Song of the Week: “Joy to the World,” by Three Dog Night - “Joy to you and me”
Growing up a pastor’s kid, I sang about joy all the time. There was the gleeful, “I’ve Got the Joy (Joy, Joy, Joy),” with its enthusiastic call-and-response: “Down in my heart!” “Where?” “Down in my heart!”
There were the instructions of the old hymn: “If you want joy, real joy, wonderful joy - let Jesus come into your heart.”
And, of course, even the most secular among us knows the jubilant opening lines of the Christmas carol: “Joy to the world! The Lord has come.”
While these songs were fun to sing, their simple equations often troubled me. If Jesus was in your heart, they proclaimed, you would feel joy. Ever the pedantic logician, I worried about the inverse: if I did not feel joy, did that mean that Jesus was not in my heart?
Even as a small child, I struggled with questions, with melancholy, with grief and regret and anger. For me, it was a great blessing to complicate these narratives of simple and endless Christian joy with deconstruction, doubt, and lament.
As I moved in more and more secular spaces, however - as a student, advocate, writer - the opposite was true. There was ample room for cynicism, rage, grief, critique. But joy was naive, even suspect. At best it was something best kept to yourself, lest it distract us from the many injustices and horrors that demanded our attention and action.
As Jake Eaton writes in a recent Substack post:
[A]mong a fraction of my leftist friends, there appears to be an internalized norm that you cannot celebrate life if you don’t first acknowledge political reality. I’ve seen birth announcements that begin with the state of American politics, family photos captioned with ‘the world sucks but here’s this,’ instagram carousels that begin with ‘this year has been hard,’ so that I need to read on to figure out whether it’s cancer or Trump.
Maybe it’s an expression of grief - fine. But my sense is that the most progressive environments demand an outward expression of despair before personal celebration, either as some sort of act of solidarity or otherwise guilt.
Or, as the poet Jack Gilbert put it more succinctly in his 2012 poem “A Brief for the Defense,”: “We must risk delight…To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
When I came across that quote during my PhD, I was so struck by it that I pinned it to the corkboard above my desk, where it sat for years. When I tried to bring it up during one of my graduate classes, however, a classmate promptly shot me down, witheringly calling Gilbert’s perspective an “immensely privileged position.”
Perhaps she was right, of course. It felt frivolous, a year ago, to write about gratitude, and it feels just as absurd to write about joy now. The 24/7 cycle of horrors delivered to us in stunning 4k resolution; the endless grim pronouncements about climate change and the economy and global democracy; the relentless and gleeful victory of evil at its pettiest and most vindictive. It is hard not to feel as if I am standing on the yawning precipice of a bottomless pit, nausea filling my gut all clammy and wet, trying to draw your attention to a flower in my hand.
But I don’t know how else to survive. Perhaps that’s why, when I walked into a local bookstore in January the day before Trump’s inauguration, I bought Ross Gay’s book Inciting Joy (2022). I didn’t read it until this week, but I knew it was there waiting for me. A lifeline on the edge of the cliff.
Survival
Gay begins Inciting Joy by addressing the exact attitude expressed by my graduate school classmate: that writing about joy is rather in bad taste, given the endless and seemingly ever-increasing horrors that surround us.
He describes an interaction with a professor during a classroom visit, where the subject of his new book came up: “‘When all of this is going on’ he held his hands up as though to imply war; famine; people all over the world in cages or concentration camps, some of them children; disease; sorrow immense and imperturbable; it only getting worse and worse and worse (dude had big hands) - ‘why would you write about joy?’” (2).
In response, Gay begins his book by defining what joy is not: not something that you can achieve, through studying hard or getting a promotion. Not something available through the market, like a designer handbag or a fancy car.
Most importantly, he argues, joy is not something safe and secure and entirely removed from suffering or loss. We often, he writes, “think of joy as meaning ‘without pain’ or ‘without sorrow’ - which, to reiterate, our consumer culture has us believing is a state of being that we could buy - not only is it sometimes considered ‘unserious’ or frivolous to talk about joy (i.e But there is so much pain in the world!), but this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without - or maybe a more accurate phrase is free of - heartbreak or sorrow” (3).
