THE haptics of delight

Ross Gay, "Sorrow is not my Name"
-after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
-for Walter Aikens
"Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.


Ross Gay, "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt"

No one knew or at least 
I didn't know
they knew
what the thin disks
threaded here
on my shirt
might give me
in terms of joy
this is not something to be
taken lightly
the gift
of buttoning one's shirt
slowly
top to bottom
or bottom
to top or sometimes
the buttons
will be on the other
side and am a woman
that morning
slipping the glass
through its slot
I tread
differently that day
or some of it
anyway
my conversations
are different
and the car bomb slicing the air
and the people in it
for a quarter mile
and the honeybee's
legs furred with pollen
mean another
thing to me
than on the other days
which too have
been drizzled in this
simplest of joys
in this world
of spaceships and subatomic
this and that
two maybe three
times a day
some days
I have the distinct pleasure
of slowly untethering
the one side
from the other
which is like unbuckling
a stack of vertebrae
with delicacy
for I must only use
the tips
of my fingers
with which I will
one day close
my mother's eyes
this is as delicate
as we can be
in this life
practicing
like this
giving the raft of our hands
to the clumsy spider
and blowing soft until she
lifts her damp heft and
crawls off
we practice like this
pushing the seed into the earth
like this first
in the morning
then at night
we practice
sliding the bones home.
"Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay, copyright (c) 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.


POETIC THEMES
           Ross Gay teaches the mechanics of how to train our curiosity in order to cultivate delight as a discipline. "Fleeting intense attentions," he explains to Krista Tippett in the On Being podcast, are the "butterflies of delight" which land on the thing that is joy. Notice what's not a part of this process: he does not demand that we say thank you! Neo-spiritual gratitude practices can be so damn guilty-making, y'all. When we dutifully make our gratitude lists in our journals each morning, we are sometimes called back to the feeling of the child unwrapping the gift and plastering on the smiley face for Aunty Linda. I remember when my kids' cousin opened his Christmas present and obediently repeated, in a robotic tone, the forced acknowledgement he had been taught:
"thankyousomuchitissperfectitisjustwhatiwanted." The gift was, like, a book or something. The notion of delight frees us from the "should" of gratitude at the gift of the world, by dissolving our attention into it. We actually, temporarily, become one with it, in a non-dual merging of self and our surround.
        Gay's trademark modality of practicing delight as a discipline offers a welcome respite from the unachievable happiness model. And no, this isn't a mode of bypassing, but rather a way of allowing our joy to co-exist alongside all that is crappy in our world. The subtitle of "Sorrow is not My Name" refers to an assertion by Gwendolyn Brooks: "I have no right to sorrow" (from "Another Girl, 1936"). The pull of darkness is no match for tree-green. Gay acknowledges with a "yeah, yeah" the world's suckiness; he remains fully aware of the creepy guy behind him on the bus taking notes, as a black man in this twisted culture must. Then he turns our attention - "But look"- to two million naturally occurring sweet things.
         Because we need to believe that, ultimately, the wind will carry away the vulture, poems like this should be taken like vitamins. Gay (note the titular play on his name) reminds us of okra, agave, and persimmon. He's irresistible, and we want to be with him in joy, and decide too that our color is green, and that we too are spring.
        All the phenomena in "Sorrow Is Not My Name" are visual or aural. But "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt" introduces the sense of touch. This ode to touch achieves a rounding out of focus, a spatial generosity on the page, even through the vertical stack of these short button-like lines. The poem shifts from front body, to hemispheric split, to back body, to the line between living and dead, human and animal, above and underground. The car bomb slicing through people places harsh reality firmly at the center of the poem, co-existing with the sweetness of the legs of the honeybee "furred with pollen." The poem itself functions as fingertips, delicately spiderwalk-touching this thing and then that thing.
        Playing with the thin disks on our shirts is a touching example (wink, wink) of the joy to be found in the little things. "Untethering" the two sides of fabric is described in terms of pleasure, in the sexiness of "unbuckling / a stack of vertebrae" (aka, let your backbone slip). The pleasure here, for Gay, seems to lie in the delicacy of what fingertips can feel and do. Our fingers learn by practicing, and the practice of subtle touch has real-world applications: we will use that delicacy to free a spider, or to close the eyelids of those we lose. Anyone who has done this gentle maneuver must feel shivers upon reading this line. My dad's eyelids were stubborn, unyielding, and I held my hand over them for a long time before the imprint was made. This association can only persist in echoing and re-echoing in the subsequent action of "pushing the seed into the earth." The poem's final action - "we practice / sliding the bones home" - brings us home to our participation in the practice: we become aware that even in reading the poem we are rehearsing a way of being. Gay's poem brings together shirt-buttoning and closing our beloveds' eyelids in death. Buttoning together multiform meanings, tangles of associative networks, changes and enriches our experience, making us more sensitive. Each micro-action of our fingertips is an opportunity to hone our awareness to nuance, and to practice delicacy in all things.

THE PRACTICE
        I love the idea of buttoning two things together as an alternative to dualistic thinking. These new combinations can be galvanizing, like trying on a new and fabulous outfit. For example: I'm not a good mom or a bad mom, instead I'm a part of a generation of good-enough moms whose kids suffer from experiencing the full range of emotion (because they have been given permission), and so those kids also have extraordinary compassion for the suffering of others. In the context of Ross Gay's magical notion of delight, co-existing realities, and the sensitivities of touch, we might choose a practice that plays with the expansive modes enabled by pleasure.
           Pleasure activist Kai Cheng Thom teaches a somatic exercise that seems to fit here. The practitioner touches one hand with the other, focusing first on giving the touching hand pleasure, then giving the receiving hand pleasure. Simple but deep, this activity can be used to explore many different embodied skill sets like consent, or giving. Or serving. It fits well inside a Queer framework that explores the potential of non-normative desire to create ingenious new modes of meaning-making. (I could queer this section further by contextualizing this exercise where I first encountered it, in a session with an Estonian sex therapist where this was one of the most erotic, and least overtly sexual, of all the things she did with me.) Kai Cheng Thom framed the practice as a bottom-up exercise, privileging the experience of the body before assigning any interpretation. Fusing the somatic with the linguistic, as my work seeks to do, you might dissolve this line by inviting a few of Gay's wonderful action verbs into the experience of touch. In fact, you could smudge that body/mind boundary further by trying out Lucina Artigas' Butterfly Hug, a bilateral stimulation exercises that neatly embodies Gay's butterflies of delight. Cross your thumbs at the notch of the throat, laying the hands over your chest with the fingertips just under the collarbones, and alternate hands as the four fingers together softly tap the chest. Remember, your color is green.