Here we are, giving a nod to last week’s exploration of literary laughter and ranting, where I wondered in the intro where sincerity and gratitude fit into all of this. Could comedy be the sign of bad faith—a form of evasion when not just a lame series of potshots or fart jokes? And is gratitude compatible with anger and blame and the drawing of lines?
In my last post, I compared the angry tenor of Tor Ulven’s Replacement with the uneasy comedy of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory. Two groups of characters stuck in unpalatable situations; two generally different ways of reacting to them. Laughter and rage aren’t, of course, the only two possibilities involved in facing up to these situations, or to any others. But I started wondering, while also reading Ross Gay’s poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, whether some state beyond anger or tears or even compensatory laughter can come about on the other side of those consoling or reactionary emotions.
The title of that collection should make obvious Gay’s attitude toward the situations, memories, ruminations, and more featured in the book: spaces of loss and grief; past non-events that could have planted seeds that in reality somehow failed to develop into lasting anger or resentment or despair; mistakes of many sorts; willing surrender to small and nonhuman things and forces. Looking back on the terrible times his mother and he experienced in the long wake of his father’s death; confronting a roomful of apathetic students; remembering a failed adolescent flirtation or imagining the horrors his ancestors endured: the pain and embarrassment and sorrow of these and other scenarios are not dismissed or forgotten; sorrow, in fact, shows up quite often. These less cheery imprints are allowed to retain their integrity as part of who Gay has become—but even while they’re given their recognized place in his person-as-history, they fail to possess the poet in the way that occurred with Ulven’s characters, holding tight to their grievances like Gay’s metaphorical birds trapped in an attic,
common sorrow made murderous simply by nailing // the shingles tight, and caulking with the tar always boiling out back / all possible cracks… // the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering // mortar everywhere, almost by accident, / for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt1
This is no cheap or showy embrace of the world as it is, however it is—but instead what I see as gratitude in the form of openness to what is and what will come, reinforced sometimes by wonder at having come this far at all. A sort of posture that’s essentially related to what I want to call equilibrium, something akin to the stability of dwelling comfortably in and with yourself, even as the rest of the world’s determined to speed its own destruction. A state in which you’re able to stand steadily in all the mess simply because of how you’ve decided to face it.
It’s not that anger and comedy and all the other forms of emotional reaction disappear or shed their legitimacy for someone who’s grown into this disposition; it’s just that those sentiments don’t turn sovereign, or get brought in to block out a moment of awkwardness, or the hurt of an absence or injustice. They might not even give rise to any commentary at all, as if people graced with this sort of grateful perspective have come to a place where they’re able to answer in the affirmative the question asked by W. H. Auden’s Prospero: “Can I learn to suffer / Without saying something ironic or funny / On suffering?”2 This, as opposed to Ulven’s preference to focus on, or rather to insist upon, what he calls most people’s “rather miserable lives;” opposed as well to making a witty or self-deprecating comment, Gay’s approach is to acknowledge misery’s reality, the reality of its marks—and then to determine that that misery will not define him in the end.3
In a letter to J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster zeroed in on how this sort of perspective can play out in very visible ways. The two authors had been exchanging thoughts about the value, allure, etc., etc., of sports in general: what they might do to or for us, what they might teach us. And then Auster recounted watching a game of baseball: one in which then-Detroit Tiger Armando Galarraga was on his way to that rare feat of pitching a perfect game. Thanks, though, to a flagrantly bad call—the batter should’ve been out on first, but was declared safe—the dream was over. As Auster recounted it,
This was a stupendous error, perhaps the worst officiating blunder in the history of the sport, and the beautiful thing about what happened at that moment, the moment when Galarraga understood that his perfect game had been unfairly stolen from him, was that the young man smiled. Not a smile of derision or contempt. Not even an ironical smile, but a genuine smile, a smile of wisdom and acceptance—as if he were saying, “Of course. Such is life, and what else can you expect?” I have never seen anything like it.4
Indeed—going back and looking at the footage, I can’t describe what that smile conveys, other than something close to knowing and accepting just how the crazy game can turn out, and that even so, it’s pretty fun to be part of it. As Galarraga walks back to the mound, the smile is still there, if fading. It looks to me like he’s trying to swallow the tremendous disappointment he and anyone in that situation must have felt. But he’s also walking back while what sounds like most of the stadium continues to boo umpire Jim Joyce, outraged at what just happened. As Auster went on,
Any other player in that situation would have erupted in a tantrum of anger and protest, screaming at the injustice of it all. But not this boy. Calmly, showing no hint of upset (for the game had to continue), he retired the twenty-eighth batter—thereby completing a perfect game more perfect than any that had come before it, and one for which he will get no credit.
Afterward, when Jim Joyce saw the replay, he was mortified. “I robbed that kid of his perfect game,” he said, and he publicly apologized to Galarraga—who graciously accepted the apology, saying that everyone makes mistakes and that he bore no grudge.5
At least one thing I see here is a clear example of how the approach to life that’s present throughout Gay’s collection might manifest itself: a recognition that something terrible has just happened, with a simultaneous and probably always-present ability to see the so-called bigger picture: in the middle of a world broken by all sorts of real injustices and dangers, here I am, lucky enough to be playing a game of baseball, even if that very game is filled with its own particular wrongs. The pitcher’s reaction to that bad call might even go beyond Gay’s own appeal to “the miracle / of the mistake”—because the mistake made here was not Galarraga’s, but someone else’s.6 That’s a level of gratitude, openness, unselfishness or maturity, call it what you will, that’s surpassed the hard achievement of being able to forgive yourself, and gone on to refuse to hold a grudge against—refuse to blame—someone else for the ways in which life didn’t turn out as you’d hoped.
