“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone tell came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a educator, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, connect. And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest unrestrained in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or 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 Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we desire, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just state dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our i
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club&#;s November selection, Inciting Joy by Ross Gay forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25,
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Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING JOY, pp.
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. I’ll never forget a girl at a reading in a public library in April of in Claremont, California—one 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 brick—I suspect she was in her overdue sixties or early seventies
“My hunch is that joy is an ember for our precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy… My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow… might draw us together.”
In Ross Gay’s brilliant novel Inciting Joy, he makes adj that sorrow and joy are not two distinct emotions that can be quarantined. Instead of running from one’s sorrow, his work suggests that the sentiment instead becomes a part of our routines; “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 dad’s slippers that we’ve hung onto for fifteen years for just this occasion. And we drape our murdered buddy’s scarf… over sorrow’s shoulders, to warm them up some.” We must hold care of and nurture this sorrow. The experience of joy is formed from our common sorrow. This book focuses on both what incites joy and what joy incites— an exploration into the practices, the rituals, and the habits that make this type of joy available, which he then proces
The Broadest Portal to Joy
All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.
All joy is the act of remembering &#; the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.
This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay&#;s essay collection Inciting Joy (public library) &#; a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.
With an eye to the community orchard he helped create &#; a &#;long sweaty collaborative dream&#; &#; Gay writes:
Though I didn’t yet have the words for it, planting that orchard &#; by which I mean&#; joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be &#; reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future. A rhizomatic care I so often forget to perceive I am every second in the midst of. By which I came to be, and am, at all. Despite ev