Irina Costache
“Immemorial” by Lauren Markham
What differentiates humans from other species, Lauren Markham proffers in her new book Immemorial, is the ability to contemplate the future. This capability has helped sustain and advance human life over millennia as we’ve prophesied and then answered the needs of a distant tomorrow. But it has also been a great burden, and Markham demonstrates the paranoia, grief, and frenetic energy that can come from overthinking the future and the impending certainty of climate collapse.
Markham is no stranger to climate writing. She’s spent over a decade reporting on immigration and its nexus with climate change. A Map of Future Ruins, released last year to great acclaim, is both a story about Markham’s search for her ancestral home in Greece and a refugee camp on one of the country’s islands that was burned down.
Immemorial is remnant of Markham’s reporting in that it is well researched and investigative, but it strays from her previous writing by being largely plotless. The short book is broken into eighteen loosely connected sections that span six years of thinking. It presents two main themes—a desire to memorialize climate loss and the search for a word to convey that desire. Rather than conferring a linear argument about the stakes of climate change or the individual’s role in slowing it, Immemorial is a meandering display of thinking on the page.
Markham writes candidly about her feelings of helplessness in the face of inevitable climate loss and the fallibility of memory and language to help her find a foothold. Most acutely, she is plagued by a tension between acting and feeling. She reflects on a trip to Mexico during which she stumbled across a beach littered with washed-up puffer fish. Markham is deeply shaken by the encounter, a reminder of the constant and excessive loss accelerated by climate change. She decides to take photographs of the fish and describes the moment as “a gesture toward action—something to do rather than just something to feel. Could grief be a raw material of creation?”
Memorials entice Markham because they blend the emotive with the generative. To her, they offer a way to create fuel out of feeling. She is fixated on physical memorials and uses a few examples as entry points into her musings on what the act of memorializing can offer us and how memorials can be limiting.
One such example is the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., a long, sleek slab, slightlyreflective, cut into the ground and inscribed with the names of dead and missing servicemen and servicewomen. The memorial was the brainchild of a then-Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin who Markham says wanted to create “both a physical and psychic space for feeling.” Rather than proposing a design akin to most traditional war monuments (grand, symbolic, and nationalistic), Lin wanted to force viewers to get up close to read the names of the victims, to feel the weight of their loss. She was not concerned with shaping narrative or memory about the war but wanted a space where any viewer could respond viscerally.
In 2018, Markham attended a high school field trip to Montgomery, Alabama where she and the students bore witness to a confederate monument on the city’s capitol hill paying tribute to Alabamians who fought in the confederacy. The students were shocked. Markham uses this moment to probe the profound paradox between memorials and time—“memorials are about time; the function of a memorial is to write a backward story, paradoxically, toward the future.” In this world to come, the monument would be toppled two years later by protestors following the killing of George Floyd.
What complicates Markham’s book, one eventually realizes, is that her desire to physically memorialize is speculative. At first, she attempts to build a memorial through words, but quickly discerns their inadequacy. She contacts the Bureau of Linguistic Relativity, a “public participatory artwork” that coins neologisms to “better understand our rapidly changing world,” to help her find a word for her desire to memorialize. What she hopes will provide her some mental clarity on her penchant for memorials actually leaves her more confused—she paradoxically can’t even provide a definition for the feeling she’s experiencing. Eventually, she does land on “immemorial,” but it doesn’t necessarily get her closer to creating or finding a memorial. Words, Markham realizes, are meager in the face of catastrophic loss. They can weaken and weaponize our memory when we become too reliant on them. They can also easily slip into platitudes and solipsistic pathology, empty gestures to self-soothe and relieve us of that pestering itch to take action.
If words are deficient, then why is Markham stringing them together to write Immemorial? What she is interested in, and what her conceptual work is ultimately doing, is collecting the principles of a memorial to present a new way of grappling with climate change. It is in its form that Immemorial takes the shape of a memorial.
At one point, on a walk with a friend through a forest recently succumbed to brush fire, Markham realizes everything can be a memorial:
By now, everything had started to resemble a memorial. That’s the problem with
metaphors, symbols. You can really overdo it. At a certain point in my memorial quest, if
you caught me in the right mood, you could convince me (or perhaps I’d try to convince
you) that my cruddy tube of toothpaste, deformed and half-empty, was a memorial to, I
don’t know, the perils of waste culture, or lost youth. So yes, I saw the bristlecones, so
thick with memory, as physical testimony to the passage of thousands of years of
ecological history, as living statuary remembering themselves.
She’s joking a little, but there is a truism there. The present is always fleeting. The sentence becomes the past as you move toward each new word. Memorializing can be a grand monument or a minute mental note to remember something beautiful from the day. At whatever scale, it is the constant response to the humming loss and grief that follows us all every day.
At one point, one of the members of the Bureau of Linguistic Relativity asks her if one memorial would be enough, to which she immediately answers “no.” Her desire for memorial is insatiable.
How lucky then, that everything can be a memorial, that there are an infinite number of places to store our grief. Markham’s prose is a testament to how devotion and affection are generated out of these infinite little daily memorials.
Immemorial eulogizes the world, and Markham’s feelings, strictly as they exist now. She has created, like Lin’s Vietnam’s memorial, a “physical and psychic space for feeling.”
In her final pages, Markham looks to her daughter and writes “my daughter is alive in a time of vanishings, but she, too, is a creature of memory. Let our grief become fuel.”
“Let us desire the world as it is.”