aesthetics of joy

Last week was not what I expected. I’m not sure I knew how to expect something like this. Even having been through storms before, nothing prepared me for the wreckage of Sandy, for the total shutdown in this city that moves with more vigor and constancy than any other. The subway system that never sleeps was down for most of a week. The electrical outage that coined a new neighborhood, SoPo, South of Power. The texts and tweets from those in the dark zone, as things got eerily cold and quiet.

I’m lucky to live on a high patch of ground in Brooklyn. Almost as soon as the storm was over, life in my neighborhood returned to normal. But it wasn’t a real normal. Marooned by transit in Brooklyn, it was strange to be going on with life, my team commuting from three boroughs to work out of my apartment, getting coffee at the coffee shop, eating muffins that taste the same as on any other day, while getting daily calls from my mother that she had no lights or heat, hearing my coworker fear that his apartment was being broken into, and realizing that just a few blocks away, Red Hook was devastated. It amazes me how local these events are, how one area can be completely unscathed while another just around the corner is destroyed. Part you wants to push towards normal, while part feels wrong, like normalcy is a form of ignorance of others’ suffering.

It’s clear that for many, the worst was not the storm, but what came after and what is yet to come. Still, when I saw the photos of the rainbows over the city in the wake of the storm, I felt what many others expressed in their tweets: hope. And I was reminded of many of the thoughts I had when I wrote that post a couple of months ago about the importance of rainbows. It’s a perceptual accident that we’re even able to see them — we evolved to see colors, of course, but there is no reason we need to be able to see rainbows. We’re lucky they happen to fall in our range of view. And perhaps that is why rainbows feel so like a blessing.

Of course, what hope needs to continue is help. Here is one site you can go to to provide urgently needed help close to where it’s needed. If you have Amazon Prime, you can take advantage of reduced rate overnight shipping to order supplies like flashlights and blankets and have them sent directly to the Rockaways.

It’s the beginning of a new week. A sunny morning, and many of the subway lines have started to come back. Our office is open for the first time in a week, and the class I teach at SVA will meet tonight. It feels as if everything has been on pause since the storm, and now it’s time to get moving again.

Images: Conor McDonough and Matthew Kilgore

Sometimes there’s a theme that just begs you to write about it. You ponder it, you scribble down a few thoughts, you procrastinate — but it just keeps following you. That’s how it’s been these past few weeks with rainbows. They arrive surreptitiously, by night in my inbox. They appear in the scatter of the spray from a drainpipe. They pop up at the ends of random links, cheerily persistent: “Hi, remember me? I’m that rainbow you were going to write about!” These rainbows act like they have important business.

And so they do. The other night I received a note from a reader named Lauren, with a story that both broke my heart and touched it deeply. Lauren wrote:

…I like to look at how others have used rainbows to brighten their world. I painted a rainbow chrysanthemum on the coffin of my baby boy when I buried him in July this year. Somehow, the colours have inspired me to keep going despite the tragedy that has divided our family.

I must say, first, that there can be nothing so horrible for a family as the loss of a child. Just reading Lauren’s few words filled me with empathy and sorrow. But Lauren’s story is not just about pain. It’s also about an act of beauty that is an expression of fierce love, and positivity that looks an awful lot like hope.

A rainbow is no compensation for the losses in our lives. Filmy and weightless, a rainbow replaces nothing, certainly not a beloved child. But strangely, the rainbow’s kind of joy is often the most able to reach us in those dark moments. Wordless, visceral, instantaneous: it has a direct line to our unconscious. We may feel incapable of laughing in a tragic moment, we may be ashamed of our impulses towards play, but we don’t begrudge ourselves a feeling of wonder at the sight of beauty. Rainbows, light, color, music — these are the things that break through to our dark places and lift us up. They make small spaces of lightness in a heavy heart, spaces for hope to take root. And it’s amazing (isn’t it?) that this kind of hope can be ignited just by color, by something so many people dismiss as “just decoration.” The surfaces of things have a deep kind of power.

In the fourteenth century, the German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote that there was a place within the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch. John O’Donohue, writer and philosopher, interpreted this to mean “that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded.” This place, I think, is our childlike heart, our awed and hopeful heart that dares to believe that life is worth living even in the midst of terrible pain. In depths of sadness, this place can seem inaccessible. It can feel as if it doesn’t even exist, that joy has been wrung out of our lives by struggle. In those moments, when we feel we cannot even find ourselves, it is good to remember that the way in, the way back, is beautifully simple.

So the rainbows were right to pursue me — their message is an important one. Beauty matters, especially in times of pain. If you know someone going through a difficult time, perhaps there is something beautiful you can do for them that will provide a spark of hope. And if it’s your difficult time, trust your own impulses towards beauty. Be kind to yourself. Take a walk somewhere open and wild, play music, or look at art. Seek out rainbows, or make your own.

