UrbanUpdate

There’s an essay in Ross Gay’s new collection, Inciting Joy, that begins with a discussion of his favorite sports book, John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots, a memoir told through the author’s lifelong relationship with basketball. Over the next eleven pages, Gay, a longtime hoop lover himself, offers a meditation on the beauty of the pickup game, and how a good court is a microcosm of democracy. “On a pick-up basketball court… aside from what’s fixed (how much a basket counts, what’s out of bounds), there is no fixed law,” he writes. “There is only us, ten of us at a time (depending on the court), assembling and disassembling and reassembling, in perpetual negotiation of the rules, in perpetual common wonder of how we’re going to be together today.”

Gay, a 48-year-old poet and professor at Indiana University, has made a career of exploring the wonder to be found in our everyday lives, notably in his bestselling 2019 essay collection, The Book of Delights. His essays are as lyrical as his poems, and, as the chapter on pick-up basketball makes clear, often begin in the physical world before launching into other dimensions. In his new volume, he’s writing about joy and all the things in his life that incite it: dancing, music, poetry, an orchard he founded in Bloomington, his occasional lack of productivity, a particularly delightful basketball highlight involving Gary Payton and a young Jason Williams. But he’s also writing about how those aspects of his life relate to forces that often rob us of joy—sickness, mental illness, racism—and how everything is always more interconnected than it might seem. “Joy is what emanates from us as we help each other carry our sorrows,” he recently told GQ. “Joy understands that no one is without sorrow. Period. Everyone’s heartbroken. Which is also to say that everyone has the capacity for joy.”

Book cover of “Inciting Joy” by Ross Gay.Courtesy of Ross Gay

GQ: A word that comes up again and again in your work is the word practice. What’s the significance of that word to you?

Ross Gay: I started to think about that word when I was doing The Book of Delights. The project was to write about something that I found delightful every day, for a year. I was like, it’ll be a discipline, which appeals to me because I grew up as an athlete. I played football in college. I was a basketball coach for years afterwards. The idea of discipline is ingrained in me. But I like shifting that to the idea of a practice instead, so that, one, it wasn’t punitive, and, two, it was more like something you’re trying to do. You’re not being punished for not doing it, and you’re not a failure for not doing it. Which is probably more in line with a spiritual practice. [The Buddhist nun] Pema Chödrön is someone I think of as a really important teacher to me. And her teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche has a book called The Sacred Path of the Warrior. He’s the person from whom I probably first heard that one of the “practices” is to “be smiling with your eyes full of tears, all the time.” Which is kind of the definition of joy I’m kind of getting at.

Can you say a little more about that? Because I think we have such a distorted sense of what joy is in our society, and your definition complicates the usual notion.

Some of the things that I hear are like, “Joy’s not serious.” It breaks my heart. Sometimes it’s young people saying they’ve been told not to write about what they find joyful, that it’s not serious, it’s not rigorous. To me, they’re talking about something different than joy. Joy is what emanates from us as we help each other carry our sorrows. Joy understands that no one is without sorrow. Period. Everyone’s heartbroken. Which is also to say that everyone has the capacity for joy. Joy is available to all of us. That’s one of the things that makes it feel like a profound emotion. It doesn’t feel like an accomplishment, and it doesn’t feel like an achievement. Often, the way we talk about joy is by getting something done. Like, the idea that if there was an endpoint to the meditation, it would be joy. You know? 

Nirvana.

Exactly. That’s not my definition of it. You can’t buy it, you can’t achieve it. It’s more a kind of a submission or a joining, a falling into, almost falling apart into. That feels really crucial because it also means that joy is not individual. It implies our connection. And I don’t just mean human to human. It implies a witness to the connection between the tree out the window, and the light and the sun that is making that tree possible, and the rain and the river and on and on. 

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What do you see as the relation between joy and delight? 

I’m working this out. I have another Book of Delights coming out, and one of the things I’m trying to do is articulate what are the qualities of these two things. One of the things that I’m noting: Growing up, we were kind of broke and stressed. I would never have called my mother a delighted person. Now, part of the sorrow is that her husband’s dead. But he had good life insurance. So many of the worries that she had in most of her adult life are gone, ’cause her bills are paid. She’s not worried about being evicted. She’s not worried about medical bills. And she’s really fucking delighted, all the time. My mom’s from Minnesota and she says, “Oh boy,” all the time. We’re driving somewhere, and she sees a deer. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.” Which was just not her thing. 

So one of the things that makes so abundantly clear is that time, space, resources, et cetera, makes one’s capacity for delight more. If you have time to sit down and look at the bird cavorting with the tree, as opposed to running from that job to your second job, all the while worrying about you gotta get to the doctor’s appointment too.... When I think of the shit that my folks dealt with daily, in ways that I don’t [have to], cause I have a completely different economic situation than them, I just think how exhausting it was. If we know that, it’s our responsibility to try to adequately distribute and share the resources such that we can all share delight. 

In one of the essays in the book, you call grief “the metabolization of change.” It feels like, after the pandemic, we have a lot of grieving to do societally, about how things have changed, and we don’t have a lot of public spaces for that grieving. I’ve found myself wondering if that’s where so much of the aggression in society is coming from. 

