Naomi Shihab Nye's "The Art of Disappearing"

Thoughts on, well, disappearing.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.



from Words Under the Words (Eight Mountain Press, 1994)

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I first encountered this poem in Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. It’s a lovely book, aptly titled. In that book, Busch writes:

Impermanence—in thought, feeling, belief, behavior—is the very condition of being.

This moment is just a few pages before Busch offers the phrase — in reference to James Tate’s poems — “clouds of small bewilderments,” which I adore. That phrase, coupled with the sentence quoted above, make me consider Naomi Shihab Nye as a poet of impermanence and, along with Tate and a few others who come to mind, a poet, too, of small bewilderments. Those are perfect little things to be a poet of — perfect little things that are full in so many ways.

In one of her poems, Nye writes:

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Such ideas, of flammability and littleness and smallness, feel so at the heart of Nye’s work, and they feel at the heart of today’s poem as well, a poem that perhaps urges the reader to make themselves as small as possible, to “become a cabbage” (an idea I find myself cherishing).

When Busch brings up this poem in her book, she writes:

I can tell you what invisibility is not. It is not loneliness, solitude, secrecy, or silence. The nature of the subject makes it difficult to be comprehensive, but my hope is to compile a field guide to invisibility, one to reacquaint us with the possibilities of the unseen world, to reimagine and reengineer our place in it with greater engagement and creative participation.

And so, I find myself thinking about invisibility and disappearance today. I find myself thinking about such things often lately, in a world where, as Busch writes, “a new vocabulary has emerged for…visibility.” Optics. Perception. Views. Clicks. Engagement. Brand awareness. This is the same world where, in “a culture with a seemingly insatiable appetite for self-promotion and exposure,” it is also true that “the human need to be seen has its limits.”

Perhaps that truth about our culture’s appetite for so much visibility is what makes the no that lands in the second line of today’s poem so jarring, especially for a poet who is as generous as Nye, a poet who wrote that happiness “flows out of you / into everything you touch.” But the no of the poem’s second line — though it might seem at first to be ungenerous — is actually a no of generosity, isn’t it? It is a generosity toward the self, a generosity that extends that same self the kindness to disappear into the world, into the soul, into whatever the body or mind or heart might need. Which might not be the party, the people. It might not be the visibility, the curated self moving through the curated world. It might instead be:

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

It might be that new project. And not just the project, but the ongoing work of it. Yes, as Nye writes:

It will never be finished.

Finishing, too, is a kind of visibility — isn’t it? It signals the end of something, and it often triggers a celebration. It is a moment when something is acknowledged, and often rightly, since the fact of finishing can be a moment of triumph, even beauty. But it is finishing that is what is most visible in the aspect of any work. It is finishing that signals to a wider public the need for celebration. In finishing, the work becomes visible, seen, published. It becomes product. The time becomes recorded. The cover gets made. The pages get sent off to the printer. And what of the time before then? That time of ordinary labor is often a time of invisibility. And so, when Nye writes that this project will never be finished, she is also hinting at the ongoing invisibility that makes up a life, even in this time of hyper-transparency.

I think our cultural tendency in the wake of such a point might be to say ah, how can we make the invisible more visible? And though there is truth to such a question, and goodwill at the heart of it, I wonder if it’s the right kind of question. I wonder if the question should be more like we live most of our lives invisibly, and there is a kind of goodness here, in this invisible work of a life — how can we acknowledge, celebrate, and live in this invisibility, rather than attempt to make every moment more brightly visible? I don’t know. Maybe that’s not the right question. But it is a question I’ve been asking myself lately.

Over a month ago, I received some not-great news about my once-healthy knee, and since then, my early morning runs have turned into early morning bicycle rides. I wake up before five in the morning, stretch a bit, and get on my road bike and am turning into Central Park sometime around 5:30. It is still darkish then, the sun hiding behind the East River, slamming the snooze button before waking with the throw of its blueblackpink blanket across the water of the reservoir, and for my first lap of the park, I am a small man on a small bike with a small speck of headlight cutting through the hazy early morning dark. There is hardly anyone there, and when I pass or am passed by any cyclist on that lap, it is with this quick, buzzing noise, maybe a voice behind it, someone anonymous letting me know (or me, anonymous, letting someone know) on the right or on the left.

