This piece includes references to suicide.
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Grief has no language. It is built from the debris of the shattered connection that created it, and it is powered by our understanding of finality. Because its component parts are assembled from that connection, grief is always personal to the sufferer and idiosyncratic in nature. And yet although it is a reaction to separation, and itself separates the mourner from the world for a period of time, grief is one of the only true things, along with love, that binds us all.
Then why doesn’t it have a language? Why is it literally unspeakable? Before going a funeral, we turn to Google for phrases to memorize. We try to erase its existence by reassuring the bereaved, and ourselves, that the loss is part of a system. Even as we speak, though, we are aware of how little utility our words have in these moments, and because of this, we avoid those to whom we cannot speak and they are left alone to figure out how to live on the margins of the void.
As we enter an epoch where we are just beginning to understand the profundity of what we are losing, and as the scale, pace, and nature of that loss will swell beyond comprehension, how will we speak to one another of our grief? For the last decade, I’ve grappled with this fearsome scenario—of collective, global grief that somehow cannot be shared and that must be suffered alone. Then, on April 14, 2018, a man invented his own private language of loss, and to my surprise—to my horror—I understood it.
*
The burned place in Prospect Park is invisible now, grown over with grass and guarded by a gang of young trees not yet tall enough to offer much shade. People have largely forgotten what happened there. Many more never knew anything had happened there at all. But the slight disfigurement of the land at the burned place suggests that the earth itself remembers what David Buckel did there.
I also remember. And like everyone who remembers the sixty-year-old lawyer’s decision to self-immolate in the last remaining natural forest in Brooklyn, I had also been left disfigured, first by the knowledge of what he did and then by my efforts to fix some meaning to his act of radical philanthropy. In the note he left behind, he said: My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves. But Buckel’s death was not a reflection. It was the thing itself.
It would be a few years before I came to see it this way, before I discovered what the thing was. Like others, I hadn’t understood his language of grief, instead processing his decision as an outcome—the result of private pain seeking an organizing principle or ethic that could be communicated to loved ones, and the public. It was only when, in an attempt to write honestly about climate change, I tried to step out of what Amitav Ghosh calls our “great derangement,” that I understood that Buckel’s death was not an outcome. It was the syntax he used to communicate his grief about climate change. Not only that, but I came to believe his death was a harbinger.
*
Philosopher Timothy Morton categorizes climate change as a “hyperobject,” which is, in rough terms, a thing so enormous conceptually that we can’t truly grasp it cognitively or even theoretically. We can only exist within it, imbedded in its substance as its substance is imbedded in us. Think capitalism, the scale of plastic pollution, the biosphere, all nuclear material on the planet. Evidence of hyperobjects are everywhere, but their totality is impossible to grasp. As Laura Hudson wrote in a Wired profile of Morton, hyperobjects “humiliate our cognitive powers.”
Even if determining the scope and complexity of climate change is impossible, the material with which it is composed is bountiful: it’s the IPCC assessments, the Canadian wildfires turning the Manhattan sky red, the rise in severe clear-air turbulence on commercial flight routes due to erratic air currents and the Antarctic ice shelves calving, a dead octopus in a parking garage, a green ash tree eaten alive by invasive insects, oil companies lecturing people on how to shrink their carbon footprint. It’s articles with titles like “Time is Running Out for Migratory Birds” and a book—nonfiction—called The Uninhabitable Earth. It’s a small number of powerful but avaricious individuals capable of addressing or even halting these planetary changes who refuse to do so. As with grief, which is also a hyperobject, it’s the failure of language to capture the meaning of climate change, to convey its substance. And it’s the burned place in Prospect Park.
The year David Buckel died I was a nobody who had, the year before, published a traditional novel set at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in the early 2000s about a group of misfits trying to get through a winter at 90 South without killing one another, all the while under the threat of a government shutdown. Because a subplot involved an industry-funded climate change-denying scientist and the coordinated machinations of a group of fossil fuel executives, I had become identified as a writer of “climate fiction.”
Even then it had started to seem that any fiction touching on climate change was being summarily categorized into this subgenre, as if a climate-impacted world was one you could visit and then leave. This segregation from general fiction seemed a symptom of Ghosh’s “derangement,” a term that describes an intentional ignorance about the reality of climate change that presents an eyes-open engagement with it.
