Immemorial

Undelivered Lectures

by Lauren Markham

A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms.

“I am in need of a word,” writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost—a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what’s to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative—the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a “ghost forest” of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park—in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create “a psychic space for feeling” while spurring action and agitating for change?

Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Environment, Art, Nature, Politics, Green

136 pages, Paperback

Published February 4, 2025

Reviews

[emma]

writing about the apocalypse as it happens

[Katie Keeshen]

it’s a slim little book but one I’ll be thinking about for a while… lots to ponder about memory and memorial and climate grief

[Mark]

In her brilliant collection of thematically-linked essays, Lauren Markham is on the hunt for a word, or perhaps a phrase or an expression. The themes are language, grief, mourning, and memory, and the specific context for her reflections is climate change. On flights over Greenland and the Alps, she sees frozen terrain or snow-capped mountains, knowing that these features of the world are disappearing. Present for eons and present now, they will be gone in some future, so the author wants “an anticipatory memorial to that vanishing world.”

Markham worries that language, through relentless overuse, can lose its effect and power to command attention and drive action. Climate change, for example, has worn itself out and become benign. Her research unearths alternatives such as climate emergency, climate breakdown, and climate crisis.

But whatever the language, the nature of Markham’s mission is a conundrum: memorials and commemoration always relate to past events, known outcomes, history; what she wants is the space and time to commemorate a future event. “I’d also been thinking a lot about memory, and forgetting, and how those unsteady acts of the mind map to grief. The feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain, nor can its timeline be predicted, is an eerie, off-putting one. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of the future? Grief can feel like a physical mass. Where to put it?”

She stumbles onto the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, “brainchild of Bay Area artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante,” who are also wrestling with the challenge of finding “words to describe the very real emotions and feelings of a rapidly changing world.” They apply gentle grilling on Markham for more discourse on her search, and unevenly, she teases out, “My word…well, the word I need is related to a feeling of grief at the state of the planet, but it’s about the desire for a memorial, a sort of place to put the grief, or to sit with it, and feel it, or maybe mourn all that’s being lost.”

And Escott and Quante do help, not so much with a single word, but with something approaching a definition: “A desire to create, hold or cultivate a memorial…Memorializing a loss that is still ongoing, unfolding. Often this loss is a collective phenomenon, the aftermath of a particular disaster, but also tied to many global disasters linked through the impacts of a worldwide climate crisis. As such the loss does not have defined scale or borders.”

Markham is dogged and tenacious in her ongoing search. “At some point in my associative searching, I arrived at the word immemorial. It was almost impossible to read immemorial and not think of the phrase time immemorial—connoting something ancient, long-lived, some ancestral past.” She plays with prefixes and suffices, and I love her invention of immemorialgia, meaning the “sorrowful ache for memorial, to be a part of ancient time and to mourn it, to be distinct from memory and deeply nested within it.”

Her word-yearning is infectious enough to launch my own search in my dictionary of choice, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fifth Edition). For immemorial, it offers reaching beyond the limits of memory, tradition, or recorded history. Unsatisfied, I grab J.I. Rodale’s Synonym Finder, to find 22 synonyms, including rooted, inveterate, enduring, and immutable.

Immemorial is beautifully written—lyrical, elegiac, impassioned, earnest, meditative, and profoundly moving. Chiseled prose undulates over 135 pages with insistent, deep, thought-provoking reflections. I read and re-read a library copy, renewed it once, and have now ordered my own copy, for this is a book to possess, and to return to again and again!

[Rosalind]

Last year, I visited a friend’s sister in Knoxville and while we were there we decided to go to a free public art performance that promised to make us feel joy. It was called Solastagia (pronounced like nostalgia), which means having homesickness for your home even while you’re living in it because you see it slowly degrade in the face of the climate crisis and know that soon it will no longer be as it is now. We thought they had made up the word to sound dramatic.

And the show was indeed both the best and worst of what publicly funded free art can be, with a discordant set of sketches about environmental impacts and their imagined future collaged together with little editing or transitions (but random audience participation) that culminated in an audience parade following Mother Spider (a truly impressive puppet rig) to a difficult to see and technically not allowed floating pyre (which I would think counts as pollution?). We might have left then, but thank goodness we didn’t, because the final part actually did make me feel joy. I don’t know how they got permission to do this, but the performers danced vertically on the side of a building, floating and twirling as though they had been released from gravity’s grip - a breathtaking sight.

