Yes, Today I Will Write About Mirth
Pancreatically speaking #3
Writerly habits are like moods; difficult to keep when they want to runaway from you and horribly consistent. I find myself having been stuck in the writerly habit of writing towards misery and melancholy; not without cause or justification, yet I don’t feel obligated to remind you yet more. If I can externalize myself from the perception of my affect, though, I do find myself operating in this space where the people I cherish do find in me something of a bubbling manifestation. I am told I have a calming or soothing voice at times, I have been accused of being so happy all the time when I was younger, I have been told I bring out a sense of childlike mischief and whimsy in others, and many have given me some inkling toward gratitude for the implicit permission for their endeavors I create space for. It is from this mindset that I diagnose something of a condition of my writerly habit: that I am sought after for writing about joy, in some type of way, or to write to cause joy, in another type of way.
Then today I will write something about mirth. I love the concept of mirth because the concept of amusement really captures the observer-joy I feel in most things. Noticing someone’s physical patterns or mannerisms, documenting in my mind the ways in which I learn details about those who I am surrounded by; this is, perhaps, the greatest game I am always playing and to whom there is no victorious or loss-ridden obligation. It isn’t enough to overcome all of the suffering, and it isn’t to negate misery in any kind, but the beautiful complications of life and humanity exist such that we may entreat ourselves to a full and dynamic perception of each and every moment should we desire.
Ally and I had our first-of-the-year Other People’s Poems poetry reading on Saturday, Feb. 7th. I was not my best Cody by a mile. I forgot the last names of our featured readers initially, I was sluggish and tired, I always find myself rushing to clean-up the event instead of taking the small moments to speak with the community we’ve brought together as though, somehow, despite all that I and we do to put this event on and bring people together, still I am not of a presence worthy to simply relax and exist.
Yet, a number of things captivated my mirth this evening.
The first: the readers. I could not stop smiling. Each artist brought a resilience, a passion, a thoughtfulness and willingness to bring each and every one of us along with them on the journey they had prepared, that from the very onset of the first reading, I found myself open-mouthed smiling, my overly-large canines (as my Dentist remarks each cleaning) exposed to the world. In moments like this, I often wish I could just exist like this forever. To close the doors and the windows of the room, to remove enough of the crowd such that the heat is tolerable and the seats are comfortable, to, at the end of each of their sets, ask them to do another, and they, generous and divine, indulge. It is the magic of art and performance and poetry to be absolved from your world, even for a moment, and to be summoned to this space.
The second: the community. As any event organizer will attest, especially in arts events, there is a certain number of individuals who, magnanimous as they are, come together predictably, with frequency; these individuals known as regulars. In Other People’s Poems, a lot of my fixation is to get to know faces of people, even if I don’t know their names, to be able to smile and confidently say welcome back or thanks for coming once more. And yet this evening I was stupefied by just how many people were there whom I was confident I’d never seen before. We had a very healthy, standing-room-only-and-even-then-standing-room-had-become-limited, attendance and I would say healthily three-quarters of whom were individuals I’d never seen before. Amused I think is an adequate response that simultaneous doesn’t suppose an ego nor does it reveal my blunderous insecurities.
And for the third: after the reading, we received a number comments and messages from individuals who attended thanking us for the event. I mean, what can you do if not be smitten by someone else’s gratitude to your efforts?
We have put on almost fifteen of these events so far, only two of which did we ask others to host during particularly rambunctious times of our lives (my marriage, Ally’s book launch). I hope to do these as long as we can imagine; I hope to continue bringing poetry to more people and provide space for more people to explore the affect of entwinement between art and community. We’ve begun being able to give money back to writers and artists, even if in small ways. What’s there to do except be amused by it all and to continue.
I attended my first board meeting as a fledgling board member of the queer soccer organization I manage the recreational games for. In this hellacious period in which everything is corporate greed and survivalism, it is always so surprising to encounter spaces that are both serious in their efforts to work within the systems available, and full with a tender fondness for each other. I was welcomed to the meeting graciously, in my introduction folks lavished me with praise and addressed how helpful I’d already been as I stepped into my role. There wasn’t a rush to get through agenda items, an urgency to maximize profits or expand tremendously, and when we did the math we attracted enough unique attendees to our games, tournaments, and leagues that it evened out to around 200 players per board member. The mirth here came from two avenues: being seen, accepted, and celebrated without a tremendous need for questioning or proving-oneself; and the acknowledgment that, slowly-and-then-all-at-once, the world of individuals whom I care for, whom I make space for, was expanding massively.
