Meditation 6: One Art

Since my senior year of high school, when I discovered e.e. cummings [and never looked back], I have defined large portions of my life in relationship to the poetry I was reading then. That senior year of high school, when I was falling in love with Joey, I couldn't stop reading "since feeling is first" and "somewhere i have never traveled," and I learned that good poetry is the kind that makes you unable to breathe when you read it.

Since then, that has been the criteria.

When I was a sophomore, when I spent months in a deep depression over the events going on with my job and in my school, I was far too attached to Pound's "The Garden" and Eliot's love song. I measured my life in coffee spoons. I knew, too, that the mermaids would not sing for me.

This past year, during the winter and spring, I was in love with Peter Gizzi's "It Was Raining in Delft." Beauty does walk this world. It does age everything.

And I like the idea that maybe [just maybe] I am just another I-am poem.

But this semester, I found another poem. I found it when I called Roberto to read him a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, when he one-upped me with another Bishop, a better one, a perfect one.

This semester, I've read it over and over again. I turn the words over in my head daily, I say them with my steps as I walk to school. I love the repetition of the villanelle, which constantly reminds you, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." It's true; I have lost many things.

The other day, I was thinking about how I would really love to write something for the Anatomical Gift service, but also about how I don't write the things everyone else may write. The over-sappy thank-yous, the standard Bible verses that do little to comfort those who have already lost. Those who know, all too well, that the art of losing isn't hard to master.

I started thinking, too, about the opposite of losing. If you ask something what the opposite of loss is, they would tell you immediately that "to find" is the antonym of "to lose." I posit, however, that this is not entirely accurate. I think, maybe just a little bit, that the opposite of "to lose" is "to give."

Think about it--when one loses or one gives, one relinquishes something that one owned. In losing, it is done unwillingly, accidentally, unintentionally. There is a sadness associated with loss. You no longer have something, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Giving, however, is the opposite. You no longer have something, but you controlled that relinquishment. It was not accidental, but intentional, and probably gracious.

And if the art of losing is not hard to master, then the art of giving must be the opposite. The art of giving is hard to master.

Which brings me back to the anatomical gift ceremony. Gift. Our cadavers were once people, and those people--and their families--have shown aptitude in the art of giving. More incredible than that, they took the art of losing--which they could not control--and transmuted it into something more difficult and more beautiful. They gave these bodies to us, gave up the chance of going down, down, down into the grave [the lovely, the wise, the beautiful, all of it] and gave, instead, what might be considered the ultimate gift.

They gave not their lives, but their deaths. Their families gave up the right to inter them in a bodily form, to close a casket on a face and say goodbye. They gave up the right to go in "peace," because lab is certainly no peaceful place.

But what is important is that they conquered the art of giving, which is--undoubtedly--quite hard to master.