Ross Gay Quotes

one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body.

The more stuff you love the happier you will be.

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.

Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

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.

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.

I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.

A good little bookstore…is a laboratory for our coming together.

I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.

...which is simply called sharing what we love, what we find beautiful, which is an ethics.

DO NOT READ THIS,” which strikes me as an invitation, if not a command, to read this.

what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?

Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use.

I've completed another year of delights. Or maybe I should say another year of delights has completed me.

grief is the metabolization of change.

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.

I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it—if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible align- ment, but simply observe the signs—light and song—for what they are—light and song. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.

I swore when I got into this poem I would convert this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts of our desolation.

...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...can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.

And we replant that insurgent gratitude by saving the seeds we have been given. And giving them away.

...the mistake I say is a gift don’t be afraid see what it teaches you...

The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.

I’m unmade, unfixed, into something else I never could have imagined? That’s the art I’m interested in making, teaching, and living with—not fixing work, but unfixing—and I don’t know that methods of creating such work can be taught.

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy. As

But when we allow and expect each other to change and, even more to the point, when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other's unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we're talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other.

Efrosin aveva piantato un seme, come sicuramente lui aveva lasciato il suo in quello del principe. Era il seme dell'amicizia, dell'affetto e -ancora peggio - dell'amore. Dmitri si rese quindi conto che, baciando le labbra rosse e morsicate di Efrosin e avendo assaporato la sensazione del suo corpo che si stringeva e tremava attorno al suo, quel seme sarebbe stata la sua rovina

I think I probably would call it grace, every moment of escape, how many actual millions of them do we carry in the suitcases of our bodies? No let’s say the trees of our bodies, because grace shares a root, you see it there don’t you, with gratitude. Amazing.

But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that.

A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas—we could go on like this for a while. But never again—never ever—guns.

The way the universe sat waiting to become, quietly, in the nether of space and time, you too remain some cellular snuggle dangling between my legs, curled in the warm swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be — And who knows? — I wonder, little bubble of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl in my vascular galaxies, what would you think of this world which turns itself steadily into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad?

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 unexpected 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... 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... 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? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying. I'm saying: What if that is joy?

The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking.

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell from the words my mind makes of the world, and everything makes me mildly or more hungry

What if wonder was the ground of our gathering?

The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

This morning I was walking through Manhattan, head down, checking directions, when I looked up to see a fruit truck selling lychee, two pounds for five bucks, and I had ten bucks in my pocket! Then while buying my bus ticket for later that evening I witnessed the Transbridge teller’s face soften after she had endured a couple unusually rude interactions in front of me as I kept eye contact and thanked her. She called me honey first (delight), baby second (delight), and almost smiled before I turned away. On my way to the Flatiron building there was an aisle of kousa dogwood—looking parched, but still, the prickly knobs of fruit nestled beneath the leaves. A cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup. A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say, “Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Or the peanut butter salty enough. Or the light blue bike the man pushed through the lobby. Or the topknot of the barista. Or the sweet glance of the man in his stylish short pants (well-lotioned ankles gleaming beneath) walking two little dogs. Or the woman stepping in and out of her shoe, her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.

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.

The “confusion” that straight and gay colonizers claim bisexuals experience is because there are no influential cultural templates for bisexuals/ fluid/pansexual people to cling to, nor is their experience politically validated.

And sometimes I’ll ask what people have recently—say in the last day or two—come to realize they love, a question that at first seems to be difficult for some of them, as they say, “I like” this, or “I like” that, to which I try to lean on them by saying, “No, no, I said, what do you love?” Because sharing what we love is dangerous, it is vulnerable, it is like baring your neck, or your belly, and it reveals that, in some ways, we are all commonly tender.

I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. That alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.

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 toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

And when we catch the grave light shimmering from the tethers between us when it happens, our dying again and again in each other's presence, this falling together, it is called, this holding each other through the falling, I am pretty sure of this, one of the names anyway: joy.

But equally important—or maybe more important, for those of us with some chops anyway—is getting past our desire for mastery, for making it right or doing it well, because a poem isn’t like that.15 A poem is often naughty if not outright bad. Disobedient, at the least. Well-behaved, god please no. Hates the clothes you think it should wear. At its best, a good poem, like any good art, is unruly, insubordinate, uncoachable, insolent, and churlish. Surly sometimes, too. Knows your little rules inside and out and thumbs its nose. Sometimes a good poem just don’t wanna.16

I have the distinct pleasure of slowly untethering the one side from the other which is like unbuckling a stack of vertebrae with delicacy for I must only use the tips of my fingers with which I will one day close my mother’s eyes this is as delicate as we can be in this life practicing like this

Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard— why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness? I am trying, I think, to forgive myself for something I don’t know what. But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says I am trying to do this or I am trying to do that.

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.

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.

when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other’s unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we’re talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other.

what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?

I think I am advocating for a kind of innovation, or an innovative spirit, which seems often to be occasioned by deprivation, or being broke. Or broke-ass. Which condition I am adamantly not advocating. But I am advocating for the delight one feels making a fire pit with the inside of a dryer, or keeping the dryer door shut with an exercise band, which is probably caused by endorphins released from a bout of cognitive athleticism. Which is also called figuring something out. Which is something we all go to school, some of us for years and years, to forget how to do.

