A Kind of Tether Between Us
Week SEVEN | For the Joy & the Sorrow | A Kind of Tether Between Us
On Monday I wrote about how I was tired, and about how my reasons for writing have changed (or distilled, maybe, is a better way to say it), and how there is a very specific “other thing” I am seeking from my writing now, which I described like this:
This other thing—and I don’t know if it’s spirit or qi or oneness or whatever—but this other thing that’s there all the time, flowing between all of us and this whole planet, and language touches it. It’s like, when two words hit each other just so, like flint, they spark, you feel it, I feel it, everyone feels it, the whole room stops breathing, then lets out a long exhale together. That’s it, that’s what I want. That’s how I want to be seen.
Spending these last weeks with you, exploring the intersection of joy and sorrow and the strange and complex nature of delight, has been like that for me—like touching that place I describe, where the words hit each other like flint.
So many moments of unveiling, of profound recognition between us all. I wonder, are you all feeling that too? It’s been like swimming naked at night under the starts in water warm enough to feel good right after that first inevitable gasp, so that you feel for a moment that you are perfectly yourself, and fully alive.
And it’s so weird, because as soon as start playing around this way—the flint, the lake, then this other thing—spirit or qi or oneness or whatever—wakes up, too, starts saying, “Hey! I love when people and art and love and curiosity start getting all mixed up! I want to play!” And when that happens, the world conspires to help us. Paulo Coelho says, “And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Except that in this case, when you pay attention to something collectively, as a shared human endeavor, all the universe conspires to help you find your way into the heart of that thing. The universe wants to play.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again, so it was no surprise when a WITD writer recently met Ross Gay in person and told him about our Joy and Sorrow intensive here, the work we are doing, our daily delight chat, etc. And he was so thrilled to hear it. And guess what else? He is on Substack as of today, sharing his passion, talent, writing, teaching, and love.
This is how it works.
Abracadabra: my words create as I speak.
Thank you making magic with me.
God, I love essayette #23 in The Book of Delights. It’s called “Sharing a Bag” and it is the first essay I ever read from this collection, though I had not recalled that at the outset, when we began this intensive. I think somehow I read this short essay before I ever got hold of Gay’s book. But I loved it when I first read it because in this tiny flash piece, Gay is describing a sliver of human interaction—an oddity, really—that I too take great delight in. So this week we’ll look closely at essayette #23 and do some writing in response to it.
I’ll start my close read of “Sharing a Bag” by noting how in this essay, unlike in so many of the other essayettes in the collection, Ross doesn’t meander his way into the delight he’s exploring; he doesn’t “string us along” in that pleasurable way he likes to do, where we follow along his circuit thought processes until, aha, here it is, here’s the delight. No, in this one, Gay comes straight out of the gate by directly naming the delight, which is also the title of the piece:
I adore it when I see two people—today it was, from the looks of it, a mother and child here on Canal Street in Chinatown—sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles.
I love a lot of things about this straightforward opening. First, as I mentioned—and this is not close reading, this is just me being a human who is struck pleasingly by sharing a delight with Ross Gay—there is simply the matter of the delight itself. But also, on the craft level, I appreciate:
Gay’s signature-style interjection between the em dashes
His clearly articulated concrete specific image of the likely mother-daughter duo in Chinatown
His subtle but meaningful and very deft way of putting us in the real world with him, of grounding his delight in a real moment in time in this real world that he and I and you, too, share, when he says, “… here on Canal Street in Chinatown…”.
The beauty and power of this tiny essay, however, begin to really emerge in the sentences after this opening, where Gay shines the light of his words on what he calls the lack of necessity of such acts of help/collaboration, elaborates on how it differs from other, more necessary acts of assistance.
From which thoughts he leads himself to what might be the most powerful ending (for me) of any essayette in this collection—the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of this ending, and the emotional impact it then has, is so gorgeous: