An Apocalypse for Every Epoch

Emmett Rensin writes on eco-grief, the climate dirge, and one Armenian monk in a new hybrid fiction-cum-essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47, “Security.”

By Emmett RensinDecember 13, 2025

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This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE STORY IS probably apocryphal, but it’s easy to believe: the minor Njálssaga tells of a village on a small island of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago whose augurs prophesied a great drought to come and a long famine to follow. The catastrophe would be so great that the island would soon be uninhabitable and the village would not survive. At first, the hersir of the isle did not believe it. A drought might come, droughts often came, and famines had been suffered before, but lean years had always given way to years of plenty. But when the lots were drawn again under supervision of the village elders, the conclusion of the seiðr was the same: this year would see the island’s final rain.

The village prepared. They stored and rationed the yield of that autumn’s harvest. In the spring, they packed the last unmelted winter snows into great sheepskins to store. For a year, they chanted prayers to Freyr, son of Njörðr, æsir of fertility, prosperity, fair weather, and good harvest. They sang the songs of praise first composed by Snorri Sturluson, and sang them loud enough to be heard in Álfheimr, the land of elves, where Freyr sometimes went to be beyond the reach of common prayers. They burned offerings to Njörðr’s servants Skínir, Byggvir, and Beyla. But there was no rain that year, then for a second, then a third. The fields failed and the stores ran empty. The villagers slaughtered their sheep, then their horses, and finally the rats for food. It was very hot and dry. Many tried to flee, but the island was remote. Without supplies, it was unknown if the longships would ever reach another shore. The poets of the Íslendingasögur do not report another village receiving any refugees. The villagers who remained on the island began to starve and many died, ribs protruding from thin flesh where they had fallen in the streets.

In the autumn of the seventh year, only a dozen starving souls remained. Among them was the last skald of the village. Knowing that the coming winter would be their last, the skald gathered the survivors at the hörgar and lit a fire. He told them how, in a dream, he had lain across the lap of Freyja in a field of sweet green reeds and she had taught him a new song. He awoke so often from his hunger that it had taken many fitful nights to learn the words and then the melody, but finally he had mastered it. Now they would all sing. This new song did not ask for rain, or beg for food or rescue. It only told the absent æsir about those feelings that no angel would ever know: Við erum svöng. Við erum þyrst. Við erum að deyja. We are hungry. We are thirsty. We are dying.

The saga does not say if the heavens were moved by this last prayer, or if the village simply vanished from the Earth. But in either case, the lesson is the same: words cannot control the weather, but they can tell God what it feels like when you’re desperate and starving and afraid.

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What does “a book about climate change” do? Before there were books, there were papers, articles, and theories: In two papers published in 1824 and 1827, the French mathematician Joseph Fourier first theorized what would now be called “the greenhouse effect,” the means by which heat was trapped on Earth by the borders of the sky. In April 1896, The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science published “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” by the Nordic polymath Svante August Arrhenius. It was the first paper to predict, with real accuracy, the climactic effects of industrial carbons on the climate.

A century of investigations followed, and the first books about climate change—the first, at least, intended for the village at large: a genre that Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) is usually credited with inaugurating—were languid, expository works. Their purpose was practical: to predict the future by reporting on a century of empirical observations. The first “book about climate change” I ever owned was David Archer’s Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (2006) , which consisted of several hundred figures (mainly graphs), several dozen plates (mainly color images of heat maps), and only 14 of its 192 pages dedicated to the idea that something might be done about the forecast (mainly dry descriptions of the “trade-offs” entailed by things like the Kyoto Protocol). The seminal work of this early era, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) by Mark Lynas, began by explicitly identifying itself as “above all a work of synthesis.” Six Degrees had ambitions beyond the merely expository—it quoted Dante and gave over fully 34 of its 304 pages to a chapter called “Choosing Our Future”—but what it mainly did was describe. It said: Here is what is coming.

Still, as with any prophecy, the point of precognition is the possibility of arriving at a different future. If at first the “book about climate change” only aspired to explain, it soon became a genre that insisted. “I was a 27-year-old and more than a little naive,” McKibben later said of The End of Nature. He believed that merely articulating the problem would inspire action. His immediate heirs had no such illusions. The climate literature of the first decade of the 21st century—An Inconvenient Truth, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, McKibben’s own Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community—were combative, demanding. They insisted, they pushed. These were still practical works, designed to produce material effects in the world beyond the text. But where the first generation of books about climate change prophesied with the unstated or barely stated hope that they might produce political outcomes, the second generation deployed prophecy in service of an explicit end. What they did was turn urgency into explicit demand. They demanded an end to fossil fuels, an end to atmospheric carbon, the pursuit of solar energy or wind energy or nuclear energy, the end of cars, the salvation of the Earth. They taught their readers how to argue for these ends in their own lives and change the minds of those who stood in the way. The book of prediction became the book of persuasion—the scientific became the political; the prophetic, the rhetorical.

