“Often On My Mind”: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
I keep saying I’m not going to review books I teach, but I’ve found a loophole — I will review books that I haven’t taught yet. When I picked up Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights sometime in 2019, I didn’t expect that I would want to teach it, but these days, his idea of developing a “delight radar” feels more important than ever. And as a book about, among other things, moving through the world as a black man, it is a different kind of “antiracist” book, one that resists dehumanization by insisting on delight. A life lived to acknowledge delight, Gay tells us, is “not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss,” but simply pulls up a chair for delight to sit in, day after day: “a cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup,” “the topknot of the barista,” “the sweet glance of the man in his stylish short pants (well-lotioned ankles gleaming beneath).”
As Gay describes, his book is a promise he made himself: that he would write one “delight” essay (or “essayette,” as he calls them) every day for a year. “I came up with a handful of rules,” he writes in his Preface, which include “begin and end on my birthday,” “draft them quickly,” and “write them by hand.” The principle behind the rules: “Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.”
Of course, he explains that “confession: I skipped some days.” But he also reveals some of the patterns that emerged: “My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.”
Unless you keep a journal, you probably aren’t entirely aware of what’s “often on your mind.” Sometimes I find out what’s often on my mind by seeing what google suggests for me to search. Last summer, when I became obsessed with Jia Tolentino and her then-forthcoming book Trick Mirror, I googled her at least once a day. Soon, every “J” or “T” in the search field led to a suggestion of her name. As Gay would say, “Delight!”
To become aware of what is often on one’s mind is political as well as personal.
To become aware of what is often on one’s mind is political as well as personal. For me as a white woman socialized in a racist country, it might mean becoming aware of semi-conscious biases I hold. But knowing I have bias can’t be the end of the story. That’s where Ross Gay’s delights come in: it’s important to know one’s own mind, but also to seek to know the mind of someone whose embodied life is different from one’s own.
Clearly, Gay’s project of delights delighted him: the more he looked, the more he found. In this book, Gay has a body of work that gives him information about what’s on his mind, and that might be the greatest delight of all. As for us, the readers, our delights are less about what Ross Gay likes. Sure, we grow to delight in his lush descriptions of his garden, his encyclopaedic array of references, his affection for nature and blackness and eccentricity. But the deeper delight for the reader is in getting to know him, in layers, as each delight reveals a new facet of his abundant humor and insight. Soon, we might guess at what would delight him, and so if our own delight radar needs dusting off, we at least have his to borrow.
Readers also get to delight in the form itself, which might be called the lyric essay. It’s a form made popular by award-winning contemporary authors like Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson. The lyric essay is the lovechild of the lyric poem (think Whitman, or Plath) and the personal essay (think Montaigne, or Jia Tolentino). Deborah Tall, in the Seneca Review in the late 90s, describes the work of those writing in this “new sub-genre”: “They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.”
If our own delight radar needs dusting off, we at least have his to borrow.
For Gay, this idiosyncratic meditation has only one governing theme: delight. On each day he writes, his delight is a window into both the banal and the sublime. He gives us details of his quotidian and also ferries us back and forth across the waters of his memory. Early forties, the biracial son of parents who met in Guam -- “I kid you not,” he tells us in the very first delight of the book, “Black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination” -- and a poetry professor at Indiana University, Gay must expect that he himself will delight us with the many contradictions of who he is. He has “a kettlebell practice” and is an avid gardener; he’s a “largish” man, and so “I try to be submissive.” More than once in these essays, he is carrying a fragile plant through airport security and onto a plane. At one point, during a moment of turbulence, he delights in the fact that he instinctively put out his arm to protect “the lil guy,” his tomato plant.
One of the most striking and tone-setting essayettes from early on in the book is called “The Negreeting.” “It’s a lot of pressure to nod at every black person you see,” he begins. In Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives, “the population of black people is scant” and so “the labor of acknowledgement is itself scant.” This delight turns out to be about waiting expectantly for a negreeting from a man walking past in red shoes, only to be denied. So begins Gay’s meditation. He has traveled to other places, like Vancouver, where the dynamic seems to be different; there he can understand why other black people might not know to negreet him. But clearly, this unspoken rule matters to him. “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.”
If this were a traditional essay, maybe Gay would feel compelled to justify his love of the negreeting; contextualize it; launch into an argument as to why it matters, etc. Instead, because this is a kind of poem-essay, his meditations are fewer, more condensed, and also more personal. “The negreeting,” he theorizes, “is a way of witnessing each other’s innocence -- a way of saying, ‘I see your innocence.’” And so, how can he excuse his red-shoed “brother-not-brother” for ignoring the unspoken rule? “Maybe he’s refusing the premise of our un-innocence entirely and so feels no need to negreet,” Gay contemplates. “And in this way proclaims our innocence. Maybe.”
This piece exemplifies so many of the qualities of his essayettes. It contains both the light and the heavy; it’s distinctly personal, yet also fraught with the political stakes of his positionality and lived experience. It’s candid, and yet it possesses that half-smiling, coy manner of a card dealer or a fireside storyteller. It is artful, even philosophical, and yet it is also so very everyday. It theorizes out from the very small -- it unabashedly sees connections -- it insists upon its delight, even if that delight comes in the form of a “maybe,” a redemptive imagining of good intentions.
Gay practices a faith in kindness, through a ritual of kindness: toward those he encounters, toward language, toward pain -- and above all, toward himself. His March 11th delight is about seeing an announcement on a church sign (he calls it a marquee, then questions that word choice) that reads “FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES MANY JAMS,” and thinking this congregation is having a jam sale fundraiser. “I did not for even half a second consider jam meaning problem, jam meaning trouble,” he admits, delighted. Or in his June 7th delight, where he recounts an awkward hug: “his arm position was such that my arm position was not going to work...and I inelegantly nearly sprained my ankle going in for the hug like this, so flummoxed, so off-kilter was I.”
These essayettes deter cynicism; sure, irony is welcome, but only ever in the service of delight, not to lose sight of an abiding wonder. They’re also not naive: indeed, it is in finding delight after despair that Gay’s essays find their force. And when these pieces are political, they remain surprising, never pedantic. For instance, in an essayette on the “repressed and repressive culture” that has criminalized loitering, he remarks, “Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.” Loitering, he goes on to say, is a synonym of lingering, loafing, lollygagging, dawdling -- all positively connoted words for him. And yet, “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.” It’s an acknowledgment of the racism he lives with; Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd haunt the subtext. But it’s a heavy essay that Gay manages to bless into a delight -- the distinctly “black delight” of “taking one’s time,” of loitering, of refusing to be productive. Of lollygagging in the face of fear.
It’s hard to finish this book and not see delight as an act of resistance. Each essay, one by one, seems to build an anti-racist, anti-sexist solidarity rooted in delight: a politics that starts with the freedom to be a tall black man who unabashedly loves flowers. Gay’s lyricism flows not from egoistic passion, or transcendent idealism, qualities ascribed to some of the lyric poets of previous centuries. Instead it is a lyricism grounded in the kind of “innocence” that his negreetings insist upon: the innocence he knows he is denied, and that he reclaims.
