aesthetics of joy

Say the name Sam Gribley and many Americans of a certain age will be instantly transported to a hollowed-out oak in a Northeastern forest, to the fictional home of a fictional boy who ventured bravely into the woods thinking anything was possible. They may tell you of how quickly they devoured My Side of the Mountain, the book that introduced Sam to the world, or how they confidently packed up a rucksack and told their parents they were “running away” in emulation. They may tell you how that book kindled in them a love for nature, or a love for writing. Or they may just nod quietly, as if appreciating some stlll-burning embers of childhood wilderness fantasies.

My Side of the Mountain was unique in that it made manifest the joy of the wild to children, for whom nature was so often tamed and sanitized. It was the brainchild of Jean Craighead George, a prolific writer and naturalist who was for many children a kind of guide to the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I was among those many children touched by Jean’s words, but I also had the privilege of knowing her personally, of being her neighbor and friend. Jean passed away earlier this year, and last Sunday I joined the (very) many who gathered to celebrate Jean and share what she meant to them at a memorial service in Chappaqua, NY. She was a formative figure in my life, and I thought you might like to know more about what it was like to grow up within the orbit of this remarkable woman. Jean embodied joy. In fact, she taught me much about it before I even knew it was what I was looking for.

I never “met” Jean, I just knew her. I lived across the street from her while I was growing up and she was a part of my life going as far back as I can remember. I would show up at her house unannounced, knocking on the screen door, in the way that Dennis the Menace dropped in on Mr. Wilson on TV. (This seems unfathomable now, doesn’t it? How impossible and quaint such a friendship seems now as kids are sequestered at home in front of devices, rather than left to wander the neighborhood, finding their own amusements.) I would arrive with some discovery, a strange plant or insect, and Jean would examine it with me, identify it, and tell me stories. She seemed to know everything. When I found a frog in the skimmer of our pool, Jean helped me set up a tank with fresh water and rocks to help it recover. When I encountered a fallen nest crowded with hatchlings, she took them in. She took note of my curiosities, and fed them. After reading My Side of the Mountain, I wanted to know if it was really true that Sam could stay alive eating only what he could find in from the forests. She soon gave me a book on foraging. This led to my decimating in short order all the fiddleheads in our front yard to sauté for dinner. (I’m not sure that counts as “foraging,” but it was delicious.)

The door to Jean’s wood-shingled house was always open to me. Invariably she was hard at work, but she was never too busy for a visit. I was never told to come back later. I was always welcomed with an exclamation — “Oh, Ingy!” — and a hug. And how I loved going to Jean’s house. Across the dirt road and up a few steps from my house was a wonderland, a world of curiosities. Jean loved to travel, and her house was full of her findings from these journeys. Inuit masks hung on the walls, a feathery blade of baleen hung over a doorway, a shark jaw sat on top of the television. A giant whale vertebra, like a stone propellor, sat on the floor by the fireplace. At the same time, Jean’s house was more than a repository of souvenirs. A lush mural on the front wall had been painted by a friend. In the foyer, a koi pond burbled a comforting background track. It was an unusual but real home, a home well-lived into. And it smelled that way too, the warm smoky air of the always-burning wood stove mingled with transported scents from faraway lands.

Jean amazed me with her adventures, traveling well into her golden years to places I hardly knew existed. She was always just back from somewhere at the edge of the map, and because of this she expanded the boundaries of what I considered my world. Jean traveled outside the realm of guidebooks. She trod the off-off-beaten path. She traveled to connect with the people in foreign lands, more often than not the native peoples who lived in kinship with the wildlife she studied and wrote about. And they embraced her because she was genuine in her desire to understand those places, the spirit that kindled their unique beauty. She listened with reverence to the songs of the wildlife, giving voice to creatures that for many people are distant and silent. She interpreted their characters for us in the hope of creating empathy that might protect them from the dangers of the encroaching modern world.

Jean’s life was so vibrant, I think, because it was all about life, the joy of all that lives and breathes and squirms and squawks around us. Jean embraced all of the messiness of the world, savoring its incongruities, its tensions. She didn’t let discomfort stand in the way of discovery. She ventured into the world’s mysteries deeply in tune with her own sense of wonder, and she cultivated that wonder in others. It was infectious. You couldn’t be in Jean’s presence and not be amazed by what fascinated her. You couldn’t read her books, especially the ones so beautifully illustrated by her collaborator Wendell Minor, and not fall in love with the landscapes she depicted. She understood that she only had one life and she was keen on using the time she had to experience, to explore, to create, and to love.

