Lichening

How to learn from this quiet, immobile life?
— Vincent Zonca, Lichens

 

Near the end of George Amabile’s poem “First Light,” the poet is arrested by a memory of lichen: “I don’t know why I think // of Patrick in Swift Current,” he writes:

 

the stone he brought
home like a lost pet
and the stone’s lichen
exactly the colour of glacial till
but white at the edges
like a drying lake
seen from the top of a mountain. (102)

 

Interrupting an extended contemplation of the mind’s confrontation with reality, the depths of human history, and origin stories, the sudden, inexplicable surfacing of this memory—of Patrick (Lane, I presume), of the stone, of the lichen that Patrick sprinkles with water to keep alive—catches the randomness and the sacredness of life’s encounters. Friend with friend, poet with reminiscence, lichen with rock: all these life-forces converge on the poem that, for a moment, carries them. “Literary biodiversity” encompasses this confluence of language and the mess of life. The stone, the friend who appropriates it, the poet’s attempt to describe this memory and then, of course, the lichen—a strange, nearly immobile being, radically different from ourselves: literary biodiversity lives in such convergences.

 

I came to this conversation about literary biodiversity through my interest in habitat studies—a method pioneered by Laurie Ricou that eschews the traditionally anthropocentric orientations of literary studies around authors, literary movements and histories, the development of genres, and the like.¹ Habitat studies begins not with the human but with the biodiversity of which the human is a part: with bees and sandpipers, bats and frogs, birches and blackberries. Or it might begin with lichen, for any being who shares your space is as valid a starting point as another. The literary comes afterward, in the form of ecologies of texts that coalesce around each non-human being, highlighting the myriad ways in which writers have named, framed, described, reflected on, and related to them. Tracing at once the impact of language on the non-human world and the impact of the more than human world on language, habitat studies offers one possible method for the study of literary biodiversity.

 

Through this approach, we can ask what it means to follow lichens: not only to look and listen for these organisms, but also to be guided by them into new modes of thinking, reading, writing, and inhabiting this world and this ecological moment. What does lichen do, not just in this poem, but outside it? What ways of being does it bring into the poem? How might we regard it as an agent of “enlichenment” (Goward)? What is the language of lichens?²

 

Lichens live in every biome. They grow on many of the earth’s surfaces, from tree trunks to tundra to desert to sheer rock face. They are the “glue” that holds the soil of indigenous bunchgrass prairie in place (Goward). They also find homes on concrete and stone walls, wooden fences, rooftop shingles. Although they can be some of the largest and oldest organisms in the world, they can also be “the smallest thing: a lichen scab on stone” (Crozier 59).

 

Showing up on poetry’s surfaces, too, lichen’s strange, faceless forms put a particular pressure on language.³ Metaphors and similes range from blight and skin disease to baroque decoration, in some cases even conjuring celestial realms: lichens are described as “whorls” and “drab arabesques,” as “splotch[es]” and “scab[s],” as “explosions” and “cosmological map[s],” “spiky as galaxies.”⁴

 

Despite their ubiquity, lichens are an example of “neglected biodiversity” (Zonca 4–5). They do their small, slow-growing lichen thing, whether we notice them or not. In many poems, lichen is as quiet and unobtrusive a presence as it is on the bark of a tree (which, despite its ability to dissolve stone, it does not kill, contrary to some popular misconceptions). A reader might overlook the lichen in Karen Solie’s poem “Parallax,” for example, but it is there, drawing nourishment from the air; tenaciously, fragilely, resiliently generating life among the stones left behind by Indigenous nations who, neglected at the hands of the colonial government, lost so much land:

 

The government once saw fit to give this land away,
there being only grass and Indians on it. Stones
from teepee rings host lichen in the rockpiles
as corporations draw a bead on the flyover zone
posing buy-outs like questions to those for whom
there are none. (76)

 

To attend to lichens, here and elsewhere, we need to slow down, abandon the god’s-eye views of flyover zones, land surveys, and picturesque prospects, and get closer to the earth. We need, in other words, to be more like lichens.

 

Growing at a rate of only one-half to five millimetres per year, lichens model an “ethics of slowness” (Zonca 33). As Nicholas Bradley also intimates in his contribution to this Readers’ Forum, such an ethic has become urgent. As rapacious resource extraction and fuel consumption dramatically outpace ecological processes of regeneration and natural carbon sequestration, we need to slow our rates of consumption. We also need to make time to think clearly, to collaborate meaningfully, and to listen attentively if we are to change how we are in the world: to treat our addictions to energy, convenience, speed, and escape; to build communities in the ways that might better sustain us and our non-human kin.

