Ideas - Poet Ross Gay on the necessity of joy and delight

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

For award-winning poet and bestselling author Ross Gay, joy and delight aren’t frivolous or a privilege. He argues they’re absolutely essential to a meaningful life — especially in the face of grief, sadness and suffering. 

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Have you ever seen, probably around Halloween, a squirrel nervously feasting on a hollowed-out pumpkin? And I was very still, so the critter gobbled away, though with an eye on me. What you could tell was really on me when looking down into the pumpkin for more goodies. The award-winning poet, essayist, and author Ross Gay noticed a squirrel in a pumpkin, and a cagey game of peek-a-boo ensued. Looking at me, then looking down,

then looking at me, then looking down, then looking at me one more time to be sure, I guess, I was not actually one of the neighborhood cats dressed up like a human being with a backpack. Before plunging headlong into the gourd so that all that remained visible of the critter was that plump butt, those long-footed rear legs, and that tail, buoyant, flamboyant, and, well, gaudy, even gauche, truth be told. Gay took note of this cat and mouse or cat and squirrel game as something delightful,

and being a chronicler of delights, he tried stealthily to record the moment. So I elegantly swiveled my backpack into my front pack, unzipped slowly as possible, reached into the bag, and as I was pulling out my notebook, the squirrel looked at me like, oh no you don't, you cat dressed as a human, and tipped away, as they do, which might be a small but useful lesson on the differences, or perhaps the consequences, of acquiring versus being with, or in, or of, the delight. or of the delight. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Squirrel in a Pumpkin is one of the 81 mini-essays in Ross Gay's The Book of More Delights, following the success of his 2019 bestseller, The Book of Delights. Not delights on a large scale, like receiving a lavish gift or your favorite team winning a championship. No, these are moments, flashes of wonderment, connection, pleasure, and human goodness in the quotidian flow of life. A praying mantis seeming to dance on the lip of a pint glass. The kindness of a flight attendant. A sunflower growing out of a crack in the pavement. Things that might pass unnoticed, unless care is taken to let them register as delightful.

Gay writes of them with relish and wildly free-flowing prose. But it's also a serious practice, a mode of being, not just cataloging and recounting delights, but cultivating a state of being in delight. My friend was walking by yesterday with her kids, and one of them was kind of otherwise concerned, and then I said hi to her. And she said hello in a certain kind of way.

Hello. And then I sang it back to her. Then her mom sang it as well. So the three of us kind of harmonized in this hello. It tickled me. But I also noticed it tickling me. And so in a way, I feel like part of the question is like to recognize when you're in the midst of it, you know, not to disrupt it, but to recognize, oh, that was in fact a delight.

Is that the entire thing is to simply notice and pay attention, you know, being receptive to joy and delight? You know, to me, like so much of the process of this delighting is that it inclines you to also note it to other people. Yeah. It inclines you to be like, hey, did you just hear that we just had a three-part harmony? Hello? Whether that means to say it out loud or to smile at each other at a point, the way that we do. I mean, one of the sweet things to me about thinking about delight, I was sitting at a restaurant the other day and there was a bench seat looking out on the street and some dude was walking by with headphones on and he was singing and conducting loud. And the person, you know, three seats down next to me, who I hadn't yet like had any contact with, we both saw it and we smiled and then we looked at each other to sort of like confirm that was wonderful and again this feels like the crucial thing that instance of the sort of connectingness

of delight it feels like that connectingness is the lifeness of it you know it sort of alerts us to not only the fact of like oh two people who don't know each other were sitting at a restaurant, see something kind of wonderful, acknowledge each other. It also sort of alerts us to the, without us necessarily even knowing it, the trillion things that made that instance happen. Yeah, yeah.

You hear a lot about, you know, the benefits of having a gratitude practice. How is this different? It sounds similar, but it's not quite the same. I don't know. You know, it's a good, it's a great question. Someone, I remember when someone sort of alerted me to like, oh yeah, that's right. When you're doing these delights, you're also sort of, there's a kind of gratitude-ness to it.

