The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  However the dumb and sad moratorium on the pretty arrived, the lavender infinity scarf Danni made with her hands, and that I am wearing as I write this, represents one small gesture of many in the moratorium on the moratorium. The scarf is a soft and endless exteriorization of a shifting interior. I want to be softer, I’m trying to say.

  (Dec. 21)

  31. Ghost

  No, not Jesus.

  Today, after I came back soaked and stinky from the sweet basement gym in my mother’s apartment complex, I kicked off my shoes, snagged one of my mom’s ubiquitous bottles of store-brand seltzer, and plopped down on the leather couch, not taking a shower. This strikes me as a version of self-infantilization, which the holidays are all about. We were struggling to figure out how to play a movie On Demand, or on On Demand, on her television, which has so many channels. Freedom isn’t free and all. Usually by this time in the visit I have developed a nervous tic from the television being on quite loud and constantly, and have nurtured my self-infantilization by enduring and resenting the television rather than asking for a different volume, or none at all, which my mom would have gladly accommodated, and does, which maybe is why I’m writing this at 1:00 a.m. instead of sleeping—cherishing this bit of waking silence.

  We were bumbling through the endless scroll of movies, trying to find Milk, which I hadn’t seen and my mother thought was wonderful and was willing and interested to watch again; she has a thing for Sean Penn but, anytime she brings up Mystic River, will actually tear up and start lamenting what happened to Tim Robbins’s character, I think, but I’m not sure because I fell asleep in the first ten minutes. She asks me why it had to happen, literally, literally, and it ruins our time together; it will drop a pallor over us as she looks sadly at me like I’ve done something terrible, then looks out the window shaking her head, the sky suddenly gray and very far away, and I haven’t even seen the goddamned movie, so if she starts going there I try to distract her the way you slip a wooden spoon into a toddler’s hand when he’s freaking out about having to put down the cleaver. Anyhow, she noticed Ghost was about to start on TBS. “Oh, Dad loved this movie,” she said, somewhat to my surprise. Now my dad liked stupid movies, but usually with car chases and explosions, and he didn’t go in for, as far as I know, the supernatural. (Real conversation I had with my father at age seven or so: “What happens when you die, Dad?” “The worms eat you. Now go play.”)

  (An aside: I am, as perhaps you are, time to time alerted to my likeness to a given public figure, an actor or professional athlete, the details of which comparison I will mostly spare you [though I will tell you President Obama, with my hair short, early on, was one of them, by white women only]. But the one who is relevant here, if you’d call him a public figure, which I wouldn’t, given as he played the part of Patrick Swayze’s murderer, and so was granted five to ten seconds in the film—the movie—though it was evidently enough screen time for two women at the Jersey City DMV, after I paid to get the boot off my car, to whisper to each other, giggling, before asking me if I was a movie star. Same for the juice lady at the health food store in Lambertville. Are you a movie actor? All of them referring to Swayze’s murderer in Ghost, my doppelganger evidently, which maybe, in retrospect, had some kind of negative effect on me and my dad’s relationship.)

  “I would come home from work and he’d be watching Ghost and the tears would be just running down his face.” The way my mother said it, the construction of her saying, I’m saying, makes it feel as though that’s what my father was always doing at 6:15 on weekdays when my mother got home from work, which, given as he was always working himself, was not the case, though in some way the construction, the figure my mother has created, makes it the case: sobbing as Magical Whoopi donates her body to . . . I mean channels dead Patrick Swayze for his and Demi’s supernatural reunion. Sobbing to the Everly Brothers. The Righteous Brothers I mean. Sobbing as sparkling, shimmery, ghostly Patrick Swayze goes back to heaven or wherever for the last time. You might discern in me a certain disdain for the movie Ghost, which is correct, and completely irrelevant, given as the subject of this essay is my father weeping at a corny movie, is my father weeping for all time, by virtue, by gift, of a colloquialism, a precise grammatical imprecision on my mother’s part. On language’s part. Which, too, is the subject. His beautiful brown skin gleaming beneath his glasses as he turns around, looking over his shoulder from his leather chair, wiping his eyes and smiling at us as we come through the door.

  (Dec. 25)

  32. Nota Bene

  In the book I was reading today the abbreviation NB was fronting a prefatory note that was half defense and half assertion of the utility and innocuousness and elegance of the word he as a universal pronoun for “person.” You know, a member of mankind. Too clumsy to fiddle around with and besides who cares, you know what I mean.

  I asked Stephanie, who was sitting next to me reading her book, what NB meant, and she told me nota bene was like a note to the reader. I looked it up, and as I suspected, bene means good; note good, note well, or pay close attention. I suppose you could also tease it and suggest it means “good note,” which this one wasn’t. It was a bad note, given as it was a book written in 2015 committed to the linguistic negation of half the population. The author probably does not think he’s doing this, and more or less said so in his nota. Think is a funny word in this context, given as this person is an author, a social critic, a belles lettre-ist whose business, presumably, is language. It’s his business enough to include in his book a not good nota about language forsaking his business of language. Thinking, I’m saying, is scarce in the nota.

