Inciting Joy: ADVENT 3

 ADVENT WEEK 3: JOY

from Inciting Joy, by Ross Gay

I’ll never forget a woman at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 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 late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not very able to talk. And she said, quietly, wiping her face, “I didn’t know you could write about joy.”

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My hunch is that joy is an ember to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unbounded solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow – which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common sorrow – might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.