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 Zadie Smith’s term, the “intolerable.” It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of every- thing, 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? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

If you’re black in this country you’re presumed guilty. Or, to come back to Abdel, who’s a schoolteacher and thinks a lot about children, you’re not allowed to be innocent. The eyes and heart of a nation are not avoidable things. The imagination of a country is not an avoidable thing. And the negreeting, back home, where we are mostly never seen, is a way of witnessing each other’s innocence—a way of saying, “I see your innocence.” And my brother-not-brother ignoring me in his nice red kicks? Maybe he’s going a step further. Maybe he’s imagining a world—this one a street in Bloomington, Indiana—where his unions are not based on deprivation and terror. Not a huddling together. Maybe he’s refusing the premise of our un-innocence entirely and so feels no need to negreet. And in this way proclaims our innocence. Maybe.

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? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

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, 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 toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

At the Afghan restaurant today I identified in myself a burbling in my reservoir of annoyance when I realized that people were going around the buffet in the wrong direction, which was, the annoyance felt, a kind of wretched incivility, a sign of our imminent plummet into lawlessness and misery. The delight is that I can identify that annoyance quickly now, and poke a finger in its ribs (I have shaken up the metaphor, you are right, how annoying), and so hopped into line with all the other deviants, and somehow we all got our food just fine. Same when Stephanie doesn’t turn on the light over the stove to cook, or leaves the light in her bathroom on, or leaves cabinet or closet doors wide open, or doesn’t tighten the lids all the way, all of which the annoyance regards as, if not an obvious sign of sociopathy, indication of some genuine sketchiness. A problem. But somehow no one ever dies of these things, or is even hurt, aside from my sad little annoyance monster, who, for the record, never smiles and always wears a crooked bow tie.

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy.

The hiding moon lighting up a cataract of clouds.

I had an Aunt Truly, who we mostly called T, though if I could call after her again I’d say Truly, because it’s one of the prettier names I’ve ever heard.

Funny how we beat ourselves up trying to get a perfect recipe, a perfect dessert, a perfect party in the books. There’s so much that goes into making a meal that might be forgotten in mere weeks. Not everyone will remember the place settings, the sprig of coral and lavender zinnias. The plump raspberry garnish in their drink. But that’s not the point when it comes to loved ones. You heat up the waffle iron. You shave the ice. You rescue the egg yolks. You have to. You make something new with what you have. You take the extra bit of time. It doesn’t always turn out how you think it should. You make it anyway.

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?

Jena Osman’s book Public Figures

I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.

the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.

My mother is not the wings, nor the bird, but the moon across the laced hands of the nest.

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 hereto 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.

And with my forehead pressed into his, and my hands on his cheeks, I noticed that my father had freckles sprinkled around the bridge of his nose and his upper cheeks. It was like a gentle broadcast of carrot seeds blending into his skin, flickering visible from this distance. It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us, not here long maybe it is. And from that what might grow.

All to say that maybe it is the case, of course it is, that the cover is perpetual, we are perpetually covering, we are ever citational, it is called thinking, it is called learning, it is called making, it is called being a creature with, it is our only choice. Nonpossessive undeclared citationality, which I'm gonna go out on a limb here and just call life.

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? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy? (Oct.

the puritan in me always carries a shotgun he wants to punish the world I suppose because he feels he needs punishing for who knows how many unpunishable things

here, where we started, in the factory where loss makes all things beautiful grow.

I can see myself trying to add some gaudy flourish to this memory to make of it a fantasy which is why I linger hoping to mis-recall the child me make of me someone I wasn’t make of this experience the beginning of a new life

yet was not really a candidate for much besides the chill of a minor shame that he would forget for 15 years one of what would prove to be many such shames stitched together like a quilt with all its just legible patterning which could be a thing heavy and warm to be buried in or instead might be held up to the light where we see the threads barely holding so human and frail so beautiful and sad and small from this remove.

, 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.

the magic dust our bodies become casts spells on the roots about which someone else could tell you the chemical processes, but it’s just magic to me,

Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use. Her treatise on the subject, long-handist that she evidently was. (I wonder if the speed they all gobbled in the sixties and seventies counts as a technology.)

When you watch yourself in the mirror oiling yourself like this, wrapping your arms around yourself, jostling yourself a little, it is easy, or easier, to see yourself as a child, and maybe even a child you really love. It is easy, if you decide it, which might be hard, to let the oiling be of the baby you. Or at least I thought so today, looking at myself, whom I am so often not nice to. But the baby you, you oil until they shine.

Same when Stephanie doesn’t turn on the light over the stove to cook, or leaves the light in her bathroom on, or leaves cabinet or closet doors wide open, or doesn’t tighten the lids all the way, all of which the annoyance regards as, if not an obvious sign of sociopathy, indication of some genuine sketchiness.

I suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is, is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet. Or a vase.

But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that. And if you imagine a classroom as a place where we do this unfixing work together--where we hold each other, and witness each other, through our unfixing--well, that sounds to me like school.

