A Whitman Moment

I do not work in a quiet environment, by any stretch of the imagination.  People around me talk all the day long, because that's their job.  Some days are noisier than others.

And some days, I find myself feeling as though I'm the quiet eye in the center of a perfect storm of noise that's all around me, that's enveloping me, and that makes me feel as though I'm part of it and it's part of me. That the noise is me and the world and me in the world, and then...

Then, all of a sudden, I realize that Walt Whitman's poem Song of Myself just started making a little more sense to me.

Please Don't Quote THAT Tennyson

I've always worn my English nerdery on my sleeve: after all, anyone who speaks with me for more than forty-five seconds will begin to suspect anyway.

But at work, this sometimes causes people to shake their heads--when I start discoursing to them about what I'm reading (the pun book, so far, is intriguing and fascinating!) to when I defend fiction (really, people, you can learn things from novels...I swear it!!!) to when I start talking about the nebulous definition of a word like "classic" (after all, it seems odd to be able to label things "modern-day classics" when usually the idea is that the classics have stood the test of time--almost as though you're making a pre-emptive decision that says to a book: "YOU WILL LAST FOREVER IN A MEANINGFUL AND VERY PUBLIC FASHION").

By far though, the best chuckle I think I've solicited from someone at work is after (on more than one occasion) he had been questioned why we were doing something, and he said: "Ours is not to question why." I grant that it's possible I physically cringed, or twitched at the very least, and almost begged that he not quote that particular line...

...because in "Charge of the Light Brigade," it's promptly followed by "Ours is but to do and die." (Not "or" die, mind you. "And" die.)

Since I value my life, I'll continue to question why.

Bishop's in My Brain, or Brief Thought on Loss

I've always loved the Elizabeth Bishop villanelle "One Art"--but something new struck me about this poem today. And yes, I'm nerdy. And yes, I was thinking about this poem semi-randomly. And yes, I don't need to read it because I know it by heart.

That's because it's a most excellent poem.

Anyway, my thought revolved around the idea that certain things have an intent to be lost, because I'd never particularly thought about that until today. And really, that's an interesting intent to assign to certain types of inanimate objects. (I must admit: I quite like the idea of keys intending to get lost...)

But then, the whole point of the poem isn't actually that the art of losing isn't hard to master, it's the exact reverse: that the art of losing is hard to master. When I think back to the early idea of intent in the poem, I begin to think that Bishop may well have been onto something: our ability to master loss depends on our willingness to accept responsibility for the loss. Our ability to fess up and say: yes, that was my fault, I'm the one who let that go.

It seems to me that if we are able to do that, if we are able to acknowledge that we did the losing, that just may be the first step in regaining some of the things we've lost. Perhaps.