Yeah. And I think of it as, I think of it as utterly grave, you know, and when I say grave, I mean that is connected to the fact of our passing. And it's connected to the fact of all of the beloved that has brought us forth. I really think about, in the same way when I think about joy, I think about it being an attempt, the gratitude practice being an attempt to practice belonging to all that has sort of made you possible. The attempt to belong to, you know, the unquantifiable, the unquantifiable things that constitute your life. Ross Gay is also the author of a 2022 collection of essays called Inciting Joy. It delves into a kind of ethics of joy and delight,

celebrating their power and probing how knotted up they are with other emotions. The book opens with a question a professor asked Ross, one that might be on some of your minds too, about the relevance of writing about joy and delight at a time like this. When all of this is going on, he 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 guy's big hands. It's a kid's 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 fantasy that because we often think of joy as meaning without pain or without sorrow, not only is it sometimes considered unserious or frivolous to talk about joy, i.e., but there's so much pain in the world. But this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without heartbreak or sorrow, which I'm pretty sure you only get to do if you have no relationships, love nothing, or a sociopath, and maybe if you're enlightened. I don't know about you, but I check none of these boxes. That encounter with the professor happened a few

years ago. And if anything, things have only gotten worse and worse since. So I asked him how he'd answer that question of relevance now. I mean, you know, it's kind of feels like a good necessary question. But to me, the reason is that joy and delight are about life. And one of the definitions for joy is basically like what the feeling that we enter when we practice being entangled, or the feeling that we receive or are received by maybe when we practice being life. You know, and that's a grave and important and necessary feeling. It's about life. And delight feels to me like the kind of pleasant flickering or fleeting alert to life. And to delight in a way feels like practicing being, again, like a kind of one of the ways

that we practice being life. So that's what I would say. And I would say that in large part because we need to be reminded of that. For the record, I do not think of this as looking on the bright side. I think of it as looking at everything. Bad french fries do not negate good ketchup. That your one friend died does not untrue the fact that your other friend survived. Nor do such losses negate the huge crop of sweet potatoes from your garden, how your bike fits you, the quilt that came your way, your garden, how your bike fits you, the quilt that came your way, and the delight of realizing that those two boys you thought were kneeling in prayer in the woods on campus were actually

feeding the corpulent squirrels, which, yeah, too, is a kind of prayer. You write, quote, I'm not being optimistic, I'm just paying attention. How much do we miss, Ross, by not noticing everything or by dwelling on the things that make us angry or sad? I don't know. I don't have an answer for that. I do feel like so often, you know, our rage and our sorrow is evidence of our love. And I feel like our rage and our sorrow and our defiance and our refusal to the brutality, to the genocide, that's evidence of love. And that's evidence of a commitment to life and living, you know? So in a way, the things feel very much connected. It feels like gratitude and rage can be absolutely tethered up. There's this other part, too, that feels like part of what feels moving to me about this

delight practice having to do with sharing, that part of the practice is that it usually doesn't stop at just noting the thing. It often continues to pointing or to reaching towards someone else and saying, hey, did you notice that? And I feel like part of the sweetness and the profound utility of this delight practice too is that we can't always be delighted. Yeah. We actually need sometimes people to be like, hey, and the garlic's coming up. Well, I wondered because sometimes we're told that we're wired to be negative, that it's actually a survival mechanism.

I don't believe that. I just wonder about that. Not that I disbelieve that that's part of our wiring. I mean, obviously, like in order to survive, we have to attend to what's trying to prevent us from surviving. But it also seems in order to survive, we have to celebrate and exalt what keeps us alive. I don't know a thing, a thing about whatever evolutionary biology or whatever this would be. I don't know the first thing. But it just seems sort of normal

that as important as being heads up for like what to avoid is heads up for what to cultivate. What to embrace. What to embrace. The Perfect Notebook Or maybe not perfect, but perfect enough. Though I could write an entire manifesto on The Perfect Notebook. I mean, seriously.

I actually think sometimes it's the notebook, or more precisely, the soiree between the notebook and the pen, the tooth of the paper and the viscosity of the ink, let alone the inherent spiritual endowments of each, that makes the poem, the essay, the dream, come forth on the page, on account of the page. You see what I'm saying? It's a lot of pressure to put on a notebook. I want to talk to you about some of the themes and the threads that run through your books of delights, like, for example, the tactile, you know, physical things like paper menus and cash and writing and notebooks, as opposed to doing things virtually and digitally. Can you tell me

about the delight and why writing in a perfect notebook is so preferable to using a computer? Well, partly, I mean, partly there is this thing about probably the slowness. Well, partly, you know, to write by hand for me is to sort of follow a kind of bodily thinking that is different than how I would write on a computer. And among the things that that bodily thinking includes, not only the fact that my body moves in ways, my hand moves in ways when I write on a page, different paper, differently,

different pen, differently, different seat, differently, different desk, differently, et cetera. So the writing itself becomes a kind of expression of the body. It's also, to me, something so beautiful about writing by hand is that we're not able to sort of delete the archive of our thinking, you know? So all of the ways that we arrive at thoughts when we're writing by hand, even though we scratch them out or this and that, there's a kind of map of how we've arrived. And it feels to me that it's very different.

I was going to say one of the sorrows, and it is one of the sorrows, but it's very different about writing on a computer is that so often we're eliminating the process by which we arrived at a certain kind of thinking. Well, the thing that I think is the most important thing about writing, the reason that I love writing, the reason that I love being in relationships is that we are able to witness the change that happened. The writing that I love is writing that is a witness to the transformation of the writer in some way.

So what's the role of commas in that? Because you really like commas. Nice. Can I say a little more? That's so great. But, you know, your writing, you know, it's full of run-on sentences. It's digressive. It would have to be written by hand because a computer would tell you grammatically it doesn't work.

That's it. That's it. Totally. That's the thing. It's a kind of thinking that, you know, that your body can do and be like, whoops, got to go this way or whoops, went too far that way, come back, da-da-da-da. And it can't like eliminate itself. It's like you did it. You did that. And that feels really moving to me. But the other thing to come back to this question of the grave is that the reason a letter, a handwritten letter is precious is because it's a document of someone's body and that person will not always be here. And so every time we're writing in a notebook, we're leaving a kind of physical bodily remnantnant of that, and a sort of evidence of that, that this is here, the person, the creature, who made this at this moment, how they were at that moment. They will never be there again in that way. And that's really a theme that's kind of at the heart of everything that you're writing about, connections with people.

Yeah. You know, you write an ode to just hanging out with a friend or doing a chore or running errands with someone else for the sake of being together, even if it's easier to do things yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it feels like a kind of practice, that practice of being together, that practice of withness.

You know, when we do that, when we are together, many things happen, but one of the things that happens that doesn't happen when we're with these other technologies that are really intended, I think, to be replacements for each other is that we don't recognize how much, like we need each other in all these ways. We need each other to like laugh. We need each other to tell stories and to remember things. We need each other to learn how to cook. We need each other to tell stories and to remember things. We need each other to learn how to cook. We need each other to know how to plant things. We need each other to know when to harvest.

We need each other to know how to take care of our kids. All of these things that, you know, you might say can happen and, you know, to some extent can happen on a device or whatever. can happen, and, you know, to some extent can happen on a device or whatever, but they do not happen like the way they happen on your porch or in your living room or in your garden or on a basketball court, you know. In addition to the porch wavers and their ilk are whoever makes it their business, often, but by no means only, people working in diners, post offices, laundromats, cafes, supermarkets, bookstores, bakeries, train stations, etc., to call us baby, or babe, or honey, or sweetheart, or love. There are angels in this world who call people they don't know love. Some of them, and

this makes my heart a flock of giraffes, a gaggle of manatees, are like 20 years old. I love that you take delight in strangers paying attention to each other. You know, when a server or a flight attendant or a counterperson calls you by a pet name like baby or honey or puts a hand on your shoulder or your back, some people might think it may be inappropriate or not respectful of boundaries, but it may be different depending who you are. But why does that kind of interaction delight you so much? I mean, yeah, granted. So I am who I am. You know, my body is what my body is, whatever. But I, I actually don't know. I actually don't know, you know? Yeah. I don't, I don't exactly know. Well, you know, that leads me to another question. So many of the delights that you talk about are about everyday acts of kindness done by random people that maybe we don't pay enough attention to, you know? Yeah.

And yet there are so many people walking around with fear of the woman or man walking down the street or walking by their house or the car that drives by or the teller that is behind a counter. Yeah. You know, I'm sure there are a lot of ways to answer this, but one thing I would say is that there is a kind of, there is a vested interest in making us feel afraid of one another. You know, people make money off of that. Sure. You know? Social media companies.

