According to  Ice Age ecologist Jacquelyn Gill, you have probably drunk mammoth pee. Thank you, Earth’s reclamation system. Dr. Gill cohosts a podcast called Warm Regards which focuses on the warming planet.

Image credit: "New York Zoological Society - Man next to wooly mammoth in exhibit," Manuscripts and Archives Division: The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 - 1945.

Yesterday, I did not spend the little free time I had on breathing exercises or reading or moving my atrophying body to do anything but clench. I need to disconnect sometimes (wine, tv), but these days the work is to connect more than to numb.

So, today I looked back at one of my favorite paintings, In the Sea by Arnold Böcklin. It’s at the Art Institute of Chicago, so I got to spend some time with it when I worked with paintings there. I never got to clean it, though. It’s not super well done, but it makes me earnestly, gleefully laugh. Böcklin painted alongside the Impressionists, but this is a Renaissance-art-looking monsters’ day at the beach. It’s all these mythical creatures listening to conch shells, floating, and hanging out with sand in their shorts.

Speaking of joy and other romantic, heavy-handed, sentimental terms, coming at tropes, clichés, and stereotypes from a slant can make them less sentimental, less heavy-handed. It can render familiar things anew and revitalize the sentiment for which cliché itself is often shorthand. Defamiliarize and revitalize: that’s what I want to do with posts here. I want to get to a granular level of joy. I don’t want to describe joy. I want to enact it. I won’t say it was a beautiful spring morning. I’ll tell you what I did and thought and maybe you’ll discuss those things with me and we can joy together.

The title of this post is the name of a creative writing class I took with Leni Zumas. If you haven’t read her work, she is an expert at defamiliarization. The title story in Farewell Navigator starts, “We live with the lights off in a rot-walled house.” I plan to read her newest novel, Red Clocks, as soon as it comes out and would love to discuss it. Just let me know if anyone would be into reading it together bookclub-like.

Image credit: Jerome Robbins Dance Division "Photograph of Litz dancing The Glyph at Black Mountain College" The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

My small goal today was to take a 1/2 hour to connect to the world in ways that brought me joy instead of fear, disgust, defeat, and and and. So, I reread Donald Justice’s “Southern Gothic” and I am listening to Dollar Brand & Abdullah Ibrahim Orchestra’s African Space Program (and wow). I am happy to report the joy is still there.

Image credit: Rare Book Division, "Fig. 1. Rosa Eglanteria = Rosier Eglantier. Fig. 2. Rosa Berberifolia. [Eglantine, Sweetbrier Rose - Rose single]" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1801 - 1819.

Keep some joy close to the surface so you can find it ever again. Don’t let it sink. Don’t let the handle rust, the crumb lose definition in that swell of bad news. Don’t nestle it in barbs, in fishnchips newspaper neglected so long the smell is neutral. Don’t attend to that and not this. This will bury itself a little deeper with every mudslide. Unattended, it will petrify, camouflaged the color of stuck, or evaporate over weeks without even a lick of steam. The planet is troubled. Douse the fire, debride the wound, use your ice cube trays to rebuild what you can of the glaciers, and keep joy available by searching for it now and then. Practice so you remember how to find it, where to even look.

Image credit: "Cobbler's tools, Deerfield, Mass.," The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections 1860 - 1920.