In the beginning, when the apocalypse was distant, books about climate change were animated by the 20th century’s abiding faith that somebody would surely do something before matters got out of hand. The first of the second kind of book about climate change kept this faith, but it faded as the years went on. The books—the articles, the essays, the speeches, the mood—became more urgent, from this is a century from now if we don’t act to this is your children’s future to this is your future to this is next year, less here is how we might avert disaster, more this is how to mitigate the things we can still save. Entering the second decade of this century, the prophecy began to feel beside the point. If McKibben had been naive to think a warning was enough to change the world, his descendants were naive to think a demand was any more effective. Everybody knew what was going to happen, what was happening already; the specter of climate change deniers gave way to simpler villains in greed and malice. If the polemical “book about climate change” could not rely on information to give the call to action urgency, then it had to bring urgency to the information itself; if the world could not be persuaded, then it might be startled. What were once dry descriptions of rising sea levels and limp references to “increased disease burden” and “coastal habitability loss” became exercises in gothic literary horror. The “book about climate change” became a genre of affective provocation, of panic and anxiety and dread. “Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do,” wrote David Wallace-Wells in the apex of this genre, his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. “At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible […] And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.” This was still a practical book. Its aim, at bottom, was rhetorical. But it was far from the function of its ancestors. What did a book about climate change do, as the years went on without action? It terrified.

For many, this is still the present of the genre. But over the course of the last decade, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of book about climate change. Perhaps it is precisely because nothing changed in the external world—or perhaps because the inner world, once provoked, will always displace the external world as the focus of the writer’s attention; or perhaps, more charitably, because it is easier to manage one’s feelings than the global economic order—that this new kind of climate literature does not make use of affect, but concerns it. It is marked by an inversion of the old faith: matters are already out of hand, the new creed says, and nobody will do anything at all. It is not a practical genre. It is not bound, like McKibben or Gore or Wallace-Wells, to the confines of general nonfiction, and it has spread into essay, fiction, film, and poetry. In this new formation, a book about climate change is neither a genre of scientific observation nor one of political persuasion, but rather a genre of pathos about a foregone conclusion. What does a book about climate change do? It sings a sad song about the end of the world. I’ve taken to calling it the “climate dirge.”

The climate dirge doesn’t warn of an incomprehensible future. It doesn’t hector recalcitrant voters or politicians, or propose treaties, technologies, or sacrifices. The dirge bears witness. It tracks, it frets, it mourns. It gives form to the unbearable, ritualizes and socializes what might otherwise derange. “As [climate] extremity becomes the norm, authors no longer need to look ahead; they can simply set their stories in the present day,” begins a review of a recent novel in the dirge genre; plots unfold “in the shadow of environmental collapse,” explains the jacket description of another. The dry reservoirs, the strange weather, the freezes and hurricanes and fires are the given landscape, just there. The scenery is both literal and conceptual, not as an issue but as a setting, an inevitability already half-realized. The dirge sees dying trees, dying fish, dying birds, water running dry. It feels haunted, sad, sometimes veering into nihilism, sentimentality, or panic. Its best register is ambivalence, its most common is fear, its most cloying is anxiety. The dirge is sometimes practical, in its own way (A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet; Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World). It is sometimes blended with other kinds of saccharine subject matter for a quick infusion of stakes (Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, Katherine Larson’s Wedding of the Foxes, the whole catalog at Milkweed). It is sometimes quite good (Elegy, Southwest; The World as We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate, in parts). It is sometimes silly, overwrought, nearly hysterical (you know the books I mean). In 2020, Story Street Press published a collection of poetry called California Fire & Water, much of it by children. One, a “group poem” titled “Climate Change Fears of Fifth Graders,” begins:

Fear of the next ice age
Fear of losing my cat
Fear of having more panic attacks
Fear of dying
Fear of tsunami
Fear of tornados
Fear of a hurricane
Fear of losing people I love

It goes on like this for 41 more lines (the last: “Fear of being buried alive”). California Fire & Water advertises its mission as helping the authors “face uncertainty and express their personal responses to the climate crisis.” Expressing our response, the climate dirge sings, is all we have left.

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The climate dirge is destined to be with us for a while. It was only 30 years between McKibben and the first notes of the dirge; even by Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic reckoning, it will be some time yet before we are all cooked alive inside our skin. The dirge has already been with us over a decade and may need to keep the tune for several more, at least until the collapse turns the composition of affective literature—the kind about how terrible all this extinction makes us feel—too frivolous to keep up between water raids. Time turns genres on themselves, folds them. Now, the dirge has lasted long enough to begin showing signs of metacognizance.

