Tag: ross-gay

533: “Casting About In Bed” (Ross Gay)

                “…neglects the fact that 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.” -Ross Gay, in “43. Some Stupid Shit,” The Book of Delights, p. 127

                I think about this two page essayette often, usually because Ross Gay does something a lot like magic in bringing delight and joy and sunbright power to turn and face horror, and this time because today I tried to take a nap. At the time I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to take a nap. I realize, now, that I’m pretty sure it was during my first bout of covid. “Tried to take a nap” is pretty off the mark for what I felt in that exhausted falling apart, but that’s the last time I was asleep at 2 or 3 pm. Lying in bed at 2 or 3 pm, today, “trying to nap,” as I put it, I thought about Gay because I realized that drifting in and out of dream is a kind of thing I could practice. A kind of thing like drifting in a river, a current-thing, pathless and gently gravity-guided, wandering through depths and reflections and shadows known and unknown. A letting go, if I’m otherwise clutching at somethings. Which I was, because in “trying to nap” today my mind kept turning back to my to-do list, the one I was too exhausted to keep at, and to the ways I should do pieces of it better. I’m thinking about Gay because all that is something I practice too, of course. That busy mindedness, that assumption that rush and press is the performance of importance. Which is something I absolutely do not believe is true. I want to go about learning to nap the same way you go about planting a kale patch. Water. Soil. Time. And someday leaves.
                Which is to say: the blankets? Stretched out. The window? Open. The breeze? Mischievous. Tonight’s sleep isn’t napping, it’s sleeping—we could I’m sure discuss the differences—but I mean for this to be a kind of gardening toward future nappings when all I’ll hold if anything is the gentle being held by sunlight and dream.

by Azlan

521: “A Song I Never Would’ve Heard”

                “…sharing a song I never would’ve heard and been struck dumb with glee by had I had my shit more together.” -Ross Gay, “Among the Rewards of My Sloth…” The Book of Delights p. 123
                “I thought to anchor my essay in an interdisciplinary epigraph, then delve into the reasons and ways that assessment could and should sidestep the standard language ideology […] Here I was.” -Maria José Palacios Figueroa, “Too-long reflections on washback”

                My partner and I have started—well, started again—reading The Book of Delights out loud together before bed. We also started last year, or two years ago, and then fell off. The pages fluttering by fast like fall leaves all a-whirl, then pausing, a frozen winter morning, sleepy and bright. Now it’s turning into a game with us. We just celebrated our first anniversary. We’ve been noting, a delight of being married is this, a delight of being married is that. (And yes, I’m coy: those delights are ours, for us, we’ll share them maybe if you visit, but not here). And a game for the everyday, every day, too. Today’s delight: lying on the floor. The complete release of it. Today’s delight: wrestling with my dissertation. Today’s delight: a friend visiting, and the fried zucchini (from our garden!) we shared. Now the crickets (I think they’re crickets?), not in that written way of crickets to mean silence, but singing.
                By which I mean: it’s 9:30 pm and I meant to start writing this sooner. I knew it was Wednesday. I knew I would post something. By which I mean: I’m glad I didn’t write this sooner. One of my favorite things writing can do is open to an experience of making, a space where I thought to start this way and yet here I am far off from my expectations. What a delight. The little dance of whatever we’re thinking about, together, here, and the crickets singing summer.

by Azlan

455: “Sometimes You Just Miss” (Ross Gay & Jericho Brown)

                “One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.” -Ross Gay, in the preface for The Book of Delights

                “Sometimes you just miss.” -Jericho Brown, in a talk at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, November 13th, 2021

                I meant to write my uproar post this morning, and ended up writing a piece of my PhD dissertation and then lying on the couch instead. By which I mean, would you like to try a practice with me?
                One of the lovely things about a practice (Uproar posts once a week, for instance, or a year of daily essays about something delightful) is that they don’t go how I intended them. Jericho Brown is responding to an audience question, maybe “How do you feel when you’re working on a poem and it just doesn’t work” or something like that. He laughed and asked if the audience member ever played basketball. “Sometimes you just miss.” 
                Ross Gay makes it clear in The Book of Delights that the daily essay thing stopped being “daily” pretty quickly. He missed a day. Then another. My own practices are like that: lots of missing the basket, lots of missing a day or three. And the practice makes it clear that this missing isn’t the horror that all these work-habits tips would have me believe. Missing is lovely. It’s another hour in bed. It’s pages of my PhD dissertation that, no, I’m not going to share here, but I might share sometime, and there they are tumbling. Five years ago when I started riding a kick scooter for my commute, I didn’t think about the days I’d be soaked in downpours, the days the wheels would jitter across icy, the snowy days I would carry the scooter instead of the other way around. All those were missing. And finding. And part of it in a way that grew delight. 
                So I’m not inviting you to try out the practice of writing a short daily essay (unless you want to). I’m not even inviting myself to try that, if “inviting” is somehow code for “setting a goal” which starts feeling like “setting in stone.” I’m saying: what’s a practice you’re growing into, a practice different from what you once thought it might be? How do you walk that practice? What do you find, what do you miss, and where (beyond the finding and the missing) do you end up, soaked through with rain or laughing about basketball?

by Azlan