"Acquire the air" is a line from the poem Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath. I couldn't help but notice just what a perfect verb "acquire" is for the relation-ship living beings can have with air. In the original Latin "acquirere/adquirere" means "to get in addition to, accumulate, gain," from ad "to" + quaerere "to seek to obtain". And how perfect it is for a visceral understanding of mushroom life, too, a quiet, discreet seeking under the earth while obtaining air in the process. In her poem, mushrooms are portrayed to be models of interaction and Sylvia Plath proves to be the human to write their manifesto.
Mushrooms
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
Source: Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, Harper Perennial, 2016