Ross Gay - Inciting Joy: Essays

Inciting Joy

Essays

Ross Gay

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2022

Through My Tears I Saw
(Death: The Second Incitement)

We Kin
(The Garden: The Third Incitement)

Out of Time
(Time: The Fourth Incitement)

Share Your Bucket!
(Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement)

Baby, This Might Be You.
(Laughter: The Sixth Incitement)

(Dis)alienation Machinery
(Losing Your Phone: The Seventh Incitement)

Free Fruit for All!
(The Orchard: The Eighth Incitement)

Insurgent Hoop
(Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement)

How Big the Boat
(The Cover: The Tenth Incitement)

Dispatch from the Ruins
(School: The Eleventh Incitement)

Went Free
(Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement)

Grief Suite
(Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement)

Oh, My Heart
(Gratitude: The Fourteenth Incitement)

I have had the good fortune in the past several years, since shortly after the publication of my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and probably again with my book of essays, The Book of Delights, to have had numerous and sustained conversations about joy. These conversations might begin during question-and-answer sessions, in interviews, or even in the book signing line. Ill never forget a woman at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 in Claremont, Californiaone of those weird, beautifully ugly sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe white brickI suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not very able to talk. And she said, quietly, wiping her face, I didnt know you could write about joy.

Or another time, this one from an undergrad at a reading I was giving, who about midway through a Q&A said something along the lines of I have always been told that you cant write about joy because its not serious. And a professor at another school asked, as much for the benefit of his students as it was a challenge, though that might be giving him the benefit of the doubt, which Im practicing doing more of: When all of this is going onhe held his hands up as though to imply war; famine; people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children; disease; sorrow immense and imperturbable; it only getting worse and worse and worse (dude had big hands)why would you write about joy?

The implication, of course, is that joy does not have anything to do with everything in that guys big hands. Or even that joy is the opposite of whats in there. Which I guess is a reasonable notion, given how joy is often imagined to be the result of organizing our closets and bookshelves or getting the new Tesla or winning the big game or acing the test or getting a promotion or getting our dishes sparkling clean. Given that joy is often imagined as the result of some accomplishment or acquisitionsomething nice you get out there and do; something nice you go get yourself. Joy, the thinking goes, is that room at the top of a flight of stairs that, upon entering, washes you with clean air and glad music and comfy furniture and gentle warmth emanating from the white pine floors, suffused with light pouring in from the enormous windows with a sweet window seat where you can read a happy book. The joy room, the thinking goes, is snug with every good and nice and cozy thing.

Oh, too, this is very important: this sanctuary of joy has a very strong lock (think Tom and Jerry, ten or fifteen latches and deadbolts and chains and the rest) for when heartbreakwhich, it should be noted, usually lives in the filthy back corner of the back room of the basement, where the stone walls are always wet and flickering with roaches and the drain with the furry green stuff crawling from it never all the way screws downgets loose and comes sniffing around the keyhole, throttling the door, trying to get in. Perhaps in the form of your father dead or your mother despondent or your cousin who shot herself in the chest or your buddy stabbed to death or your dutiful and troubled mind or the most beautiful ballplayer you ever coached at last let off the machine or your child who wont forgive you or you cant get your medicine or your beloved doggies cough wont stop or the forest you love has been logged or the school shut down or they poisoned the water again or they put a highway through again or another species gone or its raining in Greenland or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or...

You get my point. It is a kids fantasy (by which we grown-ups seem as seduced as plenty of kids) to imagine any emotion discreet from any other. But it strikes me as a particularly dangerous fantasyby which I also mean it is sad, so goddamn sadthat because we often think of joy as meaning without pain, or without sorrowwhich, to reiterate, our consumer culture has us believing is a state of being that we could buynot only is it sometimes considered unserious or frivolous to talk about joy (i.e. But theres so much pain in the world!), but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live withoutor maybe a more accurate phrase is free ofheartbreak or sorrow. Which Im pretty sure you only get to do if you have no relationships, love nothing, are a sociopath, and maybe, if youre enlightened. I dont know about you, but I check none of these boxes.

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay Joy calls the intolerable, for its existence?

If it sounds like Im advocating for sorrow, nope. Besides, sorrow (unlike joy, apparently) doesnt need an advocate. Given as, to quote the visionary blind man Pozzo in Samuel Becketts play Waiting for Godot, were born astride a grave, i.e. we and everyone and everything we love will one day (maybe today!) die, I think sorrows gonna be just fine. Like Gwendolyn Brooks says about death (one of sorrows chauffeurs), its just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; / can meet you any moment. Or as the Jackson Five sing, not in the voice of sorrow but kinda: Ill Be There.

But what I am advocating, and adamantly so, is that rather than quarantining ourselves or running from sorrow, rather than warring with sorrow, we lay down our swords and invite sorrow in. Im suggesting we make sorrow some tea from the lemon balm in the garden. We let sorrow wash up and take some of our clothes. We give sorrow our dads slippers that weve hung on to for fifteen years for just this occasion. And we drape our murdered buddys scarf, still smelling of nag champa, over sorrows shoulders, to warm them up some. We wedge some wood in the fire. As were refilling their tea we notice sorrow is drinking from a mug given to us by someone weve hurt.

We ask sorrow about themselves, and we scooch closer to hear. We eventually decide to invite a small group of friends over for a potluck, because we want sorrow to meet them. Sorrow says, Maybe more than just your closest friends? So we add to the list a couple acquaintances from work, the supermarket. We put our mechanic on the list, our chiropractor, and the neighbors we wave at but not much more than that. And when sorrow asks, What about that guy... of someone you really dont like, after thinking