The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  (Mar. 21)

  58. Botan Rice Candy

  (Prefatory delight: perhaps my favorite moment in the documentary When We Were Kings, about Mohammad Ali and the Rumble in the Jungle, is when, in a moment mostly devoid of bluster, Ali says the thing he wants the kids to know is that they need to take care of their teeth, and lay off the candy, pointing to his own cavities with a genuine look of lament and mourning.)

  Today while paying for my falafel sandwich at the International Food Market on Fourth I saw a box full of Botan Rice Candy. There were probably about one hundred packages of the candy, and I bought two of them, which felt like an exercise in moderation, because I wanted them all. The ingredients are fairly simple. Well, I thought they were fairly simple. I was wrong: glucose syrup, sugar, sweet rice, water, lemon flavor, orange flavor, FD & C Red No. 40 (allum red ac). All the same, given as my favorite candies have always tended to be gummy ones (bears especially), and those are often made with the bones of pigs or horses, both of which I consider kin, I take some degree of solace in the gumminess of Botan Rice Candy (though who knows how many pigs and horses and birds and millipedes and rivers and trees and livers and kidneys are sacrificed at the altar of lemon flavor or, dear lord, FD & C Red No. 40 [allum red ac]).

  Not to mention the edible inner wrapper that melts in your mouth, which you could imagine thrilled my brother and me, more even than the free sticker inside, when our dad took us to the Asian Market at the corner of Durham and New Falls in Levittown, Pennsylvania, right next door to the Levittown Beauty Academy, where the white female beauticians-in-training covetously marveled at our fluffy halfros that my brother and I prayed nightly might become featherable. (There may or may not have been a Wham!-era George Michael photograph involved. There may or may not have been a shrine.) Dad would pick up some soy sauce and hoisin and water chestnuts, maybe some fresh ginger from the big crooked fridge grumbling in the back, his hand guiding my brother and me by our heads toward the register, next to which were stacked these very candies. The cellophane wrapper shimmering beneath the fluorescents. My father dropping three in his basket. And, in the car, tossing one to my brother, then me, and taking one for himself.

  (Mar. 22)

  59. Understory

  Today I am admiring the redbud, this most subtle and radiant of trees, which, like many of the most beautiful things, requires some training to see—to really see, for me anyway, happy as they are tucked in the understory, their thousands of lavender or periwinkle flowers growing from the near-black wood for just a couple glorious weeks every spring. The one in front of my house is just now in full bloom, the shivering angels luminous beneath the pewter sky. The sibling redbuds growing outside my building on campus, each with its own distinct hue, lean into each other like they’re telling secrets, which I suspect they are. The redbud offers some tutorial on fashion I’ve yet to fully understand, though I think it might be something about brazen understatement.

  Today I realized that the redbud and dogwood, at least where I live, do not bloom exactly together—most redbuds come first by a week or two—despite the fact that, at least where I live, they are often planted together as a vestige of a folk Christian tradition, as I understand it, in which the dogwood is the Jesus tree and the redbud the Judas. It’s easy enough for me to infer how the dogwood became all Jesusy among these white protestants, at least the white (and, to me, common) dogwood, whiteness being for them an expression of purity and unalloyed goodness. (The pink dogwood, which to me alludes to another kind of passion, must’ve troubled Calvin.) The redbud meanwhile became Judas because it is said that he hanged himself from a Mediterranean cousin of the eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), though the way the redbud flowers cluster like an orgy of kissymouths might also have been a good puritanical reason enough to associate the tree with the less than divine. Though it’s so much more than.

  (Apr. 4)

  60. “Joy Is Such a Human Madness”: The Duff Between Us

  Or, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.

  By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms.

  Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

  (Apr. 7)

  61. “It’s Just the Day I’m Having” . . .

  . . . the young brother said to me as the wind blew his glasses from the bill of his Burger King ball cap, probably on his way to work, looking exasperatedly at me as he bent over to pick them up, looking at the lenses and then to me and then back to the lenses, and I said, hoping it was not the wrong thing to say, “It’ll get better,” and he said, “Thank you.”

  (Apr. 9)

  62. The Purple Cornets of Spring

  On the table before me, like a tarot reading, are four purple flowers, all of them collected on the five-minute walk from my house to my office. To the far left is a purple butterfly, a violet. Next to that is some type of mint that comes up this time of year and makes a kind of pyramid of leaves—a steeple of leaves, with the purple parishioners peeking out. The parishioners being the flowers, and pouty ones. Next to that is an ivy whose purple petals yearn open, baring their tonsils. And to the far end of the quartet is a lilac flower, or flowers, as there are at least twenty-one open blooms on this stem. These tiny flowers are cornets of fragrance. The cornets of spring. Among the purple things I didn’t gather today, and easily could have, are redbuds; the magnolia that smells of lemons, the insides striped like a tiger; two more ground-covery flowers I’ve seen crawling through gardens in the neighborhood; and grape hyacinth, to which the other day my neighbors caught me kneeling and taking deep breaths in the grassy easement between our houses.

