a fungal hypha seeking out a space of sanctuary away from this “infective embrace.” It feels, to me, like he’s illuminating a deeply entangled form of life seeking out an exclusion, making a disconnection, or even pursuing something like solitude.

Could this all be an anthropocentric projection onto fungal life? Could this simply be an account, from a human, of a very human desire to escape the dense relational intensity of fungal conditions? Of course. But it could also be nothing more than an anthropocentric projection to imagine that fungi never seek out forms of disconnection, or a shelter from the storm. Really, why wouldn’t they? Humans aren’t the only social creatures with a drive to be left alone for a bit. Why wouldn’t this desire for a kind of disconnected solitude—a form of sanctuary, a shelter from the storm—be endemic to relational life itself, to conditions of entanglement?

In Relation to Reality

I come at this with a bias, of course. I’m the only child of a single (working) mother, who grew up accustomed to being alone for hours and and hours. I’m a writer, so my creative practice is entirely dependent on solitude. I’ve always been drawn to intellectual defenses of solitude. Perhaps I go looking for them. 

I hate the language that Simone Weil used to speak about what she called “The Great Beast”: her word for “the social” when it becomes densely connected, oppressive, and antagonistic. She described (imperial) Rome and (figurative) Israel as forms of the Great Beast, so there’s potential to deploy her language in antisemitic registers. But I always felt drawn to her critique of the way that the collective can function, at times, as a sort of false idol. She was a thinker who believed that our ethical obligations to one another were deep, and extreme. But she also wanted to protect our solitude. I think collective identity can, as people who’ve experienced religious trauma know, become especially corrosive when it’s spiritualized. There are many people, embedded in religious traditions, who want to remind you of how deeply entangled you are, in order to manipulate you. Disconnection can be important. 

But perhaps the language that Virginia Woolf used in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” is better. In the essay she’s talking about women and writing. More specifically, she’s thinking about why—for so many centuries, in western culture—so few women wrote and published. One of the reasons, she surmises, is related to time and space. Women infrequently had conditions of solitude—rooms of their own in which to write and think. At the end of the essay she argues that, in order to have “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think”, we need to be able to “escape a little from the common sitting room.” We need to be able to “see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.” That is, in relation to the sky, “and the trees.” In relation to the more than human world. 

Perhaps it’s easier, on some crucial level, for us to comprehend our entanglements with more than human worlds if we can gain brief moments of solitude—if we’re able to turn down the volume on entanglements with one another, not in any permanent way, but to find a little sanctuary from time to time.