One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart. Which is a different thing from turning down the loudness of one’s voice, a practice that is often wise because the world is not short on either noise or bluster.
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Lowering the volume on one’s heart is also different from decreasing the quantity of thoughts to which we give voice, and this can be wise too, at least inasmuch as it allows us to listen more. What it means, rather, to lower the volume on your heart is to feel less, to hold care at arm’s length, to defend against being struck by the world and what happens in it.
And the problem with being less struck, less susceptible—with taking everything less to heart—is that you cannot defend yourself against being struck by what hurts without also parrying what would leave you awestruck or moonstruck or lovestruck. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
This habit of lowering the heart’s volume—it isn’t just mine. So many of us, so much of the time, take great (and largely subconscious) pains to keep our reactions modest. For instance, we appreciate rather than delight. We sniffle but don’t keen. We demur but don’t protest. We are too sophisticated for glee, too polite for curiosity, too circumspect for distress.
That habit (muffling what we feel, diluting what we believe) dies hard: I almost described it not as keeping our reactions modest but as keeping our reactions to scale. The other hazard of muffling the heart, however, is that it’s a surefire way to lose any honest sense of scale.
And the problem with being less struck, less susceptible—with taking everything less to heart—is that you cannot defend yourself against being struck by what hurts without also parrying what would leave you awestruck or moonstruck or lovestruck.
And, granting that no human being can comprehend the scale of the universe, let alone “the microcosmic holding points to the macrocosmic holding” that Ross Gay calls grace, his Inciting Joy and Amy Leach’s The Salt of the Universe—well, these two books could carry us a long way back toward a truer sense of proportion. I suspect they might even nudge us toward wholeheartedness.
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For Leach, a disproportional understanding of the universe was a side effect of the Seventh-day Adventism in which she grew up. She recalls, for example, a sermon with the implicit thesis “God’s a bigwig, you’re a weevil.” Accompanied by a “slideshow of wider and wider shots of the universe,” its preacher encourages his listeners to sit there “simpering, sniveling, embarrassed to have been noticed by someone as enormous as God.”
Leach contrasts this homily with another:
One time, I heard Mozart’s Requiem performed at night outdoors in downtown Chicago. There was no slideshow of the universe but the stars themselves were there. Somehow the singers did not seem dwarfed but complemented by the stars; and instead of trashing themselves, they sang, “Remember, merciful Jesu, that I am the cause of your journey.” As I listened, I thought that if a choir was singing like that to me, how readily I would remember them—especially if I had already made a long journey for them, past blazars and quasars and starbursts and the Sombrero Galaxy and all those voids with nary a sombrero.
In Leach’s cosmology, the magnitude of creation does not need marketing; indeed, she feels “embarrassed” for the pastor who has “so totally forgotten about amethysts and onyxes and tiny golden frogs and Jacob,” who “might have been a lightweight compared with God, but in their wrestling match…won.”
The writer argues that because the preacher’s awe is too small, he has to “hyp[e] the size of the universe”; because he has outgrown wonder, he cannot reckon with a glory that ribbits; because his delight comes in stingy doses, his hymn imagines a God who dispenses love the same way, one who keeps score, one whose grandeur can be calculated as a function of his creation’s finitude.
Better, Leach insists, Mozart’s hymn, his requiem. Better Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in which “the Earth is tenderly, giddily, cataclysmically adored, and the bassoons sound like they are belching.”
Ross Gay, a poet and essayist whose other titles include A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, The Book of Delights, and The Book of (More) Delights, focuses less on adoration than Leach does—as adoration needs a subject, a living being to magnify. Rather, he sings what occurs on either side of praise.
First, Gay writes about what precedes the hymn: the joy of being struck—wonder or moon- or lovestruck. He even writes about the joy that comes from being stricken. Gay counts death, for instance, as an incitement to joy. Falling apart too. And his book holds these incitements up to the light, marveling at them, his delight a precursor to praise but not adoration itself.
In fact, Gay often seems almost too dumbstruck for praise, and no doubt his very short go-to hymn would be too obscene for most churches. He distills his amazement (for the singer who transforms the song, for the basketball player whose fake is ballet) primarily in the phrase “this motherfucker.” And while only rarely does that hymn ascend higher than the heads of human beings or the crowns of trees, I am absolutely convinced that Gay is, however unorthodox his requiem, attuned to what is sacred.
As for the other side of praise—not what precipitates it, the being-struck, but what follows from it—Gay is eloquent on that front as well. If joy is the seed of praise, gratitude is its fruit, and the final chapter of Inciting Joy, “Oh, My Heart,” begins with a 576-word sentence that
proves, through both its form and content, that there is no blathering on enough about gratitude, the real thing I mean, there is no enough to gratitude [because] we can go out from the body…to the furthest reaches of our imaginations, [to] gratitude the world, garlanding the world with gratitude, an hour a day, a day a week, a week a year, we could do it always and forever and never arrive at the last gratitude.
