The Art of Letting Go

A New and Personal Audio Story

Do you know the Elizabeth Bishop poem, One Art? It’s the one that begins

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’ve had that poem on heavy rotation in the car the past few months. (Though don’t try telling Siri to play one art.) I love the tension in the words: as the voice of the poem cheerfully exhorts us to Lose something every day and then to practice losing farther, losing faster—  exuberant encouragements to raise one’s middle finger and embrace the temporality of the things of this world, and to prove that the art of losing isn’t hard to master — as the poem proceeds it feels evident that the person who the narrator is trying (and failing) to convince of this is herself. The result is a poem of dreadful joy and delightful loss, a cathartic song/scream whose YouTube-equivalent might look like the minimalist Marie Kondo giving one of her “spark joy” entreaties while wearing a death mask.

Side note: google ‘One Art drafts’ to marvel at the gap between Bishop’s ok first draft and the transcendent final version. Recently I learned that witnessing this transformation journey from first draft to last inspired one of my favorite podcasts, Song Exploder.

Anyway, my relationship with the art of letting go of things is a complicated one. I am a minimalist traveler, to a fault — I get an embarrassingly deep thrill from travel hacks like rubber drain stoppers (you gotta know it to know it) to reduce the weight of my pack an additional ounce. I also have a terrible memory for things past, I am the constitutional opposite of nostalgic, and thus hold a kind of surprised reverence for the sort of folks (the filmmaker Vincent Liota calls them keepers) capable of holding onto one object for decades.

This is a long way of saying I was glad to be invited to join the inaugural cohort of Audio Flux and to make a short audio piece about the art of letting go. Audio Flux is a new experiment in audio fellowship with a cuddly logo and a simple premise: creativity borne of constraint. Our “assignment” came with formal rules, as follows:

1. Create an audio story , on the theme of Letting Go.

2. Story must be exactly 3 minutes in length, and

3. it must include a recording, 3 or more years old, from one’s personal archive, and

4. it must be inspired by ONE of these three drawings: 

caption...

These drawings are by Wendy MacNaughton (bestselling author and artist and giver of TED talks). I would encourage any of you with a desire to make visual art or to find joy in making art with others to check out her Draw Together Substack. I got to hang out with Wendy at the IMI Festival in Austin TX this past week. (Big thanks to IMI for supporting this Audio Flux round.)

(I’m also very curious to know which of these drawings you would have chosen. Which one speaks to you, on the theme of letting go??) 

The image I chose was the middle one - The Reader. As you might have gathered from my earlier praise of the Bishop poem, I am a sucker for art that contains opposites, and for me there is a poignancy in this image, in the contrast between the boldness of the book’s title (“And Now You Can Go”) and the lethargy of the book’s reader. It made me think about how the loudest encouragements to seize the day sometimes arrive when you feel least capable of the courage needed to do the seizing. Sometimes, “letting go” is less about giving up what you have as accepting what you can’t have. But what would be the audio version of that paradox? Such thoughts inspired this three minute piece, and the response image from Wendy MacNaughton below. (And hey, guess what? The jury chose my story as the winner!)

Wendy MacNaughton

I also present this story to you because I want to try an experiment of my own: if YOU have a story that comes to mind after reading this post or hearing this piece, pull out the voice recorder on your phone — do it now, so you don’t forget - and tape yourself for 3 minutes (or less). Tell me a story about something you let go of, or something that let go of you, and how it left you changed. Email me the file and I promise to listen, as long as it doesn’t exceed the time limit. You can email a voice memo to roughtransition [at] gmail [dot] com or just click this button.

Give me permission to share it, and I can share some of your stories in a future post.

In other news: I’m headed to Toronto this week to speak at the American Anthropological Association conference - some of you know I’ve been on something of an Anthro passion project of late (more about that soon) to bring the stories and tools of seeing in anthropology to all of you. Which brings me to today’s poll:

P.S. As for the many of you who wrote to subscribe to audio - coming soon! I’m just clearing some logistical hurdles and then I’ll post info on that.