The brightest sign so far came earlier this year in Immemorial, a short book by the journalist Lauren Markham. Immemorial is a locus classicus of the dirge. It plays the familiar chords: ambivalence, anxiety, fretting amid ruin. It presents decay in the chatty lyricism that will be with us until everyone who read The Empathy Exams is dead. Markham’s subject, she writes early on, is her “trouble with metabolizing climate grief”: “that particularly unsteady, ghostly form of anticipatory grief for losses that are at once certain […] and not yet fully known in terms of their timeline or precise manifestation.” Markham discovers hundreds of dead fish littering a beach in Mexico. She visits ancient trees in California, failing to spawn. She spends several pages listening to the songs of long-dead birds. If Immemorial were only that, then it would only be a decent cover—It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I’m NOT fine!), again—but Markham’s subject is also the dirge itself: its purpose; its form; the vague, precognitive worry that this kind of writing may be unavoidable, timely, but also faintly ridiculous. What is this strange third era of the “book about climate change”? What is this project in which Immemorial is both participating and creating?

The birth of generic self-awareness comes on that graveyard beach in Mexico. Markham sees “hundreds of these aquatic corpses scattered […] as though someone had detonated a bomb in the shallows,” and she begins taking photos—“pure instinct,” she says. The photographic impulse is the dirge, by other media: an “instinctual desire to record the ravages of climate change” not as proof or as persuasive example but in order to “perform feelings” about environmental catastrophe. But now that instinct troubles her. It isn’t the desire. On the same page, Markham approvingly quotes Britt Wray’s Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, a classic of the dirge, exhorting “this generation” to capture the dread “floating freely in the air.” She is troubled by the form that her desire takes. According to the book, her song had so far been too messy, too unfocused, “a failure to sort out how to adequately feel.” Markham knows that she is participating in a new genre of literature, one that she believes in. The world is ending. We are left to express our response. But what response? How best expressed? The result is a book that is both the dirge itself and a theory of its composition: What key? What style? To what end?

Naked and suddenly self-conscious, Immemorial sets off in search of its place in the world. The book itself is mainly taken up with what Markham insists on calling her “quest” to place the dirge in the tradition of memorial. “The impulse to build a memorial is born of this desire to determine the quality of the air in the room, its emotional tenor,” she writes. It is a genre of affective literature. “I know I’m not alone in my climate grief—or eco-grief, or eco-anxiety, as it’s otherwise known. […] I wanted a space to remember and mourn the vanishing future.”

For the bulk of the text, this search is literal: roughly a dozen profiles of existing memorials. As journalism, these digressions are interesting enough, but for Markham they are candidates for membership in a canon of influence and models for the memorial she might like to make. The stakes of the dirge are immense. Every memorial marks an “acre of conflagration,” “made to remember the victims of human-made atrocities—war, genocide, mass shootings, terrorist attacks.” But with climate change, “when every corner of the planet risks becoming its own ‘acre of conflagration,’ the sort of memorial I craved was far more amorphous and vast in terms of both the victims it memorialized and its purpose.” What could possibly suffice? Markham lifts the phrase “acre of conflagration” from the Mary Ruefle poem “Monument,” and she considered another of the poem’s images: “a plate of cherries, burning forever.” A good metaphor, Markham thinks, except “for the substantial dose of carbon it would emit.”

The sequence of possibilities largely follows the path of Markham’s dissatisfaction—or the dissatisfaction of any number of interlocutors—with the possibilities. What form is best? A statue is traditional, but inadequate. Perhaps a structure, like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, instead? She is attracted to “the notion that a physical space could provide something akin to poetry,” but a friend tells her that they “don’t think we need any more building,” and Markham doesn’t argue. Might a ritual be better instead? A performance? Markham studies Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, statues of confederate generals in the American South, the poetry of CAConrad, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York, the annual ride of the Dakota and Lakota in memory of the massacre of 1862, the conversion of the Metelkova district—“an heirloom of totalitarian rule” in Slovenia—into a hostel. She visits the Peace and Justice center in Montgomery and a cherry tree memorial on the Potomac, views the death mask of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun and the 120,000 pennies assembled by Jill Magid to commemorate the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She hops a fence with a friend to see Ghost Forest, a far more recent Maya Lin installation, made up of Atlantic white cedars ravaged by changing coastal weather. Some of these memorials are buildings, some are rituals, some performances, some permanent, some temporary.

None quite satisfy. The complications build up quickly: questions multiply, become more fundamental. “In order to understand the art and function of memorial, we must perhaps first probe the art and function of memory,” Markham realizes. Memory can be personal, cultural, revelatory, challenging, or deceptive. What is memory? Who controls it? Shapes it? What does a person remember? A culture? How do they choose? History “is just selective memory dressed up as fact,” Markham concludes, something to do with “power.” And yet “collective memory” is also essential, something to do with the powerless. How to reconcile? Memorializing the climate requires “metabolizing” many “abstractions,” she says; she is struck by the difficulty of memorializing “the abstracted casualties of the future.”

