There’s a line in a Leone Ross short story that has stuck with me since I first read it all the way back in 2017. The story is Fix from the collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway. It’s a bleak story about our crumbling world in which a young girl, desperate to find food for her mother, slices the flesh off her arm. This grotesque image, however, is far from the worst thing that happens. The worst thing is this: “It took less than three generations of children online to wipe out the part of the brain that’s hard-wired for awe.”
This is a story of symptoms and causes – the tightening tourniquet around our souls wrought of our own machinations, and the desperate pushback, a hopeless pendulum-swing, the grasping yearning for any kind of feeling, for something real.
We live in a time of wonder and decay. More abundance than in all of history and yet we build our towns and cities to be hostile to people who might want to sit, to lie, to just be for a moment. More processing power than it took to land man on the moon in our pockets, but the latest software update makes it unusable because the shareholders want more money, because the engineers are exhausted, because no one has the energy to even care any more.
The machinery of the world is set to destruction, dehumanisation. What we are allowed to feel is dictated by algorithm. There is a lot of reward for doing negative things, entire careers built entirely on ragebait. (Is there a Godwin’s Law equivalent for invoking George Orwell to describe any suboptimal political situation? Sound the Orwell alarm!). Anger, despair, rage. The Two Minutes hate from a TikTok video. Maybe we occasionally cry in sudden happy-relief as we watch strangers get engaged in a big elaborate show or a baby get to hear for the first time, and then we’re straight back to being trivially furious as someone makes a purposefully disgusting recipe or renovates a beautiful Victorian house with Millennial grey.
And so, when we watch wars happen, when we hear of genocides, when we see pictures of the suffering, we are so inured to the anger, the despair, the rage, that it’s all too easy for us to move on, to go about our day. And as we disregard the humanity of others, so too do we disregard the humanity of ourselves. The centres of the brain that are hard-wired for awe become calcified, inert. No rage, no joy. Just existing, trudging wearily along the precipice, letting those who dismantle it all go about their business.
Through all of this precarity, we come back to the same question over and over again: what does a writer do? What is a writer for? What is the use of words when destruction and oppression are hovering overhead?
The anthropologist David Graeber, in his (amazing) essay What’s The Point If We Can’t Have Fun?, argues that life is not just a Hobbesian nightmare, struggle after struggle, work and more work. Instead, he suggests, play is a fundamental organising principle of nature. That pleasure and fun and joy is as significant as any other law governing our world or the larger universe.
Think about how good we feel when we are immersed in stories, when we read or write or share them. How we can begin to learn and unlearn our world, how our imagination takes us to states of pure joy, the possibilities that open up in that magical space. How we become, briefly, deeply connected to something that is so much bigger than ourselves.
And this is where all these threads converge. Sure, we can tell stories to make the world a better place and we can resist and we can do all those important things, but fundamentally we do it for joy.
In his essay collection Inciting Joy, Ross Gay says, “My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”
Joy is survival. Joy means defending our awe and wonder, pushing back against the deadening of our senses and the deconstruction of our humanity. It means we can feel something real, that we can be real.
At one point in Leone Ross’s story, in the midst of all that is crumbling, a university lecturer laments, “my students won’t write about tenderness!”. You still can though.