Life Kit - Finding joy in the face of sorrow

Episode Date: March 11, 2023

Poet Ross Gay knows a thing or two about finding joy in life's most difficult moments. He talks with It's Been a Minute host Brittany Luse about his new book of essays, "Inciting Joy" — which covers the complexity of joy, the beauty of grace, and meaning in life.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey everybody, Marielle Segarra here. We have a treat for you today. It's an episode of the NPR podcast, It's Been a Minute. Think of this episode as an opportunity for delight, which the poet Ross Gay says is a bit like the feeling of a bird landing on your shoulder unexpectedly, provided you like birds. Anyway, you're going to hear an interview with Ross Gay by It's Been a Minute host Brittany Luce. The conversation is insightful, warm, and poetic. And it's about why we need moments of delight and joy, even or especially in sorrowful times. Hey, everyone. You're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. My guest today is well known for taking delight in the little things. I've been kind of in the sun a little bit and I've been running into people. I have to tell you,

like the sort of incidental bumpings into people is a really fortifying experience to me. That's Ross Gay. He's a poet and the author of the Book of Delights, and more recently, Inciting Joy. According to Ross, we should all take joy a lot more seriously, because joy is the ember and the fire behind social movements and survival. And his definition of joy isn't something that you experience alone. His joy comes from connection and our interlocking lives, or as he puts it, entanglement. Today on the show, Ross Gay and I talk about the intricacies of joy and finding delight in the mess. After a quick break. Ross Gay, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thank you. Good to be with you. Oh, we're so happy to have you.

You know, something I've been wondering a lot about is how you would define delight versus joy or joy versus delight. Like, how would you define each of those feelings and how are they different? I've been thinking about that because I say the words and I figure it's like I ought to be able to say what they mean. I've been thinking a little bit that delight maybe is more occasional. You're like when the bird lands on your shoulder. if you like birds landing on your shoulder, then you might feel like, whoa, delight. Whereas joy, it seems to me, is something that is always there. Joy is the kind of emanation from our kind of practicing of the entanglement. Our belonging to one another is always there.

Our reliance upon one another is always there. Sometimes I think of it as like, the metaphor I like is like mycelium running through the soil in a healthy forest. Like it's always there. Joy, I think often in the practices of entanglement often come because we're devastated and sorrow is part of it. I'm glad you brought up sorrow because sorrow features throughout this book. In the first essay, you suggest that instead of thinking of joy and sorrow as isolated occurrences, that perhaps joy needs sorrow to exist. Tell me more about that. And I feel like that idea kind of came from Zadie Smith's beautiful essay, Joy, a short essay where she talks about joy being connected to the intolerable. And I think that that's true. Like among the ways that we're, I think, most connected to one another is the fact that we all

die. Not only do we die, which is a pretty big one, but everything we love will die. Everyone and everything we love will die. And so that's a site of care. Joy is the evidence of our reaching across to one another in the midst of, or as a way even of caring for one another's sorrows. And it seems to me the case that without sorrow, it's something else. And it's also the case that there's kind of no without sorrow. Yeah, it's not possible. Well, you mentioned in the book, basically, if you're living without sorrow, you're not connected to another person or you're a sociopath. You don't have anything. There's not one thing in this world that you love or care for or feel

attached to. And that's not really a possible state for most people. Yeah. Overwhelmingly. Yeah. So in a way, like one of my questions, I think is like, if we acknowledge that heartbreak, like, what does it mean? How do we be? I don't have answers for that, by the way. I'm asking. No, I mean, poets are meant to pose the question. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Something you do in the essay that I love is that you basically ask the reader to imagine their sorrow personified. And you and your sorrow plan basically a potluck. And you invite everybody that you've ever met, even people that you don't like, as you put it in the essay, over for this potluck. And you invite them and their sorrows together. And everyone and their sorrows sort of get together. And I thought that

was just such a brilliant way of illustrating how sorrow hangs about you, right? When you're experiencing it. It feels like that Peter Pan shadow that's just kind of like attached to you by the feet. It feels like somebody hanging around that you don't really want there. But also like in inviting other people to share their sorrows with you. It's like that's literally like the essence of communion. Like at first I was like, I'm going to have my, basically have my depression over and we're going to eat salad with my friends. But obviously as I continued forward, I mean, is that not what happens when you get together

with a friend for dinner? As you talk about what's troubling you, they talk about what's troubling them and you feel lighter. But it's funny though, because when you start, when I find that when I'm experiencing sorrow or sadness in that way, or pain, my instinct, which I think is many people's instinct, is to not reach out, to not invite other people in, to even try to avoid the sorrow or avoid the sadness to begin with. Yeah, I agree. I think there's some element of shame to it. Yeah.

