It was a bright weekend morning and I was walking back from the café pondering on joy when two runners passed me. They were a man and a woman and they were running not fleetly, not antelope-like, but somewhat heavily, the effortful run-gait of the recently resolved. Sometimes those kinds of runners have a sweaty grimness of bearing but these two were happily chatting as they jogged. My eyes alighted on the man’s moustache then fell to his chest. There was a sunflower’s face on his t-shirt, and the caption
SMILE MORE
DO LESS
I had forgotten my pen,1 so I walked along repeating the slogan to myself in order to remember it accurately.
I checked the letterbox on my way past. There was a business card in my letterbox that said
RADICAL MAORI ARE TAKING OVER OUR COUNTRY2
The flower / the root… Radical, I mean; which is also a word we used to use to mean cool, sick, right on, lit.
My honest first association when I think of the word JOY is a primary school one. Joy was a popular baby name after the War, so when I was a kid there were many teachers named Joy.
They did not spark joy.
There’s something cringe about the word JOY, too. The phrase joy-germ is paired in my mind with the song I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart. (Where?) Both of these, frankly, spark nausea; I think because of their Flandersesque overtones of forced joy. I don’t think you’re happy enough… I’LL TEACH YOU TO BE HAPPY!3
Joy is a spontaneous upwelling; therefore forced or performative joy cannot be true joy.
Joy is subjective, not objective. It’s felt, on the inside. Joy, somewhat like sense of humour, is innate. You can’t help what makes you laugh; same with what turns you on; same with whatever pushes your joy-buttons. That’s why it’s so embarrassing, because these responses reveal a person’s true-self— they unmask us. That said, although these personal tendencies are unchosen and wild (in a way they’re found), they are also somewhat amenable to cultivation (gardening metaphor).
Anyway, art is cringe. Sincerity is far scarier than cynicism.4 We have to risk shame to be known.
Like anything innate and deeply felt, joy is a powerful force. Joy is politically subversive because it will make people do things for free. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
Last week in the library I saw a book on a Librarian’s Choice display stand. (In the Wellington Libraries system, Librarian’s Choice books are marked with a round gold sticker, like a wine bottle; Reader’s Choice with a silver sticker.) The book that caught my eye was Inciting Joy by Ross Gay.5 I’d heard of Gay; he’s a poet who people I love love— by which I mean other writers I admire admire him— but I had never read him before.
There was a sweet twinning chime in his name and the book’s name— Gay / Joy. And the choice of the word Inciting: also inspired. I checked it out and started reading it at the bus stop. It was like looking in a mirror, digressive essays mashing together personal anecdotes with gift-economy politics.
Gay: “Oh, I remember. We’re operating under the religion of Capitalism, whose gospel is that there is not enough.6 Capitalism preaches the gospel of scarcity and, as such, demands we see scarcity everywhere. And if scarcity is nowhere to be found, it will be imposed. Among those imposed scarcities— of health, of food, of clean water, of adequate shelter, of comfort, of community, of meaning, of a future— is that of time. And to believe otherwise— in enough, say; in abundance, say; in gratitude, say; in the unmitigated, unbounded hang, say!— makes you blasphemous. Or a heathen. Or a criminal. Or out of your goddamned mind…
Probably I do not need to tell you, but resting inside that nothing (happening), inside those idle hands, maybe dormant, maybe like seeds needing fire to germinate, in this case the fire of hanging out unregulatedly and off the clock, is meaning.”
After reading Gay in bed, I fell asleep and dreamed that I was in a church hall with my songbook underneath my arm.7 I was early for whatever was going to occur— nobody much was around yet— so I started to dance in the big empty space, on the pleasantly slippery wooden floor, the kind of dream-dancing where you push yourself off the ground and get airborne. (Maybe breakdancers and acrobats experience this feeling in real life; maybe astronauts experience it on the Moon.)
In the weekend I went to my friend Amber’s birthday party. It felt a long time since I’d been to a party,8 and I was watching the energetic unfoldings with an anthropologist’s eye. Looking that way, I understood something. The magic of a party = everyone works on / polishes up their personal magics— ritual cleansing, dress, adornment, food preparation, gifts, music; all undertaken while thinking of the party, that is, with focussed intent9— then all the magics get thrown into a temporal soup, bubble bubble, their flavours mixing and deepening.
There was a baby at the party, a little kid, really, who sat on their parent’s hip or shoulder looking around wide-eyed at everyone in their finery— you know when you see a kid in full absorption mode? A sponge is the usual metaphor but maybe they are more like a seedling, drinking water and light— and I was like, Me too, kid, me too.
The reason I’ve been thinking about joy is— Nick Cave. The formerly quite grumpy Cave has undergone a profound transformation over the last half-decade or so, following the tragic death of his son(s).10 I’ve been following his advice column The Red Hand Files for a couple of years now. In Episode 299, Simon from Leonard Stanley11 suggested that Nick could ask us a question, for a change.
Simon: “This is a one-time deal— one shot, one question. After this, we’ll be back asking the questions again forevermore.
So, go ahead and ask us anything. We’re ready. Our response may surprise you in the same way your responses have surprised us for 299 astonishing issues.”
Nick thought that was a good idea. “My question is, where or how do you find your joy?”
He said, “I’ll print my favourite answer in the next issue, the 300th!”
I read that email first thing in the morning and immediately got to work on my reply.12 I tinkered with it for a few hours then hit Send. I was pretty sure Nick was going to pick me. Or at least that I had a chance. I just had a feeling— maybe based on the abundance of the four-leaf-clover-patch I’d harvested the day before.13
It feels weirdish to be writing about joy in the middle of a personal unmaking, from a drift of boxes; but even if it’s in a dormant phase, joy is a perpetual potentiality. Joy is never not.
Gay: “School14 happens all the time. Or as Harney and Moten teach us to call it, study happens all the time. Or as I hear myself say it these days, care happens all the time. Or if we pay close attention, the mycelial threads connecting us, the lustrous web— joy, I mean— is flickering there in wait all the time.”
A week later the Red Hand Files issue 300 arrived in my emailbox.
Nick said: “I was entirely unprepared for the response. Over 2,000 letters arrived in the first few days and they are still pouring in. So many of your answers are extraordinarily moving, from thoughtful and eloquent treatises on the nature of joy, to a tiny voice from Limerick, Ireland, saying simply, ‘Golf’ – a response that, for some inexplicable reason, reduced me to tears. I said I would post my favourite answer, but it is impossible to choose and so instead I have decided to collate them all onto their own page called ‘Joy’, where they will permanently and defiantly reside as a resource in times of need.”
I went to the Joy page, but my one isn’t on there yet— Nick is still working through the responses, and only the first 50 or so are up. So I thought I’d share my little ode to joy with you, here. I’ve talked about most of this stuff on my Substack before, but something about writing to a specific person for a specific purpose sharpens thoughts like a pencil. This is what I wrote.
Dear Nick,
My joy comes in two flavours: solitary & communal. Once when my heart was broken I experienced a period of temporary enlightenment. (This was some time ago. I was youngish.) It was as if the cracked-open heart let everything I saw sluice through itself in huge waves of pure feeling. Things like a ginger cat jumping over a red toadstool in the pine forest (I glimpsed this from a car window) or the bare branches of Winter trees could transport me to tears of grief or rapture or both at once. That experience informed my whole life path, like the glimpse of the mountaintop a beginner-meditator sometimes receives.
In her book Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit describes George Orwell's (economically and physically) precarious life, and also the way he took lifelong nourishment and joy from natural things: plants, wild animals, and his garden. What I took away from that book is the idea that steady-state happiness costs money, but joy is free: a grace-note, a gift from nature.
I have found that I can access natural joy most easily when I am alone. My consciousness is undivided, I give isness my full attention. Then I'm in communion with the world, and of course the world responds. Randomness is important. Doorways to joy pepper the day. An overheard phrase. A baby's dark merry eyes. Two kākā playing Spring-chase through the tall trees of the park. A huge magnolia, bent like a bonsai, flowers almost over, leaves beginning. Water welling from the concrete— a broken pipe become a spring. My Doctor's grin, his wise old teeth. A stranger on the bus, who struck up conversation by asking me what I'm writing. (These are just a few things from yesterday.)
I know that time and freedom are things not everybody has access to— yet I have traded other things for the time and freedom to wander and see and think. To put it another way, not everybody is free to be a full-time Wizard; however, I do think everyone can become more Wizardly by way of paying attention. (Turn your phone off, leave it at home, throw it in the sea.)
Conversely, my communal joy comes from singing with others. I've been singing folk songs for a couple of decades now. I have written a fair bit about folk-singing, and recently I had the revelation that it's the only creative activity I do that's communal, and that's the key to how it makes me feel. In every other art practice I'm a lone wolf; but I sing with my folk-friends, who I love. I know them, and they know me. (First Dog on the Moon once asked the same question as you: what makes you happy? He chose my postcard, and illustrated my answer in the form of a panel of happy singing dogs.)
There's a place I can get to by group singing that I can't get to any other way. We sing without accompaniment, taking turns to lead. Sometimes after hours and hours of anarchic harmonising I totally forget myself. If I close my eyes I can't tell where the edges of my body are. My limbs seem to stretch, golden bells are ringing in the bones of my face: it's as if my Self is morphing and dissolving. (In describing both this rapturous musical transcendence and the daily-joy state I keep wanting to reach for metaphors like 'psychedelic'.)