They were so earnest and they cared so much and all this took I believe around 4 hours.

This book took less time than that to read (it’s 125 pages) and taught me that solastalgia is an actual word/neologism (new word) created by the environmentally focused philosopher Glenn Albrecht, referenced during the author’s own attempt to find a word or feeling or monument or memorial of some kind to actualize her despair at the warming world.

Why do we remember history the way we do? Monuments. And why do we build monuments? To shape our society. What the memorials we have chosen to build and those we have left undone reveal how we have wanted to remember the past and how we want to continue into the future. Now we must decide: what is the future we want for our planet?

[andré crombie]

The root problem seemed to be a matter of faith. On my most doleful days, I questioned what words could accomplish, and, if anything, whether it would be nearly fast enough. What good were words when the world was burning? These questions had always been lurking in the corner, but now they crouched upon my shoulders each time I sat down at my desk. It was beginning to feel like anything I wrote about climate change or other urgent social matters was either a feeble finger wag or merely a double underline: a reminder of things everyone already knew.

notes: i am deeply interested in the subject matter and there are scattered thought-provoking moments, but i think this particular micro-genre — is there a name for an unfocused blend of reportage, diary, personal essay, navel-gazing, and collage of quotes the writer likes? — is, generally, just not for me.

[Angela Liu]

Interesting think piece on (collective) memory, but unexpectedly and unfortunately triggered my climate change anxiety

[Chelsea Jean]

I was utterly moved and captivated by Lauren Markham’s Immemorial, in a way that is difficult to capture in words but that is more of a visceral sense of aching, longing, hoping, fearing…

Throughout these essays, Markham tells of her journey of trying to find a word to capture her aching, yearning, needing some sort of memorial to honor the ongoing, ambiguous, all encompassing loss of our planet and life as we know it as this new era of climate crisis unfolds. As she considers other thinkers and memorial makers along her quest, Markham reflects on what memorials are, their purpose, what action they call us to, what feelings they help us to to individually and collectively move through. The trail is circuitous and at times unclear, for how could it be otherwise? We are experiencing right along with Markham this sense of longing that is so difficult to specifically pin down as it is so pervasive as to be simultaneously and paradoxically everywhere and nowhere, yet at the same is inherent to our current lived experience as humans in this particular moment in time.

Throughout her reflections and studies, Markham weaves what she is learning with her own personal experiences, and ultimately in addition to finding some working definitions for her longing wonders if perhaps one of the most profound living memorials of all are our children - living, breathing representations of our ongoing choice as humans to choose hope and life, while also showing in real time the still unfolding impacts of our world forever changing in know and unknown ways.

In addition to being very emotionally moved by these essays, I also deeply appreciated learning about memorials I was until now unfamiliar with, particularly Ghost Forest. I also was utterly delighted to learn of the Bureau of Linguistical Reality and its mission of fashioning new words to express our changing individual and collective experiences as the world undergoes seismic shifts.

[esther ⭐️]

probably one of the best books i’ve read all year. stunning commentary on the futility of the climate crisis and a study on memorials/artists that have been documenting tragedy in unconventional ways - including an artist that creates sculptures amongst dead coral reefs and multiple works by maya lin, architect of the vietnam war memorial.

this author also has such a knack for prose, she’s a beautiful writer and i found myself extremely compelled throughout the entirety of this slim memoir/essay collection. some of my favorite quotes :

“let grief be our fuel.”
“designers must simultaneously anticipate an unanticipatable future and design protective solutions in service of that world”
- so many more tbh just have to write them down

anyways. i wonder how the author feels now in the wake of data center and AI hell. i loved this book and i’m gonna be thinking about it for a while

[stephanie]

essential thesis text!!!!

[Jenny Sanders Mororó]

The author managed to put into words the very same complicated feelings I’ve been trying to rationalize for the last several years. Poignant and informative. Felt like she was speaking directly to me

[Eliza]

Really savored this. Markham is a strong narrative nonfiction writer. Reminded me of Daniel Sherrel’s Warmth.

[caroline]

very thought provoking… much to digest and consider

[amanda♛]

climate change is a real thing ..

memorials are fascinations

[Sarah Sibley]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay! The idea of someone trying to use the power of words, yet not having the words to describe the climate crisis we’re experiencing really resonated with me, and I found there were some eye opening parallels that she made.

