The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  Prose, though, I often write on the computer, piling sentences up quickly, cutting and pasting, deleting whole paragraphs without thinking anything of it. For these essays, though, I decided that I’d write by hand, mostly with Le Pens, in smallish notebooks. I can tell you a few things—first, the pen, the hand behind the pen, is a digressive beast. It craves, in my experience anyway, the wending thought, and crafts/imagines/conjures a syntax to contain it. On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is.

  For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I’d no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer’s green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull. To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it’s kept.

  (Sep. 12)

  11. Transplanting

  Today I have smuggled three fig cuttings onto a flight from Philadelphia to Detroit. Truth be told, no smuggling has occurred, given as I was carrying the things open and notorious, their roots tucked into some moist compost in a plastic bag. But smuggling makes it sound more thrilling than what it appears—carrying a few sticks in a bag—and therefore more like what it is: carrying living creatures for replanting about seven hundred miles away. Which, you might have already gone there, given as I’ve told you already they’re figs, is another way of saying I’m carrying joy around in my bag. Actually, right now it’s in the overhead compartment in that plastic bag probably a little funky with my dirty clothes.

  This is one of those delights that keeps piling up, as the fig tree I took these cuttings from, in Stephanie’s mother’s backyard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, was itself made of a cutting from a grove of figs farther down the Delaware in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, where my friend Jay’s family lived and where his father grew a wonderful garden, including bitter melon, Asian pears, peaches, ong choi, and, yes, these figs. When I first asked if I could transplant some of Mr. Lau’s figs (he was moving and I was heartbroken that that garden would no longer be a sanctuary to me) he said yes, if he even said that, walked me out to the grove of figs beneath his massive chestnut tree, grabbed a pickax, and started hacking.

  I was kind of terrified, green green thumb that I was. (Two ancillary delights—Mr. Lau, old school, OG, actually got a turtle, drilled a hole in its shell, tied a string to a nut about the hole’s size, which he then dropped into that hole, tying the other end of the string to a stick in the middle of his lettuces so that he could have a steady [if coerced] slug patrol. That’s not the delight. The delight is that his son, my pal Jay, under cover of night, dislodged the nut from the shell, carried the critter on his bike [one handed, no helmet] to a nearby tributary of Neshaminy Creek, the thing’s River Jordan. Ancillary delight two, with a twinge of irony: when people say they have a black thumb, meaning they can’t grow anything, I say yeah, me too, then talk about the abundant garden these black thumbs are growing.) Then we stuck the cuttings in a bucket full of water, and he did in fact tell me not to let them dry out.

  Yesterday, when I dug up a few of Stephanie’s mother’s figs, I used a shovel and hacked at the roots like Mr. Lau, though I was sending soothing mindbeams to the tree as I did so (which I’m guessing Mr. Lau was not—ref. aforementioned turtle tale). After I got a few well-rooted cuttings, I took them to the bucket near the hose, filled it up, dropped them in, showered and dressed for the funeral of a beloved twenty-year-old kid named Rachel who fell to her death a few nights ago. While Stephanie was telling me over the phone about Rachel’s death she said two butterflies alighted on the butterfly bush we had just planted. When we were standing in the back corner of the funeral home during the eulogies—I moved there because I’m tall and called Stephanie over so we could listen together—Stephanie caught sight of a silver gleam on the gray carpet. When the eulogy was over, she picked it up: a single elephant earring. Elephants were Rachel’s favorite animal. She adored them.

  When we got home, after the pizza and guacamole (my guacamole—a delight. Another delight: here’s the recipe: avocado, onion, garlic, salt. Really!), I grabbed the bucket, trimmed the cuttings into sticks, potted them in the plastic bag, and set them on the counter, where they sat like promises. Little converters. Little dreamers of coming back into bloom. And how we might carry that with us wherever we go.

  (Sep. 15)

  12. Nicknames

  I am writing in a notebook with the words Pay Attention on the front, which is a cousin to another notebook in my bag with the words Pay Attention Motherfucker on it, printed on a Chandler and Price letterpress that I co-own with my friend, which I have yet to see, for it is lodged in a print shop in Lubbock, Texas. My beloved co-owner pal, which makes him a kind of spouse, I suppose, who gifted me these delightful notebooks is named Boogie, or Boogs, and was so named by me—one of my greatest literary achievements. Boogie, or Boogs, might not be the first name you’d assign to Boogie, or Boogs, for a number of reasons, perhaps the most significant of which is that he has probably, he has definitely, not spent a lot of time dancing, boogieing, which you might ascertain from his appearance, which would be a wrong thing to do, though you’d be right. This is one of the reasons Boogie, or Boogs, is such a great nickname—it’s a kind of curveball that has, with much repetition, become utterly natural, and his Christian name, Curtis, has come to seem awkward and clunky. Kind of Lutheran, kind of curt. It’s a clothesline of a name, really. The football kind.

