This is dedicated to Nina, who said, about one year ago exactly, that I should write the “essay about ‘Joy to the World’ [I had] been thinking about”. So now I am.
This week and next I’ll be writing about Christmas, after a fashion. (You can read the first essay in this series, and about the background that leads to and shapes my thinking, here.) This week is the Sunday of rejoicing ('gaudete!') even as the nights grow longest. It is a night of pink candles for joy. To me, pink is the color of anarchism, opening, liberation, possibility, togetherness—the everything of Advent. Despite the subtitle of this essay, my answer is both indirect and incomplete. But a person’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a sobstarch for?
“Anarchism meant [‘release and freedom from conventions and prejudice; freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things’] to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. […] I would live my beautiful ideal.” – Emma Goldman, Living My Life
There is a song I have known from childhood—if you speak English and celebrate Christmas, or grew up doing so, you likely know it, too. It is an old and very popular song for that holiday, written in 1719 by a nonconforming minister, and mostly sung now to a tune composed in 1848. For some years now I have been thinking about this song, in the way you sometimes do with things familiar from childhood. Having taken it for granted a long time, you begin later in life to sense a thing’s strangeness and complexity. What had seemed straightforward, even obvious, is revealed not to be.
Here is the song. It is is in great part a celebration of power. Written in the 18th century, in England—an England both monarchical and imperial—it brings assumptions from that time along with it like one brings the cold in on one’s coat in a northern, midcontinental December. The song talks about “ruling”, “reigning”. The people of earth are “men”, God is a “Lord” and a “King” (definitely also a man). The earth (figured in the feminine) is there to “receive” and to “prepare him room”. Okay. So far, so limited in imagination. Those parts, the obvious parts, the song’s opening in particular, are all brass, shined to a high polish by the assumption that empire is the way to go, that status necessarily and even rightly seduces, that power looks like power as kings and wannabe kings (the wannabe kings of political, social, cultural, familial power and access) conceive it. These polished surfaces that reflect worldly power and assume it’s the nature of divine being are the reason that for so long I resisted the song’s pull.
But I can’t keep resisting, not entirely, because something in me insists that the song has a subversive thread to it, as when, in a shopping mall, someone has stickered the benches to insist on public space and public speech inside the privatized spaces that pass so often now for public ones. Or as when, in a massive expensive grocery store, the employees all turn a blind eye to the person putting in the code for bananas in place of bulk nuts. The edifice crumbles only after ants begin, over years, to displace one grain, then another. As so often is the case, I’m looking for tiny indices that describe the failings of systems that seem both total and natural, and that point to liberation.
What draws me to think about this song, and what keeps me thinking there, are the parts of the song where everything in the universe sings. The parts I am interested in are not made of shiny stuff—they are made, and made much more strangely and much closer to home, of human hearts that can expand and of “wonders” of “love”. They are made from what the hymnist calls “joy”. In fact the whole song is about joy—it is called “Joy to the World”, after all—which makes me ask, as I think about it, what it is that thing called “joy” might be.
I think joy is not happiness. It is not even elation, or the ecstatic and momentary feelings of triumph or delight or pleasure. I think joy is more like the sublime than like these words that are used as its synonyms—I think that joy has some of the sublime’s knife-edged terror to it. I think joy is what Fanny Howe calls “a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars”. Joy is a reordering of the world, a reordering that feels like total disorder—thus the edge it shares with terror. In Howe’s words, bewilderment is “an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability” that ruins not only our navigational tools but the systems of placing ourselves that they relied on in the first place. Like Howe’s bewilderment, joy is something that forces us to circumnambulate rather than to know where we are and how to move. It does not permit us the straight highway or self-assured knowledge. It makes us move in (seeming) error—Howe reminds me that the root of the word “error” is wandering, not mistake—and the gestures of of this ‘erring’ reveal the “axis of reality”.
When I think about Fanny Howe and her poetic-ethical idea of bewilderment, I have to think about James Baldwin, too, because there is a moment in his essay “A Letter to My Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” (in The Fire Next Time) that Howe’s failing compass reminds me of every time I read “Bewilderment”. There’s an explicit link that takes me from Howe Baldwin, and it’s a writerly one—it’s a metaphor. When Baldwin talks about the white experience of Black liberation (which is universal liberation in the end), he compares it to waking up “to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame”. This sounds like “a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability” (Howe) to me. And Baldwin writes that “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations”. There’s the same kind of image as Howe’s compass, magnet, scales, stars: the fixed star, the navigational device that allows some of us to move freely through a universe we are allowed to feel we both make and ordain.
Let me slowly bring us through Howe’s bewilderment and Baldwin’s letter, and back to joy. I will. But give me time.