Social media companies, weapons industries, you know, like the war industry, you know, which is kind of like, you know, where we live. That's it. You know, it's sort of like the idea, the prospect that we could trust one another, that we could trust one another. You know, that we're fundamentally capable and also inclined, perhaps. Not only, not only, but among the things we are inclined to do is to look after one another

and to take care of one another. And, you know, the thing is, like, you got to look around to do it. You know, you just look around. It's not really hard to sort of notice how that happens and how it happens in ways that are not necessarily along the boundaries that we imagine it to happen. And who in the busy cafe or bakery or Vietnamese joint

or pizzeria or library, seeing you seeing there are no more seats, invites you to sit at their table simply by pointing or moving their stuff or pushing the chair out with their foot and probably smiling. And who lets you merge when you're driving? And who holds the door at the elevator? And who tracks you down to give you the wallet you left on the train? And who gives directions when you ask? And who walks you there? You know, the people who kind of like have the great capacity to care for one another. Again, not only, but plenty. And it feels like that there is a vested interest in hiding that information or keeping it from us or making it smaller, making it smaller, making it much more aware that we are dangerous to one another than we are

like one another or that we are actually interested in each other's wellness, livelihood. Livelihood. You're listening to my conversation with Ross Gay, an award-winning poet and the author of the best-selling Book of Delights and the Book of More Delights. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public public radio across north america on sirius xm in australia on abc radio national and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas find us on the cbc listen app and wherever you get your podcasts i'm n Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to

make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Ross Gay is well aware of the terrible things going on in the world. Incomprehensible amounts of pain, injustice and suffering. But that doesn't mean it's frivolous or self-indulgent or tone-deaf to celebrate joy and delight as he does in his books. In his reckoning, joy and delight are inseparable from grief, anger, frustration and

sadness, and necessary, not just as relief from the many cruelties and sorrows of the world, but as sustenance and full engagement with life. And if you look around with an attentive eye, delights and evidence of human goodness abound, such as in the mini-essay called Communal Walking Stick in the Book of More Delights. As Ross Gay was finishing a hike, he came across an unassuming gesture of care and kindness. So I kept following the trail back to the parking lot, at the beginning of which, leaning against a birch tree, was a perfect walking stick. I picked it up. Sturdy, straight enough, not too heavy, a good height, I bet, for most people. And lying at that stick's feet, I saw a few others,

a little stouter or crookeder, not quite as perfect, though perfect's a dumb idea, don't you think? I had stumbled upon a way station for walking sticks, or better yet, a walking stick lending library. Oh, this is a thing, I realized. This is something we do. You know, it is not weird. It is not weird. It's not weird. You know, those little libraries that you see around?

I don't know if they got on my street. Yes. Yeah, that is not strange. That's an iteration of a thing that goes on and on and on and on and on and on. It happens in different places, in different ways. And in a way, I feel like part of my hope or practice, even this delight practice, is to notice, oh, that's one of the ways that that happens. Oh, that's what happens on a pickup basketball court. It's a bunch of people who do not know each other, who might not necessarily otherwise really like each other getting together

in the service, not only of themselves, but of this game. This game that is actually about supporting as many people as possible who could come in and keep on playing it. Pick up basketball. And it feels like such crucial work for me, for me, to try to help point it out. So many of your delights are centered on the body. I wonder if you could just expand on what it is that you love about that connection. You know, people through their bodies, high fives or hugs or handshakes, of course, we all know we love them, but they're kind of front and center in your explanation of delight. I mean, in addition to sort of being, I'm sort of like, I like to play basketball and I like to bump into people. That's part of my thing.

But I also suspect it is kind of connected to this, this sort of the fleetingness of our bodies. You know, that kid who gives me the high five is not just magical because it's like a kid misrecognizing me, but because that's never going to happen again. That's never going to happen again. You know, our bodies record that. Our bodies are sort of, they're sort of like these emblems or satchels of like the disappearing, of the preciousness.

