Because the title for this blog begins with Joyful, I sometimes look up book or articles about the topics of joy and delight. There is an intriguing book from 2022 written by Ross Gay titled Inciting Joy: Essays. Google Books has a preview of just the first two essays. The first essay ends:
“Now that we’ve defined joy, and concluded it is important, there are two guiding inquiries in this book. First, I mean to investigate what practices, habits, rituals, understandings -you know, the stuff we do and think and believe – make joy more available to us. What in our lives prepares the ground for joy. I mean to try to find out, in other words, what incites joy. And second, I intend to wonder what the feeling of joy makes us do, or how it makes us be. I will wonder how joy makes us act and feel. That’s to say, I wonder what joy incites.
Per the first question – what incites joy? This book is a profoundly incomplete effort, and though I talk about pickup basketball and skateboarding and school and time and gardening and Luther Vandross’s cover of the Dionne Warwick hit ‘A House is Not a Home,’ I thought about but didn’t have time to dig all the way into joy and architecture, or joy and sex, or joy and the amateur, or joy and play or memory or foraging or parenting or libraries, etc. I offer them to you.
Per the second question – what does joy incite? – I should say, I have a hunch, and that’s why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor 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.
And it’s why I’ve written this book.”
Titles for his essays and their starting page numbers are:
The First Incitement [1]
Through My Tears I Saw
(Death: The Second Incitement) [11]
We Kin
(The Garden: The Third Incitement) [28]
Out of Time
(Time: The Fourth Incitement) [43]
Share Yor Bucket!
(Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement) [57]
Baby, This Might Be You.
(Laughter: The Sixth Incitement) [66]
(Dis)alienation Machinery
(Losing Your Phone: The Seventh Incitement) [82]
Free Fruit for All!
(The Orchard: The Eighth Incitement) [94]
Insurgent Hoop
(Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement) [112]
How Big the Boat
(The Cover: The Tenth Incitement) [137]
Went Free
(Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement) [171]
Grief Suite
(Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement [176]
Oh, My Heart
(Gratitude: The Fourteenth Incitement) [230]
There is a 19-minute interview (and transcript) by Brittany Luse at NPR It’s Been a Minute on February 21, 2023 titled Ross Gay on inciting joy while dining with sorrow.
My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.
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