Some of us sort of feel ashamed to be heartbroken or to be devastated or to be sad or whatever. It's not devastating to be irate. People don't feel shame about that. And those are definitely emotions. Yeah. And those are emotions, legitimate emotions. But we feel ashamed to be heartbroken. And I wonder if part of that shame is actually because it is the evidence of need. And so when you get together with your people who are your beloveds, that might be a place where we actually are like, okay, let's put this on the table a little bit, because I can't carry it by myself. This feels related to a passage I found

later in the book. To quote you, most Puritans, I think this is right, are not that interested in joy. The pure and the joy, I think this is right, are not bedfellows. Well, you know, it's almost like fundamental to the idea, like to be entangled with one another, to be mixed up with one another means that if you tell me about your devastation, it becomes to some extent, not mine, but it comes into me. Just as you tell me about your glee, it comes into me. We have sort of actively crossed the imagined threshold between us. We are, in fact, porous and permeable and all of that stuff. And I think this idea of kind of a discourse of purity is not only that joy and purity

are not bedfellows. I feel like purity, the dream of purity, is like a wreckage upon the earth. Oh gosh. I mean, you just said a lot right there, but I agree. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's bad news. And I say it as someone who's kind of like got like a puritanical bent, you know? In what way? Well, you know, like for instance, I grew up as an athlete. Oh yeah. I am, it is such, I'm like 48 years old and it's such a thing that I'm learning for instance, to say to myself, no, you're hurting now, rest. It's such a thing. And it's because there is this sort of puritanical notion of like the good or the

appropriate or the right. I said I was going to do the good or the appropriate or the right, even on something as superficial as, you know, doing all my kettlebell swings or something. No, but like the follow through and like the discipline is like, that's the ideal. Yeah. And it's like, oh, you didn't do everything? What's wrong with you? And what's wrong with you? And what's wrong with you? And what's wrong with you? You know, I don't want to walk around the world being like, what's wrong with any of us?

I kind of want to just like be curious. Purity is profoundly incurious. Purity knows everything. Knows what's right. Knows what's wrong. Knows how it ought to be. Knows who you are before you say it. You might say a little bit, then it knows who you are.

I mean, it categorizes too. It's like you're good or bad. You're right or wrong. You're in this pile. You're in that pile. Totally. And there's not a lot of room for the messiness that entanglement really requires of people. Exactly.

So, you know, if joy requires mess and entanglement, which is always an adventure, let's say, how do we cultivate joy in our lives while acknowledging the mess that it lives inside? I do wonder if one of the first things is acknowledging that we ourselves are complicated. You got my eyebrows raised over here. Your eyebrows went out of the screen. are complicated. You got my eyebrows raised over here. Your eyebrows went out of the screen. We love to be persecutorial. The fact of the matter is, it's like, hang on now. I'm like a complicated person. I suspect you are too. And in fact, your complicatedness might be a reason that I'm inclined to love you more. Because I know that you're not only one thing, because I know that you're actually changing,

like a creature, like we do. What you're describing sounds to me like grace. That's it. My brother's a high school principal and he's such a beautiful dude because he seems to have this thing that I think can be hard to have, probably with one's own kids, but also kids that you're looking after in some way. The thing of these are people changing. These are just people emerging. And I don't mean getting better. I don't mean on the way to the top of something. I just mean creatures, you know?

And one day a creature is kind of like this, and then the next day a creature is kind of like that. What a pleasure it is, like when we get to sort of feel grace, to just be walking around, moving around, thinking around with grace. After the break, finding joy in the midst of an apocalypse, whether it's fictional or real. And also, you know, kind of in delight as well, around the time that you were taking note of the huge upward transfers of wealth that we've seen in society recently. And you were maybe worrying about the collapse of society, as a lot of us do. How did you land on joy as a counter to that? I feel like I follow other people in this, like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who have a book called The Undercommons. And I feel like I'm a student of like Saidiya Hartman, who has a book called Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I got it somewhere up here. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like people who have sort of just spent a good deal of time sort of teaching us to look at the evidence of how we survive and really articulating what in the midst of profound brutality, what are the ways in which we are sort of already practicing, teaching each other how to like make it through this? It kind of seems like what you're getting at is the idea that like there's joy to be found in how people manage to survive and get to the next thing, the next day, the next year, the next era in the past. And that is kind of how you arrived at this idea of joy being the natural thing to examine right now. Yeah. And particularly that that is just what happens, that if there is a

kind of hierarchical structure that we live in, their job is to steal. When you say they, who do you mean they? The government, for instance. There's a nearly trillion dollar defense budget. It seems like that could be used for other things. It's being stolen from our survival. I mean, they're stealing that money from people who need houses, from people who need clean water, from people who need medicine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was just visiting with my Aunt Butter recently, who lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and she's like 96 years old. And she shows up in the book a little bit. And her folks came up from Port Gibson, Mississippi. And she's sort of adamant about,

like when I get there, she immediately starts going through her phone book and giving me like phone numbers. She's like, you got to connect with these people. Because that's one of the ways that we survive is by knowing each other and staying connected to each other and reaching out to each other. That is an incitement to joy. Thinking about incitements to joy and the collapse of society, living right alongside each other. I feel like there's some extremely popular television shows right now that have been about apocalypse. Station Eleven is one of them.

