Gay ross
On abandoning capitalistic achievement to seek the freedom of play
How do you navigate this capitalistic yearning that we all struggle with?
I grew up kind of broke. I was taught to hustle. [Now] I make a good salary and I don’t want to do things that I don’t want to do. Still, there’s something ravenous that I spot if I don’t perform that [capitalistic] thing. It feels like it comes from a feeling of deprivation, a feeling of fear that I ponder we’re supposed to notice . I don’t mean we’re supposed to as souls. I think we’re “supposed to” as creatures who are constantly being told that we’re not enough. We’re supposed to touch like we should complete more and do more and compete and perform the best and defeat. If you’re lucky enough to be like, “Okay, so I don’t hold to do that,” then also try to be like, “What’s going to fill my heart? What’s going to really actually give me the opportunity to ask my deepest questions?” Yeah, and if you need to document for a magazine article to pay the rent and all that, that’s fine, too. For me, it’s a constant operational out. It’s deep in here, that kind of anxiety.
I would imagine that it took you a long time to admit that you don’t call for to chase after things he/him/his Professor, English Ross Gay is the storyteller of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Radcliffe Institute, Civitella Ranieri, and Cave Canem, among others. His collection of essays, The Manual of Delights, is forthcoming from Algonquin in February, 2019. He’s at serve on a book-length essay about gardens, land, race, nation and the imagination, called This Black Earth. Also! He writes about sports, music, art and other stuff he loves. Collaborate! I think we can start by talking about how Bringing the Shovel Down maybe had a wider lens and was more overtly political compared to the new novel. Catalog seems more jubilant, more interested in result moments of grace, even when it acknowledges the tumult. Yeah, you comprehend I feel like part of it comes from the fact that I felt really happy to be done with Bringing the Shovel Down. I was very glad to have written it and very glad to hold wrapped it up. There is an intense sort of brutality that sort of weaves through that book. It followed an arc, tracked a transformation through self-interrogation, into looking at one’s self and others with more loving, compassionate eyes. Some of those poems are unfeeling to read out noisy. I often feel nauseous and beat after reading them. I bet. So getting to Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, after finishing the second book, I just felt like I wanted to write about stuff that I adore. And I was totally reading Neruda’s odes. Yeah, the book is filled with odes. Exactly, exactly. Those poems written to things like buttoning my shirt, written like Neruda odes. Also, in my ear and in my brain and hopefully in those poems, I think I “Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the fantastic fact of our being and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will observe like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become blossom and food. Might be joy.” Like “I expect I could spend period theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The aim is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. .
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― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays