DEEP THOUGHTS FROM HARD LIVES

Sometimes the deepest thoughts come from those with the hardest lives.  Maybe always.  And what those with difficult lives touch in us are our vulnerable places;  places where, like it or not, through trial by fire our weaknesses become strengths. 

Look again at the poem I posted on December 21, 2021.  It's worth re-reading.  [I've spaced it differently here.]

 ONE ART

by Elizabeth Bishop (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956)

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.  The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.  The art of losing isn't hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.  I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.  

Elizabeth Bishop lost her father when she was an infant, her mother to mental illness just five years later and, as an adult, her lover to suicide.  Knowing this about her, we have no trouble believing that she's acquainted with the art of losing.  But mastered it?  As we read through the poem we begin to feel that she protests too much. 

Not that many of us have ever thought of surviving loss as an art.  Or a skill.  Bad luck maybe.  Inevitable.   And of course that comes through in her poem as the tension builds.  "Then practice losing farther, losing faster."  The pace clips along, the poet knowing that we--like she herself--have no choice.     

We can feel the apprehension in the poem.  For most of us, our loses do mount.  The predictable loss of objects of course, but then memories ("places, and names") and keepsakes (the watch), the future (trips we envisioned), the past (whole continents, rivers) and finally the loss of a person we deeply love-- which may happen at any age.  That loss does seem like disaster.  We must work hard to survive the greatest losses. And yet against all odds we do. We don't crumble into dust.  It's not permitted somehow, maybe even when we'd rather. 

At the end we see that she has not actually mastered loss.  Not because she's lying ("I shan't have lied" she demurs), but because no one does.  She has had to analyze it, parse it, write about it.  Like ours, her losses are incremental.  She does miss the "you"  with the joking voice, the intimate gesture.   And--even though succeeding, as must we all--she is working overtime to accept this vaster loss and buoy herself up.  

For me, this poem confronts those experiences most universal and profound.  It reminds us how grief, loss, disaster and survival live side-by-side in our lives. But she tells us this gradually, slant, if you will.   She begins with the inconsequential, like misplaced door keys or a squandered hour, then moves in stages to the death of one we love.  And if we do survive even this greatest of losses it must be at least in part because,  as Robert Frost says in Out, Out-- we are not the one dead.  A truth that could blind. 

One Art is hard to exhaust. And isn't that a gift?  It  is one of my favorite poems for its depth and beauty. Perhaps it is, or will be, one of yours too. 

Thank you to all who create.                   Nina Naomi