Learning to Master Disaster by Heart (2018)
A folded piece of paper has accompanied me since late last year, when I resolved to learn, by heart, a poem. I have kept it in a pocket of my weathered grey backpack, airily crossing the Bass Strait and venturing beyond the Macedon Ranges and, in between, threading all manner of urban streets on foot and wheel. It has accumulated the rhythms of these movements as I read it over and over, committing it to memory. Despite my cloying grasp on it, the poem is about loss.
Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, ‘One Art’, oscillates between “the art of losing” and the reassurance that each loss “wasn’t a disaster.”[i] The villanelle traditionally maintains its pair of rhymed lines that both appear in the first and last stanzas, then reoccur successively in each of the four middle ones. But Bishop modulates hers, giving the taste of loss and the looming possibility of disaster an altered note each time.
The loss of “things… is no disaster”, and the loss of “places, and names” will not “bring disaster.” Even losing “two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent… wasn’t a disaster.” The tense is inconsistent, from abstract present and future, to the real past. It builds towards a sense that, despite Bishop’s self-assuring mantra, loss doesn’t merely “look like” disaster.
Rather than succumb to the temptation to unfurl the poem in full – something I can now do from the scroll of memory – I will try to craft an analogy in which we can wander the poem together. To digress briefly, I want to build such a shared space because, as Gregg M. Horowitz writes in Sustaining Loss,
“A certain way of thoughtfully living in relation to art has disappeared, and with it, too, a certain solicitous concern to transmit culture between generations, the thoughtful living in relation to other people of which are was a central expression.”[ii]
My attempt to share with you this space is one of solicitous concern and relation to both art and life, one that aspires to reciprocity.
The poem could be a building. More precisely, a home. From the outside, it sits low either amongst trees along a country lane, or back from the street: not defensive, but rather, unobtrusive. Of mid-century modern design, the era in which Bishop came of age, it is layered with the absorptive, brooding darkness of wood or brick walls while remaining warmly inviting. The entrance is its rhyme and through the welcoming portico of repetition, we travel from room to astutely arranged room luxuriating in Bishop’s syntactical brilliance. Here, the volume opens into a domestic world and the light makes treading among the heavy, solid furniture of each word into easy work. The poem is both well-built in its formal quality, and has the easy-going calm of the accessible vernacular.
But among the careful ornamentation of the home lies the scattered symbols of loss that Bishop’s hand brushes with her meditative chant: “it wasn’t a disaster.” She tells us, and we partly believe her, at each turn that the objects in her house signifying cut off relations, decades of exile and forlorn dreams are evidence of her mastery over the art of losing, rather than testimony to disaster large and small.
Partly, we are convinced of her intractable resolution in the face of disaster by this very variation, from mere “things” to whole “cities”, and “vaster” – realms and continents – not losses likely mastered. By using the same poem to contain all these losses, Bishop is not seeking to deceive us. Instead, in that house of the poem she is noting how small objects remain steadfast memories of grief, loss and disaster.
Take up her “mother’s watch”, passed over so quickly in a five-word sentence in the middle of the poem. It is lost but its small, spectral weight hangs on the wrist constantly as the memory of the mother Bishop lost to an asylum as a child. I lost my grandfather’s watch, shortly after his death. It was a beautiful, simple watch that I wore with adolescent pride and affection, and it cast the soft shadow of the sensation of connection to his hand. I was reassured, after the commuter train journey swallowed it, that it was merely an object and I should not grieve. The loss was, strictly speaking, more mistake than error.[iii] But my grief was also for my grandfather, not so easily consoled.
Bishop uses the loss of the object to mediate the loss of the person, though at times, even this is too much. She instructs us to “practice losing farther, losing faster” (my emphasis), disguising in a homonym the father she lost at only eight months old. The word hangs with the ominous echo of loss, which, by translating into other words, Bishop is again reassured that “None of these will bring disaster.”
Disaster is a lingering absence, the canvas on which the poem is painted. The objects and words are composed so confidently in the poem that each time it seems as though the disaster has been averted and grief curtailed before that howling, wrenching feeling takes over. It seems as though the poem is telling us that each loss is “no disaster”, telling us in order to make it true.
So necessary is it to avoid the feeling of catastrophe that loss must become part of life; it cannot, therefore, be a disaster. To be a disaster would mean our undoing.
The wary eye detects the circular twist of logic that makes what cannot be, not be. Because we must live with loss, it cannot be a disaster. It will not be. It isn’t. It may look like it, but…
But Bishop’s poem is not merely a fantasy of self-composure in the face of loss and disaster. She confronts the reality of loss on the other side of the question Joan Didion asks in her memoir of loss, Blue Nights: “What if I can never again locate the words that work?”[iv] This, from a writer who earlier had written in The White Album with such bluster: “Style is character.”[v]
Analyzing the unsentimental style in Tough Enough, in which Bishop at times writes, Deborah Nelson finds that the suffering at the heart of trauma and disaster cannot overtake that need to articulate.[vi] Writers live by their words. If they suddenly fail to contain the experience of disaster, the writer would be at a loss. The composure of poetry, in both the sense of literary composition and emotional attitude, is a finely balanced scaffold for turning disaster into liveable loss.