Markham becomes suspicious of her own motives. Is memorializing a “substitute” for action? A disavowal? Markham turned to physical memorials in part because she became stuck in the inadequacy of her own writing, in the dirge as a purely literary genre. But of course, memorials are susceptible to semiotics too; they speak their own symbolic language, and it is language itself, not merely language written in paragraphs on pages, that troubles Markham. The “problem with language […] was one of personal amnesia,” she writes. “I had spent so much time thinking, readying, worrying, writing […] What should I do?” This feels, briefly, like an impulse toward the old kind of book about climate change, toward the guide, the call to action, the plan. But a few pages later, Markham is reading again, and another book persuades her that “the myopic focus on action at the expense of theorizing […] is also a kind of anti-intellectualism.” This, Markham says, “stung.”

Another rebuke, from another interlocutor, “helps” Markham to “see something [she] hadn’t recognized: that in yearning for a memorial related to climate grief, I was in part looking for a place to deposit it so I could leave it behind.” She does not want to leave it behind. She wants to know how the dirge should go and how to sustain it through the catastrophe to come. Markham turned from writing when words began to blend together—“becoming, essentially, gobbledygook”—but by the end of the book, memorials find themselves in similar shape: “By now,” Markham writes, “everything had started to resemble a memorial. That’s the problem with metaphors, symbols. You can really overdo it.” Even the discovery of already existing climate memorials—a funeral for the Okjökull glacier in Iceland; the last rent chunks of a lost glacier, hauled to a Copenhagen square and left to melt—prove unsatisfying, insufficient.

It is not a spoiler to tell you that Markham eventually returns to literature. We are reading her book, not visiting the site of her burning cherries or partaking in some ritual she’s devised. But this return occurs as a kind of surrender. In the end, she concedes that the “tools [she] had to nurse [her] memory and [her] grief, however incomplete, were words.” The memorial was not the father of the climate dirge, at least not the way that she imagined. There’s nearly something there. The dirge is about the present and the future; memorials are about the past. Markham writes that “memorials are about time,” their purpose “to write a backward story, paradoxically, toward the future,” and there is something there, a circle you can almost square if you squint hard enough and write in lyric essay. It just isn’t quite enough.

But the trouble isn’t that memorials occupy a different temporal valence from that of the climate dirge, at least not entirely. The trouble is that memorials presume enduring time at all. Memorials, Markham explains, are about how history is understood; they are expressions of cultural memory and form the basis for our judgment of the past. “Memorial mania,” as Markham, echoing Erika Doss’s work of the same title, terms the past few decades of American life, is “driven by our national grappling with the politics of representation and memory—questions of how our history is narrated, how to reckon with past wrongs, and how to understand who, fundamentally, we are as a people.” They are, in Doss’s words, “memory aids: materialist modes of privileging particular histories and values.” A memorial for climate change presumes some future point where we will stand in judgment of the past, when the crisis, now passed, is committed to memory and has become history.

That may be true of climate change, and some future day beyond it, but it is not true of the dirge, which began when the apocalyptic prophecy was understood but nothing happened, when warning, entreating, arguing, and begging failed. It is predicated on the belief that the prophecy will come to pass and that when it does, we will not be here to judge our ancestors at all; that judgment, if it comes, will be rendered in the court of death’s other kingdom by the author of a history beyond our power to revise. The climate dirge does belong to a tradition, but it is not one concerned with secular matters, with “controlling narratives” and “particular histories.” It belongs to the tradition concerned with the end of narratives, with the end of history, with the silence that comes from the newly packed earth after the dirge is sung and the singers have gone home.

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Al Gore has taken to telling any camera that’ll listen how “every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations.” He was not the first, nor am I, to suggest that climate literature belongs to the tradition of eschatology. The link has been suggested by sources both spiritual and secular: “Christian eschatological and apocalyptic themes are today becoming increasingly prevalent in environmental discourse, spanning across the natural sciences, humanities, popular media, and literature,” reports Modern Theology. “Global warming and other environmental hazards have conjured up […] an impending end-time apocalypse,” explains the helpfully titled “Climate Change and Eschatology,” a chapter in a recent Springer anthology on environmental science. The journal Sustainability explores “association of religious end time beliefs with attitudes toward climate change and biodiversity loss.” “Eschatological and apocalyptic patterns of thought are today prominent in environmental discourse, across multiple disciplines and media” reports “Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology.” At times, the relationship between these two traditions is contested—eschatological belief in the imminent end of days is a political obstacle for environmental activism, or secular appropriation of eschatological language is an insult to keepers of the true faith—but more often, the link is obvious: we have always written about the end of the world, about the time when whatever memorials we leave will be for no one.

There is no real accounting of the number of eschatological texts in human history. They have been produced by nearly every culture, revealed by every kind of oracle and mystic. The best known is the Apocalypse of John, what we call the Book of Revelation, but the Apocalypse of Peter, from the second century, prophesied the dissolving of all creation, the fleeing of men in all directions upon the earth, how “in all places shall the wrath of a fearful fire overtake them and an unquenchable flame driving them shall bring them unto the judgement of wrath.” The Apocalypse of Thomas, composed sometime in the third or fourth century, in Syria or Persia, foretells that on the fifth day, at the sixth hour, “there shall be a great thunder in heaven, and the powers of light and the wheel of the sun shall be caught [open], and there shall be great darkness over the world until evening, and the air shall be [sad] without sun or moon, and the stars shall cease from their ministry.” It details how all nations, in that time, “shall despise the life of this world.” In the Völuspá, the apocalypse of the Norse people and Icelanders from the Sæmundar Edda, the end of the world comes when “the sun turns black, / the earth sinks in the sea, / The hot stars down / from heaven are whirled; / Fierce grows the stream / and the life-feeding flame, / Till fire leaps high / about heaven itself.”