The body ages and it breaks down and eventually dies. That's the reason why like a poetry reading to me is so interesting or a performance or like live performance or, but the live thing is because that person will never be that person again. That's over. So how does, how does that fleetingness of the body make it a greater source of joy? Like how does that incite joy? It's a common condition. And, you know, you might call that condition whatever. You can call it mortality, or you can call the experience of that everything we love,

everyone, everything we love is also going to pass away, going to change, going to go away. You know, depending on how you relate to it, but you might call that a heartbreak. And if that common heartbreak is available to us, instead of practice being aware of it, I'm pretty sure, and for myself, it inclines me to be softer with people, you know. I think it inclines us to reach toward each other. Oh, you're heartbroken too. Oh, okay. You're not so different. You're actually not so different from me. You've given us a few definitions, but in preparing for this interview, I was thinking about the word inciting or incite. And I looked it up because it ranked to me as something

almost subversive. I don't know if that's what the intention is, but why is incitement, why is it an inciting and not a sparking or something else? That's awesome. Because it does feel subversive. It does feel subversive. So that's the intention. That's the intention. Absolutely. What happens, what happens when we sort of witness ourselves as similar, fundamentally similar in our heartbreak and our need? What happens when we sort of witness ourselves as similar, fundamentally similar in our heartbreak and our need?

What happens? Subversiveness? It seems like a political objective is to separate us. I mean, that's part of it. You might call that politics. It's to make us believe that we are actually, we have separate needs. But it feels to me that, oh, pretty much we have the same needs. And if that gets out, oh shoot, oh shoot, you need clean water? Oh shoot, you need bombs not dropping on your head?

Oh shoot, you need the land to be okay? Oh, shoot. You need a job and a minimum wage. Oh, shoot. You need healthcare. And basic rights. And basic rights. Oh, shoot. It's like, ah, don't let that out. Don't let that out. You know? Definitely incitement. That's an incitement. That's an incitement, you know? Because these little brackets that we like to imagine ourselves in down here anyway, those brackets don't hold. So if that's the right word, what does joy incite? It incites the awareness of that, I think. What it feels like when you say the subversive, the sort of pleasure of it,

the incitement is the sort of, oh, shoot, you need that too. Oh, okay. Oh, shoot, maybe we could work on this thing together. Oh, shoot, maybe we could share this. I put in the seed, the rain and sun brought them up, the pollinators caroused the flowers into seeds, the birds gobbled the seeds into more plants,

and on and on and on. If we pay just a little bit of attention in a garden, we notice that it's constant, the sharing. And if we drop beneath the surface where so much of a garden's work happens, with the roots and beetles and worms all busy with their dark labors, if it's a healthy garden, we'd see mycelium webbing through that soil,

knitting it all together, redistributing nutrients, sharing the well. Gardens come up a lot in your writing, in your books. Obviously, they give you, your garden gives you tremendous delight, and it gives you life in more than one sense. And yet, you point out that the human contribution to the labor in a garden is actually pretty small. Yeah, it's pretty small. It's incredibly small. Yeah.

And that feels like one of the gifts. And it's so much connected to this whole question, delight and joy. It's because I feel like so much of what I have learned thinking about those things comes from the garden, where you're sort of just watching all the time, like, oh, all of this interaction, all of this nourishment, all of this conversion, all of this, et cetera,

is happening in the land, is happening with the rain, is happening with the leaf drop, is happening with what remains, is happening when the goldfinches plant all the sunflower seeds all over the place. It's just happening. So much of it happens without my input.

What is the gardener's disposition? Well, I think the gardener's disposition is to, on account of witnessing how much the earth itself is sharing is to also share, you know? And I think it's just like, you know, most gardeners, you know, at some point, at some point they get too much of something. Like zucchini is the famous thing. It's like, ah, you know, it's August zucchini time. You know, everyone has their like little free zucchini stands out. But I feel like that's very much, that's among the gardener's dispositions, this thing of sharing. Like, and you know, it might also be like sharing tools or sharing seeds or sharing information. But I don't think it's because gardeners are special.

