Ask me anything, but not to write (about) elegy (again). Or on the weight of loss.

In any case those objects, to return to Rosselli’s poem, have acquired a certain “peso” [weight/heaviness], and it is on this aspect that I am going to focus on in relation to the elegy. After having long thought about the elegy in relation to a lack of presence, I want to explore it through a lack of absence, or rather: how fat did I become. To quote Cavalli again, it is not about‘Il peso immenso del tuo corpo assente’ (the immense weight of your absent body) that I want to talk.[2] I want to mourn all the weight I gained and think about elegy along this thought. I do not know how to mourn something that is even more present than ever before. My weight has not disappeared, but rather has stretched out to the point that the friction of my inner thighs’ sweats fat. It is almost 40 Celsius degrees in Florence, and my weight is naturally heavier in this heat. How do I mourn this extra 20 kilos of white greasy fat that were not present two years ago?

Do I mourn it by starving myself?

Do I mourn it by ignoring it?

Do I mourn it by creating a monument to it, as so many recent bad elegies do?

How much is the cost of my mourning this gained weight?

These questions tackle the intra-action between ethics, aesthetics, and the personal as well as financial cost that define (or should define), in my view, contemporary mourning practices. It seems to me—and this is one of the first points I would like to make about contemporary elegies—that discussions of mourning rarely consider the financial implications. How much money did Elizabeth Bishop spend moving between cities in her poem “One Art”? Would those same movements cost me more today?

These movements are not just geographical but represent the shifting terrains of mourning itself—costly, burdensome, yet often overlooked. If the elegy operates within a tangled web of the singular and the collective, what happens when one feels detached from both? Perhaps the true object of concern is not the lost object itself but the mechanics of the elegy—how it works, what it demands, and the economies it creates. Here lies the harsh violence that operates within the machinery of the elegy, if not, more broadly, any creative act.

But let us return to money. Money, then, becomes a lens through which to explore not just the act of mourning but also the broader systems of value and transaction that the elegy engages with. If the cost of mourning is literal, how do these intertwined costs shape the way we grieve, remember, and ultimately, write? What if the act of mourning is not just an emotional reckoning but also a negotiation with the economies that govern our lives? This raises larger questions about the accessibility and privilege embedded in the elegy: Who can afford to mourn? And what are we willing to pay—financially—to mourn? By exploring these questions, we can better understand how elegy functions as a complex ritual that intertwines personal and cultural economies, often invisibly.

With this in mind, two more poems by Cavalli offer a provocative entry point into these entanglements, as it engages with the weight of loss.

First, we should agree that summer makes everything heavier—or at least I want to read that Cavalli’s line in a way that it talks about my summer, my mourning. Here comes the related questions: do we still ask modern and contemporary elegies to speak directly to or about our mourned object? Should the elegy be burdened with this responsibility, or might it be liberated by its failure to fully articulate the loss of the mourned object? What if the elegy’s power lies precisely in its inability to represent the mourned object? How does the object of mourning shift from being a passive entity—a thing mourned—to becoming an active subject within the poetic framework?

This shift raises questions not just about representation but also about agency: how does the elegy negotiate the boundaries between absence and presence, between the object as lost and the object as articulated?

This tension parallels the act of eating and gaining weight, a correlation Cavalli navigates with nuanced ambivalence: mangiare-ingrassare (eating-gaining weight). The poem presents gaining weight as both a consequence and an achievement, shaped by the “buon esempio” (good example) of the poetic subject, complicating the act of eating with layers of imitation and expectation. Weight, then, becomes a stand-in for the weight of elegy itself: the accumulations of grief, memory, and poetic tradition that cannot simply be shed. Yet, there is a paradox in how we value loss and gain. Losing weight is often celebrated as a positive accomplishment, whereas gaining it is stigmatized—does the same hold true in the emotional economy of elegy? Can the weight of mourning ever be seen as a valuable addition, a necessary growth?

Imitation complicates this further. While elegy and lyric poetry resist the label of mimesis or fiction, they are still shaped, I believe, by a mimetic impulse—the drive to echo, reflect, and reproduce the gestures of mourning, even when they fail to capture the exactness of grief. Can we truly engage with mourning without mimicking the forms and tropes that have come before? Cavalli’s poetic subject highlights this tension when confessing, “Io no, fingevo, io fingevo” (“Not me, I was pretending, I was pretending”). This admission exposes the performative nature of mourning, the way it bends toward artifice and repetition, even as it seeks authenticity. What if I too am pretending—performing grief not out of genuine feeling, but to provoke a reaction, to make you‘gain weight’? This confession reveals the underlying dynamics of elegy as a space where authenticity and artifice collide, where the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, blur.

What I am probing here is the fragility of understanding within elegy: can a viable community of mourning exist, or does the elegy reveal the limits of such collectivity? Is the “our” in the elegy truly a collective, or is it more accurately a fragmented and unreliable negotiation between personal and collective dimensions? Elegy’s generalized language often obscures rather than clarifies, creating a space of productive confusion. Rather than providing clear answers or communal solace, the elegy often amplifies the disconnection between self and other, mourning and meaning. My concern is less with whether elegy succeeds or fails in representing loss, and more with what it reveals about our collective and individual capacities to mourn, imitate, and engage in the never-ending and ever-changing work of mourning.