But I hadn’t envisioned South Pole Station as a climate change novel. In fact, though it seems insanely naïve now, I expected it would be a post-climate change novel. I thought I was writing an ensemble novel with a climate-denier subplot that skewered a stupid slice of history featuring stupid-evil people who were ready to let the world burn in order to remain stupid-rich.
I’d written the book during a time of general optimism for those who were paying attention to the IPCC reports. The Obama Administration had made climate change a priority, the Paris Agreement had been signed, and climate scientists were finally at the table and helping to lead the administration’s response to this immense but solvable problem. In this real-life context, writing about the era that brought us the Luntz Memo, Inhofe’s snowball, and the “merchants of doubt” was an act of amused—and relieved—retrospection.
But writing it the way I did was, in hindsight, a deranged act. That’s because by the time South Pole Station was actually published in 2017, one year into the Trump administration, which was speedily gutting regulations and withdrawing from the global effort to curb emissions, I was being congratulated for my keen political eye, for being prescient. The praise embarrassed me. Didn’t they know a fool when they saw one?
As only a fool would, I had already embarked on another novel. This one was not just climate-adjacent. It was going to be about the hyperobject itself. Climafeel was about a solastalgia epidemic in a United States going through what I’d termed “First Impact,” a world separated from ours by only the thinnest of membranes, and composed of the material of the hyperobject. In such a world, solastalgia—a neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht that refers to our feelings of grief as natural environments are degraded and lost because of climate change—could be a medical disorder that has reached epidemic proportions and threatened the labor supply. And in such a world, a pharmaceutical company would, naturally, have developed a drug to cure it. Of course Climafeel had nasty side effects, like stripping people of their biophilic response in order to deaden them to grief. The drug enabled them to stop caring about Nature so they could remain functional and the ruling class could use them to continue business as usual.
At the burned place it is so easy to be convinced that the world—the planet itself—is better off without yet another parasite who can’t find its way out of the system into which it was born. It is the place where David Buckel invented his language of grief, which I now felt I understood.
The premise was so simple it was a trope, and, at first, the world-building was easy. After all, creating a climate-impacted setting no longer required invention or flights of fancy. It only required thoughtful observation. By this time, familiar with both Buckel’s death and Ghosh’s claim that most of us were trapped in a Great Derangement that shields us from the truth of what is coming, I had come to realize that though I cared deeply about climate change and even wrote about it, I had never had the courage to look it in the eye the way climate scientists, activists, and journalists did. I was afraid of the pain.
Reading “The Uninhabitable Earth,” the article that became David Wallace Wells’ book of the same name, had put me on the verge of a panic attack; I couldn’t finish it. A viral video sent to me of orangutans trying to fight off bulldozers clear-cutting their patch of forest— evidence of our collective crimes against the blameless—made me physically ill. I stopped opening video links friends sent me. I read headlines instead of articles. I stopped visiting the IPCC website and relied on friends to communicate the most recent parts-per-million number. In other words, I was comfortably deranged.
But how could I say anything meaningful and true about this hyperobject if I refused to look at it, if I only contemplated the evidence proving its existence and not the thing itself? I had to look. When I started looking, I stopped being deranged. Instead, I started going mad.
*
Not at first, though. It never comes on like that. At first, I simply returned to building my made-up solastalgic world. I touched the material of climate change daily, had to handle it, pick through it like I was at a Goodwill distribution center, linger over it. I had to read the truth of what’s coming. I watched the videos. I absorbed the sorrow of scientists who could not make the powerful listen and the rage of young adults who defaced art to prove, successfully, that people cared more about paintings than the world. I kept my eyes on the powerful who refused to act, who continued to extract and consume and defile and saw how little power we had to make them act. The more I exposed myself to it, the easier it got—so I thought.
What I didn’t see at the time was that each bit of information created a small wound, so small it was imperceptible until there were so many holes in me that I became porous enough to absorb what felt like the truth: it’s too late. Everything I read not only suggested this outcome, it confirmed it without confirming it. It’s too late when geoengineering stocks are exploding. Too late when climate scientists are handcuffing themselves to the doors of JP Morgan Chase, weeping as they say “we’re heading toward a fucking catastrophe.” Too late when cruise ships sail through the Northwest Passage and millions die from catastrophic heat and it doesn’t make the news cycle.