I’m inspired by Lauren’s example, and feel privileged that she reached out to share her story. She continues to look forward, not forgetting her son Elijah (whose middle name is Rainbow) but remembering with a joyful mindset:

Elijah’s unfuneral in the park was a special day with rainbow flares coming up on the lens and rainbow face-painting. Now, two months after his death, I have yet to see a real rainbow. When I do, it will be special. In the meantime, I make my own rainbows and plan to decorate our new housebus with a rainbow of colour.

Image and story shared with openness and generosity by Lauren Fisher. On her site, you can learn more about her story, and the things she does to bring joy into her life and lives of her girls.

When a country has suffered a devastating genocide and come out the other side to rebuild, the last thing you expect someone to say is, “They could really use some ice cream!” But it’s exactly what Rwandan playwright Kiki Gakire was thinking when she asked Brooklyn ice cream makers Blue Marble to partner with her in opening the first-ever ice cream shop in her recovering country. The shop is profiled in this season’s issue of Edible Brooklyn, and, in addition to filling my eyes with tears, it reminded me that the need for joy is sometimes counterintuitive.

We tend to believe that people who have suffered and are suffering – those who are hungry or destitute or illiterate or injured– must have only rational needs. We see them struggling in the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid and we believe that our only way to help them is to address their physical circumstances. With all our best intentions, we build hospitals and schools, wells and roads. And while these are critical applications of our generosity, and we could redouble these efforts many times over and still not meet the need, some very real and valid emotional needs are pushed to the background. As Blue Marble co-founder Alexis Miesen recalls Gakire saying, “There’s no room to dream when survival is the only goal. You can’t just rebuild roads; you have to repair people, and show that life is good.”

After all, survival is not living. And what “superficial” joyful moments (such as those spent catching cold drips off a cone with sprinkles) do for us is give us a model for what living looks and feels like. It restores our will to strive, when we know what we’re striving for. I was first made aware of this in the preface to Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, where she discusses men’s rush to shave, women’s application of nail polish, and the reopening of beauty salons in war-torn Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban government. She writes, “Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important.”

Reflecting on this, and the Rwandan ice cream shop, I find my hackles raised at the arrogance of judging such desires and efforts frivolous. In a nation whose founding documents enshrine the pursuit of happiness as a right, how can we dismiss this same pursuit in others as wasteful? It’s unreasonable to expect that people wait until basic needs are met to create joy. It’s not how we are built –and with good reason.

These words of Gakire, quoted from the Blue Marble Dreams website leave me ever more convinced that the pursuit of joy in design is vital. These words will stay with me a long time.

Because we struggle most of the time, we find ourselves aggressive against happiness, love, joy, life. When we have children, we teach them that happiness doesn’t exist; that there is no pure love and as legacy, we give them our despair, our debts, our doubts, our tears, our failures… Rwandan women… want to reshape life in its simple and sweetest form. We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death… We want to create a space where poverty, disease, illiteracy… are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings… We have to, for the sake of the health of our soul. The ice cream will have the power to reconcile people with life by providing privileged moments when life reminds them that it is also sweet.

You can read more about the shop here, and support Blue Marble Dreams here.

{via Edible Brooklyn}

Remember these? I found one lying (improperly) discarded on a subway platform back in September and labeled it “joyful litter.” Now, the NYT explains: it’s a public art project by artist Reed Seifer.

Read more, here.

{via @swissmiss}

Along the lines of the You Are Beautiful and Operation Nice projects I wrote about last month, HopeRevo aims to produce a “hope revolution” through the leaving of positive affirmations in notes around cities. The element of surprise is key here; messages we might tune out in expected places have a way of striking us differently when they come at us out of context.

A similar initiative, which strives to create a more personal, hopeful connection is Hope Is In The Cards, which asks every American to send just one message of hope to someone else.

I love that these initiatives rely on the old tradition of notes and letters. It’s often said that paper and ink seems more special than digital communications. Aside from the extra effort such a missive demands, there’s also the sensory impact: the experience and anticipation of opening an envelope, the texture of the paper, the scent and weight of it all. It’s a beautiful way to spread more joy in the world.

Thanks Matt for the tip!

I’m not sure why I find Sophie Blackall’s illustrations of Missed Connections so joyful. There is something bittersweet about these missives, written with the knowledge that recapturing such an evanescent bond is deeply unlikely. And yet, there is joy in the moment of connection, the feeling of some tiny but important event between two people. It occurred,(something anyway), it can’t be undone, and maybe, just maybe, it could change both lives forever.

The moment becomes aesthetic when we look at the charming, quirky details people remember about each other. The noisy tambourine and green skirt, the blue hat, the hula hoop, the fear of birds. The aesthetics of missed connections are a study in that which stands out from the rest of the gray city, things which disrupt our attention, make us look and, more often than not, give us a sense of joy that sticks in our memory, at least for the short-term.

For me, the greatest joy lies in the naked hope people display in these postings, believing that the world is full of gifts that come at unlikely moments, and that there’s no shame in believing they’re meant for you. City life is full of guarded, careful interactions. Missed Connections are an oasis of vulnerable openness and optimism, and even if their subjects never reconnect, I love that someone is bringing them to life.