Anna Gotlib
In her villanelle, “One Art,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop conveyed feelings that I've come to share:
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…
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.
Composed after a separation from her partner, the poem takes on love, loneliness—and importantly, the stories we tell ourselves about our supposed fearlessness before loss, no matter how great; our vaunted ability to, given the fleetingness of everything, simply move on; our armored knowingness meant to protect us against what is to come. Our refined art of losing.
But somewhere in that poem, Bishop suspects that we, as the artists of loss, are not quite as good as we take ourselves to be. Perhaps we have not mastered anything at all.
This is also an observation about loss. And like Bishop, I have dedicated a not insignificant part of my life “getting through” significant losses. Lately, it's the geographic ones that are haunting me.
Those count, right?
For a while, I have known that I have lost two countries: the U.S.S.R.--a frightening place that did not want people like my family - and Russia - a place that became....well, you know what it became.
The Soviet Union remains for me something like a nightmarish cradle into which I was born, filled with harsh voices, harsh lights, and harsher politics. It is also where I learned to cut sharp divisions in my “inside” and “outside” ways of thinking and speaking, as saying the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time could lead to the kinds of treatments reserved for the “enemies of the people.” I learned that saying less is always better—unless saying more meant throwing them off the scent of the “traitor.” A nightmarish, Cold War cradle—but my cradle nevertheless. And then it vanished.
Post-Cold War Russia was a second chance, although I was no longer living anywhere near its borders. Perestroika! Glasnost! A few years when ideas of reconnecting—although never moving back—were suddenly more possible, or at least less ridiculous. Look at all those teens in their jeans, listening to Western New Wave music in the open! Look at the lines wrapping around Moscow’s McDonalds!
But not so long after, came Putin and the oligarchs….and the iron curtain descended again…although it was less iron, and more greenish with money and greed; more red not with the hammer and sickle, but with the blood of those who dared to dissent. Any hopes of some kind of connection sank deeper still with every word of Russia’s new dictator-for-life.
So what about now? I suppose that answer is frighteningly simple: I have lost the place to which we, leaving almost everything and everyone behind in the U.S.S.R., fled. A place that, with all of its problems and flaws and imperfections, was still refuge from the totalitarian hellscape we managed to escape.
So here I am, in the United States. I finished growing up here. I met so many people I love and care about here. I saw the world because unlike over there, I could. I became a philosophy professor here. I found a sort-of home here.
That last part - the sort-of home part - is now mostly gone. The United States - because of those who have voted for the invasion, sat out the voting process, voted "in protest" for outcome-determinative spoilers, or otherwise opted out of the responsibility to prevent the worst possible outcome - has allowed the invaders (yes, invaders) to destroy what was good, or less bad, or even tolerable about this place.
Maybe nobody imagined that it would be this bad. But come on: they said what they were going to do. They tried to do it in 2016. We were warned. Too many of us did not listen.
But back to the personal: I am now losing a third country. In all the ways that matter, I feel, once again, stateless. I am sorry if this sounds solipsistic--after all, I am not one of the people most threatened. Although if Stephen Miller starts the "denaturalization" process...
What am I? I am the master of “the art of losing.” An expert. A professional. And I proclaim for all to hear: The water is rushing in. It is, in fact, a disaster.
Anna Gotlib is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY, specializing in feminist bioethics/medical ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of law. She co-edits the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and is the editor of The Moral Psychology of Sadness (2017); and The Moral Psychology of Regret (2019).