Lost Arts
A prelude to 'Doubt and Un/Certainty' (coming soon!)
Elizabeth Bishop wrote that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” One Art can be read as an unflinching encounter with the fear, loneliness, and anger, too, that come with loss. “Lose something every day,” Bishop counselled obliquely, in the same poem. I remember returning to her poem more than ten years ago when I was feeling rather sorry for myself. I surely was, I felt, testing her slanted guidance. Newly single and shoulder-deep in the fallout of late-in-marriage divorce with all its emotional, financial, and practical challenges, I suffered another blow when my adored father suffered a heart attack that would prove fatal.
It was an odd loss to follow the collapse of a long marriage. Two men. But not just any two men. A husband and a father. If there continues to be pressure on women to please, I can think of no two life-relationships more central to that particular, formative battle of girl/womanhood.
Although I could not foresee it while early grief had a hold on me, these two losses, coming so close together and relatively late in life, would bring me face to face with that battle again - the lifelong pressure on women to please, make ourselves smaller than men, draw them out, suffer their opinions when our own are so frequently ignored or stolen, earn less, never age, accept invisibility when we do age. The list goes on. Finding myself more alone than at any time in my life, I gazed upon the battle with new clarity. And despite my long feminism, I found I had not won as often as I liked to think.
There is nothing like unexpected loss and the contemplation of solitude in worlds that are intensely peopled and organized into units. A divorce and a death, two shocks, lightning flashes followed by low rumbling thunder. In the night sky lit by a summer storm, I glimpsed – for the last time – my life before. Then the sky returned to the moonless and starless deep blues and greys of an overcast night. My past had been extinguished. I saw how easily luck runs out and how unprepared I was. Days, weeks, and months would follow. I knew that. And I would learn to live with a sense of precarity that had not been there before.
I played Buckets of Rain a fair few times: Life is sad, life is a bust / All you can do is do what you must, sang Mr. Dylan. I saw the element of chance too, initially painful, then intriguing. Forced back upon the lone self more sharply, I began to view my interactions with others as if my eyes had been lasered. Chapter one, start again, it’s a blank-page mystery. I saw the daily opportunity to make myself without reference to a parent or partner. And this rippled out to larger waters. At a certain point, every person felt new: family members, friends, lovers, and strangers. I felt new. The effects – those many years ago – were tangible. Although tossed by crashing waves of grief about my father and swells of bitterness about my ex-husband, I had to admit that I enjoyed my own company. This is not to say I enjoyed it all the time. It is not to say that I felt no loneliness, no regret, no fear of what the future might bring. But it is to say that I liked moving about the world as a free agent, untethered by the emotional expectations of one ‘significant’ other.
I was lucky in finding love and support from friends, both women and men. But it is also true that being single heightened my feminist impulses. And perhaps I had been naïve in counting the successes of 1970s feminism, because I was truly surprised to see how many of those old conflicts concerning the personal and the political were still flaring. Not only in the wider world of political ideas and activism, but on my own doorstep.
Let me put it another way. You could say that the art of losing is not terribly compatible with the art of pleasing. And here and there, my growing reluctance to please resulted in strained work relations or friendships, notably with men. First, I noticed yet again that with some men, unless I continued to ‘draw them out,’ privilege their words and experience, and keep relatively quiet about my own, or to paraphrase Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, serve as a mirror to reflect the figure of man at twice its size, well, I risked ending up not only half their size, but effectively unheard and unseen. This began to bore me more quickly and decisively than before. And ultimately, it added to my growing preference for the single life.
There were also particular moments of acute communication failure. Typically, it began with my voicing a criticism or difference of opinion that escalated into an argument. I was struck anew by the rigid confidence of male opinion and the ease with which it could be injured by my not backing down. In a few instances, I saw men resort to very old tactics. I was told I was oversensitive, that I lacked a sense of humour. I was bitter. Perhaps I needed therapy. Yes, the figure of the questioning woman recast as mad is still out there, and it did not take me long to confront it.
This is not to say I was never sensitive, bitter, or lacking in humor. Of course, I was! As a human being in possession of the gamut of emotions, I would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But when the ordinary and human becomes a trope, a means to make someone ‘representative’ of a ‘group problem’ and to put that someone ‘in her place’, well… it can and should be called out. I am still regularly struck by how unthinkingly some men resort to such old reactions – even in friendly conversation. Very often, they simply don’t see the system of privilege in which they operate, and in this, it helps sometimes to view them not as oppressors but as victims too. This is not to say we should grin and bear it. But it can be a source of healing in friendships that are damaged by the internalized workings of power.
And now? All these years later? It helps me to remember the stretch of time that followed that loss of ‘two men’ – husband and father, one too soon after the other. How painful and confusing it was, and still can be. How it made me return to Bishop’s poem. How I began to rethink my dialogues and relationships with others. How to love my male friends without diminishing myself. In retrospect, these were small but significant moves, paving the way for a gentler acceptance of life’s shocks, losses, and changes. Or, more to the point, we don’t know what’s coming, what it will do to us, how it will alter our friendships, whether it will prove good or bad, or even what we should do in any given situation.
These days, fierce arguments are rare. It’s a measure of hard-earned strength and peace that I choose disagreements more carefully. And whether to remain and discourse or walk away – well, this depends on the subject, the stakes, moral questions, projects, the setting, and most importantly, the other person. Do we matter to one another? Is there mutual respect? Can we make good friendship? Good collaborations and learning? To repeat the old childhood question that we really should bring to adulthood, are we having fun yet? If these are mostly a yes, then stay. But sometimes, let it go.
But something else has altered. A recognition that some of the old fights reduced me to behaving like a few of my male opponents. Surely, this was no victory for me and no victory for feminism. Need I remind myself of Margaret Thatcher syndrome? If winning means behaving like the men who have been winning for centuries, who wants it? And of course, few arguments are ever ‘won’. It is a precious thing for two fierce adversaries to reach a new knowledge or understanding that is beyond winning or losing. So, I suppose I’m seeking a subtler, more compassionate form of conflict and discourse, at least in my own communications.
And lately, I find myself more actively exploring states of doubt. The capacity to begin with a question rather than an assertion. Or to say, I don’t know, I’m not sure. Can we talk this over some more? Maybe womanhood, or perhaps now, I want to say personhood, is not only about the art of losing. Not only about how to unlearn the art of pleasing. It’s about coming to cherish and practice the art of not knowing. To borrow again from Bishop’s lines, unknow something every day. It is not hard to do.
If you need a bit of added inspiration, here’s Joni, who at a very young age, sang hopefully about not knowing life at all, and then sang it again as a wise woman of many years.
And on the topic of doubt, watch this space. A post is to follow!