What seems to me the problem is that elegy brings with it an inevitable concentration on one object. Even when there is an enumeration of mourned objects—let us think again of Bishop’s‘One’s Art’—it is still one. We mourn what is lost. I want to mourn what is gained—what I have gained. What those objects have gained. To return to Rosselli’s poem, it presents something that I find rather rare in elegiac writing, particularly of this period of the 20th century: weight and loss are put together: those objects have been defeated by pain because of their signifying both weight and loss.

Let us take another brief detour through Cavalli again:

The problem here seems that even when these objects will be stripped from being signifiers, there will be the problem that a chair is so much a chair: “troppa materia, troppa identità. / Tutti padroni della propria forma” (“Too much matter, too much identity. / All masters of their own form”).  And it is on the matter of form that I would like to turn to now: elegy has been working as a genre, but could we agree that is a form now? This is perhaps the result of simply trying to hold the elegy tightly within the closed form that the elegy has become.

*

– This is just to say I have eaten the butter that was in the icebox and which you were probably  saving. for breakfast. Forgive me, it was so so delicious, so sweet and so cold.

– [. . .][3]

*

The present challenge for elegy is to navigate past the concerns discussed above. This is what I have tried to do in most of my writing: both academic, non-fiction, and poetic. How can that mourned object not be swallowed up by the mourning subject and turned into something else in the process. How can elegy be just an elegy and how can the mourned object remain just itself.

One more thing. There is another point that emerges: elegy requires that concentration in one object. The truth is that after a couple of paragraphs, I wanted to change my topic from weight to something else. But I cannot. I have to stick to it. The same seems to be in academic writing. This is a short essay about elegy and it is going to continue its focus on elegy all the way to the end. Anything in-between must serve this purpose and is carefully selected. What if I tell you that Rosselli and Cavalli are easily substitutable by anything else really. What if I tell you that the dialogues in italics are unnecessary? The point of how the work of mourning works in the elegy is how everything around it is used in that process of mourning the mourned object and is stripped away from any other meaning—this happens in this short essay too, not so much by stripping away the meaning of the two poets’ lines, but giving them another added meaning in context—a newly gained meaning in the face of addressing the topic of this essay: that is, my gained weight. How can we do an elegy without transforming the world around us, how can elegy be just an elegy and not getting bigger and bigger to the point that it is the fattest of all genres.

Let us return to what is the cost of my weight. Its name is Cryolipolysis: fat freezing.

The truth is we are still within the same room that opened this essay. Its walls are so so white. My nightdress—which is also a daydress—is so so white. It’s no Emily Dickinson’s revival here. Everyone is dressed the same. When I shower, they watch me. What I eat my teeth breaks little white pieces of something white. Those who give me this white stuff are also dressed in white. They are also white beneath. Everything is white. Everything is pure fat. This is what I mourn. Why do I tell you these things? Not because I really care, nor should you. But because I can. This is the most important thing about elegy: what do I care about and will care as long as I wish for. This is the whitest thing of all about elegy. This is its white fat. Tennis players are also dressed in white and play with a white ball. They often quote a sentence that is put up in the corridor leading to the court: pressure is privilege. I watched this on Netflix as they allow me to watch TV once per week here. How could I choose to come to this place of my own initiative? They—the tennis players, I mean—they know too well the original version of that quote: mourning is privilege. I mourn because I can. I can spend all the resources I have to concentrate on one single object no matter the cost of it. For this reason, elegy is white. I am white. My fat is white. Everything is so so white.

*

– I’d don’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me?

– Cryolipolysis, commonly known as fat freezing, is a cutting-edge cosmetic procedure that targets and eliminates stubborn fat cells by exposing them to controlled cooling.

– I’d don’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me? About the size of an old-style dollar bill?

– This non-invasive treatment uses advanced technology to precisely cool fat cells without damaging the surrounding tissues, leading to the gradual breakdown and natural elimination of fat from the body.

– I’d don’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me? About the size of an old-style dollar bill, American or Canadian?

– The process itself and the equipment used are meticulously designed and maintained to ensure a sterile, pristine environment, often featuring sleek, white devices and clinical settings that emphasize cleanliness and professionalism.

– I’d don’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me? Mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays?

– The high cost of cryolipolysis reflects the investment in sophisticated machinery, the expertise required to perform the procedure safely and effectively, and the maintenance of a hygienic, white-dominated environment that assures clients of the highest standards of care and quality.

– I’d don’t mind, but please tell me, how much will this cost me?

– According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was summer a farmer was ploughing his field and could only but notice such an enormous fatty conglomerate of white fat falling off the sky. It did so because it was so so fat. It was so so fat that everyone pretended not to see it. We don’t like fat people.[4]

– Can I venmo you? Why do I tell you these things?