Eating (each other’s) (hearts) out: mycelial love and the forest as queer con/figuration

The active sapwood of a tree encloses a structural core of ‘nonfunctional wood’ – the heart – that decays even as the tree grows, providing habitat for other life and contributing to the cycle of nutrients that feeds both the tree itself and the forest of which it is part. This chapter elaboratesthe proposition that heart-rot, an important fungal decay process in oaks and other trees, might offer a way of lovingly undoing cis-hetero-reproductive assumptions about the ‘nature’ of love; it gestures towards a theory of love grounded in the observation that entities are not pre-individuated or fixed beings within an ordered system, but emergent constellations of relations that are constitutively vulnerable and entangled. Heartwood rot has traditionally been understood on apathogenic, immunological model as an external threat in which one organism causes catastrophic damage to another. Recent mycological studies instead highlight that the relationship between oak and heart-rot fungi may in some circumstances significantly enhance both the longevity of affected oaks and their associated biodiversity. While we do not view longevity as a ‘natural good’ in itself, we note that this observation challenges classical understandings of decay in living trees: much of what makes an oak an oak is in fact its non-dyadic entanglement with fungi and their wider communities. We develop this observation as an analogical study through which to imagine other ways of approaching love. What if the aim of love were not to consummate a dyadic reproductive association, but to commit to an ecosystem of individual and collective affective capacities, contributing to a distributed cycle of growth and decay?