Unsurprisingly, this mighty sentence also involves delight; Gay writes, for instance, “that our skin is one of the many evidences that we are directly related to the sunflower, and other heliotropic critters,” and one could make a case that the bracketed exclamation “gobsmack!” that follows this gem constitutes a tiny hymn.
I sometimes find myself wishing, though, that Gay would look higher than the heads of sunflowers and Gary Payton, that he would “gratitude” not just the world but its maker. Not because God needs our garlands. As already noted, God’s grandeur cannot be calculated as a function of creation; not only would that operation be logically backward, but, more importantly, creation—gobsmacking and finite as it is—is a hint at, not a factor of, that grandeur.
No, God doesn’t need our garlands. Rather, I want this book to look higher, voicing adoration, because I need that in a cosmology. I cannot get my heart back to a right sense of proportion on terrestrial delight and gratitude alone.
That is not to say that this book doesn’t fulfill what its title promises and then some. Not only has reading it incited joy for me, but it has also turned up the volume on my heart. Even so, “macrocosmic holding”—which is, I think, Gay’s synonym for grace, “which is defined as ‘God’s unmerited favor, love, or help’”—is not enough.
A gift, even one lavished on the whole cosmos (that is, a common grace), needs a giver. More: apart from “merciful Jesu,” who needs no reminder that we are the cause of his journey, grace can’t be fulfilled.
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It is not only grace (and delight and gratitude and praise), though, that Inciting Joy and The Salt of the Universe call us to take to heart. These books also urge us to take on grief in all its volume. Gay, in fact, observes that grief requires us “to get deep enough into the waters that our feet lift off the sand beneath.”
To that end, Leach apprentices herself to a child. Her “five-year-old, sitting on the floor in front of [a hamster’s] cage, sob[s] an impassioned speech: Shimmer do you know that you are dying? Shimmer do you know that this is your last night on Earth? Shimmer do you know that you will never see me again?” An adult, as Leach intuits, has to relearn that kind of undefended, undefensive sorrow.
For his part, Gay goes to therapy in order to practice opening himself to grief, to a sorrow composed not only of loss but also of remorse. There he learns, among other things, to say “My bad,” to own up to having said the wrong thing to someone beloved, to acknowledge the self-centeredness that, here and there, makes each of us hard to live with.
He, of course, is not the only one of us who could benefit from lessons in moving past defensiveness, just as Leach is not alone in needing a kindergartener to show her how not to defend against sorrow. But once we drop our defenses, “what might be possible,” Gay asks, “what tenderness, what healing, what different something—less flailing, less wreckage…? And not just [for] people, but institutions? What would happen if our institutions—even an institution as big, for instance, as a state—grieved?”
He answers too, at least in part, quoting Patrick Rosal: maybe our “grieving would be ‘an altar for listening to the beginning of the world.’”
As things stand, Gay has little faith that institutions will wade into the “deep waters” of grief, ceasing their flailing and wreckage. Mostly, his doubts hang on how desperately we fortify our kingdoms (read: nations, corporations, universities, churches, and so on). He sees clearly, after all, how ruthlessly we have stolen forests and crowded prisons and killed off bees and corals and each other.
He writes:
All these comorbidities, all these communities exposed to toxins, all this absence of sick pay or good pay, every day, is not simply an affliction…but an infliction. It is on purpose. And the withholding from some the means of life, of which means there are plenty to go around, is a disprivilege. Which is to say: life, though it is a gift, is not a privilege.
For Gay, to let grief in at its full volume is also to give anger its due crescendo, to recognize the true proportions of injustice. And, in turn, he raises his voice. He calls out “the makers of the end of the earth,” who, if they kneel, kneel on men’s necks, unmoved, too cruel and foolish to grieve. For them there is no altar, no “listening to the beginning of the world.”
Leach is no less skeptical of institutions, and she too singles out would-be makers of the end of the earth, in her case, Seventh-day Adventist eschatologists who eagerly await the apocalypse—although Adventism has proved less efficacious in bringing about the world’s collapse than the empires Gay cites (the empires of Amazon and white supremacy, for example).
And, since her religious tradition has failed to push the world any closer to its end, Leach can afford a little levity. Which she happily spends.
For Gay, to let grief in at its full volume is also to give anger its due crescendo, to recognize the true proportions of injustice.
“The two most annoying things about Adventism,” she explains, “are its fetish for the apocalypse and its fear of harmless things, like coffee and cheese and dancing and bracelets and jeggings and drums and Winnie-the-Pooh.” Put otherwise: the trouble with Adventism is a distortion of scale, where the volume of delight is muted, and, moreover, where the heart mumbles because it must “speak in unison, sing in unison, think in unison.”
And while this woman who wants to belong to a denomination of “daffodils and doodles, turnips and babies” makes clear that Seventh-day Adventism is far from the only fundamentalism, its dogma turns her against any institution where “the individual is nothing,” where “whoever you are, you are a zero, a naught, a little nobody.”
She refuses, in short, to accept systems that diminish individuals. For a diminished individual will have a shrunken, shushed heart to match.
Elsewhere Leach writes, “My problem is with the -ism more than with the -ists.” Actually, her problem hinges on the way –isms want to swallow up -ists, as evidenced by her departure from the religious tradition in which she was raised.
“I was sitting in a church in Iowa City,” she remembers, “and heard the [organization’s] president say, in a sermon beamed out to Adventist churches all over the world, ‘The individual is nothing—the institution is everything.’” He thereby “showed me the exit,” Leach says, “like a nice usher with a flashlight,” and she walks through the door, eventually moving from demurring to protesting.
Specifically, she asserts, “Because of my experience with both individuals and institutions, I defy the Adventist president’s statement—‘The individual is nothing’—and maintain the reverse. The institution is nothing; the individual is everything.” But to reverse a binary does not dismantle it, and in this negative of a fundamentalist slogan, the sense of scale is still off. Of course it is: both institutionalism and individualism aim, in their own ways, to turn down the heart’s volume.
I do, however, understand the impulse to rescue the individual from the institution. How could Leach not want to single out from Adventism her Adventist mother, who—as “a happy puller of weeds, a happy doer of laundry, a happy fixer of toilets, a happy vice president of advancement at a university”—”demonstrates the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life?”
How could she not want to single out from Adventism her Adventist father, “who says you shouldn’t major in minors” and encourages “play[ing] four-square with the lonely, clumsy kid at recess?” How could she not size them according to her own heart? She could not be more right than to protest their reduction to an institution’s “little nobod[ies].” It is right to rebel against any fundamentalism that casts the individual as nothing.
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Notably, though, this declaration that “the individual is everything” comes at the end of a chapter titled “Good Friends.” And here Leach, her claim for the individual’s primacy notwithstanding, contends, perhaps unintentionally, that a good parent or a good friend is not, first and foremost, an individual.
I was again glad, then, to be reading Inciting Joy alongside The Salt of the Universe, because Gay, I think, can help us reframe Leach’s protest against fundamentalism. What Gay says (and what I suspect Leach, too, believes) is not that the individual is everything, but that what binds us is everything. What holds us is everything.
He writes, “Despite every single lie to the contrary, we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. By far.”
And that truest thing, that “rhizomatic care,” is indispensable to what makes the individuals Leach holds dear—from Nina Simone to her husband, from the volunteers at an animal shelter to volunteer lilies—”good friends.” Good friendship, then, matters more than individuality. To be a host and guest of rhizomatic care matters more.
Gay would call Leach’s “good friends” “microcosmic holding points to the macrocosmic holding,” and they are. They are spurs of connectedness, of grace.
Leach knows this as well as Gay does, even if she articulates it less precisely: to give a heart back its volume, you have to give it other hearts. We need people to whom we can call and to whom we can listen. Thus Gay, who calls out those who have damaged the world irreparably, calls louder to anyone open to feeling, to changing, to trying on joy.
“We aren’t beholden,” he calls, “to the makers of the end of the earth. And though I don’t think the brutality, or the sorrow, is reparable, it seems the least we can do is something else. For example: being beholden to each other.” He calls us, as Leach does, to love.
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One can lower the volume on the heart a thousand ways. Bravado will work as well as cowardice, platitudes as well cynicism. Greed will make your heart an understocked warehouse, and fundamentalism will teach it to whisper, monotone. Put on bravado, and you’ll see everyone, including yourself, from the wrong end of a telescope. Put on cowardice, and the monsters (there are monsters) will loom larger than life.
I am taken by the truth at the heart of both The Salt of the Universe and Inciting Joy that “sharing what we love is dangerous,” but that not sharing what we love—not delighting, not praising and gratituding, not grieving and resisting—costs far, far more.
Resort to platitudes, and you will dilute both love and grief. Give in to cynicism, and you will forget “the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.”
I know: we don’t turn down the volume on our hearts without reason. As Ross Gay says, “Sharing what we love is dangerous, it is vulnerable, it is like baring your neck, or your belly, and it reveals that, in some ways, we are all uncommonly tender.” I am taken by that paradox: that we are commonly uncommonly tender.
And I am taken by the truth at the heart of both The Salt of the Universe and Inciting Joy that “sharing what we love is dangerous,” but that not sharing what we love—not delighting, not praising and gratituding, not grieving and resisting—costs far, far more. This too is grace.
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