  Rather than acknowledge the fact of male-centered or male-dominant or nonmale erasing thinking which the universal “he” enacts—magically, in his book, converting all imagined readers and writers into men—it’s magic, really, how language stokes the imagination, and the imagination language; actually, it’s not magic at all—rather than pushing into language, pushing against it, dancing with it, so that it not only expresses the multiplicity of possible pronouns and genders and worlds but engages the language such that the difficulty, the richness, the loveliness of an author’s thinking might be contained and expressed. So that the clunky, clumsy attempt at linguistic inclusion can itself be a kind of elegance. Try harder, I’m saying. Think better, I mean.

  The delight? When I read this note to Stephanie’s seventeen-year-old daughter, she said, twisting up her face and pulling her head back on her neck like a stone in a slingshot, note well, What the fuck?

  (Dec. 26)

  33. “Love Me in a Special Way”

  The song begins with a few chords, a few trilly flourishes, as a prelude to El’s singing: “You know you had me, with your sensuous charm, yet you looked so alarmed, as I walked on by.” At this point, if you’re me, or if you’re like me, which is most likely a generational designation, but also, perhaps, and imprecisely, a racial one—I’m saying my dad’s de facto Philadelphia station was Power 99, and WDAS a not-too-shabby backup—you are writhing. If you are standing your knees may in fact have buckled, which is a fine metaphor for being moved, and one I have likely overused, but I’m talking about your knees buckling and your hand, or hands, going to the ground to keep you above it. Or if you’re sitting you might strike something, perhaps your own body, if you don’t even draw all of your limbs toward your heart, which makes plain that the heart, itself an overused metaphor, is not always a metaphor.

  It perhaps has to do with the song’s place in one’s (my) history, and more particularly one’s (my) psychosexual history, by which I mean when crave became an inarticulate state of being, one’s (my) tongue somehow always almost out, and nose thrown into the breeze, rubbing oneself (myself) helplessly against every couch and mossy tree in one’s (my) path, that this song was a sort of red carpet, and so can almost feel like the origin of the craving, or at very least can occasion the near-precise character of the craving, which was youthful and wild and utterly ove
rwhelming and therefore a little odd to feel sitting in this basement café in Indiana full of people I’m going to take a wild guess have no similar feeling about this particular DeBarge tune. I could be wrong. I know.

  The feeling arrives when it does almost as much a recollection as a feeling, or, perhaps more accurately, a recollection that imparts the feelings it recollects, which occasions in me an actual bodily, and hopefully pretty quiet, response. An animal response not unlike the one I overheard a friend make when she caught sight of some hunky mostly naked guy doing calisthenics in Boston Common, a subtle growl like a muffler with a hole in it. An animal in between pleasure and hunger. Hunger itself sometimes a kind of pleasure. This song actually makes me make that sound sometimes. No kidding.

  And El, too, let me not neglect to acknowledge his beautiful, androgynous crooning, the plea, which is such an upsetting of dumb-conventional narratives of heterosexual pursuit (also doing their work in my not-quite pubescent mind), because El is the one begging—oh, it’s a declarative sentence, but you better believe he’s begging and playing hard to get at once: how do you do that?!—to be loved, and loved specially.

  But not only that: despite someone very recently pooh-poohing the DeBarges as a bunch of light brights when I mentioned how much the group meant to me when I was a kid, it thrilled—no, delighted me—when I was recently standing in the security line at the Philadelphia airport and an older gentleman working there said to no one in particular, and just loud enough for me to hear (this is an as-yet-uncoined rhetorical maneuver, though within the larger umbrella of signifying or talking shit): “Is that a DeBarge?!”

  (Jan. 6)

  34. “Stay,” by Lisa Loeb

  A deliciously corny song just came on that might’ve once been your favorite, too, just like it was my most sociopathic childhood friend’s, my friend who, with another pal, snuck into our home while my parents were sleeping upstairs (we were an easy mark—the key was in the mailbox) and rearranged the furniture: the couch facing the wall, the chairs stacked up, and the dining room table in the living room. I actually came home from my girlfriend’s late that night after my buddies had done their stealth interior design work and thought, Mom and Dad are officially off their rockers. Then I went to bed.

  But when my mother woke me up pissed off about the tomfoolery, I immediately suspected these two assholes (we were a legion of pranksters, truth be told), a couple of my besties, and dialed up the unsociopathic asshole and told him my mother tripped in the early morning dark because someone had rearranged our furniture in the night as a joke, and she busted out her tooth, a trick I can’t take all the credit for; my dad gave me the idea when he was yelling at me: Mom could’ve knocked her tooth out! Why the singular rather than the plural, I will never know.

