Ait Benhaddou: Perfecting the art of losing and (not) seeing in the kasbah

Ait Benhaddoud is a jewel of a town. We stop here for the night on our way to Marrakesh. There is a certain stillness about the place. We check into a hotel right opposite the world famous Kasbah (Lawrence of Arabia was shot here). The day is spent meandering through palm groves (palmeria) and ruinous chocolate colored walls of the Kasbah. A languorous, contemplative day doing absolutely nothing. I get so lost in my thoughts that I manage to misplace my bag which contains two pairs of glasses and a book (total value = $400). I retrace my footsteps but alas I have lost my bag and my glasses (reading and sun glasses) forever! I am upset at my callousness but feel liberated in a strange way. As our land cruiser drives away from the Kasbah, I think about two of my favorite poems. One on loss, on the ‘art of losing’ and the other on not being able to see.

Travel on the road allows you to cultivate a certain detachment from things and when divisions dissolve, the heart does expand to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

One Art

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's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--- Elizabeth Bishop

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.

Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

-- Lisel Mueller