Forrest Gander

 What many of us learned in high school about lichen— that it’s an indicator species for pollution (litmus, in fact, is derived from lichen), and that it’s the synergistic alliance of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria— is largely true, but simplified. If lichen ecology has more to do with collaboration than competition, it’s nevertheless true that collaboration is transformative. With lichen, which may be more related to animals than plants, the original organisms are changed utterly in their compact. They can’t return to what they were. And according to Anne Pringle, one of the leading contemporary mycologists (with whom I had the lucky opportunity to collaborate), it may be that lichen do not, given sufficient nutrients, age. Anne and other contemporary biologists are saying that our sense of the inevitability of death may be determined by our mammalian orientation. Perhaps some forms of life have “theoretical immortality.” Lichen can reproduce asexually, and when they do, bits of both partners are dispersed together to establish in a new habitat. How long can the partners of a lineage continue to reproduce? No one knows. The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?