Also the idea of “what do we memorialize” and “how we do it” has never struck me in a climate sense - so I really loved learning more about the amazing displays people are making. I feel like I’ve read so many books on the climate crisis that fill me with dread (rightfully so, given the situation) - it was a nice change to really have a different lens on this and go into the art and literature world, as opposed to politics.

I recommend reading this if you like essays and want to learn more about this topic! It was really down to earth and used examples you could easily google and find out more about! 😇

[Hannah]

In this excellent and thought-provoking book-length essay, the newest offering in the Undelivered Lectures Series from Transit Books, Lauren Markham posits the question: "How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of the future?" Markham structures this essay around the need for a new word, a word that functions as a tribute or memorial to this feeling of future loss. If a word exists in the vernacular, then the emotion or state of being can be pinned down, explained, explored. While nimbly mining this particular feeling for answers and a word to take forward, she turns to art, other writers, architecture of remembrance, disappearing species, climate catastrophe, the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, and memory itself. Nearly every page in this stunning book has been dog-eared and underlined...I am enamored. Here is a book I will return to again and again.

[Tessa {bleeds glitter}]

Okjökull is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did.

I guess it's nice to know how many people suffer through this fear of the future with me, but at the same time I don't really need all those autobiographical parts. Who cares if one more person decides to put a child into this world and pretend like that means anything for the future.
A potentially meaningful book if you pick out the right parts, but overall a little too pointless for me.

[An]

A meditation on memorials and relics-how we immortalize tragedy and its victims, and what it means to preserve memory. The book explores these themes thoughtfully but doesn’t dwell too much on climate anxiety or grief itself, which was the main reason I picked it up. Instead, it focuses more on the structures and symbols we create to remember, as well as the emotions tied to loss.
While I appreciated the perspective, I was hoping for a deeper engagement with grief and ecological loss rather than just an examination of remembrance itself

[Heidi]

Interesting topic with deep research but the text is so verbose and self-referential that I was more annoyed than inspired. Immemorial is like a bibliography to a thesis project that leads the writer to change their thesis. I don’t know if this book needs to exist.

[Ava Mohsenin]

My review :*) https://avamohsenin.substack.com/p/on...

[Richard Derus]

Real Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms.

“I am in need of a word,” writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost—a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what’s to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative—the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a “ghost forest” of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park—in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create “a psychic space for feeling” while spurring action and agitating for change?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The issue many of us have been braying about for a generation now has burst uopn us unmissably. The climate has changed. The results are blatantly obvious and the profiteers, mainly insurance companies and oil companies at the moment, are raking in the money out of your pockets.

The other costs, the ones not as tangible as lost spending power, are still to be named, and still to be felt. Until we can name something, like "spending power," it's nebulous to us as linear-time-trapped people. What name can we give to sights we will never see again? To descendants who can never be born, or can't be kept alive? To lives unlivable, to thoughts unthinkable, because there was/is no one trained, taught, allowed to think them?

Author Markham does the heavy lifting of identifying this dawning reality for us. She asks us to make room in our heads and hearts for an unbearable, unthinkably terrible, loss we're not making room for. It takes a person to speak a truth for it to be recognized. This truth, still nameless, is spoken, and it's now in our collective court to put a stop to our losses before they mount up in reality.

There is something like a haunting, a poltergeist infestation, in the idea of absences as losses. The absence of children unborn, of life...not unlived, nor even unlivable, simply "un"...impossible to experience this void of Reality unless one's alerted to it. Author Markham's essay, tight and compact of duration, carries resonances forward into time for her readers, makes patterns of thought that, now they exist, are indelible. An example of how the "un" is real....

Time's weird at the simplest level...what is it? explain it and how you know what it is, I'll wait...but when bent like this, when folded into a curve that feels untraversable, it begins to feel physical to me. I can respond to time in a new way, not a fun way but a new one, thanks to Author Markham. Immaterial is an ironic title for something that, through its power of observation alone, caused me to concpetualize time as a physical, separate entity from my world. Its positing of conditional loss, of non-existence as a loss, is a powerful insight I'd never have come up with on my own.

I won't get all the way to a fifth star because I felt at times a punch being pulled, an implication she knew was too much being avoided. The rigorous honesty of the piece was incomplete, partial; but I'd be extremely hard pressed to do half so well as Author Markham's done. Don't allow my weird frisson to dissuade you from wrapping your head around her arguments.

[Luke Hillier]

"The feeling of grieving something that isn't yet gone, and whose disappearance isn't fully certain, nor can its timeline be predicted, is an eerie, off-putting one. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of the future? Grief can feel like a physical mass. Where to put it?"

