June 2020

It’s rare to find something that is exactly what it says it is. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a delight. Delightful. Delight full. Delight filled. I smiled so much reading this book. It felt like sitting in spring sunshine after a long cold winter dark.

Ross Gay, the poet and author of this collection of essays, set himself a task, a practice. Starting on his 42nd birthday, he would write about a delight every day for a year, draft them quickly and write them by hand.

I rememberthe book drift through my awareness. It popped up in Brain Pickings, and I’d see sections quoted in some of the poetry blogs I follow. I loved the joy and the generosity in them.

I thought I was going to read one a day, after breakfast before I started work, a simple read for my jittery attention shot pandemic brain.

I read the whole damn book in two days.

Writing is always an invitation, a way of sharing. This is how I see the world. Come sit by me for a while. The essays invite you into Ross Gay’s delights, into his world and invite you to consider your own, to pay attention, to cultivate delight.

One of my favourite questions I’ve been asked is a simple one. What is it like to be you right now? Gay’s essays are luminous with this, an embodied aliveness, rooted in who he is, noticing delight, and what that means for him as a black man in America.

They shine with tenderness, the quiet act of choosing to notice beauty, in every day ordinary life, in a complex and difficult world. They’re wry with humour and so generous. There’s a blend of memoir, biography and reflection that I love in writing, similar to why I love Maggie Nelson’s work. The anticipation of a vegan donut, the community garden he works in, the satisfaction of pulling up bindweed.

Woven through his observations is a point he makes in Joy is Such a Human Madness

“And given as I am writing a book of delights, and I am ultimately interested in joy, I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight… I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.” And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy”

A few sections from my favourites:

Loitering

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING / NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: ‘to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,’ and ‘to travel indolently with frequent pauses.’”

Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygaggle, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (‘Lollygagger!’ or ‘Loafer!’).”

Is “lollygag” a Minnesota thing? Because my mom says that all the time.

Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering.’ Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception.

A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible, and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, ‘Lord.’)

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed — in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight.

The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke) but if the laugh is hard enough, if the talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not — and this hurts — your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go…”

Joy is Such a Human Madness

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

I mentioned this last week, but it’s worth mentioning again. Krista Tippett did a gorgeous interview with Ross Gay which brought me so much joy.

In these strange days, living by myself in lockdown, there were days, weeks, when my concentration was shot. I couldn’t pick up a book, I was exhausted by screens. Compulsive doomscrolling ate away my peace of mind, watching a film, or a TV show felt too much like work, too divorced from reality, a kind of junk food distraction to numb out. I’d call and Zoom with a handful of friends but stretches of time when I’d sink into silence.

That’s when I’d flip on On Being. On Being’s a public radio show, a podcast with Krista Tippet. The blurb says this:

A Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other? Each week a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett.

I found it a few years back. Krista had been the last person to interview Irish poet and writer John O’Donohue before he died and I remember the immense beauty of that interview, on the inner landscape of beauty. How it rang inside me like a golden bell and to borrow from Charlotte Bronte, changed the colour of my mind.

Some of that was John, wonderful John, but it was Krista too. Conversation is an art. An interview is an art, and Krista is one of best interviewers I’ve ever heard.

I was listening to an interview she did with Seth Godin, a man who’s done thousands of interviews in his life and he, like other guests, was delighted to be there, as a listener and a fan. Hers is the only interview he sends to people. Because she brings out the best in her guests. Because Krista is as Seth says, so generous as an interviewer. She listens, she asks attuned interested and interesting questions. Because the episodes are a delight of a conversation, the kind that’s a privilege to listen to and a joy to have.

The kind you’d have over dinner with a really good friend, new or old, where the ideas are bright, where you find yourself stepping into another world. There’s laughter in it and sharing and deep listening, kind curiosity, to be with complexity and such a willingness to understand and like Rilke says, to live the questions.

The conversations made me ache for days walking through art galleries and sat in bookshop coffee shops with my friend Emma and talking poetry, writing and ideas. The kind of nourishment I get when I talk to my fairy godmother where our conversation loops and weaves activism, plays and people, evenings when I’d cook and invite people over for story dinners, or go over to dinner with friends, the richness you get when you sit down with people and you really hear them, you really see them.
Magic.

I learn when I listen to On Being. I stop to write down books, Google people, and scribble down sentences, a web of ideas woven, interconnected growing in me. Part of the magic for me is her guests are a forces for good in the world.

There’s a phrase I learnt from her interview with Jacqueline Novogratz, hard edged hope, which I love. She leads a company called Acumen, that works in creative, human centric capitalism, backing people who want to do good in the world, including a pair of young entrepreneurs who had the heart-full audacity to say, we want to eradicate kerosene in the world, how do we bring light and electricity to the poor? Not as an act of charity, but as collaboration, solidarity, to make the poor partners in the endeavour. Committed patient compassionate passionate action.

There’s an edited version of the interviews that’s an hour and she shares the unedited conversations too, which if I have time, I always listen to.

I sank in the bath and listened to her interviews with writers and poets Ocean Vuong and Ross Gay (so joyful. The laughter in his voice was such honey and delight.), and as she does with poets, she invited them to share their work and I’d close my eyes and let the beauty of their words wrap around me. I stayed up too late last night listening to her conversation with therapist, author and trauma specialist Resmaa Menkakem on race, cultural trauma and embodiment, which made me catch my breath, cry in recognition and smile in hope.

Because in these days which were and are dark, when the enormity of the times we’re in felt crushing, On Being was a quiet beacon. There is good in the world. There is beauty. There are people who live the questions, who choose radical joy and practice delight, who know to live with love and to act with love isn’t about softness, it is about the fierceness of integrity, the willingness to admit when you are wrong, the courage to look at injustice and inequality, and the urgency of now, and have the moral imagination to imagine and say yes, let’s make a better world. And do it.

Writer and storyteller.

Friday Beauty – The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

Friday Beauty – On Being