I think it's because gardeners are in the presence of a kind of sharing. The land, the critters, you know, the beetles, the plants themselves are sharing. And so it feels like you're just learning. You're just sort of carrying forth what the garden is showing you how to do. All of which is why I bristle at the idea of gardening as an act of self-sufficiency or independence. I get the premise. But a garden, a healthy garden anyway, shows us no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you earn or stash or hoard or bunker up, no matter even your fleet of spaceships,

you will never be self-sufficient or independent, because nothing living is. because nothing living is. To be among the living, to be life, means to be in dependence, always and forever, whether you like it or not. It means, whether you like it or not, you are the beneficiary of a largesse so large and so deep, you will never in one lifetime get to the bottom of it. Like it or not, you will never pay it back or settle it up, even if you devote your every waking second to the task. What is rhizomatic care? Well, rhizomatic care, well, one, I think of Rebecca Sonnet at some point. I remember her talking about rhizomes

and also all these other people, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Vandana Shiva, all these people who are, Wendell Berry, who are deeply important to this thinking. Rhizomatic care, I think it's kind of, or mycelial care, we could say too, is a kind of alertness

to the many ways that we're being cared for. I'm actually making a gesture with my hands where I'm sort of moving them over each other to sort of make all these roots that keep on happening in every direction. That each plant is the evidence, actually. Each plant, each person is the evidence of these thickets, these underground thickets of care, some of which you could point out and be like, oh yeah, that's my mother.

And some of which you could never find it to say quite what it was, but it's also contributing to your capacity to live, you know? I have to ask you this. You may be a bit of an outlier among gardeners because of the delight you take in dandelions but a lot of people think of them as an undelight what is it that you love about dandelions well one they're beautiful two honeybees love them and other bees I think I see on there um three they're delicious.

Dandelion greens are... That's true. Yeah, they're some of my favorite greens. The root you can use, it's medicine. You can fry up the flowers and bread them as fritters. People make wine out of it. They go deep into the soil and pull up all these nutrients. They're a very deep-rooted plant. In that way, they kind of break up, loosen into the soil and pull up all these nutrients. You know, they're a very deep-rooted plant.

In that way, they kind of break up, loosen up the soil. They care for the soil. They're prolific as hell. That's why a lot of people don't like them. Yes, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. Like the moment that I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to call dandelion a crop. The moment I did that, I became like the best gardener.

You know, I was like, man, I'm all in great at this. So if you define them as, would you say you define them as, as a crop? Yeah. So how do you define weeds? Or is that even a valid word in your term? No, I don't really. I try not to. No weeds. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, like, look,. I try not to. No weeds. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, like, look, if I was making my money off of my, I'd probably have a different thing. I garden. It's a 0.1 acre. It's a garden. Yeah.

You point out that there are bound to be people who say that's all lovely, that you've had all these wonderful experiences in your garden, but that millions of people can only dream of having a garden of their own. How do you tackle that question of whether having a garden is or isn't a mark of privilege? You know, I wrote that down and maybe I could just read that little passage. Absolutely. Please. Okay. One of the things I want to be cautious of, by which I really mean refuse, are the ways we sometimes consider, for instance, gardening, or health, or health care, or potable water, or clean air, or pleasant and stable housing, or decent jobs, or good schools, or libraries, or living relatives, or being unabused, or having free time, or not being imprisoned, or not living near a power

plant, or an incinerator, or a landfill, or a million acres of corn or soybeans sprayed with toxins, a privilege, which actually obscures the fact that to be without a garden, or to be without green space, or to be without access to a park, or clean water, or the forest, or fruit trees, or to be without access to a park or clean water or the forest or fruit trees or birdsong or shade or a deep and abiding relationship with a tree or to be without health care and so often to be without health is violence. It is abnormal, even if it is the norm, and it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural. All these comorbidities, all these communities more exposed to toxins, all this absence of sick pay or good pay every day is not simply an affliction, oh, too bad you landed in Cancer Alley, or, oh, bummer about all those opioid deaths, or,

so unlucky about the lead in your water, but an infliction. It is on purpose. And the withholding from some of the means of life, of which means there are plenty to go around, is a disprivilege. Which is to say, life, though it is a gift, is not a privilege. The word disprivilege is not one you hear. How would you define that word? I think the

disprivilege is the sort of imposition of precarity. The imposition, you know, all that sort of list of things which are not, they're not like accidentally occurring. Yeah.

You know, they're impositions. There's sort of the evidence of a system that considers some people disposable. Some people, some land, plain and simple. Yeah. And that's a disprivilege. And to call clean air a privilege normalizes the brutality. Thank you for reading that. Yeah, you're welcome.

