#7: On Letting Go
February 27, 2024
Cambridge
SOPHIE – Is It Cold in the Water?
Here’s a poem that I didn’t get until I had lived a little: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. The New York Times has done a marvelous deep dive into it if you’re interested. The short version is this: the art is loss, it isn’t hard to master, and the poem ends with a wobble: losing something “may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
The poem says it’s talking about the moment of loss itself, but I think it evokes something else, a slightly different concept that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: letting go. It’s a beautiful pair of words: let (to allow a process to occur without disturbing it) and go (to move, to skip, to plummet; to, well, go!). The image that comes to my mind when I imagine letting something go is releasing the thing into a river and watching it float away.
Rivers. In “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop describes a river that reminds her of “what we imagine knowledge to be.” It’s a moving passage:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Bishop’s knowledge river is connected to my letting-go river. Letting something go means giving in to a truth that already exists. The dog wants to chase the squirrel. The balloon wants to float away. My friend’s mom is gone. They’re the same river. (For additional support I can’t help but point to the title of Joni Mitchell’s great song about a failed relationship.) In Bishop’s telling, the river is terrifying: “If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn.” It’s “dark.” It’s “utterly free”—free as in wild.
What I’ve been thinking about is how the act of letting go is intimately connected to the act of freeing our minds from the various oppressive habits that the world teaches us. Really what I’ve been thinking about (and I know it’s silly) is stopping going to the gym. For years I’ve at least tried with some consistency to get stronger (or maybe just bigger muscles, I’m not sure). I bench press, I deadlift, I do pull-ups. But most days, there’s something I’d rather do with that time—even if it’s just lay in bed and watch TikTok. So I want to replace my heavy weight routine with something a little closer to what RBG did before she died.
I’m trying to let go of the idea I am better if I am stronger. There are a million things like this, ideas that we don’t want to care about, but that we nonetheless do. Those ideas, as I wrote a few weeks ago, aren’t just annoying mind-mosquitos. They’re really bad! When I hate myself for not being strong, I undermine my conviction that it’s okay for other people (other men) to not be strong. When I worry about getting bad grades in a class, I undermine my commitment to the principle that grades don’t say something about a person’s worth. There are a lot of ideas like this, and letting go of them would be great.
More than great, letting go of them is necessary. It’s solidarity. As long as we apply an oppressive measurement to the world, to ourselves, we’re keeping it alive—even if right after we apply it, we say “oh, but it doesn’t mean anything anyway.” The measurements—weight, strength, grades, health—mean something if and only if we apply them. So into the river with them!
But like Bishop says, letting go may feel like “disaster.” Even something as silly as not going to the gym feels like it. Especially when I think about really committing to letting go, no matter how my body starts to look after months or years of RBG weights. I’m not even sure that letting go is something that you do; it might just be something that happens. My grand theory of letting go will wait for another week; for now, I just mean to invite reflection on what it means—and why it matters—to let go.
To close what has been a very free-assocation (ahem, flowing) email, another poem and another sense of “letting go.” In “Mystic Bounce,” Terrance Hayes writes: “If I were in charge, I would know how to fix the world: free health care or free physicals, at least, and an abiding love for the abstract.” It makes me think of the meaning of let go as a reflexive verb: to let yourself go. To open yourself up to the abstract, the unknown. To face the strange. To step into the river yourself and let it carry you.