IMMATERIAL (Undelivered Lectures series), offering a different take on what there is to lose

IMMATERIAL (Undelivered Lectures series)
LAUREN MARKHAM
Transit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook edition, available now

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 upon 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.