So your ethos of gardens is rooted in sharing and not putting fences around things. A lot of your contempt for the sanctified status of private property is the history of black people in the U.S. Can you expand on that? Well, I mean, obviously the condition of having been property, believed to be property, gives one a more complicated, maybe, maybe, might incline one to have a complicated relationship to private property. I feel like

I'm learning. I'm not quite sure how to articulate kind of a proper response to that. But one of the things that I'll say that I feel fairly clear about, or what I might mean, is the sanctified position of very few people owning all the private property. I think that's what I mean. I'm talking about a kind of a system by which all of this dispossession of life and livelihood happens so that very few people can accrue all of the private property. through all of the private property. It's not all unmitigated joy and delight in your books. There is anger at the legacy of slavery and the persistence of racism, at injustice and the abuse of power,

and as you say, sort of this status of the very wealthy, and anything that kind of denies people their dignity and right to joy. wealthy, and anything that kind of denies people their dignity and right to joy, is acknowledging and expressing undelight, like anger or sorrow or outrage. Is that all necessary to fully experience delight and joy? Joy and sorrow and grief and anger are kind of two sides of a coin. Yeah, I mean, I think that's very accurate. And I think I would say more than two sides of the coin. I would say they make the same, they are the same thing. They make each other up, actually. And I would say that the sort of deepest expressions of joy does not exist without the deepest expressions of sorrow and probably vice versa. You know, like joy cannot be absent sorrow. And thanks to

writers like Zadie Smith and Pema Chodron and many, many other people, I think of it as, as the unfathomable connection. I think of it as like that rhizomatic mycelial connection between us, which is that we and everything that we love is dying, you know? And what might sort of come from that mutual awareness? What might come from the understanding or practice of that heartbreak, which is not the only thing. practice of that heartbreak, which is not the only thing. And often the not only thing that emerges from that, oh, is like a dance party or it's like a potluck or it's like a, oh, let me get that for you. Or, oh, you need a ride to the hospital. Got it. Or, oh, okay. Come on in. Come on in. That sorrow makes the sweetness, I think, not only more radiant, but the awareness of the sorrow makes the sweetness maybe more possible. I think of being aware of our sorrow, which we're often inclined and encouraged not to be.

Get over it. Yeah, it's true. I think attending to our sorrow will better articulate our joy. It seems some days, these days, like we're a bunch of cops hunting for who's messed up. Trigger warning, all of us. Which mess-ups, some days these days, more than ever it seems, can be terminal. As though the worst of what we've been is the whole of who we are. You know how they said it in the old-timey movies when they knew they were caught,

about to be hauled in or driven over the cliff? We're finished. Which, being creatures, we never are. We change until we die. And even then, depending on where you go, you might become soil and worm scat and nutrients to be sucked into the flower whose nectar becomes honey. But the real sorrow and loss, and what I think of as the danger, is the persistent inquisitional

threat and fear of being finished, or finished off, not only on account of having actually messed up, but of having been incorrect, which sometimes means little more than not agreeing, or following suit, or doing as we're told, or staying in our lanes. Being wrong some days these days simply means having a different take. It means thinking different, for which you'd think with all the diversity committees everywhere, we'd have some tolerance or curiosity or even taste. The title of the 80th delight in the Book of More Delights is, quote, to respect each other's madness and right to be wrong, which seems kind of out of step with the tone of social media and a lot of the public discourse that we hear today. up with the tone of social media and a lot of the public discourse that we hear today? Well, there's a sort of profoundly homogenizing aspect to certain aspects of our culture.

You know, I don't do social media, but I can kind of feel its presence strongly. I think there are many ways that we're encouraged not to think differently. And that feels like a dangerous, it's important that people think differently. You know, it's important that they're allowed to. You know, too, like I think of, I think to some extent of like the history of like artists and writers and poets and stuff and zany, zany, zany people, you know? And I'm like, I am so grateful for that. Folks who manage to think in ways that not everyone else is. Folks who manage to make in ways that not everyone else is, you know? Not that I'm always going to be interested in it or agree with it, but I'm interested in the space for it to happen. Going back to what we just talked about a moment ago, the two sides of the coin and joy and

as opposed to anger and sorrow and all that, some people might feel too heartbroken or dejected or beaten down to feel delight. But you, again, you write about grief in particular as life-affirming, a kind of resistance against the same things that throttle joy and delight. Can you speak directly to grief and how that is a gateway to joy? If I understand grief right, I think among the things that it does is it alerts us to being among the grieving. Not always. Of course, sometimes we've probably all had the experience of grief isolating us profoundly.