It’s a hard place to get to, especially when you’re dealing with social and structural forces—racism, sexism, unfair labor and economic and legal conditions—no one individual can be blamed for. Those larger issues are at least partially and probably behind some of Ulven’s characters’ anger—and they, at least the realities of employment and the workplace that rule in the novel—are the looming force behind The Factory’s characters acting and questioning and looking ironically at their situations in the way they do. Those larger forces do make me wonder what role fulfillment plays in gratitude, especially in a world where everything seems to work against the achievement of both or either: can you get to gratitude without being fulfilled, or can gratitude help you reach a place of fulfillment?
There’s no formula here, of course, no right answer—but I look at Gararraga’s reaction and think, yeah—look at this guy! He’s being paid to play baseball. Most of the loyal fans who wanted to wring the ump’s neck—the fans for whom that call seemed more of a disappointment than for the pitcher himself—were probably getting away from very unfulfilling routines that paid for their tickets to the game that day. And Gay gets to pay the rent by writing and teaching poetry; he gets to spend a good amount of time gardening, and hanging out with plants and animals and people that make his life a rich and interesting place.
The thing is, though, neither Galarraga nor Gay was just plopped down in their lucky places, and the content of Gay’s poems attest to that fact—success in poetry and baseball and academia hardly just happen—and there’s no guarantee you get to stay anywhere once you’ve arrived. After that 2010 game, Galarraga would go from the Tigers to the Astros, into the minor leagues, and eventually playing in Mexico before leaving professional baseball in 2015. So much for what gratitude will get you, you might say; so much for the fulfillment of a great job. But if you take a look at what that former player is doing today—he runs a “baseball academy” in Austin—and at the picture that appears on that academy’s website—the handshake that took place between Galarraga and Joyce in the game that followed the near-perfect one—it seems like you’ll have to retract your cynicism. And although Instagram’s hardly the place to determine what you can really tell about a person, there’s nothing but good vibes—smiling kids, dogs, baseball and the gym—on Galarraga’s account. That grace under fire celebrated in 2010 really does seem to have been more than just a fluke; the way in which the pitcher did and does position himself in the world appears to involve something that runs more deeply than a single mature reaction to a one-off situation.
The question might be, then, how are you supposed to get to this vaunted place, if you don’t get paid to play ball or write poetry, or do whatever it is you love? The realities of earning a living, especially in an unsupportive social-civic realm like the US, or the world of The Factory, where any fate seems to be better than the social-death shame of unemployment, mitigate against the time and energy and general ability to, as they say, work on yourself. At the end of the day, you might be too tired to see straight, much less vibe with the ants and bees and horses, the natural world of which Gay recognizes he’s a part. You might be too exhausted to be able to do more than crack a wry joke, laugh at a dumb sitcom that at least takes you away from your own reality for a bit, or just lift your fist at the injustice of it all before turning over and sleeping until the alarm kicks you out of bed the next day. What’s the secret? How to find your way to something better, to so many better things?
If nothing else, I guess, Ross Gay’s collection shows how hard-won that open, grateful positioning vis-à-vis life probably always is—but that it is possible. Maybe we work our way to this equilibrium by starting small, by taking notice: by watching the bees on a flower for a few minutes, when a few minutes are all we have. Maybe we start by looking at examples, like the poet and the pitcher, and in knowing it is possible, and begin with a small bit of thanksgiving even for just that kernel of hope. Then we might find ourselves one day next to Gay, entranced by the interaction between a goldfinch and a sunflower, knowing in that moment, at least, that it’s enough:
… I could see / the points on the flower’s stately crown / soften and curl inward / as it almost indiscernibly lifted / the food of its body / to the bird’s nuzzling mouth … / what I realize now / was being, simply, glad, / which such love, / if we let it, / makes us feel.7
Ross Gay, “The Opening,” in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 65.
These lines from Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror were recently quoted by Nick Laird in his article, “Auden’s Dialectic, The New York Review of Books, 6 April, 2023, 68. (Online version available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/audens-dialectic-poems-w-h-auden/.) Also, compare the question’s contents to to the title of Gay’s collection: unabashed gratitude indicates the freedom from the hip(ster) imperative to feel foolish about simply being grateful. (Or even, I would venture, enthusiastic about anything at all—but that’s another matter entirely.)
Cecilie Schram Hoel and Alf van der Hagen, “Interview with Tor Ulven,” transl. Benjamin Mier-Cruz, in The White Review (January 2011), https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-tor-ulven/.
Paul Auster, Letter of July 21, 2010, in Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters: 2008–2011 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 167.
Auster, 167–68.
Gay, “To the Mistake,” in Catalog, 46. The connection to sports and (Gay’s) poetry is likelier than might be expected; my favorite work of Gay’s so far is Be Holding, his lyric meditation on Dr. J’s incredible from-behind-the-backboard shot in 1980. (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2020).
Gay, “Wedding Poem,” in Catalog, 80–81.