When Heather and I set out to plan for our wedding, one of my biggest fears was that I didn’t have people who found me close enough to really be in my wedding party. I know (although even writing this line feels with the visceral discomfort of pulling a thread of yarn from your cat’s throat) that this is not true. There are people I care about, but I worried so much that the relationship was not applicable in reverse that there were still friends of mine who I was inviting just a month before the wedding. And now — behold! the mathematics supporting the mirth of expansion — I am caring for people and groups of people into the hundreds now.
An ex-professional soccer player posted a video the other day, tears astrewn, in shambles over how simultaneously disappointed and motivated she was with herself: she’d recently gone back to play in a semi-competitive soccer match for the first time in nearly a decade without any warm-up or conditioning and found, to little surprise for anyone who’s played the game, that her body had rusted, so to speak. That she felt less competitive, less of an athlete, after dedicating so much of her life to being valued on her competitive value, was identity-shaking. I found myself wanting to give her as big of a hug as I could imagine, to assure her that it would stay hard at first, but as she continues to grow and find the communities that will support her, a new form of sport will arrive: being seen and accepted in our failing and flailing, in our oops and our aw shit and our hell yeah moments.
In a game I was playing recently, the player I was defending against beat me in a 1:1 because of an overstep on my part. I started laughing and gave up on the play. The defender behind me was yelling to have me stick with them, and all I could muster in response was man I’m tired. We laughed because that’s how it is playing a sport non-competitively in your 30s+; that sometimes (most times) your body is not going to behave in the ideal way, and that we can celebrate the ridiculous bodily machinations together in this our shared embrace of foot to field.
The Seahawks won the superbowl, which as a now Seattle resident for almost the last decade, feels like such a fantastic win for the city. I don’t really care about football, or that’s what I say when I try to tell people that I don’t watch the games anymore. But care is such a spectrum, and I find myself unable to distinguish my form of caring between rigorously checking scoring and schedules each week and wanting to write letters to my friends afar. So, I guess I care about football as a means of connecting myself to people; however, I don’t care about football as a sport for me to invest any sense of self-integrity into. Thereby, we went to the Seahawks celebration parade this last Wednesday morning. There were kids climbing onto awnings, there were signs all over the place in bold font FUCK ICE. There were all number of Dads and families and people who were there to exist and revel and that was about as far as they’d thought. We couldn’t get any type of chants going for very long, it certainly wasn’t a protest, the most complicated was about five rounds of call-and-response starting with SEA and having the crowd yell HAWKS. I wouldn’t say it was a particularly spectacular parade by any means, and yet being in that moment, seeing everyone around just happy to be there celebrating, to take some time off work and come together in the million+ crowd who showed out for a mile+ long parade blasting music and drinking, I found myself cementing this part of my identity even further: that part of caring about Seattle is caring about all of the ways that Seattle comes together; that even if I don’t care about football I care that people care about the Seahawks.
I especially loved seeing that, as the parade ended, people simply stayed celebrating. They went to all manner of small businesses in the roads nearby, got lunch and drinks, every now and then on the street someone would yell SEA and unendingly there would be a response of HAWKS and cheering. And isn’t that what this is all about at the end of the day? People being happy, together. People’s happiness funding people’s joy whose joy is coming from making people happy with food and good drinks. People’s happiness multiplying each other into this dynamic world where the sun is shining and rain was on the horizon but dissipated without a drop and there is no such thing as history, only the present moment.
It jostles me to arrive in this moment, to talk of amusement in a landscape where there is, quite frankly, so much to be distraught over. Close friends are losing loved ones by the day, endeavorous chapters close and thereby vacuous moments are created where the ekes of melancholy can bloom in the otherwise mournful void. That’s about what I can muster. I’m not exactly hopeful, but I’m not willing to subject myself to loss; I’m not exactly energized yet the strength with which I crave to live in a way that satisfies the mission I’ve deigned for myself keeps my feet plodding.
Update: I continue to read poems weekly. I’ll likely continue to do these livestreams once a week for the foreseeable future. They bring me joy. I also post the individual poem moments on Youtube in smaller form.
The poetry reading events sound magical. It also sounds like you bring a lot of mirth wherever you go 🙂