My experience of reading Immemorial was to, at least for a time, find a place to put it. Markham's vulnerable, elegiac text was impactful far beyond its slender length led me to expect. I recognize that, as a millennial, the climate anxiety and grief and urgency I feel is not unique to me, but there was something so grounding to essentially have so many of my thoughts and feelings reflected back to me here in Markham's insightful writing. She manages to articulate so many of the paradoxes at hand: how to mourn what may be, the warring tensions between immobilizing grief and active hope, the simultaneous sense of culpability and powerlessness. And, notably, this is not a book seeking solutions to the crisis but instead focuses on how to steward, navigate, and honor all the interior experiences we have in light of it. For Markham, one way forward is through memorials.

I loved the dives she makes here into the history of Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Memorial and then her later work constructing a ghost forest in NYC as well as the NRA Children's Museum, a "caravan of ghosts" in empty school busses stationed outside Ted Cruz's office following the Uvalde shooting. There is also an intriguing throughline focusing on the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a small org that helps people define and create new language and supports Markham's attempts to find a word for her amorphous feelings. It's easy to judge this endeavor and larger project as solipsistic, but in my experience there's profound need to genuinely acknowledge and articulate our emotions in order to integrate and transcend them. The book's tender, subtle gestures towards hopefulness and dedication towards the future feel earned and achieved through the effort that preceded it.

[Darth Reader]

Thought provoking as heck. Really like what the Bureau of Linguistic Reality is doing. They have a ton of good neologisms (Marsification; shadowtime) but I really vibe with solastalgia: “the feeling of being homesick for the place where you are because you know that it is changing so quickly it will soon be rendered beyond recognition.” https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/

Couldn't give this a full five because there's something particularly gross about writing an entire essay about how doomed we are, how there is no hope, yet choosing to bring an innocent child here, to this place, because of "the future". What future?

"Part of the trouble with metabolizing climate grief is that to do so requires grieving many abstractions at once."

"A further complication of the problem of language to describe our changing planet is that the language humans have developed to describe the world are disappearing too."

"Part of the trouble with comprehending climate change is that its costs are abstractions until they're at your own door."

"Could grief be a raw material of creation? Could memories of the vanishing world be not merely vessels for grief, but an alchemical force to transform that grief into something else?

Writing had always been that vessel. But the container wasn't working like it used to, as if its latch had broken or its bottom panel had warped and cracked. Sentences had once come easily but now I grasped for the right words. There didn't seem to be enough of them. When I turned in a draft about imperiled forests to an editor, he pointed out that I'd used the word vast fifteen different times."

[Tiffany]

"The artists graft their work to the concept of "linguistic relativity", which suggests that the language available to its speakers determines how they see the world and how they act within it. "We reference this term playfully," the founders write, "but believe sincerely that until we have the language to describe the changing world around us, we will not be able to fully grasp what is happening."

"As Clint Smith writes, "America will never be the country it wants to be until it properly remembers what it did (and does) to Black people."

"Grief and sadness are not something to be edited out of life," she cautioned. What tends to be missing for many of us, she thinks, particularly those of us living in the US, are the rituals needed to metabolize these emotions. She sees this best done in connection with larger ecosystems in which we live. In creating a ceremony, she said, "you are holding space for something to happen where someone can rest their bones or cry or reflect. For me it's less a building and more a space-- a moment, or a magical pocket of time, to be held in that reflection."

"Between 2012-2021, one in every eight acres of California burned; in that year alone, more than 4 million acres had been destroyed by fire, and nearly everywhere I went I confronted those excruciating scars."

"Part of the trouble with comprehending climate change is that its costs are abstractions until they're at your own door. How about this: the amount of California that had gone missing that year was almost equivalent in size to the state of Massachusetts."

[Henry 磊磊]

Nearly gave up after a strong opening and then a terribly far fall face flat. Luckily, I skipped the annoying section and continued to glean some gems including a deeper analysis of Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial and ghost forest; the poet for the Icelandic glacier; various memorial proposals that were either conceptual or never built.

Hard cons: despite her upfront awareness of constantly flying for writing assignments and the dissonance (blissonance? lmfao) covering a subject while actively destroying it--along with her supposed "climate grief"--the narrative arc shows she simply continues to actively destroy. Why not just continue to be upfront and say "I care, but not enough to change my lifestyle" or blame capitalism like someone is holding a gun to your head forcing you to fly? Instead we get some thread about ACHING/YEARNING for a NEOLOGISM to capture her IMMENSE FEELINGS around it.

