Dear friend—
Bring forth the fruit! All that stains the edges
of a smile, all that colors laughter &
tosses it to air — what gift, what nourish.
First! a harvest. From grandmother’s garden,
orchard down the road, the farmer you see
once weekly, on Sundays, the new neighbor,
so quick to kindly. Second! homage the
soil. Dig in to wrists, feel it all shift, breathe
about your fingers, the million tiny
souls, squirming to raise it all to sunlight.
Third! kiss the sunlight, let it kiss you. Feel
it on every honest part of you &
know, all you touch also names it “mother.”
Now, bring forth the fruit! the many-named much-
loved, the sweet burst on tongue & soak between
teeth, so evolved as to be shared. What else
do you know, so intended by time &
creation to be plucked from bush & tree,
seeds saved, gathered, grown, again & again —
this most generous reincarnation!
title line from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.
.
The other day I read an interview with Ross Gay that reminded me how much I love Ross Gay.
His Book of Delights is one of my favorite things that I have ever read. Each day for a year, he writes a short essay, a few paragraphs some days, about something that delights him. And he is so wonderful at capturing the profoundness in the little things, the way something that brings us joy can be so complex and multifaceted, and how that joy can be so complex and multifaceted, and boy, he just has a way with words. He can make a sentence sing.
I wrote the poem that opens this missive after reading The Book of Delights, trying to recreate some of the magic that Gay so laboriously captures. Emphasis on the labor. Joy and delight, he makes clear, must be cultivated. It is a practice.
This interview I read with him, by Sara Franklin for The Nation, was full of wonderful nuggets. On why we need joy, not just on its own but also entangled with grief:
There are plenty of people who think that joy is not serious. But I'm arguing for joy as a rigorous emotion that excludes no one and the repression of which is a kind of alienation, a suggestion that we ought to be alienated from each other.
Repressing your joy for something, as some (including me) often do because it isn’t Cool to be Eager or Genuine anymore, is not simply bad for your soul, but also for the wider community of souls we find ourselves in. It pushes us away from each other when the best thing we can do is remember that we are all connected.
Along the same lines, Ross Gay says this of a mindfulness class, and how he felt when a participant said she was not fine and the teacher dug into it:
The teacher was taking care of it, but as it was going on, it felt, to me, like a brutality ... I realized my refusal to engage with other people's sorrow is my refusal to engage with my own sorrow. I realized that a part of myself would rather die than be sad, because being sad reveals that you're entwined with people.
As someone who would rather die than ruin the vibe, who prides herself on her ability to read the room and chameleonize herself for that room, this stopped me short. What am I running from, what am I shutting down when I am so worried about the vibe? When I am more attendant to tending the vibe of a room rather than engage with everyone’s emotions, including my own, head-on?
And reader, my thumbs are very not-green, but I love the way that Ross Gay talks about gardening:
A seed contains the past and the future at the same time. When you start to garden, your realize that what's gone is not really gone; it doesn't get to go away without going into something else.
I'll say the last line of this interview is absolutely beautiful and fantastic, but I won't share it here to encourage you to read the whole thing yourself.
.
The fall is my favorite time of the year. As I'm writing this (days before I will send it), the weather in Pittsburgh is dreary and wet and grey, but the colors of the trees break through the gloom like a flame. It stormed last night, and the ground is littered with leaves, in some places blanketed with them, in a way that suggests in the next week or two, everything will be gone. The iceman (winter) cometh. I have found my soundtrack to the season, and it’s Taylor Swift’s Midnights.
(A disclaimer—I am not super familiar with Taylor Swift’s back catalogue or the long course of her career, in case that affects my following notes.)
When I was in middle and high school, I think I was about 3 beats away from being one of those girls that defined themselves in opposition to Taylor Swift. She felt deeply unfeminist at the time—not only for her love-struck, “boy-obsessed” songs, but also her "Pick-me Girl" kind of storytelling ("She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts / She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") and the gossip around her, which seemed chock-full of petty cat fights with other artists.
