Friday
When Bill Clinton, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, said, “We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us,” I thought of some of the great poems about joy. They include two by William Blake and another by Kahlil Gibran.
Before looking them over, let’s first talk about this joy explosion that has broken out amongst Democrats. Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that joy is critical in opposing dictators and wannabe dictators and that the Harris-Walz campaign are right to adopt the slogan “Joy and Hope.” The scholar notes that
positive emotions such as love, solidarity, and yes, joy, have been part of successful anti-authoritarian political strategies. Positive emotions motivate people to engage in politics when they might have grown apathetic or cynical about the possibility of change.
She therefore takes issue with a New York Times opinion column by columnist Patrick Healy when he “cringed a little” at Clinton’s words, opining, “”Joy is not a political strategy.” Rather than simply disagree with him, however, Ben-Ghiat goes further and analyzes his response. We’ve been so inundated by negative images and rhetoric “designed to evoke fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others,” she says, that the prospect of joy feels unfamiliar and even shocking. The purpose of Trump’s language has been, in part, to make us “feel hopeless and down, so that we lose our faith in ourselves and each other.”
One thinks of the “immigrants as rapists and murderers” speech with which Trump began his first presidential campaign; his “American carnage” speech at his inauguration; the ceaseless lying and demonization that we endured during his years in office; and the non-stop attacks in the years since on the judicial system that has been trying to hold him accountable. No wonder, then, that a newspaper columnist would be distrustful.
Fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others don’t necessarily get the last word, however. In his poem “Joy and Sorrow,” which appears in The Prophet, Gibran makes Ben-Ghiat’s point in another way. The joy that many of us are feeling at the moment, Gibran would explain, is a logical outgrowth of the sorrow we have been experiencing. The two are coin sides of each other:
Joy and Sorrow
By Kahlil Gibran
Then a woman said, ‘Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.’
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Perhaps Trump has carved into our being, attempting to hollow us out with his knives. What he has wrought instead, however, is a lute that soothes the spirit.
Blake makes the same point–that joy and woe are closely linked–in a passage from his mystical “Auguries of Innocence”:
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
Blake doesn’t end the matter there, however. In his short poem “Eternity,” he feels the need to distinguish between different kinds of joy:
Eternity
By William Blake
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
The lyric serves as a good rejoinder to those who contend that Democrats are experiencing a sugar high, that Harris is having a honeymoon that can’t last, that “joy is not a political strategy.” And to give this observation some credit, this is the case when we “bind” ourselves to a certain feel-good moment. If we do so, then we do indeed destroy this winged thing, becoming disheartened when the feeling dissipates.
But if, instead, we kiss the joy as it flies—if we dedicate ourselves, in our multicultural democracy, to living fully each moment and honoring the full personhood of each person we meet—then the daily sunrise promises us new experiences and new treasures. When a joyful approach to life brings such rewards, why would we ever tire of it?
Citing a Biblical passage that Blake knew well, the Rev. Al Sharpton summed up my point today in his uplifting speech to the Democratic National Convention. Psalm 30 tells us, he told the delegates, that
weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. We’ve endured January 6th. We’ve endured conspiracy theories. We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness. But if we stay together, Black, White, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.
You tell it, preacher.
