The Art of Losing

Suddenly there are small, nearby emptinesses.

The corner full of crumpled blankets where he often slept. The bits of kibble that made you curse if you stepped on them in your stocking feet. A basket of old socks that were once tug toys or objects of hide and seek.

With Oliver, we knew it was coming. He was nearly 14 years old. It was blessedly sudden--a seizure or maybe a stroke; loss of strength, arrhythmia, disorientation. I carried him to the car, laid him on his bed in the back. They carried him on a stretcher into the vet office. A compassionate doctor checked vitals, explained, gave us space, then administered a painless end. "He's at peace now."

There are many lessons learned when you live with a dog, but the one that Oliver tried to teach me was the joy of life without caution or second thoughts. A dog's will is the purest kind of free will.

Dogs make us experts in the art of doing nothing. Tossing a tennis ball is a nice, monotonous diversion. And the dog wants to keep going...and going. Eventually, worries and obsessions fade, and you enter his world--marvel at his persistence, the grace of his easy gait, the beauty of his full-hearted run.

And, of course, the ultimate lesson--the one that sits with me now--is impermanence. With the passing of "dog years," we see a scale model of our own unwinding. The Seven Stages of Dog does not need the retrospective wisdom of a Jaques (from Shakespeare's As You Like It). It is right there in front of you: from pup, to mischievous adolescent, to stately maturity, to the infancy of old age.

For Oliver, it was a slow transformation, then sudden. Walks dwindled from a few miles to a few blocks to a few feet front to back yard. In the the sunset years, you can barely remember when he could climb stairs or leap onto a bed or sofa.

But in that shadow time after he's gone, the recent habits of the day-to-day stick to you: You turn from the breakfast table to offer a piece of your breakfast banana. Coming home, you check to see where he's been sleeping. Your internal clock still sends signals: Time for food--morning, night. Time for pills. Time for a walk.

Those reflexes dwindle. Memories linger. A few hold fast. Others return only with a shared photo or a story ("Remember when Oliver...?"). Most are gone with the passing years.

"The art of losing isn't hard to master," writes Elizabeth Bishop in One Art. Although she knows--and we know--it is its own particular sort of—as she calls it—”disaster.”

Uncommon Places

Photographer Stephen Shore sees the American landscape like no one else. He explains how he sees in an engaging interview with New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. In the interview, Shore has a lot to say about the simple act of “seeing” and turning that sight into great art.

Stephen Shore/Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

“What is it like to have eyes? Or to be conscious of our uses of them? I think our ideal way with art is 1) to see, 2) to look, and 3) to really see. How does that unfold? I think it’s important that you distill this into three aspects. The first aspect is physical. It’s what the eyes do. The second aspect is cognitive. It is apprehending the image from the eyes. The third aspect is metacognitive. It is being aware of apprehending what one sees. It’s this last that’s of particular interest to me as a photographer. It’s been my experience that, when a photographer takes pictures they’re seeing in a state of heightened awareness, they make subtle decisions that lead the resultant image to appear particularly vivid. “

Kurosawa’s Ikiru

Takashi Shimura in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru

Living—the Oscar-nominated feature starring Bill Nighy, directed by Oliver Hermanus, and written by Kazuo Ishiguro—is still on my “watch list.” But anticipating it made me curious about Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, on which it is based. In it, Kanji (Takashi Shimura), a mid-level cog in the city bureaucracy, finds out he has six months to live, and seeks escape from the news by wandering through bars and dance halls with various characters, only to find a renewed purpose in helping a group of local mothers build a playground in a neglected part of the city. There are crowd scenes that pulse with energy, but this is not the Kurosawa of Seven Samurai or Ran. It is dominated, instead, by the meditative and existentially dour face of Kanji. It will be interesting to see how Nighy handles the quiet depth of this role.

Sentence(s) of the Week—ribbit!

George Orwell wasn’t always spinning dystopian tales of life under Big Brother or Napoleanic pigs. Sometimes, he just liked to look around and write about what he saw. The socialist firebrand meets the dreamy observer in his essay, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” After a detailed chronicle of a toad’s habits and life cycle, he concludes with this:

“At any rate, spring is here, even in London. and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.” The Tribune, April 12, 1946.

Eclectic Salvant

Judging from the recent output of singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, it's been a restless couple of years. Boot up and shuffle a recent playlist, and it might start with a sarconic version of "The World Is Mean," from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. Next could be a 12th century song originally written in Occitane, an ancient language of France, translated into Haitian Kreyòl. Next, to offer a little "uplift," a soulful version of Gregory Porter's "There Is No Love That's Dying Here," interrupted with bursts of "You're out of the woods..." from The Wizard of Oz.

Ghost Song (2022) has been nominated for two Grammy Awards. Mélusine, released in March, 2023, is a song cycle of sorts that circles around a folk tale about a woman who turns into a half-snake every Saturday due to a childhood curse. McLorin Salvant’s restless embrace of variety isn’t an end in itself. She is a towering vocal talent. Her tone is whisky-rich and immersive. She can sooth in one phrase, alarm in the next, and explode into wonder after that. Wynton Marsalis, with whom she toured in the mid-teens, has said “a singer like this comes around once or twice in a generation.” Be sure to get your fill.

Have a good week.