Ferns and Foam Rubber by Juniper

 

Ferns and Foam Rubber consists of 10 short prose pieces, each of which is accompanied by a tattoo-like drawing of an anthropoid, but also insect-like, creature in various states of transformation. These drawings usefully provide an inroads for visualizing the book’s “characters” (Halifax, Narli, Shila, and its first-person narrator) who are either sprites, humans who have shrunk, or an altogether new species enduring earth on the way to its submergence in a detoxifying soup (the book's last line is “Bile will rise”).

 

The book begins rainily in winter sometime after “the world changed.” Here, glowing mushrooms walk in the company of reindeer and the creatures around whom the “plot” transpires have lungs that are transforming into frilly gills merging with those of the pea pods in which they will soon hibernate:

 

We hibernate in the pods during wintertime with anus and mouth tied together the way the mouth and anus of a fetus are tied together. During this time only the hypnotic jerks wake us and our lungs turn into frilly gills so that we can breathe through moist pea pods. During hibernation our ventricles connect to the photosynthetic pod, thick with cuticle and stomata, veinlets of the vascular network, parenchyma layers of the endocarp, an abundance of chloroplasts. Cerebrospinal fluid starts floating back and forth. We synchronize and photosynthesize our ways of thinking. Our communal sleep glands produce melatonin and fermentation begins. Sap will drip. Myrrh will crystallize on the tip of every pea pod. It will shine and light up our commune through the long nights.

The book engages in a world-building enterprise without the conventional political intrigue or "character" development. Instead, what drama exists is “sensational,” literally having to do with in the moment feelings/sensations of merging with plants, exchanging flows and fluids with all other beings (including stones), and following that forward.

 

That said, the book celebrates resourcefulness and adequate belonging to one's immediate ecosystem. In this case, that ecosystem is one most obviously characterized by ferns. The narrator, with “impassioned green energy unfurling from [their] lips” describes their (along with other members of the commune’s) symbiosis with these ferns as follows:

 

We live from the ferns and the dew. We eat them, we boil them, we wring them and drink the juices from them. We speak through the green spores on the surface of their leaves, all starting form the same point, a root or a growing point on a stem. It takes some effort to squeeze words in through the spores but the sensational feeling when it succeeds hits the body in waves and echoes out to the smaller limbs. Fern leaves simulate my hands and my hands simulate theirs.

 

Not only does the commune milk the ferns, they approach a point of indeterminacy with them where fern leaves and hands wave the same way, embodying a common matter. It’s a condition of druggy simultaneity that connects creature to pea pod, creature to fern, narrator to Halifax, to Narli, to Shila, and so on, so that the narrator states:

 

You don’t answer when I tell you about our doings in the pea pod commune. You only ever ask and I must imagine your answer. My eyes belong to me and your eyes belong to you but I always mix them up. We’re volatile. They say I suffer from echolalia. You say nothing so there’s nothing for me to echo.

 

In this interconnectedness, it’s as if a new species is forming, fermenting. This formation is fostered in no small part by the remaining specter of some catastrophe (“after the world changed”), or by the acid rain and foam rubber that’s constantly falling. This array of factors has resulted in the evolutionary conditions for the creatures of the text to have so-called “sensory horns,” which “are like radio antennas capturing signals from near and far, wiring outside input to inside signals…mounted on our forehead with witches’ butter and synthetic plant foam, synthesized with our skin-like surface…able to adjust to signals from cunning trees. Like this, they transform hearing into listening and sound into touch.”

 

The attunement to the environment, product of both catastrophe as well as adaptation, is a central problematic of this lysergic, plotless sci-fi book. On the one hand, the text describes a utopic situation: “In the circle, we holds hands and exchange particles and body fluids. Each hand is a plug-in to the other, letting liquids run freely. The sensation of a flowing river through one’s body is immense and so very joyous that it makes me want to laugh. We hone our senses. Then we talk. We talk about plants, we talk about how green they are. We talk about insects, how warrior-like they are. […] We nod. We talk and we feel.” On the other hand, the text describes a world where foam rubber has taken the place of raindrops, whose “soil is sad."

 

Our bodies are transformable. When I touch you, your body changes slightly and adjusts to my touch. You elongate or shrink against the palm of my hand. Foam rubber is scattered everywhere, covering the damp soil making the soil gasp for breath. It is moving up and down in hectic movements to let air into its spores. We clean the drains, connecting one pea pod to another, with acid rain collected in reservoirs, acid rain acidifying our mucous membranes day by day and night by night as we work.

 

What makes the book so interesting is its refusal to take a stance and instead its adaptation (affectively, physically) to the changing conditions, doing so in a way that seeks symbiosis with a damaged planet, rather than moralistically claiming anything:

When we work, I hand pieces of foam rubber to Shila who hands it to Narli who hands it to Halifax who offers it to the pea pod on a flat palm as if feeding a horse. If the pod accepts it, the foamy material connects to the green surface of the pod. As we work, our hands get to know foamy textures and foamy textures get to know our hands and we sing and hum the commune’s hymns to generate energy and sensitivity for the work. It puts us in the right mood. We get excited and start bouncing up and down from heel to toe, each of us rocking back and forth on the soles of our feet. “Doesn’t it feel great?” we say.

The text does adapt but not without apprehensions of another catastrophe or without acknowledging that while foam is what is being given by reality, it is damaging the environment in the long run.  

 

Like the creatures of the text, the genre status of Ferns and Foam Rubber is hard to define. Its form and content are inspired by poetry, sci-fi, improvisational music, ecology, and new materialism, all of which works together towards, as the narrator puts it, listening to the landscape--a landscape of earth that has been profoundly transformed, pixelated or randomized:

 

It is a dark design, a dark web of nightingales singing in the night. We did not create this. It happened many moons ago, so many that I lost track of the counting. Only a few people in the commune have lived through the time of change, so the rest of us depend on the old ones to tell stories that assemble our history. The time of change swung the gates open to dream time and now we follow let lines or song lines and listen to the landscape til it speaks to us.

 

Also notable is the construction of the book itself. Beautifully made but also brittle, I frequently felt that the ink was wearing away as I read it, in keeping with the overall fever dream of the text, ending with a vision, extracted from rubbing a stone, of the earth on the way to its submergence in a detoxifying soup, under the rain of foam rubber. 

 

Buy it here (and/or request an additional printing).