  (Apr. 10)

  63. The Volunteer

  Particularly this one, who right now stands on the corner of Kirkwood and Maple with her hands behind her back, the stop sign dangling from her left hand like a pendulum. She looks up and down the streets not only for schoolchildren but for adultchildren, too, evidently, as she walks to the middle of the street holding her sign to oncoming traffic, escorting these two middle-aged women on their morning walk. She looks to be, maybe, seventy or seventy-five years old and has the elegant carriage of her years, and a nearly perpetual smile. She occasionally straightens her green-yellow reflective vest by the lapels, which announces her vocation as a school crossing guard, which I’m guessing is voluntary, and so makes her a volunteer. She never sits down, despite the very comfy-looking chair-height ledge just a few steps away, which I might assail as Puritan rigidity if she wasn’t smiling. This volunteer has a fairly pronounced tremor, maybe it’s Parkinson’s, nodding her head as though she is saying yes to everything. And because I’ve a mind of death, I imagine her as a kind of boatwoman, waiting patiently to take peop
le across Kirkwood like the River Styx (did someone really name their band after this?). It would be a great comfort to me as I embarked, to see her smiling at me, nodding, Let’s get you on your way.

  (Apr. 12)

  64. Fishing an Eyelash: Two or Three Cents on the Virtues of the Poetry Reading

  It might be a kind of self-aggrandizement to say so, but I love poetry readings. I love going to them. I think I probably love them, most often, more than I love poetry books. I’m pretty sure this is true.

  The reason is simple: because during a poetry reading you are watching someone communicate with their body, which is as it communicates in the process of fading away. It will, perhaps one day soon, be dead, I mean. It sounds necrophilic, I know, but it’s not exactly. Because the fact of the dying, which, too, you and I will do, and which books will not, reminds us that the performing body, the reading body, the living body, the body fiddling with the reading lamp on the podium or playing with the hem of her dress or keeping beat on the microphone like Whitney Houston used to, looking into the corners of the room, the occasional sparkling line of spit between his lips, the armpit of their T-shirt damp, pointing to the giraffe in their poem, all of it, is lustrous.

  Books are lovely. I love books. And libraries are among my favorite places on Earth, especially the tiny hand-built take-one-leave-ones like book birdhouses popping up in the last five or ten years. That’s a delight. And the libraries in small towns that only open two and a half days a week, and odd hours at that, where the knotty pine boards creak and the book-stuffed shelves of the old house wobble as you pass through. Where you have to duck walking beneath the sagging doorframe into the sci-fi, gardening, erotica, and children’s lit room.

  As I write this it’s occurring to me that the books I most adore are the ones that archive the people who have handled them—dogears, or old receipts used as bookmarks (always a lovely digression). Underlines and exclamation points, and this in an old library book! The tender vandalisms by which, sometimes, we express our love. Or a fingerprint, made of some kind of oil, maybe from peanut butter, which it would be if it was mine. Or a tea stain, and a note to oneself only oneself could decipher.

  But books do not, the way the poet today did, cough and excuse herself and sip some water and comment on the pollen, sending you into a lilac-inspired daydream, wiping your own nose on your sleeve. Books do not look searchingly while communicating their contents at the twelve or thirteen people gathered on couches in what must’ve been one of the most passive-aggressively lit rooms in America. Books do not, mid-poem, reach the forefinger and thumb into one’s mouth to gently fish out an eyelash. There are multiplicities within a human body reading poems that a poem on a page will never reproduce. In other words, books don’t die. And preferring them to people won’t prevent our doing so.

  (Apr. 17)

  65. Found Things

  Among the qualities of delight, I’ve found, I’m finding, in my dalliance with it (T-shirt: DALLIANCE WITH DELIGHT), is the feeling of discovery. The sense that one has found something, been shown something, perhaps materially, perhaps spiritually or psychically, that was previously unknown. Perhaps delight is like a great cosmic finger pointing at something. That’s not it. Perhaps delight is like after the great cosmic finger has pointed at something, and that something (which in all likelihood was already there, which is why I’ve enlisted a cosmic finger rather than a human one) appears. A-ha! Or, Whoa! Yes!

