A Responsible Joy
Belfast, Ireland. 1972. The Troubles in full swing. On January 30th, twenty-six unarmed civilians were shot and thirteen were killed by the British army during an anti-internment demonstration in Derry.
Later that year, Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, along with his close friend, David Hammond, a singer and filmmaker, were headed to a recording studio to make a tape of songs and poems. The tape was intended for a friend in Michigan who had hosted the two of them at a memorable party. As Heaney describes it in his essay, “The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” the whole purpose of the tape was to “promote that happiness and expansiveness which song, meaning both poetry and music, exists to promote in the first place.”
Heaney and Hammond never made the tape. As they were going to the studio, explosions erupted around the city, and everywhere they heard the sirens of ambulances and fire engines. Casualties were reported. When they arrived at the studio, Hammond unpacked his guitar. Heaney prepared to read his poems. But something was wrong. As Heaney described it, “the very notion of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering.” Hammond packed up his guitar, Heaney his books, and they “both drove off into the destroyed evening.”
In his essay, Heaney explores the notion of how and if “song constituted a betrayal of suffering.” As we move into the engulfing uncertainty of the Trump administration, I have had similar feelings about posting anything that drills down into the joy of song and music and literature and art. Our current situation doesn’t remotely resemble The Troubles in Ireland, and I don’t mean to exaggerate our own lower-case troubles, but I do worry about the propriety of joy in a Trump-administered reality — a strange and unsettling thing to worry about.
After considering the cases of Wilfred Owen and his war poetry, Chekhov and his trip to the penal colony on the Russian island of Sakhalin, as well as poems by Mandelstam and Herbert, and after worrying about falling into the long shadow of Nero, fiddling as Rome burned, Heaney does an about-face and asks, “Why should the joyful affirmation of music and poetry ever constitute an affront to life?”
One answer to his question is clear: some songs and poems wander into the territories of complacency and apathy, and they risk insulating themselves from this troubled thing we call reality. This gap, then, between reality and rhetoric might well constitute an affront of sorts. I have felt this, even as I read, alone in my chair, haloed by lamplight, the poems that bring me great joy. What place does joy have in our lives when our country has reached its current state? I have wondered that as well.
Heaney adjusts his position further when he confesses that “lyric poetry, however responsible, has an element of the untrammeled about it.” I agree, and I would take it even further: anything that creates joy in the moment, untrammeled joy, even in the face of what Heaney labels “the unfree and the hurt,” will finds its legitimate and legitimizing place in the spectrum of responses that we bring to our very own American crises.
Joy, after all, is our most efficient builder of communities — Who isn’t drawn to joy? — and to the degree that we create and indulge it, we are constructing the kind of resistance that the top-down management style of authoritarianism simply can’t control. And even more, can’t understand.
Joy is the natural predator of the despot.
But joy enters the moral world as well. The greatest joy seems to me to have a sense of responsibility about it, even if that sense of responsibility chooses to be disruptive and chaotic simply because disruption and chaos are called for, joyfully, in the moment. Joy will never fix itself on ends and results, although the hope will always be that its presence strengthens and improves the communities it serves.
Yet, from where I stand, for joy to be authentic, it must for the moment crowd out the pressing concerns — political, social — that traditionally have identified themselves as the enemies of joy. You might not find atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes, but neither will you find authoritarianism infiltrating our days whenever joy has gained the upper hand. Someone mentioned to me recently that they had never seen Trump laugh in an authentically joyful manner. Trump and joy in the public arena— I can’t and don’t wish to speak to his private life — seem not to get along well at all.
So henceforth, I will see joy, a responsible joy, as a potent, maybe subliminal, certainly effective response to the new world order taking shape in Trump’s administration. I will see joy as a reputable project.
And I will remind myself continually of the physics of it all. Joy as energy: joy conserves energy by producing an over-abundance of it, and the energy to be fully human, expanding our essential spirit to its limit, is a form of resistance that authoritarians fear because it has no predictable blueprint. Its structure can’t be anticipated; its arrival can’t be predicted.
Joy appears, renovates, and disappears. And joy will reappear in a different guise every time. Joy is shiftless, has no permanent address, is always on the move. It is a nightmare for those who would control, confuse, and frighten us through authority, disinformation, and intimidation. We must create as much joy, responsible joy, as we possibly can.
We have worried ourselves sick about infectious diseases and viruses, and now with our current health secretary in place, we need more than ever to be vigilant about our health. But remember that nothing is more viral, more infectious, more quickly able to overtake a community, than joy.
Unmask and expose yourself deliberately, regularly, and indiscriminately to joy.
E.B. White, writing in 1939, on the brink of a massive world conflagration, gets very close to what I mean: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom — he fears a drunken poet who cracks a joke that may take hold.”
My hope, my prayer, in closing?
May we all be drunken poets, in our own ways, and may we never cease cracking our jokes.