I cherish that first lap of the park before dawn. I am new to cycling, and, during that lap especially, I can hear each pedal stroke and focus on the bend of my body as I lean into a turn. I click up or down the gears and they catch and move into place, and I feel my body adjust to them, the solid and satisfying crunch of the drivetrain whirring and turning. I feel my body most of all. The heat of it rising from the legs as I ascend, and the breath of it emanating out of me as I descend, relax my arms, bend my body low, click through the gears, and pedal again. In that first lap before dawn, I am someone practicing and moving and being and breathing. I am speed, too. The sheer rush of it, and the muscular, mechanical making of it.

In all of my years spent running, and in these weeks spent cycling, I never thought of such moments as long moments of invisibility or disappearance. In fact, such words never came to mind. I’ve always felt particularly visible, in part because of the physical idea of such acts, the way they connect me so intimately with my body. And yet, such connection could be considered a disappearance into the self, my own way of feeling like a leaf or a cabbage. Indeed, lately, it is only when I unclip after a ride, balancing the bike against my body, that I become aware again of all the various machinery that runs up against a self. The screeching cars. The other selves. The world, calling again to me at its own pace and from its own place, no longer my little and small thing, my tiny body moving through it — wind tunnel ears, body that breaks the wind.

I am working on an essay about learning how to ride a bike as a grown man, my friend Hal taking me to Central Park on a summer day, and the way I sweated and fell and sweated and fell, again and again, as people — hundreds, I imagine, cumulatively — walked past. I felt visible then. That’s a fact. And with that visibility came embarrassment, and shame, even. I took my shirt off and felt bloated and ugly and red, and I felt all of those things to a higher degree each time I tried to get on the bike and couldn’t. At some point, though, I surrendered; I disappeared into the long moment, to the sound of Hal’s voice, and to whatever joy I could find. And then I rode my bike. Joy was there, in such disappearance.

Yes, writing this out now, and writing about it in an essay, I am, as Nye writes:

trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Sometimes, I think, we have to disappear in order to remember, to love, to live. Sometimes, I think, we are so much of so much else. After a hard fall while cycling two weeks ago, I treated a wound day after day with Neosporin, only for it not to heal. I went to urgent care the other day, thinking the wound infected. I was wrong. The doctor spent a few minutes leaning over my arm, cleaning the open sore. I’m not cleaning the wound, he said, I’m cleaning out everything you put on it. Sometimes, I think, we lose ourselves with all we put on ourselves. Sometimes, I think, living is remembering that small particular detail of who and how you are, and disappearing into it, rather than layering onto it.

Sometimes, as one of my favorite poems by Nye reminds me, we even lie about what we see in order to disappear again into our own sense of peace:

    Yes       Yes

        I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

           where it is

I never thought of it this way, but maybe this fact of disappearance is why I enjoy those early mornings so much, the long and dark miles spent running or spinning around the park. I keep thinking of that phrase from a Bill Knott poem, when he writes It will look as though I am flying into myself. When I am up in the early morning, feeling my body flow along a downhill slope, I am flying not into the world, but into myself. I am living with the little intimacy I call my body, making out of it something too important to forget. Maybe I am disappearing. Maybe I am not catching anything. Maybe there is nothing to finish. Maybe I will never catch up.

It is no surprise that the Bill Knott poem mentioned above is titled “Death.” Death is, after all, the supreme and ultimate act of disappearance. But what if life can involve such disappearance, as well? Those moments when we fly into ourselves? When we acknowledge our frailty, our impermanence? When we realize that we could tumble any second?

The world always offers us instructions for living. It also offers us instructions for disappearing. Think of the leaf of Nye’s poem. Think of anything that only appears in your particular field of vision once you decide to offer it your attention. A disappeared thing, this world is. The problem with us is that we are making it disappear faster, into the kind of disappearance that has no reappearance. Permanently gone rather than impermanently here. There’s a difference. Funny things we are, so noticeable and yet still trying to be noticed. Oh, to be like a leaf. A cabbage. Ordinary spectacle, gorgeous bewilderment. Hold it in your hand; hold it in your mouth. Small disappearance that appears again and again as beauty.

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