We Are Two Things That Shouldn't Survive Together

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind on bare rock, very quiet)
Lichenology. A lichen is not one organism. It never was.

[Verse 1]
It is a fungus that learned to farm, and an alga that agreed,
and neither of them can live where they live without the other,
so what you are looking at on that gravestone is not a plant —
it is a RELATIONSHIP, with a shape, growing half a millimetre a year,
on a rock, in weather that would kill both of them alone,
and it has been doing that since before your grandmother was born.

[Chorus]
We are two things that shouldn't survive together.
The fungus gets the water. The alga makes the food.
Neither of us chose this and neither of us can leave
and we have been on this stone for four hundred years.
Two things that shouldn't survive together. And do.
Somebody studies this. Thank God somebody does.

[Verse 2]
Some are older than cathedrals. There are map lichens in Greenland
estimated at nine thousand years, which makes them the oldest
living things anybody has ever put a number to,
and they are on a rock, doing nothing, in the cold, slowly,
and the whole of recorded human history has happened beside them
at a speed they could not possibly detect.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And they die in cities. That's how we found out about the air.
Lichens will not grow where the sulphur is, so a map of the lichens
is a map of what we have done to the sky above a place,
drawn by an organism that cannot leave and cannot complain
and simply is not there anymore where the air went wrong.
The absence is the data. The silence is the reading.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(wind, and stone)
Still there.
Nine thousand years, and still there.