 

New worlds emerge through collaboration with lichen. In “Gathering,” Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s fiercely loving reclamation of Indigenous land relies on an intimate bodily connection: “tonight,” she declares, “I’ll dress / in my lichen robe” (19–20). Inhabiting lichens becomes key to a transformative relationship with the earth.

 

Lichens are born of slow collaboration. Defying many of the categories humans have created to understand biodiversity, including taxonomic systems that account for species as individuals, lichens are symbiotic assemblages that cross species lines: composite beings “In photosynthetic algae-fungus cahoots,” as Sonnet L’Abbé puts it (xxxii).

 

While at first this way of being appears radically different from our own, the idea “We are all lichens” echoes through enlichenment thought.⁵ Recognizing that there are no individuals is a critical ecological insight made glaring by our global environmental crisis, and it must become central to our understanding of who we are in the world if we have any hopes of shifting the dangerous individualism that has led us here.

 

As a literary scholar, I like to think about reading and writing as collaboration: about intertextuality and citation, about the polyphonic practices of scholarship. There are no individuals in this line of work.⁶ Literary biodiversity, as a critical concept and a forum-generating practice, exemplifies further forms of collaboration that might help us navigate the enormous challenges, the griefs, and the possibilities for change we need to explore collectively. We need to sit together, to make time to talk to one another. We need to step outside, to approach literary studies through the non-human beings who have shaped it alongside its human concerns and plotlines. Literary biodiversity, like habitat studies, prompts us also to collaborate with ecologists. The gap between science and the humanities remains wide. We rarely think together, and we need to. We need to be lichens.

 

Notes

1. See especially The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest and Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory.

2. “Quand tu vis sur le territoire,” writes Innu poet Joséphine Bacon, “tu parles le langage des lacs, des rivières, du lichen, de la mousse, des montagnes” (1).

3. As Vincent Zonca observes, “Faceless, mineral and inert in appearance, lichen poses a moral and political problem: it inspires no spontaneous empathy. Like other ‘lower’ beings, it has a hard time accommodating anthropomorphism” (5).

4. Ormsby 132, 71; Crozier 59; Lane 15; Ormsby 71.

5. This metaphor, first posited by biologists Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber in “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals” (2012), also appears in David Griffiths’ “Queer Theory for Lichens,” Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, among other places.

6. My thinking on lichens rests not just on the work of poets and researchers cited here, but on the diligent rummaging done by my SSHRC-funded research assistant, Rachel Burlock.

 

Works Cited

Amabile, George. Dancing, with Mirrors. Porcupine’s Quill, 2011.

Bacon, Joséphine. “L’innu-aimun: une langue en marche.” Trahir, vol. 9, no. 24, 2018, pp. 1–7.

Crozier, Lorna. Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir. Greystone Books, 2009.

Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 87, no. 4, 2012, pp. 325–41.

Goward, Trevor. “The Enlichenment: Lichens and the Vanished Grasslands.” BC Naturalist, vol. 29, no. 6, 1991, pp. 8–9.

Griffiths, David. “Queer Theory for Lichens.” Undercurrents, vol. 19, 2015, pp. 36–45.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.

Kanapé Fontaine, Natasha. Blueberries and Apricots. Translated by Howard Scott, Mawenzi House, 2018.

L’Abbé, Sonnet. Sonnet’s Shakespeare. McClelland and Stewart, 2019.

Lane, Patrick. Red Dog, Red Dog. McClelland and Stewart, 2008.

Lilburn, Tim. The Names. McClelland and Stewart, 2016.

Ormsby, Eric L. For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems. Grove Press, 1997.

Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwester. NeWest Press, 2002.

—. Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory. NeWest Press, 2007.

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020.

Solie, Karen. Modern and Normal. Brick Books, 2005.

Zonca, Vincent. Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance. Translated by Jody Gladding, Polity Press, 2023.

 

Sarah Wylie Krotz is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and director of the Centre for Literatures in Canada / Centre de littératures au Canada at the University of Alberta. She researches the spatial and ecological dimensions of literature in Canada and the possibilities of reimagining settler relationships with Indigenous lands. The author of Mapping with Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789–1916 (U of Toronto P, 2018) and co-editor (with geographer Bruce Erickson) of The Politics of the Canoe (U of Manitoba, 2021), she is currently working on a book of literary ecologies and habitat studies tentatively titled Everyday Nature: Guides to a Shared Habitat.