  Another reason I love this nickname, and have now come to love how much I love this nickname, is because Boogie doesn’t know that every time I say his name I am also invoking the great and similarly nicknamed L-Boogie, or Lauren Hill, whom I am guessing, wrongly, probably rightly, Boogie has never boogied to. Boogie calls me Salpicon, which he tells me means sizzle, which I think fits—though it would be a safe assumption given my own delight that the nickname Salpicon might afford Boogie some similarly pleasurable ironic association, which I do not need to know about. I’ve shortened my nickname to Picon, whatever that means. Anyway, I love nicknames. They delight me.

  There are, evidently, people from whom nicknames are repelled like projectiles from Luke Cage’s skin. Fried eggs to Teflon. My friend Patrick is one, though the simple Spanishification of his name, Patricio, time to time, among some of us, is one that has endured, sort of, time to time. Drop the Pa, jiggle the spelling, and it might be a good, sticky name—Treecio—one that, in a generation or two, might become associated, incorrectly, and beautifully, and so correctly, with something arboreal. How delightful is that?

  I am a bit of a nickname magnet and have been assigned the following aliases—Bizquick, Biz, Raheem (the compassionate), Beef, Beefie, Big Man, Bigs, Biggie, Big lil Big, Big Poppa, The Big Gay, Bones, Babyboy, Babygay, The Baby, Booger, Beast, Sammy, Sossy, Saucy, Sauce, Saucypants, Dr. Sauce, Dr. Hot Sauce, Doc, The Doctor, Tall Lady, Tall Drink, Wave, Arroz (con pollo), Ross the Boss the King of Applesauce, Rosski, Snozzers, Six, Seis, Unky, Daddy, and several others too lewd or private to share. I don’t know exactly what nicknames mean, though a quick reading of mine, and the abundance of the b sound, that babiest of sounds, makes me think it might be primal. I know that I rarely call the people I lo
ve by their names. I call them, if it is okay with them, by the name I have given them. I wonder if this means I think of my beloveds as my children. That seems very patronizing. Especially because I mostly don’t give them money. But, on the other hand, how lovely all my mothers. All my babies.

  (Sep. 26)

  13. But, Maybe . . .

  I was driving with Stephanie back to our beautiful, ugly little house and I said, imitating someone’s disdain for something, “Whoop-de-doo.” She said, “Whoop-de-doo good or bad?” I said, “Whoop-de-doo is bad.” She said, “Always?” I said, “Always; whoop-de-doo is always bad.” She said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Oh, I’m sure!” She said, “You’re telling me whoop-de-doo is never good?” I said, “I guess I can’t say for sure.” Certainly it delights me when someone (especially someone other than dear Stephanie) gently alerts me to a significant possible crack in the foundations of my knowledge, lexical or otherwise. For I was pretty goddamned sure whoop-de-doo always means something like big shit, but that phrase of dismissal and contempt, thank you Stephanie, is now also thrown into doubt, so obvious is it that the veneer of irony might easily be peeled from it. Big shit meaning wow, I mean. A dismissive phrase my mother discharges like she’s getting paid to do it is la-di-da, meaning something like aren’t your britches big, which, yes, thinking a bit about it, could be good, big britches indicating prosperity and weather-readiness. Not to mention the Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh song, which, every day in the sixth grade, we sang: Antonio making the beat on the green vinyl seats, his younger brother Mike next to him, me and Maurice and Kamara nearby, all singing or screaming, driving the driver, surely, crazy, la-di-da-di, all the big-shit twelve-year-olds conducting all the pipsqueak squirts with their big britches, la-di-da, whoop-de-doo, it was delightful.

  (Sep. 29)

  14. “Joy Is Such a Human Madness”

  So writes Zadie Smith toward the end of her beautiful essay “Joy.” She gets there by explaining that she has an almost constitutional proclivity toward being pleased. She is a delight to cook for, she suggests, because your pancakes will be the best pancakes she has ever eaten! And she has what I consider the wonderful quality—doubly, triply, wonderful in the almost prosecutorially vain and Hollywood-obsessed (or whatever’s the new Hollywood) culture of ours—of finding interesting faces beautiful. I love that. Something crooked or baggy. A squirrelly tooth or two. Hairs where hairs, according to the magazines or movies, ought not be. (Let me take a moment to honor and delight in and hover above the birthmark on my father’s left temple, which he kindly bestowed upon my left hip, in a lighter shade, and which makes, in conjunction with the long scar zipping my upper thigh beneath it, an upside-down exclamation point.) But I have veered, as I am wont to do, from Smith’s meditation on joy, which veering also delights me. But that’s not, here, the point.