Or we might draw dried flowers—still wrong-handed and quick—if we have them. Which makes us all commonly flustered and silly (and usually really gets us laughing). We might then exchange those drawings with a partner who will add captions, making a kind of lyric comic book, which makes us now collaborating (though listening to each other’s dreams and talking about what we love is collaboration as well, maybe even radical collaboration). This seems like something I probably got from Lynda Barry. There is a lot, so so much, to get from Lynda Barry.

community-supported bewilderment, is the practice.

that the practice of inquiry and unfixing is a practice of changing.

Or, as the writer Patrick Rosal might say: the grieving would be “an altar for listening to the beginning of the world.

all the gestures these days that are more about laundering one’s image than changing one’s soul. All

And I guess the endeavor then might be asking the poem or essay, etc., what it wants to tell or show you, and really listening, to the best of your ability. This endeavor, which for me can go on for a while, is also called revision.

Years where nary a blade of grass. Nary birdsong. But one day a small seed took hold. Then anchor. Soon, beetles and spiders came back, and then, and then, the birds were chatting in the new growth.

I take it as no small gesture of solidarity and, more to the point, love, or, even more to the point, tenderness, when the brother working as a flight attendant—maybe about fifty, the beginning of gray in his fade, his American Airlines vest snug on his sturdily built torso—walking backward in front of the cart, after putting my seltzer on my tray table, said, “There you go, man,” and tapped my arm twice, tap tap. Oh let me never cease extolling the virtues, and my adoration of, the warranted familiarity—you see family in that word, don’t you, family?—expressed by a look or tone of voice, or, today on this airplane between Indianapolis and Charlotte (those are real places, lest we forget), a tap—two, tap tap—on the triceps. By which, it’s really a kind of miracle, was expressed a social and bodily intimacy—on this airplane, at this moment in history, our particular bodies, making the social contract of mostly not touching each other irrelevant, or, rather, writing a brief addendum that acknowledges the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us, or trying to, always figuring out ways to keep touching us—and this flight attendant, tap tap, reminding me, like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched, and are, there you go, man.

But I am advocating for the delight one feels making a fire pit with the inside of a dryer, or keeping the dryer door shut with an exercise band, which is probably caused by endorphins released from a bout of cognitive athleticism. Which is also called figuring something out. Which is something we all go to school, some of us for years and years, to forget how to do.

probably explains why the grim reaper does not push a lawnmower.

Don peered at me again with those sad eyes, or through me, or into me, the way my dead do sometimes, looking straight into their homes, which hopefully have flowers in a vase on a big wooden table, and a comfortable chair or two, and huge windows through which light pours to wash clean and make a touch less awful what forever otherwise will hurt.

Milk and his allies wanted their movement to signify hope. So he approached a friend, the graphic designer Gilbert Baker, who suggested a rainbow instead. “A rainbow fit us,” said the man who became famous as the “gay Betsy Ross.” “It is from nature. It connects us to all the colors—all the colors of sexuality, all the diversity in our community.

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.

The earth has a taste so good you could mess your pants for it.

these little ones crawling from their holes to study the patterns of the bones spilled and splayed and broke as a language

for a river burns inside my mouth and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings

Because the bullet was a dream before it was a bird.

41. Among the Rewards of My Sloth . . . . . . is that the tree in our backyard that we had cut down because it was mostly dead and waiting to pierce the asphalt-shingled roof and, more urgently maybe, the neighbor’s (and always, yes, mourn a tree by my hand felled, for it is a home, dead or not) is still, about three and a half months later, sprawled in many parts of the backyard. Probably about one hundred little and not so little logs chucked in a pile out near the black walnut tree, very much alive. And a brush pile about the size of a Cadillac Escalade leaning up against the building you’d be very generous to call a garage, twisting slowly apart on its cracked foundation. Sometimes the brush pile and logs would make me feel like a piece of shit, perhaps especially when Stephanie looked wistfully out into that yard, remembering, I imagine, when she could visualize a garden there. Not to mention my mother, who, when I first got this house in Bloomington, Indiana, in a kind of terror I have to think is informed by some unspoken knowledge (black husband, brown kids in the early seventies kind of knowledge), pleaded with my brother and uncle to convince me to mow my grass lest the neighbors burn my house down. (Of which, let it be known, there was no danger in my case. Despite the Confederate flags in the windows three doors down. You should see his yard. By the way, if you haven’t seen the movie A Man Named Pearl, you should.) Anyway, I’d think, very much pervious to all of the above despite my affect to the contrary, we’ll get a splitting maul and wood chipper and turn a lot of that wood into good mulch, which turns into good soil, trying to make myself feel better about myself. But today, going out back to grab some wood for the stove, past my mess, there was a racket blasting from that thicket like the most rambunctious playground you’ve ever heard, and getting closer, looking inside, I saw maybe one hundred birds hopping around in this enormous temporary nest, sharing a song I never would’ve heard and been struck dumb with glee by had I had my shit more together.

not everything irrepressible. (Delight: a T-shirt I saw that read, “Make it scary to be a racist again.