BRS: Michael Malay (video from UBCO) "The Grammar of Extinction"

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In one of his poems, Coleridge writes that the world is ‘one mighty alphabet’. We are surrounded, he thought, by emblems and signs, marks and inscriptions, by a universe loaded with meanings. If we could decipher these marks with our ‘infant minds’, we would find the world to be ‘Symbolical’: a large and spiralling metaphysical poem.

            What happens when these marks begin to go? When letters of the ‘mighty alphabet’ begin to peel away? This paper tells two connected stories. One story is about the decline of moth populations in the UK. I talk about lepidopterists who have spent their lives studying and caring for moths, and who are living through the mass disappearance of these creatures from the landscape. The other story concerns the cultural losses that follow from ecological ones. What happens when creatures that have filled the night-skies (and the notebooks of writers and poets) begin to vanish from the world? When the Silver-Y moth, for instance, or the Black-V, or the L-Album Wainscot, are no longer among the ‘letters’ of the universe?

We no longer see the natural world in Coleridge’s terms, as a ‘book’ filled with divine meanings. Nevertheless, we may still grasp the intuitive force of his idea. Instead of ‘mighty alphabet’, read ‘genetic codes’; and in place of ‘symbols’, read ‘signatures’: not the autograph of a Creator but the text of evolution, whose intricate and variegated writings, produced over unimaginable aeons of time, is writ large and small in the forms of biological life.

In this paper, I discuss what might be called ‘the grammar of extinction’, by which I mean the simplification of syntax, and the impoverishment of a landscape’s ‘meaning’, that comes with mass extinction.

Michael Malay is Lecturer in Environmental Humanities and English literature at the University of Bristol.