The word you're looking for is HYPOCRISY and a 2025 word of the year: PERFORMATIVITY.

Using her newborn daughter as a narrative device for caring about the future also gave me the ick. Plenty of childless people care about the future.

But in terms of writing on the concept of memorials, great book. You just have to cut out all the fake feeling theater.

[Abhishek Vishwanathan]

Read it while in transit so I was moving through time and space as I tried to grapple with the need for a memorial to ecocide that the author describes wanting. I liked her exploration of memory, the neologisms that attempt to provide language for something very intangible, and the backstory behind the Vietnam war memorial. I wish there was some exploration of the limitations of using English as a base for thinking through these issues, and how other languages (incl non verbal) conceptualize these concepts. I came away from the book feeling more uneasy than when I began. Perhaps this was her intention too, it's certainly quite an unsettling time. I also wish there was some exploration of the intersectionality of our condition. Grieving for the 'climate' and 'ecosystem' is one thing, contending with (societal) collapse wholly another. Anyway, it is a slim book and easy to get through. Mix of memoir and quotes - mostly from global minority white philosophers, psychologists, authors etc. but some generative ideas and anecdotes in there.

[Antoinette Van Beck]

obsessed fr. this is the book i wish i could write. the concepts of memory, impermanence, beauty, seasons of transition (becoming less and less distinct as every change comes quicker than the last), and the impact of loss. the human need to document and remember is something that is so relevant in today's world.

overthinking all of this toward the end of my college experience with my photography minor is part of the reason i haven't picked up the camera in so long. it comes to a point of asking, "what is the point," when the number of photographs is so large you can't appreciate them and their lifetime is dictated by the medium on which the images are created and the "security" (if there even is such a thing) of their storage.

i love this book for the overlap it has with so many of the pressing matters of today's society-- climate catastrophe, political and financial greed, reaching the point of no return, and being human amid it all. there were so many points that i felt she took the words right out of my mouth. truly a masterpiece. highly, highly recommend!!

[Meslie G.O.]

"As narrative agents, memorials are bound up in problems of power. This never bothered me so much in the context of climate change, which seemed an absolute, affecting everyone. Wouldn't any narration of any version of the brutalities of climate change its fact, its impacts—be fundamentally good? But this, too, is shaky ground. For as much as everyone on planet earth is vulnerable to climate change, we are unequally protected and exposed, and also unequally responsible."

What a lovely little book. The writing is beautifully done, and I had so many points of reflection during it. I came into the book with little idea what it talked about (aside from climate discourse) and was fascinated by the intersection between climate grief and memorials. It reminded me once more that we, humans, are always seeking mays to immortalize our "truths". Quotation marks needed-- since our past is dependent on our contextual reality. Thank you Markham, for this dissection.

I end this review with the writing that hit me the hardest, inscribed on the Icelandic glacier memorial:
...we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

[Sam Lien]

Lauren Markham presents really thought-provoking discourse around language, memory, memory-making, and grief in relation to the climate crisis. Her pursuit of a word reminds me very much of my undergraduate years as an English and Linguistics student, poring over the OED (or its equivalent in other languages), dis-membering and re-membering terms and concepts in the vast complexities and multitude of their definitions, etymology, and compositions. I suppose my intellectual relationship with languages and words long preceded college seminars, though, long before I could even put into words (hah!) the role of language in shaping our understanding of time past, present, and future. To engage in these colloquies as a medium to process and articulate the anxiety and grief around our wilting climate, however, was certainly a novel practice for me, so I was delighted to have come across this book.

[Raghav Arora]

premation: A desire to create, hold, or cultivate a memorial

Immemorialgia: The sorrowful ache for memorial.


I was hoping we would get a better closure at the end of the book regarding the most appropriate word for the author's feelings and a deeper understanding of how this form of memorial should exist. It almost feels like a published book for a work in progress instead of a finished product.

[Lawrence Lawson]

Stunning. Eloquently and richly written. So many threads to tug on and reflect on. (There’s one idea that’d make an excellent piece of fiction if unpacked and built out.)

Ultimately, this is a memoir of sorts grappling with future loss and how to talk about that future loss—specifically, loss from climate change. It’s about the inaction of now and the slimming possibilities of meaningful action in the future. A lot to think about.