In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of the 17 most important things I have learned about life.
Nick Cave, who has lived through some unimaginable loss, brought the paradox of joy to the 300th edition of his wonderful journal The Red Hand Files — an oasis of largehearted anticynicism in our world, and my favorite email by orders of magnitude. He writes:
I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at least, it can seem that way.
This paradox comes alive in Nick’s song “Joy” from his altogether soul-slaking record Wild God. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” goes a lyric spoken by the ghost of his dead son.
Some time ago, amid a season of suffering, Nick introduced me to the soulful work of poet Christian Wiman and sent me his lifeline of an anthology Joy: 100 Poems (public library) — a kaleidoscopic lens on, as Wiman writes in the introduction, “why a moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss.”
Among the hundred poems, as various as Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, is the plainly and pointedly titled “Joy” by one of my favorite poets: Lisel Mueller, who lived nearly a century and wrote with such ravishing poignancy about the consolations of mortality and the dazzling complexities that make life worth living.
JOY
by Lisel Mueller“Don’t cry, it’s only music,”
someone’s voice is saying.
“No one you love is dying.”It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
“Crazy,” she told herself,
“I should be dancing with happiness.”But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love —
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
Couple with Nick’s beautiful of reading of “But We Had Music,” then revisit poet Ross Gay on delight as a force of resistance.