The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

When I landed back in Denver, bereft of negreetings for my two days in Canada, I was immediately negreeted, again and again, five times in ten minutes, which felt comfortable and inviting and true. Felt like being held, in a way, and seen, in a way.

Maybe he’s going a step further. Maybe he’s imagining a world—this one a street in Bloomington, Indiana—where his unions are not based on deprivation and terror. Not a huddling together. Maybe he’s refusing the premise of our un-innocence entirely and so feels no need to negreet.

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I’d no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer’s green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull.

I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different

Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

So, truth be told, I give almost nary a shit about the hatred of poetry given the abundant and diverse and daily evidence to the contrary.

I could feel him shaking at the enormity of the gathering, at which a bunch of mommies gathered around the child on my shoulders to care for him, looking up: “You’ll be okay” and “We’ll find your mommy, don’t worry” and “Do you need a hug?” None of which prevented this kid from sobbing at how many mommies we were, how tiny he was in the midst of this mass of mommies, who quite spontaneously erupted into the chant FIND HIS MOM! FIND HIS MOM! which brought his mother forth—There you are!—everyone weeping at their reunion, the boy hopping from my shoulders and into his mother’s arms, where they held each other for several seconds, the boy wrapping his legs and arms around his mom, his mom putting her hand on the back of his head, their faces pushed into each other’s necks, holding each other, the way we do.

But this Jeffersonian sentence especially glows with stupidity, with cruelty, when you picture him at his desk, up before the sun in his parlor, drinking tea he did not make or pour, eating a crumpet he did not make or put on a plate, scratching this and other pithy statements with his quill dipped into a well he did not fill, because he owned six hundred people, most of whom were probably already at work.

(I have shaken up the metaphor, you are right, how annoying),

It is beneath your dignity to mention that the annoyance always originates in the annoyed, which is why I have personified it and housed that personification in the body.

Which is only to say consider my luck. Which is only to say my heart cooing like a pigeon nestled on a windowsill where the spikes rusted off.

blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blacknessandsuffering. Which is clever as hell if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people. Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying Lord.)