Ross Gay by Wallace Ludel

WL I'm looking at my copy of the book now, and I see in the margins I made a note that says, "The extreme efforts we go through to ignore the interdependence of all beings."

RG That's exactly it. I'm noting that effort—I think it's important to note it—and what I'm trying to do is refuse it, and probably part of the refusal is pointing towards the evidence to the contrary, which is all around us.

WL Why do you think we go through these efforts to blind ourselves to our interconnectivity?

RG It's goes so deep. I suspect there have been theories on this, but my experience of it—and it feels like a particular sort of time and place, the way I grew up and the culture that I came up in—is that we’re terrified to imagine that we might need one another. The terror of need is the first thing, and I think there are a million stories that circulate about why we shouldn't need one another, but the fact is that we do. If you express need, or if you understand that you're basically sort of a sack of needs, then you start to understand, Oh I'm a kind of walking porosity, and then it starts to be like, Oh the boundary between me and everything else is sort of flimsy if it's even there at all. After that it's a kind of profound groundlessness, which could be terror, it could feel like being subsumed or given over to something beyond our control.

WL Ironically, accepting that I'm not in control has been one of the great anxiety relievers of my life.

RG That's it. Every few weeks it seems like there's a new invention for how to exert your control or dominance or coercion on the day. People say things like "smash the day!" or "dominate the day!" or "murder the day!" What about just like, be with the day as it unfolds. Believe me, I've come to this from experience, when you say anxiety, I'm right there with it. I've been debilitated in retrospect, and even now it will still come up, by the fact of not being in control. Which is also the terror of belonging to what is way beyond anything we could ever conceive of.

If in some way I’m porous to the person walking down the street, then in some way I belong to that person. If I'm dependent on the rain, then I guess I belong to the rain. We could go on and on. That's intense! If we can get our heads around the idea that we belong to one another, it might give us a very different kind of ethical predisposition than if we feel otherwise.

WL Why do you think we can't talk about joy without talking about sorrow?

RG I think you probably can, but if sorrow's not somewhere in the room, it might not be the joy we're talking about. Far be it for me to define someone else's joy, but the way I'm defining joy is that it’s what shines from us as we help each other carry our sorrows. It implies many things, things that we would mostly think of as sorrowful, like the fact that we're always heartbroken, every one of us. Among those heartbreaks is that we're going to die, or who we love is going to die or change. I think of joy as a grave emotion, because it almost emerges from the fact of the grave. If we ignore that, I think we're talking about something else. But there's often a kind of immature approach to joy, which is why “serious” people will often say things like, "How could you talk about joy at a time like this?" First of all, it's always a time like this somewhere for someone. Secondly, joy emerges from times like this.

WL Do you want to say anything else about the relationship between joy and death? Or joy and impermanence?

RG Zadie Smith says it so well in her essay that's one of the origin points of this book; she used the word "intolerable"—that the intolerable is a component of joy. Impermanence, change, loss, and suffering are inescapable things for everyone, and to pretend otherwise—which we spend a lot of time and money doing—is a kind of destitution of spirit.

Look at what changes in our hearts when we're practicing being conscientious of the fact that everyone we encounter is heartbroken. Everyone is devastated in their various ways. That feels like a step in the direction of joy, actually.

WL When you have that in mind, it would be crazy not to want to help everyone. I don't mean in big ways, but if someone's walking to the door and I recognize that they're having a full human experience with a full range of love and sorrow and everything else, it would be crazy not to hold the door open for them.

RG That's it.

WL A friend of mine has terminal cancer right now, and in the two years since her diagnosis we have gotten so close. We say “I love you” to each other so much, and we hold hands, and it’s like there’s no barrier between us, we are just in this world of love when we hang out. And I'm so glad we're there, but I'm also like, why'd we wait?

