Learning from loss
The work of making meaning from loss and absence is even more necessary now.
Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.
A couple of months into 2021, I’m perplexed enough by whatever kind of political transition we’re moving through that I can’t fully get my head around either what we’re coming out of or what we’re headed into. I’ve tried to get some perspective by reading essays from the last formal moment of transition in 2017. These included retrospective pieces, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “My President Was Black” (in The Atlantic), and forward-pointed pieces, like Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” (in TheNew York Review of Books).
Both of these pieces from the earlier moment have helped me get some limited purchase on the current moment, but I also read another, less political piece from 2017, Sheila Heti’s “A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante” (in Brick), that includes what feels like the most helpful single sentence I’ve yet come across. Ferrante says, in response to Heti’s question about tension and her creative process, “We have difficulty accepting that our lives acquire meaning more from losses than from gains, from absences rather than presences.”
Losses and absences are apt words for whatever it is we’re living through—and Ferrante’s claim that our lives acquire meaning through losses and absences feels to me like exactly the frame we need as we move forward. Ferrante is right, in my view, about the relationship between loss and meaning, and even more importantly, Ferrante is right to draw our attention to meaning as a category or phenomenon, as that part of our collective lives that we most ought to be thinking about.
Consider, for example, the question of whether schools should open, or what the order of vaccine distribution should be, or when we ought to travel. There are seemingly endless bits of technical knowledge that can inform our responses to these big, pressing questions, but the information on its own is never enough.
It can’t be, because information, or technical knowledge, cannot respond to our biggest questions—questions about what school means to our children and our future, or what inoculation means to our most vulnerable neighbors and to us, or what sharing a meal around a familiar, overcrowded table means to us and the people we love. We answer these questions by trying to foresee the meaning of what we will lose out on: proximity or safety; self-determination or public health; a sense of agency or immediate relief.
Ferrante’s comment, which she made while talking about art, implores us to look directly at what we give up—at our losses, our absences. This approach can clearly be extended beyond the realm of artistic production into politics. Given all the losses and absences of the past year, an approach like this would seem to provide hope that we might, in the current moment, make or acquire (a strange word in this context) a lot of meaning.
If we give ourselves the time and space to take seriously what was absent this past year, what we lost this past year, then we ought to be able to direct our politics in a more meaningful direction. I have my own sense of what was absent and what was lost, as I would imagine we all do, both in the political realm and in the personal realm. How then can we consider these losses and absences together—not only in the making of policy, but also in the making of meaning, through stories about the past and commitments for the future?
One way we can do this kind of considering together is, first of all, to recognize that looking squarely at the losses and absences is essential. Not to rush past, not to seek too quickly to solve.
A second way is to create more opportunities for community members to consider, together, what we’ve lost, what absences we’ve felt. This is what the organization I work with, Oregon Humanities, has been trying to do for a while, through Conversation Projects and letter exchanges and Connect in Place discussions and Beyond the Margins stories and even through a program called Consider This, which next Monday will explore negotiating water resources in the Klamath Basin and next Tuesday will take up white nationalism in the Pacific Northwest.
It turns out this work of making meaning from loss and absence is even more meaningful, and more necessary, now.
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