Rather, Gay is interested in joy as something intangible and uncontrollable, entangled with and inextricable from sorrow, grief, rage, and uncertainty. It is, above all else, relational: “an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity” (9).
He calls the book Inciting Joy both because he is interested in the practices or perspectives that lead to joy, but also because he is interested in what joy makes us do, or leads us to: most often relationship with each other, which he puns on as “enjoyning.”
In the book, Gay shares lovely, poetic, rambling essays about thirteen places where he finds joy, or joy finds him, including skateboarding, teaching, and the death of his father. As a Black man in Indiana, who grew up working class and has lost friends and family prematurely to illness and violence, Gay has no time for easy platitudes or toxic positivity. He also bristles, however, at assertions like those from my classmate that joy - or attention to those things that incite it - stems from privilege. In a chapter about gardening, he writes:
...one thing I want to be cautious of - by which I really mean refuse - are the ways we sometimes consider, for instance, gardening (or health or healthcare or potable water or clean air or pleasant and stable housing or decent jobs or good schools or libraries or living relatives or being unabused or having ‘free time’ or not being imprisoned or not living near a power plant or an incinerator or a landfill or a million acres of corn or soybeans sprayed with toxins) a privilege, which actually obscures the fact that to be without a garden, or to be without green space, or to be without access to a park or clean water or the forest or fruit trees or birdsong or shade or a deep and abiding relationship with a tree, or to be without health care, and so often to be without health, is violence, it is abnormal (even if it is the norm), and it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural…it is not simply an affliction…but an infliction. It is on purpose. And the withholding from some of the means of life, of which means there are plenty to go around, is a disprivilege. Which is to say life, though it is a gift, is not a privilege. (34-5)
For Gay, joy - drawing attention to it, and sharing it with others - is a matter of political and personal endurance. “...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,” he writes. “It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival” (9-10).
Here are three things that have been helping me survive.
Karaoke (My First Incitement)
The first time I ever sang karaoke was the last week of the summer after I finished university. I was reeling from a betrayal that pulled the rug out from under my heart, preemptively grieving the community I was about to leave behind, sparking with infatuation over Taylor, who I had just met.
It was a dimly lit dive bar in Indiana, reeking of stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer. It might have even been my first time inside a real bar. It was a Tuesday, and the bar was half empty, but there we were.
QR codes weren’t the norm yet, so we chose our songs out of a thick three-ring binder. I had immediately known what I was going to sing: Adele’s “Someone Like You.” I chose the song for its alto range, but what shocked me as I sang was the rage in my voice, the catharsis. Here were my feelings, huge enough to fill a room.
A week later, I moved away, and while I sang karaoke from time to time, I didn’t really understand it until last year. My friend Betta invited Taylor and I to a queer karaoke night in town: lights pulsing, people whooping and hollering, a sea of bodies undulating to the music. From then on, I was hooked.
Some of karaoke’s joys, of course, are obvious ones: watching your friend flawlessly deliver the rap in Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” laughing as someone does both parts of a Disney duet, gasping as a tiny and unassuming woman reveals a molasses-deep contralto that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end as she croons Nina Simone.
But the greatest moments are the ones when you lose track, for a moment, of who you are: of your insecurities and pains, hangups and pretentions.
These are the moments that Zadie Smith describes in her 2013 essay “Joy,” “…that the experiencing subject has somehow ‘entered’ the emotion, and disappeared. I ‘have’ pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. A beach holiday is a pleasure. A new dress is a pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy, or some small piece of joy, with all these other hundreds of people who were also a part of joy” (5).
Perhaps a married couple are softly singing Coldplay and you raise your lit phone to ignite a conflagration of fireflies. Perhaps it is 2 am and you are making eye contact with a suburban dad in the crowd as the two of you belt the chorus of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” to each other and he shouts “This is my song!” Perhaps you are at a gay bar in Colorado and someone is singing “Sweet Caroline,” it’s his first time, he’s kind of off key, but it doesn’t matter because every single person in the room is pumping their fists and shouting along, and we are with him, and he is with us, and we are here together united by the music.