Too late. These words carved themselves into my existence and because they did, simply thinking about my teenage children’s future became unbearable, mostly because I couldn’t formulate one that wasn’t terrifying. I was overcome by despair.
As this grief penetrated, my ability to use language to tell a story of the hyperobject declined.
Initially, it showed up as small difficulties: plot failures and rabbit holes that stole entire days, flimsy character motivation, overly engineered conflict. I rewrote scenes over and over again, being slower than usual to understand the once familiar signs that this meant it was time to throw everything out and reset.
In addition, many of my characters, some of whom were subjects in the Climafeel clinical trial, were weird and getting weirder. I didn’t know who they were or where they came from, and I certainly didn’t know what I should ask them to do. They told me who they were: A seventeen-year-old girl who understands birds but doesn’t understand their unrelenting queries about the changing planet; a black market stranded-asset caretaker working out of the Miami terminal submersion zone who electively self-amputates in order to achieve total personal atonement for his role in climate change; a FEMA Generation kid from the former site of New Orleans who disappears from his life in a series of disaster-caused fugue states; and a teenager with tree-based mirror synesthesia, which makes his life unendurable because the trees do nothing but sob. They resisted any narrative I created for them to inhabit.
Eventually my faith in the traditional literary tools I’d used for South Pole Station—dialogue, flashback, chronological storytelling—disappeared. They subverted meaning rather than created it. The hyperobject was too vast for any framing device, too volatile to be distilled.
Around this time, I noticed I was spending an inordinate amount of time on a minor storyline about an underground “philanthropic suicide” group called Boots of Titus, named after Lawrence “Titus” Oates, an injured member of the doomed Scott Expedition who’d walked out of his tent and into a blizzard rather than endanger the rest of the party. He’d left his boots behind. This secretive organization and its raison d’etre was the only well-developed aspect of the book, probably because I’d spent so much time on it. When asked by a potential member what made Boots of Titus suicides “philanthropic,” I had the founder reply that the philanthropy was in the member’s absence from earth. “A freely given gift to the natural world, which has been traumatized by humans and ruined by their presence,” he said.
When challenged on this point by the would-be initiate, my character replied with a question: “What do you think is the most rational act a human being could perform at this point in time and history?”
“Love,” was his companion’s response. “Love is the most rational act.”
I know now, after everything, that I should have let the curtain drop at that moment, to leave the promise of hope and goodness. Instead, my character replied, “When men speak of love, it is by default that they refer to the love of other human beings. But there are other kinds of love.” Someday, he said, you will understand the truth and the ethic of the act I’ve described.
When I wrote this exchange between two characters, I thought I was in my life, at my desk, just doing my work. But in truth, I was standing at the burned place, where madness is a rational response to our circumstances. Where those who care the most are the ones most compelled to leave, despite our great need for them. At the burned place it is so easy to be convinced that the world—the planet itself—is better off without yet another parasite who can’t find its way out of the system into which it was born. It is the place where David Buckel invented his language of grief, which I now felt I understood.
No one else I knew I had arrived at the burned place, or they had not admitted that they had. To be honest, I’m not sure I even knew I’d arrived. It’s easier for writers to hide their pain because we can give it to made-up people in made-up places and say that it’s fiction. I can invent an anti-solastalgia drug with a tag line that asks Have you ever wondered what it might feel like not to care? Have you ever wished you didn’t have to? and play it off as satire and not a fervent wish for a pill that could take this all away. I can make up a boy who walks out of his life on a regular basis to escape the wounded world, a man who is compelled to self-harm because he sees it as penance for his role in what we let happen, a “philanthropist” who rationalizes self-destruction as a gift to the earth, and I can give them names that will keep people from seeing that they are pseudonyms for me. And I did.
I had become dangerously solastalgic.
Eventually, I abandoned my book—or my book abandoned me, it was hard to tell—and I tried to get back inside the Great Derangement so that the pain would stop, but it was too late. You can’t go back. In a misguided attempt to hold off madness, I started writing another book, this one about something that, I told myself, had no connection to climate change. But when it became clear that I’d simply come up with another iteration of the Boots of Titus—this one a right-to-die group led by two old women who wanted to “die with dignity”—I stopped writing altogether. I knew I needed help.
