IMMEMORIAL

Mourning a changing planet.

In her contribution to the publisher’s Undelivered Lectures series, journalist and author Markham offers an intimate meditation on the climate crisis, particularly her frustration at finding language “to describe the very real emotions and feelings” incited by a rapidly degrading world. Beset by a sense of loss—of glaciers, bird species, forests—she suffers, she admits, from pre-traumatic stress disorder: “A condition in which a researcher experiences symptoms of trauma as they learn more about the future as it pertains to climate change and watch the world around them not making necessary precautions.” For Markham, this variation of PTSD leads to a “sorrowful ache” to memorialize in some way a “future gone.” That need to memorialize leads her to think about memory: her own, the “selective memory” we call history, and the functions of physical memorials as “a space for communal mourning and remembrance.” She considers, for example, the impact of Maya Lin’s stark Vietnam Memorial to create “a physical and psychic space for feeling.” How, Markham asks, is it possible “to allow a mass of land, a body of water, a species of bird, to speak?” Many artists, she discovers, are grappling with this very question: One has created “Sound Columns—ringed sculptures standing over eight feet tall shaped in [the] form of the sound wave of an extinct birdsong.” Others participate in the Bureau of Linguistic Reality, aiming to invent neologisms to shape how speakers see the world and act within it. She consults the Bureau to help her find the language that continues to elude her. “I wanted for change to be made manifest in the world,” she writes, “and I continued to doubt my, or anyone’s, ability to manage it with words.”

Urgent, heartfelt, and lyrical reflections.