Book Report: The Book of Delights

23. Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019) (4/23/21)

I love Ross Gay. (I've shared a couple of his poems before, here and here, and you can hear him in conversation with Pam Houston here.) In this book of 102 "essayettes," he takes on delight—daily: it was a project, begun on his 42nd birthday, ending on his 43rd. I love daily projects, too. (Obviously, he provides here a selection from the year.) 

The subjects range far and wide, from pecans to black bumblebees, a Rothko basketball backboard to a pawpaw grove, coffee without a saucer to Donny Hathaway on Pandora. Friends and family populate the essays. Some of the musings are focused, while some veer here and there. I especially enjoyed the pieces that include close attention and description, or some quirky retelling of an interaction he had, or a meditation on words and meaning, or, especially, a revelation, an insight, a sort of "note to self."

Like here, in #88, "Touched," after he has lovingly described three individuals who might be called eccentric or innocent, might be considered "touched," he writes:

All of these examples make clear that touched often also means exuberant or enthusiastic, both of which qualities can provoke in us, when we are feeling small and hurtable, something like embarrassment, which again maybe points to the terror at our own lurking touchedness. When I watched the child doing his wonky, unselfconscious moonwalk [to the song "Billy  Jean" while standing in line], I had a feeling that I might have then identified as embarrassment, aware of this kid's obliviousness, his immersion—his delight.
     But I am coming to identify that feeling of embarrassment as something akin to tenderness, because in witnessing someone's being touched, we are also witnessing someone's being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another, moonwalking the half and half, . . . can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

Or here, from #10, "Writing by Hand":

I often write [prose] 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.

And finally, I'll quote this, from #87, "Loitering" (which is also a meditation on production and consumption, racism and repression, as well as safety and laughter), because it caused me to go in search of this photo:

Carrie Mae Weems, Mom at Work, 1978–1984

There is a Carrie Mae Weems photograph of a woman in what looks to be some kind of textile factory, with an angel embroidered to the left breast of her shirt, where her heart resides. The woman, like the angel, has her arms splayed wide almost in ecstasy, as though to embrace everything, so in the midst of her glee is she. Every time I see that photo, after I smile and have a genuine bodily opening on account of witnessing this delight, which is a moment of black delight, I look behind her for the boss. Uh-oh, I think. You're in a moment of nonproductive delight. Heads up!