  For instance, when, a couple days back, I saw a husky middle-aged man pulling his roller bag down the block with wheels that sparkled, which are in the same aesthetic ballpark as the children’s sneakers that do the same, I thought, Whoa! Yes! Much the way I do when I see the kids with firefly feet. Or when I learned from a Thomas Lux poem that pigs cannot look up: A-ha! Or when I see birds swooping through the Detroit airport, which I happen to fly through sort of regularly, because I don’t see them every time and forget that I see them sometimes, I always—not almost always, always—lose my shit with glee. My finger, also a kind of bird, flying from my side to point at the little tuft that just skidded onto the trash can: Whoa! Yes! I also notice myself looking around, searching among the commuters for fellow compatriots of glee.

  I wonder if this impulse to share, the urge to elbow your neighbor, who maybe was not even your neighbor until the bird flew between you up into the pipes and rafters you did not notice until you followed the bird there, is also among the qualities of delight? And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests—and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem—that our delight grows as we share it.

  (Apr. 17)

  66. Found Things (2)

  This delight is about another kind of found thing, another kind of bird, a letter sent to me from a high school student in California. I will forgo the whole contextualizing rigmarole in favor of simply offering to you the delight I found in my work mailbox, which had been forwarded a couple times from other addresses, written in a boisterous felt script, quoted almost in its entirety below.

  Dear Mr. Gay,

  My name is __________ and I am writing from my English class at __________ High.

  My favorite poem in your collection is the chickenshit one. I really like the repetition and symbolism of the chickenshit.

  I have a few questions. How difficult and how long did it take you to finish the entire poetry book? What is the chickenshit?

  Also, my teacher really likes your work.

  Sincerely.

  (Apr. 18)

  67. Cuplicking

  Today I found myself (I adore that construction for its Whitmanian assertion of multitudinousness) licking the little remnants, little stains, from the coffee dribbling down the rim of the cup. More fastidious than lascivious—kind of cleaning the cup. Like a raccoon.

  The first time I noticed someone doing this it was my friend, my professor, Susan Blake. I was back at Lafayette College on a teaching fellowship, and we were meeting over lunch to talk about me coteaching the Invisible Man unit. She got a warm-up on her coffee as we were eating dessert, pumpkin pie I think, and I noticed her lick the cup, unselfconsciously removing the dribble stains. I can’t recall if she looked to see how thorough a job she did, though I usually do, and will touch up where I’ve missed. Nor do I recall if she licked the cup more than once, though I assume she did, since I do, and she was my teacher in licking the cup. I think I wondered, when she licked the cup, dragging her broad tongue against the porcelain, if she was flirting, if cuplicking was a way middle-aged people communicate desire.

  Being a middle-aged person now, it’s no surprise that I worry that any odd gesture might smuggle with it the possibility for misperception as flirting with beginning-aged people, some of whom I teach, and that, friends, is a losing battle. By which I mean to say, I don’t think she was flirting and, if I lick the cup while in the presence of students, I do it surreptitiously and never, god forbid, while making eye contact. When Professor Blake, which she forbade me from calling her and so made me a kind of adult—when Susan generously read the first two chapters of my dissertation, she asked me, without meaning to hurt my feelings, if I spent anywhere near as much time on my prose as I do my poems. When she handed the sixty or so pages back, all sliced up with red-penned comments, she also handed me a handbook kind of book called Writing Prose (ninth edition) with the ugliest teal cover ever. How do we thank our dead teachers?

  (Apr. 22)

  68. Bobblehead

  I suspect there will be no more apparently superficial delight than this one, given as I am swirling in a volley of birdsong, given the pine tree just beyond me has a branch like an arm bent into a greeting, given the near-glowing green of these trees against the soft blue of a misty morning. But it is true, I adore bobblehead toys, one of which passed by me on a dashboard maniacally agreeing to everything. As a kid I might also have loved the Weeble Wobble, or at least I loved the commercial, which is probably the closest I got to that toy, for whic
h I commend my parents given, as I recall, the purpose of that toy was to encourage a child to strike it as hard as possible to see if it would stay down. Bad toy idea. (I Googled the Weeble Wobble to find that I have conflated the Weeble Wobble with the Bozo and, I imagine, other people-faced punching bags. Bad toy idea still.)

  The syrup-filled Godzilla my folks got me one Christmas when I was about four would not, for another child, have been a bad toy idea, but for me it was simply a Godzilla-shape blunt object with which to beat my big brother, whom I loved, but I didn’t yet know how to express that love thanks to all the Weeble Wobble commercials, probably. People-faced punching-bag commercials, I mean. Thankfully my grandmother noticed this ignorance on my part, snatching the Godzilla from my hand on my backswing as my brother cowered below, and thunked me on the head with it, hard. Once. (It was a similar tutelage when I was tugging Spot’s floppy spotted ear on the farm while she was feeding the chickens: hearing Spot’s yelps, she marched toward us and yanked my ear, hard. Once.)