Delight Receptors
I’ve been writing these delight essay(ettes) for a number of reasons, though I’d be hard-pressed to recall them without needing to think it over anew each time. And even after some careful chin-stroking, I’d still probably find it difficult to provide anything resembling a cogent list of the motivations behind this project. The reasons tend to shift about, evolving just as I do, this resistance to a careful articulation forming its own form of delight — no ready-made series of bullet-points here!
For me, documenting delight is a way of practicing writing, which is a way of practicing thinking, which is a way of practicing reflection, of living with more focus, with intentionality and care. The practice of living well. Ross Gay writes about how the exercising of one’s delight receptors (something to this effect) provides a way to better relish the delights one encounters, to ensure the deeper appreciation of delights to come, and through practice to cultivate an awareness of the daily delights that fill our lives, whether we are consciously (or even unconsciously) aware of them or not. (a question: if a delight goes unmarked, is it still a delight?)
There’s a sense of self-fulfilling prophecy in this, in the idea that being more aware of and receptive to delight has the effect of bringing more delight across your radar, seemingly conjuring it into existence, transmogrifying the commonplace into the sublime, which is really about making us more aware of the commonplace, of nuance, of detail, so that we are the ones who change. This suggests a form of magic-making and magic-doing, something we tend to associate with childhood and with the myth of childhood innocence. Perhaps developing a receptivity to delight is a way to reclaim a less mediated awareness of the world and of self, an approximation of one’s actual childhood before the frames set in and flatten our experience. To reshare, understood both as sharing in again and as sharing well.
Do we somehow lessen the delights upon writing them down? Do they lose their effervescent sheen when pinned to the page? The attempt to define is in part the attempt to preserve, and this process of naming necessarily sacrifices nuance and detail, severing connections in the name of organization.
Bringing order to a buzzing, unrestrained creative chaos, so that both artist and audience can make sense of things. Can share, transmit. These digestible approximations of what we experience approach but neither replicate nor replace “the real thing.” And just what is the real thing here?
Does the acquisition of knowledge stifle creativity, or threaten to? Can we ever reclaim, or approximate that original unawareness of the rules, the innocence (dare I say childlike innocence?) as a creator? Why might we wish to?
I wonder if these sorts of questions are necessarily restricted to the creative realm. They come up, regularly and unprompted, in the theory classes I taught, and there’s an understandable anxiety underlying them that speaks of an earnestness and sincerity of artistic expression. The notion of a “creative realm” is a dangerous false binary, the idea that we can compartmentalize something like creative work, instead of being open to and delighting in the potential for creativity in all things. Celebrating nuance. Uncovering joy in detail. Delighting in the day-to-day and the moment-to-moment of our everyday lives, every day. Finding euphoria through living.
6.4
Gay: “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights, I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.”
