At a Loss: Part Two

by Guest Blogger, Alexa Mergen

Elizabeth Bishop

Continuing from last week’s guest blog post, we have part two of author and poet Alexa Mergen’s exploration of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and her own experiences of loss. If you would like to be considered as a guest blogger for inContext, get in touch at incontext@hercircleezine.com.

With a new bridge in place with my mother-in-law after three years of estrangement, armed with the arrogance of having engineered my life, I decided to build more bridges, to move from California to the East Coast, closer to my own parents and my stepmother, whom we barely know. Moving now, in a recession, means selling our house at a loss. We’d leave the Golden State with the equivalent of the hummingbird-sized nest egg we put down on our first house 15 years ago. With successive moves that nest egg ballooned magically to ostrich size. A Buddhist monk said, “If things are going smoothly you are merely between disasters.”

Nevertheless anger at realtors, flippers, lenders and debtors stewed in me like food poisoning until one morning I lay on the floor clutching myself in a foetal position. This anger I latched onto buffered chaos. Friends told us they could not sell at such a loss themselves though they confessed to feeling boxed in by their lives and otherwise ready to try something new. Holding anger left me no room for doubt. My meditation practice, erratic at best, lapsed; with it, all sense of gratitude. Gratitude is mindfulness; anger is mindlessness—we lose our minds in anger.

In my haste to get moving I mailed books and a photo album via the U.S. Postal Service media rate to my brother who offered to store it. The box was lost: the books my great, great grandfather carried in a trunk from Scotland to Utah in the 19th century were gone. The album contained rectangular Kodachrome photos of my brother and me collecting pine nuts in Great Basin mountains now heavy with tract homes. But as Bishop spins, “so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

I saw the movie Eat, Pray, Love with a friend much younger than I, who is in conflict over the next step in love and life. At one point, as we munched bonbons in the near-empty Cineplex on a Wednesday night, Julia Roberts’s voice surrounded us like earthly wisdom. Her character, Liz, says something about life as transitions, that if you welcome transition and take all you meet along the way as lessons from a teacher, you’ll come out well off. Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “… It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated….one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

Six months ago, I could not have predicted I would communicate with my mother-in-law, consider a move, nor quote Gilbert. “Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way,” she writes. I agree. “You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

Loss—of money, pets, people—does not cause misery. Attachment to loss does. How simply Buddhist on the surface and how deeply hard to live.

Translation. Transition. With trans- we are all always moving across and beyond. If you’re not moving, you’re dying, a boss once said to me. No, he said, if you’re not changing, you’re dying. Bishop left us “One Art”:

…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 disaster.

Every loss means something after. The box came back three months later, battered and with postage due. We’ve stayed in California, releasing a dream of moving. While things fall apart and away, words remain. “Lose something every day,” Bishop says. “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.”

There’s a star, astro, at the heart of the word disaster. Perhaps our millions of tiny disasters—the cake that doesn’t rise, the missed bus, the email lost in cyberspace—are our star shards, dimly illuminating what we have here.

Alexa Mergen is the author of From Bison to Biopark: 100 Years of the National Zoo, a chapbook, We Have Trees, and co-editor of the 45th anniversary anthology for California Poets in the Schools, What the World Hears. Two poems about her blind dog, Molly, will appear in the forthcoming Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology from Salmon Poetry. She recently completed a poetry manuscript titled Dirt Hill. Born in Iowa in 1967, she grew up in Washington, DC and Nevada, and lives in California. She is an avid walker, amateur naturalist, and a connoisseur and baker of pies.