Singing is my church, a church built from the collective history of the common people, all those invisible minds and breaths that shaped the songs over hundreds of years. I am a living voice for the Dead to sing through. (Another way of saying this: music is deeply intertwined with time.) There's also something about the whole of life's path being visible in folk-world, from someone's kid singing a song they learnt, to a very old person drawing from their mighty storehouse of memory. And me, somewhere in the middle. Like a village. That feels rare and powerful.
I could go on and on about joy. (In fact, I have.) Joy is balm, antidote, and fuel. The most important point in all I've said, what I want you to remember, is that JOY IS FREE. It is free in that it costs nothing— it's a gift; and it is free in that it is wild and can't be tamed. I think these twinned freedoms are the heart of joy.
Love,
Rose
Nick said: “Joy continues to leap up, unafraid to find us. This thought profoundly moves me.”
Shock! Horror!
Errr…. Who has taken over whose country?
No tohutō / macron in Māori; maybe they think macrons are pandering to the wokerati or something. Or maybe their shouty font wouldn’t allow it.
Ren & Stimpy: the Happy Helmet. (See also: Happy Happy Joy Joy)
Nick Cave talked about this in issue 190 of the Red Hand Files: “Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people… Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”
If you click on that link and go to Gay’s website, under About Ross it says:
“Ross Gay is interested in joy.
Ross Gay wants to understand joy.
Ross Gay is curious about joy.
Ross Gay studies joy.
Something like that.”
Here’s one of his essays, for instance, about basketball courts. I don’t know anything about basketball, still, I can pick up what he’s putting down. Ross Gay: Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved? On the Unlikely Tenderness and Care of a Good Pick-Up Basketball Game
See? Specificity.
He adds, in a footnote: “Strange that this coincides with the tenet, an equally magical belief, of endless growth.”
Actually a cardboard folder holding songs written out on loose sheets of paper. That way I can rearrange, add, or remove them at will.
Rightly or wrongly, parties seem like a past-thing. I saw a meme about it: ‘Nobody has house parties any more because nobody has a house.’ Maybe it also felt that way because I have been to parties in that same house decades ago. We used to be allowed onto the roof, so it was effectively three stories instead of the two of now, and I remember the whole place being packed with bodies, having to fight my way up or down the stairs. I miss the roof-island: cool night air, city-sky, those big ventilation ducts like on a ship’s deck, stars, clouds, (other people’s) cigarettes. Now the smokers hang around outside the front door, which is OK, but a different vibe entirely.
Like a collective of bowerbirds hoping to lure the sexy wild onto the dance floor…
In this interview Cave discusses that transformation, and The Red Hand Files: ‘No longer in awe of my own genius’: Nick Cave talks about how he changed after sons’ deaths
P.S. Fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis’s book Nina Simone’s Gum is very good, too: ‘I love the perversity of it’: Bad Seed Warren Ellis on how Nina Simone’s gum inspired a book
P.P.S. A Red Hand Files highlight— this peak-Nick anti-A.I. rant from January 2023: Chat GPT - What do you think?
A village in Gloucestershire, apparently…
In this way it felt like receiving and replying to a paper letter. I used to do a lot of letter-writing. I recommend the following method: Save the opening of the letter up until you have time to reply. Ceremonially open and read the letter. Immediately write a reply, then put it in an envelope and address it, all in one wave of energy. Then you tuck the letter into the back of your journal, and post it next time you pass a post office. It’s a kinetic thing: the spirit of the gift that jumps out of the letter-received can be harnessed to fuel the reply-sent. Don’t pause at any point, or it’s easy to stall.
An unopened letter is of itself pleasurable, a pleasure you can prolong by deferring the opening— correspondence-edging, if you will.
Another letter-writing technique I always use is to begin the letter on the back of a postcard. I’m constantly collecting postcards for that purpose. It felt weird, when I was writing to Nick, not to be able to add images to my words like I do here.
Here are the ones I haven’t already given away:
Defined a few sentences back: “[F]rom the Greek skhole, meaning (enhanced definition) ‘spare time, leisure, rest, ease; idleness; that in which leisure is employed; learned discussion, be right back, getting down, WENT FREE, loitering, also known as the loiterary; a laboratory of wonder and care.”
Every time I read your writing I find ten things I want to comment on and steadily forget them as I get engrossed in further reading. Wonderful text ⭐️ Which dog are you? I know which one I would be.
Ah yes, you have the gift Rosie. Thank you.
Last night, just on dusk, we walked under a paulownia tree in full flower. Strong scent and a mass of purple, but the best part a thousand or more bumble bees feeding and singing joyfully. It allowed me to forgive them bypassing the broad beans; they'll be along shortly.
Yesterday Substack suggested David Knowles / Elvers by moonlight. He's another gem.