On Fig Trees and "Inciting Joy"
Hi There Friend,
Welcome to Spirit: Notes for the Creative Contemplative, where I discuss the role of literature, creativity, and mindfulness in culture through personal essays.
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Much Joy,
Sarah
It’s fig season in South Texas. My backyard tree, in the span of a few weeks, has transformed from splayed bare branches to lush, dark green leaves the size of my outstretched hand. Then, the fruit set, forming green clusters, like a stash of dull marbles. Once the figs started to turn from dull green to chartreuse on their way to ripeness, I knew it was time to protect them from grackles, those greedy, stubborn trashy-talking birds that would pluck every last fig off my tree if I didn’t intervene.
I had an idea to hide the fruit from the grackles by covering them with tiny, chiffon party-favor bags that had ribbon drawstrings. The bags were extras leftover from a writing workshop I taught. Students had filled these bags with words. They wrote juicy, lush, seedy words on notecards and kept them safe in bag with sparkly glittery designs. The words were prompts, meant to propagate writing.
I combed through the branches of the tree for almost-ripe figs, fat ones about to blush and covered them with the festive bags, tying the drawstring tight. When I finished, my fig tree had festive flair reminiscent of Christmas.
When I think of figs, I’m reminded of Ross Gay’s poem, “The Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which is about a moment of delight and connection, a way of loving others and being in the world together. I love that this poem exists in the world. It was published in his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, and that’s the perfect title for a poem that is unapologetically thankful. (Thank God.)
The fig tree poem led me to Gay’s new book, Inciting Joy. I devoured it, like a fig-hungry grackle. The topic of joy is not new territory for Gay. His earlier essay collection, The Book of Delights, chronicled his year of writing one short essay a day about something that delighted him, items including kombucha in a mid-century glass, bobble-head dolls, and fireflies. The book is also a cataloguing of things that bring joy, but those short bites of delight didn’t land with the satisfaction of Inciting Joy. Why? Because in this book Gay doesn’t shy away from the fact that joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another. He asks (rhetorically), “What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”
From the introduction he invites his readers into sorrow’s house (a lively extended metaphor that he pulls off with grace). In sorrow’s house, we’re shown the joy—surprisingly—that can be found there. The prose is stunning. Gay’s voice has the aliveness of telling good joke, but the joke is not at the readers’ expense, instead he let’s us in on it (with whispered asides in parenthesis) and footnoted digressions that engender more trust than pretension. He lets us in on a secret that seems too good to be true: JOY IS EVERYWHERE, if you know how to look for it. We fail to recognize it because it gets muddled up with grief and pride and fear and all those other unpleasant emotions. But by welcoming sorrow et al, we’re also throwing the door wide open to let joy in too.
Gay never takes himself or his writing too seriously, which gives him the freedom to discuss openly serious ideas and painful experiences. His fear while skateboarding as a young Black man, his grief at mourning his father’s death from cancer, distrust among a committee while building a community orchard, and despair for the shambles of our public education system are the sorrows that end up inciting joy, that particular deep brand of joy that comes from a community of caring.
One of my favorite passages of the book is one in which he describes his method for teaching creative writing (duh, I’m a creative writing teacher, so there’s some bias).
Gay explains: it’s important to get “past desire for mastery, for making it right or doing it well, because a poem isn’t like that. A poem is often naughty if not outright bad. Disobedient, at the least. Well-behaved, god please no. Hates the clothes you think it should wear. At its best, a good poem, like any good art, is unruly, insubordinate, uncoachable, insolent, and churlish. Surly sometimes, too. Knows your little rules inside and out and thumbs its nose. Sometimes a good poem don’t wanna. As you can image, this is a puzzle, an unsolvable one if you think of art as something you fix or impose your will on. Something you put a screwdriver to or throw some more parsley or smoked paprika into or squirt a little WD-40 on, to get it unstuck. But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that.”
I think this passage applies to more than poems. He’s talking about any form of creating. He’s talking about the complexity of making anything worthwhile. It’s hard, yes. But it’s also a lovely process of discovery--the universe is trying to show you something you do not yet understand—that curiosity can drive a lifelong practice of making and creating.
As for the grackles versus me and my fig tree…it’s an evenly matched battle. The day after I cloaked the ripening figs with the chiffon party-favor bags, about a dozen were nicely ripe and they went on my bowl of steel cut oatmeal the next morning. Two bags had been infiltrated by stubborn grackles. A jagged hole pecked through the fabric until the fig could be gobbled, leaving behind a brown, sticky fig pulp.
Their desire, their absolute hunger for the world is helping them figure something out. Am I projecting onto these grackles? Perhaps. (Grackles have a lot of lessons to offer, and I’ve written about them before.) I do know this: there’s a lot of joy going out to the fig tree to see how many figs survived and how many were grackle-breakfast. It’s a game I’m playing with some very smart birds, and what a shame it would be if I’d missed the joy of it.
Figs, grackles, and Ross Gay! Protect the seasonal sweet as best as one can🙏
I like knowing I can wager getting a little lost in the making or viewing or reading of art and the odds are likely in my favor.