Joy Is Such A Human Madness

Week FOUR| For the Joy & the Sorrow | A thing we already know, hidden in plaIn sight

I’ve been looking forward to talking about essay #14 in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, “Joy is Such a Human Madness.” I’ve been looking forward to it, but also kind of dreading it. Or, not dreading, but anticipating it with some intimidation. Because it’s such a complex and beautiful short essay. I won’t use Gay’s word, “essayette,” for this one, which clocks in at 1662 words—that’s a true short essay, one that exceeds the bounds of flash by most definitions. But it’s not the length of the essay that has had me treading cautiously. It’s the depth.

This essay of Gay’s seems to want to illuminate something so simple and so obvious that we’ve known it all our lives, but at the same time, the essay wants us to see this simple thing, really see it, as if we are seeing it for the first time.

It’s trying to do the thing I talk about rather frequently, which is to wake us up, defamiliarize the world and the words we use to depict the world just enough to grab and hold our attention a millisecond longer than we’re used to, so that we can know more than we thought we knew but also less than we knew, so that we can know just a little differently than we thought we knew, while also collapsing into the secure truth of what we’ve always known.

Essays that do that are not easy to write, and they’re even harder—in my view—to talk about. Nonetheless, we shall try.

When I was seventeen, I worked very briefly (and never again) in a nursing home as a certified nursing assistant. I’ve told that full story here, so I won’t repeat it today; instead I want simply to tell you a tiny snippet from that time in the nursing home, a time when it was winter and I was seventeen and in foster care, a time when it was the the deepest darkest part of the year and I wore the kind of white canvas tennis shoes that were in style for teenaged girls then, the kind that soak up the snow and slush as you walk to and from the bus stop, snow and slush which melts once you go indoors, so that your feet are always either freezing and wet or cold and damp.

I’m thinking of a time in that nursing home when I was helping a group of women in a large, shared bedroom. This nursing home where I worked was not a good or maybe even decent place. I already knew what a fancy nursing home looked like because I had volunteered in one earlier in high school, before I entered foster care. The fancy one was called The Sholom Home, and it was quite beautiful with its wide sloping lawn on the expansive, tree-lined boulevard near Como Park. My volunteer role at the Sholom Home was simply to visit with residents who had no family, and to help the activities coordinator with various, well, activities in the … activity room. I recall the Sholom Home as a brightly lit, modern place where a lot of old people lived in obvious comfort and seeming happiness. Yes, there were wheelchairs and sometimes sounds of distress because, yes, there was a part of the Sholom Home where residents received higher levels of care than the part I normally volunteered in, and sometimes I went into that wing, too, and it wasn’t quite as bright, you might say. I’ll admit that. Aging and, of course, ultimately, dying, are not—at least, not always or maybe even often—simple or sanitary processes. Aging and dying are not for the faint of heart. The luckiest among us will age and, eventually, when our time comes, die in the company of and inside the great and boundless love of at least one person (and hopefully more) there to say goodbye and to wish us safe passage.

But, still, aging and dying aside, I remember The Sholom Home as a place that was recognizably good and decent. Whereas the nursing home where I was hired after my training was … not. And while I remember many harsh experiences in that place, experiences soaked always in the smell of the urine that splashed on my shoes when I emptied the catheter bags for the men on the fourth floor, one memory feels softer and more mysterious. A memory of that time in the large shared room of several women, women I was helping to wash and dress at bedtime.

Remember, I was seventeen. I had only recently—maybe a few months ago—had sex for the first time, with a boy who didn’t love me, and whose hands didn’t love me either, but I couldn’t know that then, being as inexperienced, lonely, scared, friendless, and sad as I was. That boy was more or less my only friend during the foster care year, and I was grateful for him, and in a real way still am, for I needed him very much, and am not sure what I would have done without him, despite that he didn’t love me and treated me thusly. So, I was seventeen and—though I did not feel what you would call pretty, I did feel the shape of my young body in its smooth, taut skin over its smooth, strong(ish) muscles, and I felt the buoyancy of my shiny hair and saw the perfectly unmarred backs of my hands, free of visible veins and tendons and almost plump with whatever it is that plumps the backs of our young hands. I could see and feel my life force, my young sexuality, my deep yearning for things I didn’t yet know. I could feel the force of something yet un-blossomed inside of myself, something so powerful and vast it sometimes made me giddy, even in my constant sorrow.

The women I was there to wash were old, obviously, but not old-old. They were ambulatory with walkers, and cognitively alert. The washing was, if I remember correctly, just a bit of sponge bathing and hair brushing, followed by helping with changing into nightgowns. Nothing complicated, just some assistance for bodies that could not reliably hold themselves steady and balanced for these tasks. It was all so intimate. More intimate than I had ever been with anyone, even the boy I was having occasional sex with, or the children I had sometimes bathed during babysitting stints. While brushing the women’s long silver hair, I could see the fragile skin of their scalps, and the many intersecting veins pulsing across their hollowed temples. I could smell the heat of their skin, the strangeness of it. I had never then, and still have never, brushed my mother’s hair, or stood this close to her as an adult, or touched her in these tender ways. In fact, I have never since touched any other older adult in quite this way, this close-up, vulnerable sort of washing and brushing way, which is something I might like to think on a bit more later on. But at the time, I was seventeen, largely unloved and alone, and not to quite able to understand what I was feeling in those intimate exchanges, or why I was feeling it.

But sometimes a feeling in itself is enough to teach us. And the feeling I had washing those women was so close, so inside of something not me, but also me. There was one moment during the undressing and dressing that I suggested to a woman that we change her underwear, which I thought were damp with the evidence of incontinence. So much urine in the nursing home. But the woman laughed and brushed the air with her hand. “Oh, honey,” she said. “That’s nothing to worry about. That’s just womanly juices.” When I blushed, she laughed and laughed. I knew she was not laughing at me, even as the other women laughed with her. She was laughing with some future version of me, a future older me who would, decades into the future, look back and still not know for sure exactly which way she was teasing as she pinched the firm flesh of my arm. “So young,” she said. “So pretty.”

She kept laughing quietly. I felt embarrassed. Her eyes were full of mirth, and something else. And I felt ushered into something real, someplace real and meaningful. Maybe that old woman and I, all the women and I, were touching a quiet and mysterious thing, a thing we already know, hidden in plain sight.

So, here we are. Ready to think together about Gay’s essay, “Joy is Such a Human Madness” and to do some writing in response to it. Which I look forward to each week more than you know. Your words have been a bit of a raft during this time, with their true-hewn shapes. I’m also finding so much pleasure (and so many good laughs!) over in the Writing in the Dark chat, where we’re sharing the oddities of daily life that bring bits of delight, or at least, the potential for delight (so if you haven’t joined the chat, we’d love to welcome you). And below the paywall is the essay, my short close read and guiding questions, and the writing exercise.

Gay’s words have been a real source of light for me (I hope some of you are feeling the same), and this essay in particular resonates deeply, starting with the gorgeous, evocative title (a Zadie Smith quote). From there, Gay describes Smith’s “almost constitutional proclivity toward being pleased.

I love this obvious idea of how our delight brings out the delight in others. I mean, we know this in the context of laughter, which is contagious, and we know it in the context of sex, where pleasure breeds pleasure. It’s so simple, but