The second book of Hadiths, the Sahih Muslim, reports that when Allah’s messenger, peace be upon him, discovered his disciplines discussing the last hour, he told them that it would not come before the appearance of 10 signs: “smoke, Dajjal, the beast, the rising of the sun from the west, the descent of Jesus son of Mary […], the Gog and Magog, and land-slides in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia at the end of which fire would burn forth from the Yemen.” The Aztec oracles of the end of the Fifth Sun told of earthquakes, then great beasts from the sky come to consume the world. The 13th chapter of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius speaks of when the “gates of the North will be opened up and out will come the powers of the nations which were enclosed within,” how “the whole earth will reel from their face, and men will cry aloud and flee and hide themselves in the mountains and in the caves and among gravestones.” But when they perish, “there will be none [left] to bury the bodies.”

An apocalypse for every epoch: Joachim of Fiore’s works on the Third Age, the letter on the Antichrist by Adso of Montier-en-Der, the 13th-century fashion for drama of the Antichrist, the Liber de magnis tribulationibus (“Book of Great Tribulations”) of Telesphorus of Cosenza, the prophecies and tribulations of John of Rupescissa, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 by Edgar C. Whisenant, Beginning of the End by John Hagee, The Jupiter Effect by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn, the whole of Left Behind. Books of Revelation, the wrath of God, or the wrath of atmospheric carbon, whether authored by St. John or by Bill McKibben, are among the most popular and populous works of literature in the history of the world.

The history of eschatology follows the first two eras of the book about climate change quite neatly: the signs, the warnings, the rending of the Earth, the great fires, the pleading and proof and terror deployed to make the reader prepare for what is coming, to do something and get right in the eyes of God before the end. “Watch concerning your life; let not your lamps be quenched or your loins be loosed, but be ye ready, for ye know not the hour at which our Lord cometh,” exhorts the second-century Didache, for when the deceiver comes and “signs and wonders” are seen across the world, “then shall the creation of man come to the fiery trial of proof, and many shall be offended and shall perish; but they who remain in their faith shall be saved by the rock.” Where the classical eschatologies differ from their ecological heirs is in the movement toward the purely affective, toward lamentation or despair. Among the better-known apocalypses, the closest note to the climate dirge comes in the books of the Sibylline Oracles, said to be Roman seers of the sixth century BC but likely impostors writing sometime in the fourth century AD, who predict the coming of an “inexorable wrath,” the flowing of a “fiery cataract” from heaven in which all men shall perish. Then, to complete the verse: “Ah, wretched me!”

When the eschatological has turned to the affective, it has generally been because the world failed to end. In 1844, when the apocalypse prophesied by William Miller ended in the Great Disappointment, the Millerites were left to express their response to the crisis in memoirs, diaries, and letters: “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. […]We wept, and wept, till the day dawned!” The real calamity was that life would just keep going. We may someday see the same response to our apocalypse. If we are fortunate, the fourth kind of book about climate change will concern expressing our response to the fact that civilization endured, and some of these books will be quite sad, but the rarity of a real antecedent for her “quest” in eschatology may be why Markham looked elsewhere for a genre of influence. She wouldn’t be the first to note the way the dirge splits from the books of revelation: “Apocalyptic discourses continue to be central to environmental movements, media representations and even establishment accounts of environmental politics,” wrote Suvi Alt in “Environmental Apocalypse and Space: The Lost Dimension of the End of the World” for the journal Environmental Politics. “At the same time, ecological thinkers increasingly argue that the apocalypse is already here: We are already living at the end of the world.” St. Peter, St. Thomas, the völva seeress of the Völuspá, those old Aztec astronomers, and the disciples of the messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) never saw the sky torn open, the flood waters come, or the unquenchable fire. They had no opportunity to mourn, to invent the dirge.

But there are rumors of exceptions. Among the various revelations, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was among the most popular and widely translated. Composed in Syriac in the seventh century, it saw the world consumed by the “sons of Ishmael” and the armies of Gog and Magog, imprisoned long ago by Alexander the Great. It prophesied the ruin of Egypt and Greece, of Persia and Syria, and of all the righteous lands until the world was reduced to drinking the blood of cattle and slaughtering the young to feed to animals. This apocalypse was translated first into Greek, then Latin sometime in the mid-eighth century, and later into many of the tongues of Christian Europe and the Levant. It was common, then, for translators to include their commentaries in the form of prefaces. These were often brief and anodyne: Peter the Monk, the most famous of the Methodius translators, whose preface is included in the Latin version, takes only a few pages to promise that he has added nothing to the text and to explain that he has produced his translation because “what was prophesied is more relevant to our own times.” The signs, he explained, had begun to appear. But not every translator was so circumspect.

In the ninth century, Christian missionaries reached the Icelanders, the final holdouts among the Northmen against the mother church. For years, the southern clergy largely acted through Olaf Tryggvason, Christian King of Norway, who attempted to induce conversion by threatening trade embargoes, taking Icelandic nobles hostage, and deploying the Saxon missionary Þangbrandr to Reykjavík, where he answered insults and refusals with violence. Þangbrandr is said to have killed several pagans in duels. But the church was not entirely content to trust the work of salvation to a Viking, particularly one who had only converted himself some years before. Learned men and priests from across the Christian world were sent to spread the Gospel among the Icelanders. One was Haik Artasheyan, who brought the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius with him to the frozen north.

Artasheyan was a Vardapet, an Armenian monk. Born in 927 AD in a Byzantine client state in the southern Caucasus, Artasheyan discerned his vocation to the priesthood as a young man. After taking his initial vows, he crossed Abbasid-ravaged Anatolia and was ordained in Constantinople in or around 955. Much of his activity for the next four decades is unrecorded, but he was known as a quick study, particularly of languages, and it is likely that he worked primarily as a transcriber and interpreter of religious texts. We do know that he learned of the conversion of the Vikings in 987, likely from one of the Varangian guardsmen in the capital, and although he was approaching his 60th birthday, Artasheyan felt compelled to join the mission. Sometime in the summer of 988, he traveled with a group of fellow priests up the Dnieper River before embarking from Norway to Iceland on one of Olaf’s ships.

While many southern priests had difficulty adapting to the weather and customs of the north, Artasheyan took to Icelanders, and they took to him in turn. He learned their language and proved himself a ready student of their customs. In 994, he was accepted into the kinship network of the hersir Þórr Bjornsson and took the name Haik Þórsson. In Constantinople, Haik had studied the Pseudo-Methodius. He believed that the conversion of the last of the northern pagans must occur before the prophecy could come to pass. Likely working from a Greek text he had transcribed himself back in Byzantium, Haik rendered the Apocalypse into the traditional Old Norse fornyrðislag meter. As a translation, this Uppljóstran Meþódiusar was typical: well annotated, accurate to the original, only slightly awkward in its style—a triumph for a man who had only recently learned the language. What made it unusual was its preface. It ran nearly 150 pages, more than double the length of the actual text. It recorded, in incredibly personal detail, Haik’s anxiety and terror over the imminent end of the world.

For many years, Haik wrote, he had welcomed the end of days. He had spent a lifetime in the study of eschatology. He had prepared. He longed to see the Second Coming and to stand among the righteous in the kingdom of heaven. But his time in the north had changed him. From a distance, he was startled to consider how many of the signs prophesied by Methodius had come to pass in his old home. The Holy Land would suffer under the rule of the “sons of Ishmael” for seven weeks of years. Nearly that much time had passed since the fall of the Byzantine Levant. The final days would be preceded by a great scourge of apostasy, of liars and servants to the anti-Christ professing false fidelity while engaging in every form of sin and doubt. Haik had seen, even among the ordained of Byzantium, the spread of skepticism, vice, degeneracies of the body and the soul. The final war would come when the last Roman Emperor, son of Greece and Italy and Ethiopia, would march at the head of an army of the righteous to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land. Haik had begun to hear rumors among his contacts in the Western church. They said that among the Italians and the Franks, such an expedition was believed to be inevitable within a generation.

For the first time, Haik was forced to contemplate the possibility that the end of the world was not some distant abstraction, a blessed event to be anticipated by his grandchildren, but a catastrophe to be endured in his own lifetime. He would live to see the agony and the ecstasy of the doom of the world, and he was terrified. He believed that his soul would be saved—he was a righteous man—but he had always been afraid of fire. He thought of his mother, still in Armenia: so close to Muslim borders, would she survive the final war, or would she be among those crazed and desperate, slaughtering his young cousins and feeding them to animals? As he looked across the ice of the North Sea, he considered the birds circling above the water. He found them beautiful, their songs a comfort in these barren lands. Were they to be consumed? Destroyed? Their wings torn apart and their bodies cast into the ice below to make way for the glory of the Son of God? Haik knew the world was damned, that all men fell short of the Glory of God, that we deserved it. But he did not believe the world was without value, that all that would be lost in fire and glory was just rubbish meant to burn. He wanted some way to remember, he said. No—he just wanted to live in this world a little longer. He believed utterly in the Apocalypse but his faith did not bring him comfort, only grief. The commentary ends on a series of declarations: Oh Lord, I am terrified! Oh Lord, I am beside myself with grief! Oh Lord, my Lord, I am afraid! I am afraid! I am afraid! The commentary of Haik Artasheyan on the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was a dirge.