But I think both Taylor and the Zeitgeist have realized how badly the 2000s and 2010s did women. There has been a reckoning that Taylor has slipped into, in conversation with and perhaps in opposition to some of her earlier stuff.
And now, Midnights. It is an album deep in the weeds with her own ouvre, her own reputation, her own history (as per the music folks at NYTimes and others). For critics familiar with that ouvre, this seems like a rumination backward for Swift. For me, as an outsider, it felt like a fresh breath of air.
I don't think it's any coincidence that the first Taylor Swift album I've ever listened to all the way through was the one co-produced and nearly co-written in full by Jack Antonoff, producer for the likes of Lana Del Rey, the 1975, Lorde, and the talent behind Bleachers.
Bleachers' sound is euphoric, sun-spun, even when waxing lyrical on the most doomed love. It's got quite a bit of Springsteen in it—the infinite tragedy and possibility of being young, a breathless Americana. Not to diminish Taylor Swift’s central role in her own fucking album (plenty are doing that already), but I could sense Antonoff’s presence like ectoplasm on the walls.
Midnights is synth-heavy, coursing, vibrant. It feels the way a close-up of a plucked steel guitar string looks, but reverbed a hudredfold, bathed in neon and glitter and the glowing fuzz of a television set sans-signal. The melodies are catchy and alive, as easy to dance to as to cry to. It’s giving Troye Sivan or Lorde's Melodrama. It’s giving stepping out of a club for a smoke in January, and the snow on the ground shocks you sober for a moment.
The only other song from Taylor Swift that I have absolutely loved is 2014's "Out of the Woods," a pulsing, roaring, bittersweet song that has one of the most beautiful screaming-crying-singing-as-you-pull-90-on-the-freeway bridges I have ever heard.
I gave it another listen during work the other day and I just started crying. Out of nowhere. And for what?
The cumulative effect of Midnights isn't quite so visceral, but it comes pretty close for being nearly an hour long.
I think one of the reasons I’m enjoying this album so much is that it follows the tradition of layered, synthy, sad-cotton-candy electro-pop 80s-adjacent production that seems to have come back in vogue over the past few years.
While I am undoubtedly enjoying it, Midnights reminds me of a recurring Hot Take about the dangers of nostalgia, especially around pop culture. Our moment is knee-deep in sequels and reboots and throwbacks. The 80s, 90s, and aughts are coming back in fashion, in movies, in music. Stranger Things meets the 30-billionth Marvel movie. Kate Bush is running up that hill, 40 years later.
And if I am to believe the critics, having not listened to Taylor Swift’s whole body of work, Midnights is just as backward-looking, lyrically and sonically. Apparently, the album is not only the 80s synths I heard but also the entire pop ambiance of the mid-2010s.
And what does it mean for a society, culturally and politically, to be stuck in the past? To revel in that past, perhaps sanitizing its problems, perhaps rewriting it, perhaps failing to face—or proactively develop—the future?
Is Midnights good because it’s beautiful or because it recreates the (supposed—I wasn’t alive yet) feeling of 30, 40 years ago when you could wear heaps of eye makeup, blast Bruce or Whitney in your dad’s pickup, and get a good job without going to college? (For the record, I think both can be true.)
I am the last person to yuck someone’s yums when it comes to this. I watch the same six movies over and over again and am knee-deep in 80s dance hits. I am a staunch believer in the old adage, “There is nothing new under the sun” (sorry, g.), and I am still writing the same stuff I was writing at 14.
But I am curious about this idea—what we lose, how we stagnate, what we allow for and stand for when we live too much in the past.
I’m still gonna listen to Midnights by Taylor Swift, though. It has rekindled my zest for music and for life in this election-season pandemic-stricken climate-apocalypse hellscape. In short, it delights me.
As Taylor herself once said, perhaps in a spirit similar to Ross Gay’s:
“I don’t think you should ever have to apologize for your excitement. Just because something’s cliché doesn’t mean it’s not awesome.”
Thanks for reading, I'll be back soon,
—mia xx