Lessons for Losing

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines how two very different thinkers address the question of how to live loss. The first is the Canadian Cree artist and writer Tomson Highway, author most recently of Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordians, and the second is US environmental writer Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. In two very different modalities of knowledge making, we see a shared quest for a planetary subject able to live loss in a clear-eyed and affirmative way. For Highway, the question is how to live loss, beginning with language loss, without losing the capacity for laughter and joyfulness. The arts of the trickster are his answer. For Rush, the question is: what changes can we be making now to head off crisis, and what language can make such change meaningful and desirable? We also see the two writers striving to make language respond to the challenge of scale. How do you capture the gigantic without being abstract? Highway moves to the mythic, arguing for Indigenous pantheism. Rush tacks between the particulars of planet science and the personal narratives of those living the loss of place.