But there's this, the sort of power of grief is that it joins us to the grieving. Yeah. And joining the sorrow as witness to, as evidence of a kind of care for life. Grief feels so powerful because it alerts us to how many of us, how many of us are grieving. You know, we are not alone in the grief.

Another way you talk about that is a phrase that recurs several times in your books and your work in general. It's about the idea of falling apart. Yeah. You know, that we try to keep ourselves and each other from falling apart. You yourself tried to keep yourself from falling apart for years. But how is falling apart something we're kind of called upon or asked to do as humans?

How is it a healing and a joyful thing? Well, that's one of the, I mean, you know, many ways, I suppose, that the falling apart itself, again, it feels like it might be a kind of joining. It might be a way by which we actually realize that we are among the falling apart. We are among the falling apart. To the extent that it happens, we become alert to who gathers us up, which, you know, doesn't always happen. But it happens sometimes that when we fall apart, we're gathered up. And again, you know, it seems so often it's our need that sort of, to the extent that we can be aware of it and sort of like loving toward it, our need is one of the things that alerts us to the kindness, you know, to what we're amidst or to what we might be amidst. When we make room for and witness and invite each other's unfixing, and so are unfixing ourselves, when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again,

making up that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice, when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other. And when we catch the grave light shimmering from the tethers between us when it happens, are dying again and again in each other's presence, this falling together. It is called this holding each other through the falling. I'm pretty sure of this. One of the names anyway. Joy. Do you see any signs of that gathering up? I mean, it seems right now that the whole world is falling apart these days.

Every day I walk down the street, I see it. Maybe it's like both. Yeah, the world's falling apart. And my neighbor and her kid stopped by and sang a little bit to me and told me where the bike pump was. her kid stopped by and sang a little bit to me and told me where the bike pump was, or someone else is like looking after some kid who needs help. I feel like that daily noticing of what is in fact happening. I believe that it's, again, not the only thing, but I believe that it is our inclination to be a part of that, to look after one another. I do want to mention there's a book by Saidiya Hartman called Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Such a beautiful book.

The book is, you know, about Black women from the 1890s to the 1940s in New York and Philadelphia. Black women from the 1890s to the 1940s in New York and Philadelphia, basically like the sort of social innovations, the inventions that they have to make in order to sort of survive what is an utterly brutal kind of regime. The innovations that they have to make are these kind of profoundly politically radical, anarchic even, modes of life and living. And when she talks about it, I've heard her say before that she's describing things. Hartman. I mean, clearly she's doing this incredible sort of remarkable archival work that is just astounding and so beautiful. But she's also describing things. And that's been such a model for me. I'm trying just to describe how when people have too much zucchini, they put it out on a table and they make a little hand-drawn sign that says, take some zucchini.

You know, I'm trying to describe how like it was just a deal. Like if you're leaving the court and you're the one whose ball we're using, you leave the ball and someone's going to get it to you later. That feels really important to know. So how might things be different if we all, all people, all countries fall apart together? So, you know, you might be able to tell. I'm like, I'm real, I don't know. I have no idea. I mean, I'm best at like thinking about like my neighbors and me.

But I suspect there would be enough, you know. Of course, like obviously there's a certain scale to these questions. Because for me, the scale of these questions ultimately is not about, like, what if everyone? It's really like, how do I keep trying to do this? Yeah. So how do I keep trying to note the sweet things that my neighbor, the ones that I know by name and what they lay like on their popcorn, and the ones whose names I don't yet know? My hunch is that joy is an ember for, or precursor to, wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. It might depolarize us and deatomize us enough that we can consider what

in common we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage, and it happens also to be very big business, noticing what we love in common and studying that might help us survive. It's why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival. Ross, it's been an absolute delight talking to you. Ah, it's been so fun to talk to you, too. You ask such great questions so many times. I'm like, oh, man, this is all right. All right. Well, your books really make you think. They made me think.

Oh, good. Thank you. Ross Gay is an award-winning poet and the author of The Book of Delights, The Book of More Delights, and Inciting Joy. This episode was produced by Chris Watzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas And I'm Nella Ayed

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.