Art of Forgetting~!

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 is not too hard to master
though it may look like disaster.


The poem entitled “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop is a villanelle that uses both the structure and content to evoke the emotion that the poet is conveying and it set me thinking...

Throughout the poem it seems that Bishop is not talking to an audience but rather thinking through or convincing herself of struggle and acceptance of loss in her life. Is it as simple as telling yourself over and over and over again that,"hey its no big deal…" I can get over this… or get over that...or can get over her/him!!

Here at this point I should clarify what exactly I meant by “getting over”. Getting over from something or somebody means, forgetting; wiping the concerned memory out of your conscious, sub-conscious or un-conscious mind (much like the guy you saw waiting for a lift on the roadside while you zapped in your friend’s car after a great drinking session at the local pub. You have absolutely no recollection of him the next morning.. and nor you bother to remember..) and that my friend is not quite possible.

A wise guy told me other day.. you know try to get used to your cleaned closet.. and I told him.. yeah even after you clean the 4 day old garbage, its stink lingers..and I guess even Ms Bishop will agree with me.. although she mastered the art of “losing” but mastering “forgetting” is a different matter altogether.

Eternal Love and Recurrence

Imagine, If you have to live your life just as it is everytime.. time after time, where nothing can be changed.. The choices which you made, decisions that you made, all were to remain absolutely same..will you be content in living it or you will be ready to throw this all away and never to return? This thought is not mine but of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, his popular theory of eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche writes, "What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!”

Well renounced Czech author, Milan Kundera, contradicts this theory. That is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again.

“Einmal ist keinmal” (whatever happens once mightas well have not happened at all!) If we have only one life to live, we might as well have not lived at all. By this logic life is ultimately insignificant; in an ultimate sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light — that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms (In his book by the same title) the unbearable lightness of being: because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as humans we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to extend beyond just our immediate surroundings.

Having said all this, my point here is, If I were to go with Nietzsche’s theory then my life will occur over and over again.. with the same people, same choices and same decisions. Moreover when I think of this theory in the context of “Eternal love” it means that one would be glad to spend lifetime over and over again with the same person one “loves”. What if you made a mistake? What if you actually loved your best friend but successfully chased the prized Casanova and now your present life is in tatters..and imagine living it over and over and over again.

Or going by Kundera, where einmal ist keinmal.. it really doesn’t matter if you love your best friend, or that crazed Casanova or your married neighbor next door, since life is insignificant; it does not matter. So you can end up loving all three and more, at same time or at different times, it doesn’t matter. Your actions will not have any consequences; one will not be weigh down with the heaviness of their decision. Isn’t it a liberating idea?

I couldn’t agree with Kundera any more. For me Eternal love is being in love with the idea of love for as long as you live. Love is a euphoric almost psychedelic feeling of lightness.. of happy warm sunshine, like a butterfly gliding over the spring flowers. It is not colored with tradition neither it is contained in rules and boundaries of society; of so called values nor good conduct. It is to let be, just be, like a flowing river, which ultimately merges with the ocean..to the higher power called nature. Life is now, it is that moment which matters the most, because what happens will not ever happen again. Love freely, impulsively, passionately.