I wasn’t diagnosed with solastalgia, but depression, having tallied up a score on the pre-appointment PHQ-9 that resulted in an immediate phone call from my provider asking for assurances that I was not planning on harming myself. I’d never had depression before, had never experienced any diagnosable mental illness. But I didn’t try to explain to my provider that climate change—or looking directly at climate change—had made me sick. I didn’t think she’d understand.
So many of us won’t listen, or are afraid to listen. Maybe we do listen but don’t understand. Maybe we can’t hear them from inside our willing derangement.
I was prescribed a kind of Climafeel, and, after a while, started to feel a little better, so long as I didn’t look or even think about the hyperobject. I was able to be a functional spouse and parent again, but I still hadn’t said the thing. I still wanted to say it, but I had no language for it, no forms, beside David Buckel’s.
One day I decided to read Melville’s brilliant Benito Cereno, based on the true story of a revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship. For days afterward, I found myself wondering: what if the “strange folks on board” weren’t enslaved humans? What if they were polar bears?
I have a lot of dumb ideas, and I was sure this was one of them. However, the question persisted, so I sat down and began to write a sea salt-encrusted nautical tale that reimagined the novella as a story of animal mutiny set in a liquid Arctic. Built on the bones of Melville’s masterpiece, the story agreed to be told because it had been told once before, and it bent but did not break under the alterations I made to it. Stranded on the other side of derangement, I mined the hyperobject to say the thing, and the first words I wrote came from the mouth of a bear: “What is considered madness by men is oftentimes nothing more than comprehension.”
When I was finished, I knew that as a piece of writing, the story, called “Muri,” was unlikely to be read by anyone. It was speculative, but not sci-fi, anachronistic, but not steampunk. And the ask I made of the reader—mutiny by talking polar bears—was too great. It didn’t matter. I had looked at the hyperobject and, with the help of a dead giant, found a language to say the thing. The thing, I now knew, was grief.
I started writing again, sifting through the chaos in order to find fragments of meaning. I wrote as the premises and frameworks came to me, in whatever bizarre form they arrived: menus for ersatz cafes, Craigslist ads, a Nabokovian account of an environmental migrant resettlement voyage, marketing documents, government forms, and “patient histories” of four solastalgics in the Climafeel clinical trial: a girl with “Dolittle Phenomenon,” a man with “Environment-induced Apotemnophilia,” a boy with “Natural Disaster Dissociative Disorder,” and a teenager with “Environmental Hyperempathy, Tree.” The four faces of my own solastalgia.
By the end, I had a kind of speculative time capsule of oral history, documents, and detritus from a close future where the natural world has changed but what Roy Scranton calls our “conceptual armature” has not. And though its weirdness was unintentional, it was weird because that was the only way I could write the hyperobject, the only way I could speak of the weirding world. As with Muri, I didn’t think anyone would read these fragments, or if they did, that they would understand it. But my grief had a language and it had led me away from the burned place.
I am keenly aware that I looked directly at the climate change hyperobject only briefly. Thousands of scientists, journalists, researchers, public health workers, activists, indigenous people, communities of color, and children—so many children—have been looking at it for years, trying to communicate to us what it is, what it means, trying to find a common language that we will hear. Even at such close proximity to grief, they cultivate hope for those of us who can’t, or won’t. That work comes at a cost. Still, so many of us won’t listen, or are afraid to listen. Maybe we do listen but don’t understand. Maybe we can’t hear them from inside our willing derangement.
*
There is a crooked old oak tree in the small hardwood forest on my property. It’s the tree I heard first, and the one that introduced me to the protagonist of my story “Your Ghost Remains Upright,” the solastalgic teenager who hears trees and longs to become one. I’d convinced myself that I’d heard the oak because I’d been unaccountably drawn to it one day, even though it was fifteen yards in from the edge of the forest and I’d never noticed it before. This idea that it had called to me was made even more compelling when, after I’d made my way over, I saw that it was being choked by invasive vines. As I pulled the Virginia creeper away from the tree’s trunk, solastalgia reminded me that it was too late by pointing out the obvious metaphor: like these insidious vines, we had attached ourselves to something bigger than us and far more beautiful, and were killing it in the process.
But now, having found my own language of grief—a farrago of forms—I saw that there could be a different story in different setting. A story we all can understand, one in which we aren’t too late, set in a place where our children have a future where we are not the vines that kill the tree but are instead creatures whose hands pull the vines away.
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Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is available now via University of Minnesota Press.