RG That's it. We're terminal one way or another, so to the extent that it's possible, how do we practice being alert to that all the time? I can imagine the intensity of uncompromising tenderness when we know that one of us or the other is in that process. So, if we bring that to the fact that we're all in that process…I know the feeling of that, of being so close to someone's sorrow or heartbreak or dying. I was just visiting my aunt Butter who's ninety-six, and when she says goodbye it’s like, Oh yeah you might be saying goodbye forever. And I might be too. We always might be. It's hard to remember, but it's a practice.

WL Were you noticing these moments of grace before you were writing into them?

RG When I go back and look at my books, the last poem in my first book is called "Thank You." That poem is pointing to an awareness that everything is just here for the moment and it wants you to say thank you. I remember plain as day having an intense panic attack a few days after my father had been diagnosed with cancer, and that poem came out of that. There's a through-line from that poem to the questions that I have now. But I don't feel mandated, I feel excited and curious to explore this subject that in a lot of ways is under-considered, and I get to wonder what it is; I get to wonder what provokes it; I get to wonder what it does. I even get to wonder what all this wondering does to me.

One reason I don't feel hemmed in is that what you study grows as you study it. One of the things I feel lucky to do is pay close attention to the ways that we are caring for one another, or that our inclination is to share. Like I'm just studying pick-up basketball, or I'm just watching and describing closely what a dancefloor is like, or what skateboarders—at least in the late eighties and early nineties—were up to. There feels like nothing luckier in the world than to be pointing out places where this stuff is going on. It's this stuff that might keep us alive. It's fascinating to be like, Damn that's what those kids were doing when they were sharing? They were doing something that I want to learn how to do.

WL It's like you're looking through your own life and finding all these ways you were saying “I love you” to each other.

RG Boom! That's it. And there's all kinds of reasons we do the opposite. We spend a lot of time being like, That person didn't say I love you. They didn't love me. I spend plenty of time doing that too, but what I want to spend more time asking is, how do we say I love you.

WL I grew up in Los Angeles and I didn't have a car, so I was always getting rides from people. People drove me home hundreds and hundreds of times per year. Often it was friends but sometimes it was just a random person and I needed to get home and they got me there. Literally for hundreds of nights per year, when I was a teen, I would end my night by saying "thanks for the ride" to someone, and now many years later I'm like, Wow, that was the only way I was comfortable saying “I love you” or “thank you for loving me.”

RG Amazing. God, that's so beautiful.

WL It sounds like there's a lot of exploration and discovery that happens for you in the process of writing these essays?

RG Oh yes, for sure.

WL Then how much of an essay or a poem do you have planned before you actually sit down to write it?

RG Very few things seem to be planned. There are a couple essays in the new book that I was pretty familiar with when I started them. Like the first essay where I'm talking about my father's death. I knew the story and I knew approximately what happened when he died, but then in the process of writing it, everything changed. The order in which I told the story facilitated these departures that completely changed what I thought I was going to do. So even when I know the kernel stories, the essays are nothing like I ever could've imagined them to be. I often have no idea about the departures I will take in the telling of a story, and the departures are usually the most interesting places, in part because they’re where the revision is happening.

WL I've been thinking about the wonderment in your work. It's like the quote from the New Testament, "unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." I feel like you're a proselytizer for this wonder, and you're helping so many of us relearn it.

RG I teach at a college, and you learn from being around college kids that part of growing up is extinguishing your wonder. That's just what we do. It's part of the reason little kids walk so fucking slow, because everything is wonderful! So, to the extent that it's ever possible in our lives to just walk slower, we don't all get the chance to do that, but if we do, it seems pretty important. As we speak there are honeybees on this fleabane beside me, and if you look close enough at their interaction and at the flower itself and the bee herself, you'll see that you don't know anything. Which again is a kin to the idea that you're connected to everything. Noticing how much there is to notice sort of takes the ground from under us, and it might also alert us to the common groundlessness. There's more to notice than we could ever notice, so it follows that there is more to love than we could ever imagine.