Good times never seemed so good.1
Community Gardens (My Second Incitement)
Last year, the University of Waterloo’s sustainability office announced a community garden pilot project, and Betta and I signed up for a plot. It was already June, and we had no idea what we were doing, but we planted seeds and let them grow in an unruly and often self-sabotaging tangle. The peas choked each other without a proper trellis, the spiky zucchini vines hurt my hands, and many of our tomatoes succumbed to mildew before they could fully ripen. I wrote, last year, about the paltry products of that garden, but I worry I undersold how much we delighted in it.
The dried peas, so similar to the ones we reluctantly pushed around our plates as grade schoolers, were miracles as we tucked them cozy beneath the soil. We marveled at the way the sun shone almost neon green through fresh new shoots. And when we did harvest, we were proud of each green bean, each instance of soil and sun and water alchemized into recognizable food.
Last summer, however, we barely spoke to our fellow gardeners. By some quirk of fate we were almost always at the garden alone, knowing the others only as “the ones with the huge bamboo trellis,” or “the ones with the really good habaneros.”
So when we were able to sign up again this year, we vowed to do many things differently. We planted radishes just to watch them come up quickly, and marvelled at their vibrant pink shoulders appearing above the soil, then ate them roasted on a butter-soaked baguette.
We weeded and pruned, bracing ourselves as we uprooted some of our seedlings to give the others space to thrive. When we returned from the long weekend to discover that our beans had magically twirled their slender green runners along our bamboo trellis, we screamed.
And we speak about our garden every chance we can - with the others who are at the garden, and with coworkers, and family, and people we meet at the airport. “Someone mischievous has been munching on our bean leaves,” we grumble good-naturedly, or “How are your tomatoes this year? It’s been so wet.” Nearly everyone has had a garden. Nearly everyone wants to see one grow.
To be in the garden is to be in the past and the present and the future at once: to marvel at how quickly these seeds have turned into sturdy plants, to dream of pickles made from cucumbers not yet growing, to tend and to water and admire things just as they are in this moment. To know that these plants will brown and rot, that the ground will freeze. To dream of next spring’s planting.
I think, often, when I am in our garden, of Li-Young Lee’s 1986 poem, “From Blossoms”:
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.Weddings (My Third Incitement)
Perhaps it is obvious to the point of insult to tell you that weddings are a site of joy. Too often, in fact, they are spaces of enforced happiness, of exclusionary revelry. Whether you have forced a smile as you watched a dear friend marry the wrong man, or exclaimed “Wow, I love it!” of a puce-green satin bridesmaid’s dress with an enormous butt bow, weddings demand a level of manic positivity that can often smother genuine feeling.
And weddings are also places where we perform our expectations for what it means to be good, or lovable: whiteness, thinness, wealth, heterosexuality. When I planned my own wedding, I bristled at the ways that my social media feeds served me diet tricks and beauty treatments, luxurious magazine spreads and disposable “bride” merchandise.
And yet - beyond the stress, beyond the noise, beyond the spreadsheets and down payments and vendors and squabbles over napkin color - if you are lucky, in the middle of it all, you get to witness something transcendent.
I’ve seen it in a bride wearing her grandmother’s veil while her grandfather looks on, the love of all those years shining from his face almost as bright as the newness of the love on hers. I’ve seen it in a tiny flower girl spinning and cartwheeling on the dance floor, and her great aunt shaking it next to her to “Dancing Queen.” And I’ve seen it, of course, in the main event: hand joining hand, vow joining vow, life joining life.
At my own wedding, my friend Livvy read a poem by Mary Oliver that I return to again and again:
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
I was in Colorado, last weekend, because my dear friends Robert and Joe were getting married, and they asked me to be the officiant.
I had never officiated a wedding before, and though it began as a joke, I soon realized the solemnity of the task, with its heavy symbolism and pronouncements. To perform a wedding, I discovered, is to be a midwife to something that began before I arrived, through no work of my own, but was my honour to help welcome into the world.
In my homily, I talked about the many paradoxes of love: its ordinary, everyday nature and its profundity, its vulnerability and its safety. Robert and Joe’s love was particularly paradoxical, I said, because of its queerness: they live a quiet and ordinary life together, and yet their love is also “an act of radical imagination.”
To bear witness to their relationship - their tears and inside jokes, their community and their simple, resilient, shining love - was one of the most profound honors of my life.
It was, simply, joy.
When it comes to joy, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
So good! So good!