This is a strange story. This preface was a strange thing for Artasheyan to even contemplate, much less compose. Securing the additional ink and vellum alone had added months to his labors. It was reported that he spent far more time composing and revising his preface than he did translating the actual book. His fellow missionaries found it utterly inexplicable. In the intervening centuries, scholars have debated explanations. It is possible that Artasheyan simply suffered some form of emotional collapse. It is also possible that the commentary was a kind of performance—perhaps sensitive to the fact that the Icelanders had not yet converted, Artasheyan wanted to reassure pagan readers that the new priests were not enticing them into a giddy suicide cult—and he was only demonstrating, before his baffled colleagues, his superior insight into Icelandic culture. But there is another possibility, stranger still.

Four hundred years before Artasheyan’s birth, the church was split open by a series of schisms over the nature of the essence of the Lord, the so-called “Christological debates.” Was He fully human? Fully divine? A combination of the two? Of two natures entirely? Blood was spilled over these questions and it flowed for the better part of a century until 451 AD, when the Council of Chalcedon declared that Christ possessed two natures united in one person, that he was fully human and fully divine, without confusion, change, division, or separation. This declaration did not reunite the church, but it laid the basis for a clean and stable break. “Chalcedonian Christianity” became our Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. Large sections of the Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Egyptian Coptic churches remained committed to a variety of alternative miaphysite doctrines.

Haik Artasheyan was ordained an Orthodox priest. But he was from Armenia, and in his preface to the Apocalypse, he mentions in passing that he discerned his calling to the clergy while visiting relatives in the old abandoned capital of Shirakayan as a teenager. Shirakayan, of course, is best remembered as a hotbed of schismatic Pioetetes, followers of what is now sometimes called the Qualianist heresy. Founded in 545 by the Syrian monk Matius of Edessa, the Pioetetes drew on late Platonic philosophy and the work of the Pseudo-Dionysius to posit that the nature of Christ was neither fully divine nor fully human, but rather essential qualia, a Platonic form of human consciousness itself.

God, they reasoned, could have forgiven the world’s sins without the Passion. This was within the possibilities of omnipotence. The true purpose of the life of Jesus was to learn what God, in his omniscience, still could not know: what it felt like to be human. Jesus Christ was the archetypal experience, the Archetypos Peira, the perfect, universal template of what it meant to experience existence as a mortal soul. His flesh was not material at all, but rather the Form of Sensation: his pain, his joy, his sorrow were of the perfect, eternal essences of these experiences, rather than the limited sensations of an ordinary man. His sacrifice was sufficient to redeem the world because it was the Form of Suffering itself, more real than any individual experience of pain. The mind of Christ was universal: the core of all human consciousness recognizable as such.

In 554, the Second Council of Constantinople anathematized the Pioetetes. Matius himself was captured, tried, and burned in Antioch in 558. But Qualianism persisted underground, spreading among philosophically educated Christians in Antioch, Edessa, and Armenia. It persisted in whispers in the halls of monasteries in Syria and Egypt. Estimates of the true number of Qualianists vary wildly, but we know that it was common for adherents to seek traditional ordination among the Coptics and the Orthodox, to spread their doctrine of the nature of God among the men they met in their parishes and monasteries, growing beneath the noses of the ecclesiastical authorities.

While the Orthodox and even many non-Chalcedonian churches condemned the Pioetetes for making Christ into an “abstraction,” the Qualianists were in their own way far more human than the legalistic scholars of the mainstream church. They believed that God in His eternity longed to touch the temporal lives of man, so much so that they had sent His only Son to feel the world and die in it. They believed that God wanted to understand us, but that true understanding was beyond even omnipotence and omniscience. The Orthodox missed the forest for the trees: for all their preoccupation with the interpretation of ancient texts, they had never wondered why, with the exception of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, God spoke to man in tablets, books, and letters, why God had given the world the written word at all. The Qualianists had an answer: God spoke, just like us. He communicated in language. We communicated with Him in words. Christ had given Him some qualia of human life, but we were not like God, and He was not like us. We needed language, symbols, metaphors—a discourse to carry out the dialogue between creator and creation. As a consequence, the Qualianists believed that God could be moved by writing. If you found the right words, you could make Him understand.

The evidence is only circumstantial, but if Haik Artasheyan was a crypto-Pioetete, then his preface to the Uppljóstran Meþódiusar was something more remarkable than the idle terror of a monk living in the cold north far from home. He was trying to save the world. He was singing the dirge—expressing his response—to an apocalyptic prophecy he believed would soon come true, and hoping God would change his mind. It was a tenet of Pioetetes scholasticism that not any expression would do. Finding the right words was vital, difficult, the work of a lifetime or at least of many months spent among the pagans. But if done properly, if the affective tempests of the human heart could be expressed just so, then it could reach God, and move him.