Howe writes that the bewilderment that results from the compass failing is not a ‘merely’ artistic question (as if art could ever be separated from life). She explicitly names bewilderment an “ethics” as well as a “poetics”, a “way to enter the day”—our ordinary lives. And she also writes that “A big error comes when you believe that a form, name or position in which the subject is viewed is the only way that the subject can be viewed. That is called ‘binding’ and it leads directly to painful contradiction and clashes”. What Howe calls ‘binding’, this thing that is both in error and painful, sounds like all kinds of assumptions about value that are structured by the networks of power and relation we live inside.
The belief that one knows how things are and that that is the only possible way for them to be sounds like Baldwin’s “fixed star” to me. I know that Howe is thinking about whiteness elsewhere in the book that contains “Bewilderment”, and so I can’t help reading whiteness as one such ‘binding’, because whiteness is about ordaining, sorting, and control. And that brings me again to Baldwin, who writes that “people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity”, an identity, Baldwin writes, that is established in relation to the “fixed star” of Blackness figured, imagined, and situated (socially, culturally, economically, historically) as lesser other. When Howe writes that bewilderment requires us to “circumnambulate”, she is insisting that a reordering of the universe will require us to take paths we may not have even known existed, paths that may seem nonsensical or impossible or nonexistent. To circumnambulate is to be committed?
What if I place Baldwin’s idea of commitment and Howe’s of circumnambulation together? Both writers seem to suggest that to rely on the systems of knowing, being, moving, having, and relating that we already know will merely replicate those systems’ painful, unjust, and unfree hierarchies and binaries. Bewilderment, on the one hand, and commitment, on the other, “crack open the dialectic” to show us “myriads all at once” (Howe); they put us “in danger” because they require us “to act” . And that is the knife-edge I find in the song I’m trying to write about here—the knife-edge of the world that changes, or cracks open (with all the violence that verb implies), along the lines of repressive and oppressive habits of being both social/cultural and personal.
I live in a culture (not the only culture on earth, but a dominant one) where it is commonly held that there are speaking kinds of beings and thinking kinds of beings, and there are beings who do not speak, and beings who do not think. (The rubric of “non-thinking/non-speaking” is and has been variously applied to humans as well as to non-human beings.) I live in a culture where there are more and less valued ways of being a thinking-speaking being, all of which are almost always more valued than being a non-speaking-non-thinking being, and than being a ‘non-being’. I live in a culture that has a sense that these are settled questions, “fixed star[s]”, “the only way the subject can be viewed”. I live, in other words, in a culture that has at its heart a sense of ranking and a sense of sorting, and a belief, often untroubled, that ranking and sorting are so natural as to come from the ground itself, like elements. A lot of the song I’ve been talking about is preoccupied with the trappings of this culture, its reigns and its kings and its nations and its proving and its rules.
But then there are the non-speaking-non-thinking beings and non-beings in the song, the fields and floods; the rocks, hills, and plains. And what do these do? —They disturb the universe of order and of “sense”. They shake “the heavens and the earth to their foundations” (Baldwin). How? Joy. It says so right there in the song. What does joy do? It makes it possible not only for “fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains” to sing, but for us to hear them. That is not a description of “happiness”, but a deep disturbance of order. A breakdown of the rules that seemed to be effects of a natural order, revealing them to be contingent. A rearranging of the cosmos. The failure of a compass that I had trued to stars I thought fixed—stars of an order that arranges things so that what I know is what there is to know.
Singing rocks, singing land, singing water: an inversion of my habitual assumption—my knowing, my unerring knowing—of who speaks, who listens, who it’s possible to be here with, and how we can be together. When I read Howe, I learn to look not for the earthquake but the wobbling compass needle as an indicator of a necessary collapse of meaning. When I read Baldwin I am reminded that what feels like the end of the world may be a door opening to a completely new one, one the fixity of my gaze had occluded, and one inviting my commitment—that is to say, my action. The fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains are not passive (the land we live with, through, in is not subordinate to humans). They sing and repeat the song (their own song), a song that calls for a total “upheaval in the universe” (Baldwin).
It is not for a crown-wearing, oilfield-owning, prizewinning, property-hoarding king that the hills and fields, the rocks and the water are singing, but for the joy that is the disorder of all systems of dominance, all systems of unequal being, all systems depending on the oppression of one sorted and categorized kind of being for the seeming, though not actual, freedom of other kinds of being. It is a song for the child of poor people, soon to become refugees, born without even a bed, if you need that image to get the inversion I’m talking about, although I don’t think that image is necessary. I think it’s enough to think about those singing hills, singing rocks, singing springs of water and take that song literally, to experience the upheaval and inversion of our given modes of understanding. After all, here we are in the world so many of us were—I was—mostly given to understand as non-speaking-non-thinking. And here it is. All around us. Singing.
The human being is holy, the land and water are holy, the animals and plants, fish and birds and insects are holy. End all wars forever. Free Palestine.
Thank you for reading—I will be here next week with one more piece in this series about Christmas.
This is so *joyful*. Thank you.