Unlike Bishop, I have not mastered the art of losing. Nor have I mastered the art of the poem I sought to commit to heart. I continue to stumble over its delicate phrasing, appreciating anew each time the spaces given to breathe. I forget the need to modulate the pace of my recounting, sending the words out in a cascade so as to have finished my embarrassed recitation. And I, hardly, have lost enough to know what it means to master the art.
Yet the poem’s tone is neither didactic, nor admonitory. There is no scold for not having lost enough, no command to lose and be threatened with disaster. Despite the lines in the first half – “Lose something every day” and “practice losing farther, losing faster” – Bishop’s poem is not a lesson but an example: “And look!” We, the reader, watch her handle each object in the poem with care and biting sorrow but keep talking to us nonetheless.
When I am sleepless, with the damp dark of the night slowly encroaching on my effort at repose, I keep talking to myself. Lately, I have been able to turn from the incessant chatter of what tasks I have not done, to handle the poem. I turn each of the poem’s lost objects about, examining the marks of its absence, pausing over the watch and my grandfather’s wrinkled wrist whose touch I felt the shadow of, briefly, daily.
The flow of objects, contained in neat sequence within the tightly formed villanelle, loses the anxious rush of mislaid time or misspent things. They dance like my grandmother’s line dancing feet, a whole continent apart but joyously recalled, here, and now. Suddenly, perhaps, I am learning how loss is no disaster.
I read and write the loss into cogency without presuming mastery. It is posed best as a question, as does Brian Dillon in Essayism: “Was it possible I could write out of the fog itself, out of confusion, disarray, debility? From inside the disaster itself?”[vii]
There is a disaster inside each of the losses sustained by Bishop but they are far from disarranged. There is no disorder in the house of ‘One Art’ except that which is artfully intended. Out of each calculated burst of distress, Bishop cultivates the beautiful object that is the poem and proffers it to us in common.[viii] If the condition of disaster is one of speechlessness, a writer tends to that condition like a doctor to illness.[ix]
Unlike the doctor, however, the writer does not solve or heal the illness or wound. After a disaster, grief and loss become part of us in a way that even scars do not. They move and affect us in unexpected ways. Lessons cannot prepare us for the ways loss returns to us. Disaster exposes us to something beyond us, a reality that then must be “faced in a condition of exposure”, as Deborah Nelson puts it.[x] On the other hand, disaster can acquire the appearance of irreality in its overwhelming magnitude. In fact, Nelson believes, this sense of irreality comes about by turning away from the disaster and failing to face the loss it brings. Art brings us back, swivels us towards what we might not want to confront.
It gives us back the sense we need to live with loss. I mean ‘sense’ in as many ways as there are senses: the way we touch, smell, hear, see and taste the world; the way we make meaning out of those sensations; and the sense we have in common, the way we can share with one another both what we sense and what we mean.
What is most difficult, in Bishop’s poem, which creates the most aching sense of hesitation, is in the final stanza. It begins, not with a word, but with a ‘dash’:
“ – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied…”
The mere dash – that break in all the words that have been giving us sense up to now – halts me every time I recall by heart the poem. It threatens us, like disaster, with the failure of any way of making sense of our lives. And it is even ‘you’, the figure of the beloved for Bishop, whose loss almost derails the poem. You to whom I might share my sense, to whom I might give my words.
It is with mysterious urgency that Bishop reassures us that she “shan’t have lied.” This line hints at the turmoil of facing the disaster and turning it into sincere words in testament to the loss. It pairs ambiguously with what follows:
“… It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
There is a sense of awkward misplacement about the possibility of Bishop having lied and the self-evidence of the final lines. We would not have thought her dishonest if she did not tell us she was not dishonest. The double negative dips towards disaster, then pluckily rights itself – or writes itself – again as it sails over the wave towards the lighted horizon of sense.
We get wet. It can be a miserable sensation, especially in cold or dark. The wave of disaster looms, surges, crashes, and drenches but also passes. It carries things away irretrievably, which we must leave behind though we may grieve. Indeed we should grieve. By turning towards what sense we can make and the ways we can share it with one another, across traditions and generations we can recuperate from the disaster of loss. From the tumult of disarray, Elizabeth Bishop shares an art, ‘One Art’, so that we might share her sense with each other, by heart.
Image credit: Elizabeth Bishop sleeping, date unknown. Copyright @Barbara Hammer. Image from Hammer’s 2015 documentary film, Welcome To This House (https://euppublishingblog.com/2019/05/02/22-things-you-didnt-know-about-elizabeth-bishop/)
[i] Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ was published originally in her collection Geography III in 1979, the year of her death, and is collected in the 2011 collection Poems (Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’, in Poems, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p.198). It can also be found in full online at The Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art).
[ii] Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, p.17
[iii] cf J.L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’
[iv] Joan Didion, Blue Nights, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, p.111
[v] Joan Didion, The White Album, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p.127
[vi] See Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017
[vii] Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, p.120
[viii] cf Lauren Berlant, ‘Trauma and Ineloquence’
[ix] medicine and writing in Huysmann’s The Damned, also Derrida’s Pharmakon.
[x] Nelson, Tough Enough, 2017, p.75