Did Haik Artasheyan succeed? We don’t know. In 1000 AD, the law-speaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði deliberated the faith of his people for a day and night beneath his cloak and then declared to the Althing that Iceland would convert. Perhaps delayed by the composition of his preface, Artasheyan’s Uppljóstran was not completed until at least 1003. It played no role at all. We do know that the world didn’t end. Artasheyan died somewhere en route between Brittany and Rome, where he had gone to investigate rumors of a coming expedition to the Holy Land, sometime in 1016. By the 13th century, excerpts of an Old Slavonic translation of the Apocalypse, perhaps based on Artasheyan’s efforts, made their way into the Russian Primary Chronicle. In 1683, when the Turks besieged Vienna, excerpts of the Pseudo-Methodius, rendered in German derived either from the Russian or Icelandic, were printed on broadsheets and distributed across the city. Then, as was the case six centuries prior, the gates containing Gog and Magog did not burst open. The Earth went on, long after the last emperor of the Romans was gone.

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The jacket copy for Immemorial, and a great deal of its marketing material, focused on a second element of Markham’s “quest”: she was “in need of a word.” Her grief for the climate was not only an ecological catastrophe but also a “crisis of language and memory.” Although she was drawn to memorials “because they worked with material other than words,” the real trouble was her “linguistic complacency,” her inability to feel “beneath the stale casings of language.” She needed “new methods of rendering the global crisis, new words,” language as an “alchemical force to transform that grief into something else.” This thread takes up much less of Immemorial than the study of statues and centers and rituals do, but it reveals the extent to which Markham always meant to write a book. It was only that she needed the right language. “I grasped for the right words,” she writes, “There didn’t seem to be enough of them.”

The particular word that she is looking for proves difficult to define. It isn’t always clear if Markham wants a word to memorialize the climate, or a word to describe the kind of memorial she is after, or a word for the desire for the memorial she wants, or a word for the desire for the loss to be memorialized? Does she want a name for the dirge, or for the ambitions of the dirge, or, perhaps most difficult, for the effect the dirge is meant to produce in the world? “I was breaking apart language like a giddy scientist and putting it back together again,” Markham writes, but the “quest” ends in failure. She settles on two candidates: “premation,” provided by an arts collective called the Bureau of Linguistic Reality, and a term of her own invention—“immemorialgia”—which is notably not the title of the book.

What is this new word, this new language, meant to accomplish? Markham doesn’t just want to express her affect more precisely. “What good were words when the world was burning?” she asks early on. She answers on the final page: she wants, through that alchemical force, to “let our grief become fuel.” Markham is trying to theorize a genre; she is trying to answer the question “what does a book about climate change do?” and has found that the unselfconscious dirge—the pure expression of response—is insufficient. She wants the response that transcends mere expression, the kind that might change the world, the kind to stir the heart of God and avert the end of days.

The tragedy of the “book about climate change” is that having finally encountered an apocalypse we brought upon ourselves and could prevent without the intercession of a higher power, we nonetheless did nothing: words were not enough. The first two eras of the climate book could not move our fellow men, and so like the villagers, like Haik Artasheyan, we have turned to the theurgy of affect. The climate dirge is a modern genre, so this impulse is subterranean, half-conscious, half-expressed, yet how else to read the whole of the climate dirge but as something animated by the barely concealed psychic need to bridge the terrible gap between language, which is so inadequate to the catastrophe, and action, which feels impossible to undertake, even if it’s not already too late? Singers of the dirge want a song capable of summoning the rain. Markham, like many writers in her genre, is committed to a kind of Whorf hypothesis—the idea that “words help determine the reality we live in”—she means this academically, socially, not literally. The dirge settles for expressing a response because nothing else seems possible.

This is the old dilemma of post-structuralism: having overthrown the Enlightenment’s belief in empirical reason, the revelation that we can only access reality through the mediating influence of discourse does not mean that discourse itself is reality, and Markham is not the first artist of considerable talent who struggled with the discovery that the function of writing is not to change the world but to describe it. The climate dirge is an honest genre: it does what books do—it feels, it remembers, it describes, it mourns—but its metacognizance comes, painfully, in remembering, describing, and mourning the extent to which this all begins to feel beside the point. What is left to the page is just this searching for a new way to say what writing wants to do but can’t.

Early in Immemorial, Markham says that she has a “syntactical problem […] one that required time to be bent like a boomerang.” This is what she believes is so challenging about the dirge: the absence of vocabulary for this abscess in time. She returns again and again to this feeling that she is moored between a vanishing past and a terrible future, trying to remember what has yet to happen, trying to preserve what has already been lost, trying to find a novel way to express this strange place and this strange feeling, one that will provide the fuel for her grief. But there is already a term for the precarious edge between the past and the future: the present. And there is already a phrase for the grief and the longing and the uncertainty she feels, one perfectly adequate to mere expression, even if it’s so far failed to touch the mind of God: “I’m afraid.”

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Featured image: Arkhyp Kuindzhi, Red Sunset, 1905–08. Rogers Fund, 1974, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974.100). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed December 11, 2025. Image has been cropped.