Immemorial

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 losta landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of whats 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 speculativethe Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a ghost forest of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan parkin 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.