for Queer Ecologies
Mutualism
Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad, ca. 1975-1979. Watercolor and pencil on paper © Arnold Lobel
Frog and Toad are friends. Frog rakes the leaves at Toad’s place, while Toad is over at Frog’s house doing the same. It’s not about every frog and every toad being friends. It’s about this one and that one. Mutualisms make strange relations, coming together to create something more than themselves.
Mutualism is the mutation of the individual into the collective. Microbiomes blend: we are shaped by whom we hold close. We’re spinning in a circle with our hands held tight—feel the counterbalanced pull between you, the earth, and every beloved body as you fall.
When I map my mutualisms, I first consider what is nearest. [see MAP] A bloody ocean blooms within me; my microbiome is me, my health—it coconstructs my being. I cannot tend to other relationships until I shape this first one, internal.
What does mutualism look like as an economic system? As a city? Mutualism is leaving the place cleaner than you found it. [see OIKOS] It’s the sphere of eye contact and empathy, of reciprocity, collaboration. It’s a cleaning wrasse, and the moray eel opening its mouth tenderly, so tenderly. It’s the forest fungal network, it’s the rhizome and the tree. It’s you and me.
Mutualism emerges. This phenomenon of coming together and sharing in something that ripples out, boundlessly, is a generative process. It is a driver of emergence: complex systems arise from spontaneity and chaos. Perhaps the earth itself is an organism like this, a mutualistic web of interactions. The world is born of collaborations.
Is mutualism necessary? Mutualism is the joy of multiplicity, the syncing of two clocks. It’s harmony, a universal chord. Mutualism is the symbiosis of lovers, of pieces fitting into place, of double-bonded atoms, transference, generosity. Mutualism is moving through the world in a million duets with everything you share breath with, which is to say, with everything. Mutualism is home again, even after all this time.
Nicolas Baird and Lee Pivnik with QuERC, 2023