When I was discovering writing, Jean cheered and fed my passion. When I didn’t know what to write, Jean said to me,”write what you know.”* But she may as well have said, “write what you love.” It is what she did, and oh, the places it took her. At the memorial last weekend, as I listened to so many people speak of how Jean had changed them — how she had pulled them out of depression or inspired them to adventure or taught them to listen to their inner child — I thought of the words of another writer, the poet Mary Oliver:

               Tell me, what is it you plan to do
               with your one wild and precious life?

So many of us forget, in our humdrum routines, that we only have one life. We let days full of potential go by without realizing just how rare they are. But Jean didn’t, and looking back, I believe that is her most important gift to us. By living her life to its wild and precious fullest, she leaves a light for the rest of us. And I feel sure that there’s no better way to honor her memory than to do the same.

For more:
Jean’s website
NYT obituary
Jean’s books

*To any of you who aspire to write, this remains the best advice I’ve ever been given on the subject. It’s certainly what keeps me at it.

This may have already crossed your transom, but even so I wanted to share it because it is so beautiful. The project, called 21 Balançoires (21 Swings), is an installation in Montreal by the Canadian design collective Daily Tous Les Jours. The swings play sounds when in use, and through cooperation, different harmonies can be produced. One special set of melodies only appears when all twenty-one swings are in use.

There are layers of joy in this piece. It starts with a familiar form, the playground swing. We may think this is joyful simply because of nostalgia for childhood. There is that, but it’s not the whole story. Dig deeper, and ask: How did the swing get so popular in the first place? The answer arises from the movement; the soaring, freeing, swooping arc that gives the sensation of flying and that millisecond of weightlessness before the gentle fall. Layered on top is the music, and the light, and the abundance of it all — the line of swings stretching on and on, an endless playground.

The collaborative aspect adds another dimension. The music echoes that wonderful feeling when you find yourself perfectly in sync with others, when the hidden harmonies of the world are revealed. One of the teenagers in the film puts this nicely when he says: ”I find it adds to the beauty of life, because a single sound isn’t really nice, but together they make a beautiful melody.” And actually, we frequently use these kinds of musical metaphors to describe our feeling of symbiosis with others: we resonate to someone, or sing the same tune, or feel in harmony with each other.

It’s a success for public art in my book, not just to be pleasing or interesting, but to celebrate the interactions between people, promoting cooperation and harmony. Are there installations like this in your cities? If so, please share them!

via Colossal, with thanks to Sera

And yet the fifty-year birthday of a good children’s book marks a real passage, since it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again. A book that has crossed that three-generation barrier has a good chance at permanence. So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an “Alice in Wonderland” of its own, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters.

The Phantom Tollbooth turned 50 a couple of months ago. I have a deep affection for this book. I will never fail to be moved by the image of the conductor who orchestrates the sunset, colors coming in at the flourish of a baton – it was my first understanding of synesthesia, and continues to be my reference point. It was the moment that art transcended medium for me – that I understood that to write was to compose was to paint – all equivalent creative processes, despite the differences in syntax.

The excerpt at the beginning of this post is from an excellent Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker about the impact of the book. There’s also a sweet documentary project that was just funded on Kickstarter. Read the book if you haven’t, or reread it if you have. It’s a treasure.

What do lollipops have to do with keeping the peace? Surprisingly, more than a little. A recent initiative by a city council in the city of Victoria in British Columbia offered free lollipops to drunken revelers leaving bars to cut down on noise and violence after a night out. Councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe explained that the treats make it hard for inebriated partiers to be too loud, and that they minimize dialogue that could lead to brawls. More practically speaking, they also regulate blood sugar and, like pacifiers, have a calming effect.

While there’s no hard evidence that the lollipops worked, councillor Thornton-Joe says that it seemed to be so effective that the city is considering making it a permanent program. It’s a charming idea – that something so childlike and innocent could disarm a rowdy bunch. And it makes for a joyful image, to imagine adults appeased by candies on sticks.

This is aesthetics of joy at their beguiling best. Sugar, color, and a form that evokes nostalgia for childhood – these things have real power. Contrary to so much of what we are taught, they are not just styling or superficial extras. They are phrases in the language with which our stuff speaks to us, quietly shaping our desires and our behavior. It’s a joy to see them applied in a such a novel way, and for such playful problem-solving. I hope to see this idea take off in other places too.