  The point is that she differentiates between pleasure and joy, and for that I thank her. Pleasure—for me, this morning, a perfect cake donut at the vegan bakery down the hill, which I rode to on my bike, the early fall briskness breaking me into a few tears in my bombing (delight!: the word bombing wrested from military discourse to mean going fast down a hill on a bike or skateboard, especially to the vegan bakery), is great, but it is not, by itself, a joy.

  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—pleasure as Smith offers it, 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.

  Smith writes about being on her way to visit Auschwitz while her husband was holding her feet. “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.” It has little to do with pleasure (though holding one’s love’s feet is a pleasure; and having one’s feet held by one’s love is a pleasure). It has to do with this other thing Smith describes perfectly, if a bit riddly, which seems perfect given as it is a bit riddly: the intolerable makes life worthwhile. How is that so?

  There is ridiculous, and then there’s ridiculous. I prefer the latter, I think, sitting behind a family tending to their two kids, digging through their carry-on for medicine for the little one, who wears a kind of foam hockey helmet and wails. Was wailing. I think it was Kenzaburō Ōe who said somewhere, wrote somewhere, that he wouldn’t know what it was to be a person without his son, who has a profound cognitive disability. I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow—terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.

  Is this metaphorical bridge in the body of the parent? And if so, what are the provinces it connects? Or is it connecting the towns of terror and delight, which might make the dangling legs very high up belong to the mayors of terror and delight, both of whom look, I’m afraid to say, exactly like your child.

  When Rachel fell to her death—an accident, a slip, doing precisely what you or I did one thousand times as kids, fucking around, balancing on some edge, trying to get a better look, a little closer, a little faster, a little higher—

  The bridge exists, on second thought, perhaps, in the bodies of all those to whom the fallen child is beloved, and in the bodies of all those to whom any possible falling child would be annihilation, which, sorry to say, is all of us.

  And the slipping child—hand from a rung, foot from a rung—what metaphor the ladder?—how she seems to pierce us, drive a hole through us.

  A hole through which what.

  Here’s the ridiculous part. Is it possible that people come to us—I do not here aspire exactly to a metaphysical argument, and certainly not one about fate or god, but rather just a simple, spiritual question—and then go away from us—

  I don’t even want to write it.

  Rather this: And what comes through the hole?

  There is a scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty where Jep, the one-hit-wonder novelist and socialite in what we might call late middle age visits the exhibit of an artist who has taken or had taken photos of himself every day of his life since he was about four or five. It’s thousands of pictures of this, oh, forty-five-year-old guy, all hanging like a quilt on the walls in the courtyard of some beautiful Roman building. As Jep looks over the photographs, his arms behind his back, he’s overwhelmed—we see him seeing time passing in some utterly unequivocal way: the boy’s mussed hair; the skinny teen; the newly facial-haired young man; the what, weariness, as his true adulthood comes on. It devastates me, and only partly because of the lamenty song, “The Beatitudes,” played by the Kronos Quartet, filling out the scene as Jep’s chin starts to quake. It’s devastating because we know that Jep is seeing his own life—what remains of it—pass. Lost love, dead friends, the whole bit. He is seeing what I was going to write was the fundamental truth of his life, but that is a fundamental truth of our lives, which is simply that we die. Or, everything dies. Or, loss. Or, as Philip Levine put it in his beautiful poem—truth is, this is what I’ve always gathered from the title; the poem’s kind of otherwise concerned—“Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Nothing expresses it better than that. And sometimes—maybe mostly?—we are the animals.

  I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization—in that clear way, not that oh yeah way—that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be
no more so soon, or now. Good as now.

  It’s a feeling I’ve had outside of dreams as well—an acute understanding, looking at a beloved’s back as the blankets gather at her waist and the light comes in through the gauzy shades, lying across her shoulder; watching my mother sleep in her chair, her mouth part open, the skin above her eyes exactly like mine; looking at the line of mourners; tugging the last red fish pepper from the plant. It’s a terrible feeling, but not bad—terrible in the way Rilke means when he tells us at the beginning of the Duino Elegies that “All angels are terrible”; terrible in the old German way (if you think I know what that actually means I have a bridge to sell you), or maybe more accurately in the Romantic sense, or in the Burkean sublime sense, which speaks to obliteration and annihilation—all angels remind us that annihilation is part of the program. And those terrible angels—the angel of annihilation—is a beautiful thing, is the maker, too, of joy, and is partly what Zadie Smith’s talking about when she talks about being in joy. That it’s not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible (the old German kind), joy is.

  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: “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?