Ghosts remind us that we live in an
impossible present – a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat
of extinction. Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are
bulldozed into gardens of Progress. […] Ghosts, too, are weeds that whisper tales of the many pasts and yet-to-comes that surround us. […] Worlds have ended many times before. Endings
come with the death of a leaf, […] the death of a
friendship, the death of small promises and small stories. […] Whereas
Progress trained us to keep moving forward, to look up to an apex at
the end of a horizon, ghosts show us multiple unruly temporalities.
[…]
Some kinds of lives stretch beyond our ken, and for us, they also offer a ghostly radiance.
The lichen that grows on tombstones is one example.
Every
autumn, mycologist Anne Pringle goes to the Petersham Cemetery near
Boston to trace the outline of individual lichens, watching their growth
on the gravestones of local residents and dignitaries. They grow
slowly, and sometimes some disappear. Some are probably the same
individuals as those that first found a place to settle when those
dignitaries died centuries ago.
For fleeting creatures such as ourselves, lichens are more-than-ghosts of the past and the yet-to-come.
Lichens
are symbiotic assemblages of species: filamentous fungi and
photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. Lichens are themselves a kind of
landscape […]. Many filamentous fungi are potentially immortal. This
does not mean they cannot be killed […]. Until cut off by injury, they
spread in networks of continually renewed filaments. When we notice
their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of
a different kind of livability.
Many kinds of time – of
bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and Western colonialism – meet on the
gravestones of Petersham. The ghosts of multispecies landscapes disturb
our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing
leading to another. […]
These temporal feats alert us that
the time of modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our
metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters.
—
Text by: Elaine
Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction:
Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.