Photo: Beautiful feather lollipops by Abbey Hendrickson of Aesthetic Outburst, via Pinterest
NPR: “Lollipops: Pacifiers for Bar Patrons?” 

I missed the last blizzard, so the forecast title “Major Winter Storm Set to Clobber Northeast” holds a certain kind of poetry for me. I’ve written at length on the joys of snow in the past, from my own personal memories to its more universal attractions, so I’ll try not to be repetitive this morning. I love snow for the very reasons practical people dislike it – it slows things down, confounds our rhythms, accumulates without regard to all the Very Important Things we have to do. It creates new patterns. It opens spaces for indolence, daydreaming, and rediscovery. Yes, it will get wet and grey, it will slosh into your boots, it will calcify into unmelting, inconvenient drifts. But before it does that, it will fall pure and light from cold clouds, and it will be perfect.

Anyway, it’s coming, so you may as well find a way to enjoy it! I’ve been wanting to share this piece for awhile. Called Snow, it is an installation made from feathers by Tokujin Yoshioka exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Japan. It amazes me how beautifully the feathers reflect the movements of snow, and how deep the simple sensory pleasure of those textures and movements feels. There’s also a video, here. I hope it stirs up some joyful anticipation for the slow, snowy days to come…

It’s been a hot summer (today was no exception) and since the first taste of this ebbing-and-flowing heat wave, I’ve been thinking about swimming pools. There is no greater luxury or greater joy in a midsummer city than a swimming pool, a cool watery oasis in a desert of hot reeking concrete. Last summer there was the frenzy of the Gowanus dumpster pools, now converted into a public attraction by the Bloomberg administration for Summer Streets. Before that, the most talked-about New York pool was the floating pool lady, a barge converted to a pool by the city that debuted in 2007 in Brooklyn, and that docks in a different borough each summer. I haven’t managed to swim in either, but this summer I’ve been the benefactor of the generosity of a friend with a private pool, a backyard gem in the East Village that is all the more tantalizing for its secrecy.

After a couple of years living in Sydney, it’s hard to be without a pool. There, private pools are rare, but the public ones are ubiquitous and stunning. There’s the Andrew Boy Charleton pool, a 50m beauty that makes you feel like you’re literally swimming in the harbor. There’s also the North Sydney pool, right in the shadow of the Harbor Bridge. And there are the ocean pools, so beloved by Australians that they have their own culture, a culture robust enough to be the subject of a documentary: Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, teased in the video above. Bondi Icebergs, shown in the teaser, is particularly amazing; fed by crashing waves, it is briny and bracing all year round. Membership requires that you swim every weekend, regardless of the weather. Do that for five years, and you’re a member for life. It is the ultimate pool-lover’s pool club.

A frigid pool on a hot day is a delight; on a cold day, it is a trial. This may be an illustration of the difference between joy and happiness. Joy is immediate, momentary. It reacts to stimuli that accompanied the satisfaction of needs over the many generations of our evolution. A hot body in a cold pool is one step closer to homeostasis, and the aesthetics of the swimming pool (cool, shimmering blueness) are all designed to advertise that temperature-regulating function. Hot and cold in tension, moving towards balance: there is a certain kind of harmony there. A cold body in a cold pool, on the other hand, stands in defiance of emotional logic. The winter swimmer must see something beyond the immediate, because the proximate experience is discomfort, possibly even pain. Past the trial must be something: the satisfaction of completing a goal, the strength of physicality inured, the delight of an invitation to a company of like minds. It’s the pre-frontal cortex that envisions and plans this, that looks past disharmony towards a greater future pleasure. Joy, arising unconsciously from the limbic brain, revels in a more immediate gratification.

Along with the harmony of the pool, there is also freedom. Buoyant, liberated from gravity, we float in effortless space. We glide on the edge of another world, one in which the usual rules of movement are relaxed and transformed. I’m reminded of a moment in the John Cheever story The Swimmer:

To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.*

The waterborne lightness of swimming does feel natural, even in the truly unnatural setting of the swimming pool. And it feels freeing, even though the pool is a fixed, bounded area. The pool becomes an oasis, a space where the rules, both natural and cultural, are different. Not only are we free to move differently, but we are free to act differently: We do spontaneous headstands, splash around in silly patterns, lounge indolently. We are a bit more childlike, and perhaps more like our real selves. Childlike pleasure is often a breadcrumb on the route to joy, and the child’s love of the swimming pool is a clue to a delight buried within most of us.