  Being unsociopathic, he immediately confessed and apologized profusely and almost wept, and was so kind as to also alert me to the sociopath’s involvement. So when I called the sociopath and employed the same mode of entrapment—My mom tripped and busted out a tooth and had to be rushed to the dental hospital—this buddy said, more or less, Bummer, which is why the next day when driving with my girlfriend and spotting a fat roadkill possum I convinced her to pull over so I could toss the thing in the trunk before depositing it on the sociopath’s doorstep, where inside, for all I know, he was watching the video, sweet Lisa Loeb in that big empty loft in those dorky glasses with the turtle-shell rims, singing softly along, re-falling in love as she pleads, “You said that I was naïve, and I thought that I was strong, I thought, oh, I can leave I can leave, oh, but now I know that I was wrong, because I missed you, ohh, I missed you,” the bloated possum’s empty eyes looking through the door and the game over.

  (Jan. 8)

  35. Stacking Delights

  I’m about five months into this delight project. Naturally, as these delights accumulate, as they stack up, I begin to recognize patterns, both in the ways the delights operate, unfold, amble or stumble or babble toward their knowledge (or confusion), and in the way I have come to relate to their making.

  That is, whereas I originally walked through my day attending to my delights until I arrived at the one that felt irrepressible and then sat down to wonder about it with a pen in a notebook, I have since begun cataloging delights that I will save for a future date, which, while stacking delights in itself is a useful activity and practice (sounds like a Denny’s pancake breakfast special: Delight Stack), it defeats this book’s purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which I actually wrote on my hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup in Bloomington today, where I had some very good lentil spinach soup, spiffed up with some actually hot hot sauce, while sitting in a booth reading Renee Gladman’s darn good book of essay(ettes), Calamities.

  Yes, stacking delights defeats the purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which, note the caps, is a fancy way of writing on one’s hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup what means, simply, dailiness. So today I’m recalling the utility, the need, of my own essayettes to emerge from such dailiness, and in that way to be a practice of witnessing one’s delight, of being in and with one’s delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn’t hoard it. No scarcity of delight.

  And in that spirit I am going to empty the docket, clean the slate of delights I have squirreled away in various notebooks, usually in bulleted but scrawly lists, some of which I have in a stack on my lap. My lap is full of delights. And strange as it sounds, clearing them away is itself a delight.

  Following is a not-quite-exhaustive list:

  The experience, the feeling, that I had been writing for the previous two hours when in fact I had been reading Brian Blanchfield’s book of essays, Proxies.

  Callie Siskel’s observation: “There’s an etymological connection between thinking and thanking. Both have the same Indo-European root, tung, which means to feel or think.”

  Jamila Woods’s album HEAVN, particularly the song “LSD.” How a good song makes my head rock like a boat in the wind.

  My friend Evie Shockley, who told me, after I gave a reading where she teaches, that a turn in one of my poems, which in some poets I say might be a horseshit trick, is in fact a horseshit trick.

  Gold Rush apples.

  The phrase—a colloquialism (a regionalism?) not native to me—“I’m gonna get me some x,” which these days I myself occasionally employ. The understanding of a multiplicity of selves, of a complexity of self. A self-weirding. I does not equal me.

  My friend Abdel’s lament, after watching a student “solve” the Rubik’s Cube on his desk just like the YouTube video showed her how: “You need to value your ignorance.”

  Elvin Jones, on a live John Coltrane quartet recording from France, soloing in my ears while the raindrops percussed the sidewalk in front of me, making it sparkle. His sticks, his hands, articulating the light.

  A quote from June Jordan’s response to the moon landing. “How about a holy day, instead, a day when we will concentrate on the chill and sweat worshipping of humankind, in mercy fathom.” In mercy fathom.

  The laughing snort: among the most emphatic evidences of delight.

  Remembering, rereading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, that the painter Joan Mitchell “customarily chose her pigments for their intensity rather than their durability—a choice that, as many painters know, can in time bring one’s paintings into a sorry state of decay” (i.e., she painted for people, not museums).

  The cardinal (my favorite bird) made of two adjacent knots on the two-by-twelve bench next to me, with feathers windblown by the wood grain like it’s about to take off.

  Walking down the block in a cold rain with the poet Gerald Stern, who was using a walker that day, and despite the weather needed, more than once, to stop and grab my arm to make a point.

  The first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one
’s own?”

  Layaway.

  (Jan. 9)

  36. Donny Hathaway on Pandora

  My friend Jericho said it best when he observed that when Donny sings his song “For All We Know,” which for other singers is an over-the-top, sort of desperate, extended pickup line (“For all we know we may never meet again,” i.e., time is of the essence, now or never, I gotta catch a flight, your man’s coming home from work, etc.), he is singing about dying, and not about the little deaths the extended pickup line might (hopefully) lead to. Actual dying. Which is to say, our imminent disappearance is Donny’s subject, his voice’s subject—which the voice’s first subject always is, as fading and disappearance are sound’s essential characteristics. His is a voice that makes you realize that your voice is the song of your disappearing, which is our most common song. The knowledge of which, the understanding of which, the inhabiting of which, might be the beginning of a radical love. A renovating love, even.