More recently, The Last of Us on HBO. And these shows have these moments of finding gratitude for the world before collapse. Like they look back and think, oh, it's so amazing that people flew in airplanes because they've reached a point now where this mushroom fungus is just killing everybody and turning them into basically zombies. They're not flying planes these days. So they look back and they have this gratitude for, oh, wow, there was some cool stuff that was happening before society completely bottomed out. I feel like you are not nostalgic for a better past, but living in the present to find joy in the tough times we're in now. And it reminded me of a passage you wrote where you say, the way things become more lustrous,

dearer, when we know they or we are disappearing. Say more about that. You're absolutely right. There's not a drop of nostalgia to this. What I'm trying to do is attend to models of surviving because most of us at some point come from people for whom the world was ending. Most of us come from collapse. Right.

So there are people who have been there. And those people say people who had to flee. And when they tell you, hey, keep up with your cousins. It's not just because it's cute. It's because you might have to flee. Right. Or it might just mean you might need help. Yeah.

Actually, yeah. Just not make it dramatic. You might need help. And that help might be like directions, just not make it dramatic. You might need help. And that help might be like directions. It might mean a meal. It might mean a place to stay. It might mean a loan. It might mean like a good song.

Like a playlist. Hey, I need a playlist, cousin. All legitimate and in serious needs, you know. But also, that thing of like it all becomes more lustrous and more luminous when we know that we too are disappearing. When we witness that, when we attend to that, that you and I both are disappearing, we are more inclined to be like, hey, well, let's share.

You've made mention that like, this is necessary work. This is important work. But you know, not everybody feels that way about joy. The first chapter of your book also mentions receiving commentary or feedback that joy is not a serious subject. Yeah. Why do we need to take joy more seriously? Attending to joy or witnessing joy or falling into joy or entering joy or however we think about it. Practicing joy, practicing our entanglements. Actually means practicing, you know, what our entanglements, actually means practicing what

you might call meaning, which I think is a worthwhile question. What's meaning in life? Meaning is sort of meant by giving and receiving care. I'm pretty sure that's true. I'm pretty sure that's true. And I feel like in my own experience, I feel like I have a meaningful life when I'm collaborating with people in many ways. But among them, like a really important one is collaborating toward a kind of collective care or something. And it might just be that the care is the way that we're gathering. Like a potluck is an instance of care.

And even if someone's brownies are terrible, it doesn't matter. And even if like someone doesn't have brownies and then, oh, I forgot, you know, I don't, I don't have brownies, but they came. Like it's all the evidence that we need each other that feels really important to attend to. You know, it made me think of something else that you mentioned in the book that once at a reading of yours, a white woman asked you, how can a black man write about flowers at a time like this? Which, you know, it's a question that one can get from time to time. Or rather, it's a vein of question that one can get from time to time just as a Black person expressing themselves and having thoughts and ideas out in public.

But, you know, you had a response to her, which was that eloquently, like, shut up and grow up like yeah but within that response you remarked that you know she's talking about times like this at a time like this rather you remarked that there have always been times like this and i inferred that you meant that like of course i need to be writing about flowers of course that's necessary and also it's not your business to tell you what i think is important but but yeah yeah that, that struck me that the idea that we're always living in a time like this and thus this is what I must do. Totally. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. Like the first thing is like you don't actually get to police what I think or do or say or write. Part of what I think is being said inside of that is that what you love isn't important. What you're fighting against, what you hate, what you want not to be here, that's important. Those are the legitimate subjects of our deepest inquiry. But to me, I'm like, okay, yeah, we got to figure out how to deal with that. But I'm going to wager that a bigger question is what, in fact, I love. Gathering around what I love might, in fact, be the process by which we imagine the lives that we want. I have one last question. How does joy feel in your body? I think we all understand delight, you know? But how does joy feel in your body?

I think sort of expansive, you know? I think I feel it in my chest often. And I think sometimes it makes me feel like I want to cry, actually. It makes me feel often like I've been loved by people who don't even know me. There have been people like Karen for me, looking out for me, who they couldn't even have imagined me. Ross Gay, thank you so much for joining us today. This was so fantastic. It was really wonderful to talk with you about this book.

Same to you. I love your questions. It was really lovely. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. That was poet Ross Gay. His books, Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights

are available right now. This episode was produced by Leah McBain and Alexis Williams. It was edited by Jessica Plachik. Engineering support came from Patrick Murray. I'm Brittany Luce, and we'll be back Friday with another episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. you