Monday
The United States hit 700,000 Covid deaths over the weekend and it’s as though we hardly noticed, even as our local county hospital—like hospitals across the American south—fills up with unvaccinated Tennesseans. In this pandemic of those who refuse to get a shot, it appears as though certain Americans have “mastered the art of losing” their fellow human beings, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The One Art.”
I do not count myself amongst them. No fatalist, I am doing all I can to protect myself, my wife, and my 96-year-old mother. I would rage against either of them dying or against getting critically sick myself. But as I look out and see that only 36% of the eligible people in our county are fully vaccinated—and that only 24% of those in adjoining Grundy County are—I can’t help but think resignation has set in. As the speaker says in the poem, if you learn to accept losing something every day, soon you can resign yourself to losing even loved ones. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/ I love),” she writes, “I shan’t have lied” (about achieving mastery). In other words, one can write off dead people the way one writes off lost keys.
The poem sounds more like someone dealing with forgetting rather than with death—maybe the onset of Alzheimer’s or the alcoholism that Bishop suffered from. But it partially works in our case. At the end of the poem, the poet must forcefully remind herself to “Write it!”–in other words, interrupt the sweetly flowing rhythm and rhyme of losing and acknowledge that what she’s witnessing actually is a disaster. Because she has allowed losing to creep up on her, she has become numb to the catastrophe that’s staring her in the face.
700,000 deaths and counting is what disaster looks like. The only way to shrug that off—to master the art of losing—is to deny your humanity.
The One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
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.