Do we grow out of the joy of the pool? Ellen Meloy writes in her ode to the pool, a chapter called “Swimming the Mojave” from her memoir, The Anthropology of Turquoise:

The human body needs the embrace of water. The fifties boom in California swimming pools, and the attachment of pools to the culture of a mobilized America, announced affluence, comfort, and good climate, and it made the embrace available in controlled circumstances: big recreational bathtubs gone outdoors, with no worry about what might lurk in their depths. For everyone but children, for whom it is a baptism of sheer joy, a pool holds more chlorine than wonder.

It’s true that a pool can be fake, and chemical, and wasteful. In a backyard, it can be mundane. In a desert, absurd. But I still think there’s always a glimmer of joy in the swimming pool, regardless of your age. It’s in the faces and movements of those in the video above—a visceral pleasure, a reawakening of body, a liberation of spirit. A pool may be an artificial experience, but the joy is all real.

*The Swimmer tells the story of a man who decides to swim home from a party, dipping into all the pools along the way.

Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, by Jason Wingrove
More teasers here and here

{Thanks, Sarah, for the link to the video above, and the swims!}

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

This whimsical series of photos by Jan von Holleben has me totally charmed. There’s something so sweet about the landlocked restaging of childhood fantasies of flight: Peter Pan, Superman, The Red Balloon, etc. It looks like it would be such fun to be one of the kids in the photos. It also highlights a connection I hadn’t noticed before — the link between childhood and a fascination with flight.

So many characters in children’s stories fly: superheroes, fairies, wizards. Many toys fly as well, from balloons to paper airplanes, kites to whirlygigs. There’s something enchanting, liberating about flight and I wonder if children are more fixated on flight or just less inhibited about imagining it. As we get older, the characters in our stories tend to keep their feet more firmly on the ground, and even our dreams seem to have less flying in them, or at least that is the case for me. As a child I used to spend many nights leaping through the air in REM sleep; now, I covet a dream where I even get a few feet off the ground.

It’s also interesting to me how these photos illustrate the joyful gestures of flying. If we take away the props and the settings, what’s left are splayed-out, arms-up gestures that stretch the body wide and open. With no context, you could still understand the form as those of bodies in flight. There is an exultant quality to these bodily shapes; they are delight in contour, revelry in sinew. Joy thrives in this unthreatened openness, this delicious expansion of a physical being into its space. It makes me wonder how we might incorporate more of these kinds of gestures, in stills or in movements, into everyday life.

There’s something so delightful to me about this midcentury child’s table and stools set with its colorful wedge-patterned laminate surfaces. I think the splayed tripod legs look kind of anthropomorphic, like an unsteady toddler, which adds a sense of a cuteness to the appeal.

{via Dwell}

It’s not really lemonade season at the moment, but Seth Godin has a nice little parable on his blog about business and joy as told through the classic child’s first business. One is a garden variety lemonade stand, with the usual reconstituted beverage served for just a dollar in a Dixie cup. The other is run by a little girl making lemonade from scratch for the love of it, offering it for free but leaving a jar for tips. As he describes this second stand,

The whole time that’s she’s squeezing, she’s also talking to you, sharing her insights (and yes, her joy) about the power of lemonade to change your day. It’s a beautiful day and she’s in no real hurry. Lemonade doesn’t hurry, she says. It gets made the right way or not at all. Then she urges you to take a bit less sugar, because it tastes better that way.

….

Finally, once she’s done, you put $5 in the jar, because your free lemonade was worth at least twice that. Well, maybe the lemonade itself was worth $3, but you’d happily pay again for the transaction. It touched you. In fact, it changed you.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the transformative power of joy — the way a single moment of delight can shift the course of your mood and your day. A joyful moment can have ripple effects, in the way you treat other people, the things you notice in your environment, the paths you choose to take, the interactions you have with objects and people. Joy can transform space — making it feel more open or more intimate — and it can transform time, shrinking so that your delight spills over its boundaries.

The idea that lemonade could change you sounds silly at first. But in this case lemonade is a conduit for the sharing of joy. It is a craftsperson’s joy distilled into an aesthetic experience for a consumer — to experience, and to pass on.

{via @swissmiss}