Ancient Lichen

Sept 16 2014

There is an ancient lichen

in Greenland’s glacial mud
that every hundred years
grows one centimetre.
Even the continents
drift faster,
as they jig-saw the map
we always imagined
eternal.

I take this on faith
like most scientific pronouncements.
Was it isotopes, growth rings
meticulous accounting?
Did someone draw a line
in the last century,
like a child's height
pencilled on the wall?
As if we actually talked
across time
listened to the past,
in the headlong rush
of science.

The breakneck clock
of a human life
from single cell, to death,
while this tiny plant
toils so slow
it seems inanimate.

Our frame of reference
imprisons us.
Too big or too small
and we are oblivious;
the magnitude of the cosmos
the expanse of time.

Perhaps there is strength
in give-and-take.
This co-habitation
of algae and fungus
that grows on rock,
seems to have solved the problem
of eternal life.

Except where the scientist walked
busily sampling, clambering up.
Did not notice
the dull green patch
scuffing the rock,
that slight dry crunch, underfoot
too soft to hear.


I read this in a short piece in The New Yorker today:

Stepping into the sticky Staten Island mud, she said, “When I was in Greenland, there was this glacial mud—someone had to pull me out.” She paused. “There are map lichens in Greenland that grow one centimetre every hundred years. Just think about that in human terms: imagine if, in your whole life span, your main accomplishment was to grow one centimetre. Continents drift away faster than that!" (The article is Survivors, by Raffi Khatchadourian, and it's about photographer Rachel Sussman's book and exhibition The Oldest Living Things in the World. ...The attached pic is generic, btw -- to add a bit of colour -- and has nothing to do with her work.)

I loved that comparison so much I couldn't resist stealing it. So, if I want to be ungenerous, the best part of the poem is plagiarized. Or, being generous, borrowed ...an homage ...research! In the New Yorker piece, there are references to a 13,000 year old South African forest that was recently bulldozed for a road; a 3500 year old tree in Orlando accidentally incinerated by meth heads; a 13,000 year old oak in California growing next to mounds of garbage; cordgrass on a polluted Staten Island beach that dates back to the recession of the glaciers; and a bacteria that has so far lived for half a million years. She never specifies the age of the lichen, but I took the liberty of presuming that it was similarly ancient.

I've obliterated patches of lichen innumerable times, clambering over the rocks of the Canadian shield. Even if not so old as in the poem, they too grow painfully slowly. So there is a kind of irreverence, a human-centred solipsism, in this unmindful action.

I've written before on this idea of things that hide in plain sight. Of how we are blinkered by our order of magnitude, our conception of time; and so either miss, or find incomprehensible, anything that doesn't conform to our scale: the slow unfolding of the cosmos; the invisible goings-on of undiscovered micro-organisms, as well as the intricate machinery of cells, molecules, atoms.

According to Webster's, lichens are plants. But they're actually symbiotic organisms composed of both fungi and algae. Evolution isn't always rapacious predation. It's also co-existence and co-operation. What a contrast to modern society, which seems to be based on speed and competition. So lichens are nice stand-ins for the "slow" movement, as well as for collaboration: the slowing of food, of so-called progress, of consumption. While we are "breakneck" and "headlong", the lichen is "ancient", "eternal", and almost "inanimate".

I don't really equate science with faith. And if any of us are patient observers and respect the past, it's scientists. But when I listen dizzily to cosmologists and sub-atomic physicists, it does feel like an act of faith. The scale of time and magnitude in which they dwell defies comprehension. I nod my head knowingly, but really have no idea!