Twice Alive, a poetry collection by Forrest Gander, is, at its earthy heart, a reflection on lichen. Gander marvels at the spread of unassuming moss the way one might marvel at the way a lover turns to look into the corner of the room when thinking. For him, lichen is a metaphor for a kind of intimacy with the natural world. But lichen is also lichen. He is endlessly engaged with the primacy of the stuff; with its contours and shapes; what it feels like to touch, how it smells.
Gander is overwhelmed by its matter. One imagines that, just as Maggie Nelson is stiffened by her desire for the colour blue in Bluets, Gander wouldn’t even know what to do with lichen if he encountered it in the wild – he wants to eat it, rub himself with it, consume it somehow, in ways not entirely clear even to himself.
Moss is both “alive and dead,” Gander tells us. In the world of the forest, endings become beginnings. Everything is in movement. If Twice Alive were a song, it would be an endless classical round, voices overtaking one another, the old becoming new. Reflecting on the fallow deer introduced to the headlands by his house – pests, slaughtered en masse by hired hunters – Gander writes of the “arguments about what was native / if all systems are given to change.” There is no static culture that Gander can see. The natural thrives on flux.
And then there’s looking. Observation changes the thing that is observed, and changes the observer. Gander says: we are not outside of the forest, hermetically sealed. We are the whole natural world, we are hidden in the corners of the “wind-wet” animal eyes that stare out at us as we take in the beach, and the water, and the waves. So what do we do about our essential malleability; the ways that nature morphs us naked apes into shape? Gander says: submit.
This is natural poetry on a macro scale – poetry about that miniature kingdom that lives in the loam. But from these tiny things, Gander constructs a politics. If we are not separate from that ancient and saggy moss that scrambles across the floor of the forest, then we are wrong to consider ourselves outside or above the world of lichen and deer and silver slithers of fish. We should not torture and eat those creatures that we share the planet with. We should not hack down trees, or pollute the air. Not for selfless reasons, but for selfish ones – those trees, that air, are of us. Environmental destruction is reconfigured as a form of complicated and expensive self-destruction, a slow process of cutting off our own toes with a pair of bolt-cutters.
Gander acknowledges his apocalyptic eye. “I need to turn / everything to tragedy before I can see it,” he writes. He understands that to love moss is to love a process of decomposition that most of us find repellant, like sniffing a corpse. It is to be the amnesiac narrator of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ – the text closest to Gander’s in form and function – and finding musk in every corner.
But even the kind of destruction that Gander adores exists in a state of change. Death is not the end, and even if we successfully eradicate ourselves, the human race will not eradicate life on the planet. Life on the planet will be just fine. After all, out of death and rot comes the mites, those grey stubs of consumption, that turn mushrooms “the colour of rodent’s teeth.” As John Gray notes, as Gander does, like all plague animals, we will only succeed in destroying that habitat which sustains us, our numbers crumbling, while the creatures outside our crooked inner circle thrive.
So this is also poetry of hope, albeit of the ancient, unspeakable kind. It is the hope that comes when we accept that we are no better or different from an asexual spore, or a mushroom thrusting up from its lair, “something the earth said to provoke our response / tasking us to recall / an evolutionary / course our long ago / initiation into / the one-among-others.”
The natural world is not a glass orb that we have been tasked with carrying and have spectacularly dropped. Our warming world is one more channel of change. Our bodies will not survive that rebirth. We will be immolated. But in some ways, we will carry on, causally linked to the creatures that succeed us, those coils of animal consciousness that will come after a historically narrow passage of flesh.
All things continue. All things end. It is the story of the ancient caveman, “froze & thawed & froze again / for 5,00 years”, a body gone hard and soft, a desolate pair of ears that heard the Earth – that heard the whole Earth. After all, “Whoever thought / anyone was just one thing?”