I hadn’t thought about it in terms of social aggression or something like that. But to follow that thread, in that essay, I’m wondering about masculinity. One of the qualities of being trained as a man is to pretend that you’re unmovable. You don’t grieve, you’re not hurt or brokenhearted. It seems to me the result of that is exactly what you’re saying. If we grieve, and have ways of grieving together, we’re more inclined to sort of recognize how joined we are to one another. Grief is terrifying because it’s evidence of our connection to one another. If you start to grieve, one of the worries is that, I’m going to fall into grief. I’m gonna join forever the grieving. I’m going to forever be connected to people. I will no longer be this autonomous, self-determined, self-possessed thing that I’ve always thought was what I’m supposed to try to be. To come back to Pema Chödrön, it’s a groundlessness. The ground I have imagined for myself is that I am distinct, and I will construct all kinds of stories to imagine that I am separate from every single thing. To get rid of that, it’s like the ground has fallen. What are we walking on if we’re no longer discrete little egos? 

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These days, there’s a lot of talk about masculinity and how to evolve it. But you make the point that the very act of creating that gender binary between masculine and feminine might be the root of the problem. 

I can’t remember who said it—maybe the writer Robin D.G. Kelley—but someone said binaries are made to put one group in power. The category of the masculine is partly why I’m so moved by these big ass dudes holding each other after they go at it, in a basketball game or a fight or something. It troubles the category of the masculine. It makes it more complicated. In various ways, it’s sort of the anti-masculine. I think those categories are harmful. Also, they’re just not true to me. They seem like a violence to our capacities to be complicated creatures. They feel like bullshit.

Is that why you described The Last Dance documentary as a shit show? Just because it was all about this ultra-masculine competitiveness?

It’s a story about competitiveness and domination at the time when there’s the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of certainly the country, if not the world, happening, on account of this medical crisis. They’re basically showing one person getting all the rings at the same time that the billionaires are getting so much more money. It feels like, okay, there’s an ethos being celebrated here, while there are more and more people sleeping under bridges. We probably need to reconsider. Not to say that dude’s not the best basketball player ever. Yeah, of course. I’m never gonna question that. But it was sort of a celebration, ultimately, of domination. Getting every ring and at any cost. There’s a lot of ways to describe what that is, but it ain’t good as far as I’m concerned.

I wonder if the fact that you’re a professor makes you uniquely positioned to answer a question I have about accountability.  I know we need accountability to create change, but it sometimes feels like we have so much righteousness in our society that there’s no room for change—like maybe we want vilification or posturing more than we want growth. In your classroom, how do you think about holding your students accountable to the best version of themselves, but not shaming them or not vilifying them?

So I don’t grade. I mean, I give A’s. If I could, I would just happily not give grades. It immediately changes the dynamic of the class. It doesn’t set up the kind of hierarchy where I’m the one determining whether or not they’re good. And so it doesn’t set up for them the desire or need to appeal to me to verify or validate the fact that they’re good. It just cuts so much away. There’s something about eliminating this notion of hierarchy, of coercion, to the end of understanding, lovingly, that we are in the process of becoming. We are not finished and we are not fixed. That’s one of the words that I use a lot in that essay. So much of school is about just fixing each other. You send your kids to school to get fixed. But you also fix something to the wall so it can’t move. Fix also means you kill ’em. And to me, we’re not actually trying to fix each other. We’re trying to be with each other as we emerge. If you try to facilitate that perspective, I think it reduces the carceral impulse. It reduces our desire to throw people in the fucking jail because they fucked up. Which we all do. It doesn’t diminish the desire to be like, “Why’d you do that?” Or, “Let’s understand that.” In fact, it might encourage the possibility that we can do that. And to be together with each other, wondering, how did that come to pass? How do we emerge through that, change through that, develop through that? 

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For me, it’s bringing to mind that very American ethos that you need to fix or better yourself. That creates a lot of guilt. How do you think about guilt? Obviously if you grow, and hopefully we all do, you’re going to look back and not feel great about who you were. 

One of the things that I try to encourage in our classes is that when we make work, we don’t start to evaluate it. Like, we don’t say how it’s so brilliant—it’s hard sometimes for me not to. But, we really don’t say, “Oh, if you just did this and that…” like the typical workshop does. Instead, we just notice things about it. We just observe. I feel like that’s a way to think about this. What if we just observed our behavior ten years ago? Try to approach it [like that]—and to approach other people like that. With curiosity. I want to have that for myself. I want to have it for the people that I love. I want to extend that to people that I don’t know.

There are a lot of themes in this book that I would describe as counter-cultural. Our culture is obsessed with being productive, maximizing time, endlessly consuming, and being relentlessly individual. But you explore the joys of slowing down, taking your time, working together, and sharing, literally, the fruits of your garden instead of hoarding them. Are there practices—I’d imagine for you gardening is one, and reading poetry might be one—that can better orient us to these sort of countercultural ideas? 

I feel like it’s really important to study and share what we love. In part because we’re so often studying and sharing what we hate. The other thing—this feels so important to me—is to witness where in my life things like sharing are happening. Which is also to say, where in the culture is that countercultural thing already afoot? Where are people already just giving their shit away? Where are people already just being like, “Here, I got extra, take it.” Part of why I wanted to do that deep reading of the pickup basketball court is because it’s where there’s this kind of radical social life, this radical living, happening. How can we all share this space, and make beautiful stuff ongoingly? That’s a thing that I would say. Where are there places in our lives that we can already witness what we want the world to be?

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQQ&ABooksLife Advice