Krista Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves as much as what one must fight.

Ross Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. And … I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often — often. Not everyone. I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.

Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said, “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”

Gay: I think so.

Tippett: I think about journalism a lot and how — when you talk about the delight — you developed a delight radar and a delight muscle — basically, journalism has a despair radar and a despair muscle.

Gay: I know. I know.

Tippett: And it’s not that we don’t need to know those things. It’s not that those aren’t part of the story. But I feel like what you’re saying is — that’s what you mean, right? It’s inadequate.

Gay: Well, part of the story, that’s the thing. If the news was as invested in talking about how this person was great to that person as it was in talking about how that person was terrible to that person, it would be a radically different experience. It would be like, “Oh, OK — we live amongst people. People do many things.”

[laughter]

But part of what I think is interesting about this book is that it brings to my attention, just clear, that many things are happening. Many things are happening. And like you said, it sells. It sells.

Tippett: Well, it also — our brains are wired to get riveted by something that’s scary, that’s threatening. We mobilize around that. It’s automatic.

But I also think that the exercise of the book is to say, “Look how amazing this is.”

Gay: Totally. And I also think that —

Tippett: “And look how intricate it is.”

Gay: And intricate and endless and unbelievable. And I also think that there’s a part of our bodies that are wired — and this is a thing that I noticed, that when I would experience something delightful and sometimes I’d be like, “Oh, that’s wonderful” — so often I’d be like, “I want to tell you.” It is this thing that actually makes me reach out towards someone.

And that feels bodily. That feels — I don’t know if a scientist has found this out yet, but when something good happens, do we gather around a thing? It is a feeling that I have, a deep feeling that I have, and I feel like it’s something that I witness, too, that people kind of want to share the stuff that they love.

Tippett: And what you do is, you put vivid language to it. You put beautiful, riveting words to it. So there’s a little bit of discipline involved. But that shifts it, too, to being more interesting.

Gay: How do you mean?

Tippett: Well, I mean that if we acknowledge this reality that on autopilot we’re going to be galvanized by something terrible coming at us, then those of us who care about getting this other story about ourselves in the world out there have to also apply some intelligence to doing that well so that it will also rivet. And it’s with this care with words and stories, which we do respond to.

Gay: And I think it also knows, or comes to know that what is galvanizing, as well, is what we love, and has a kind of belief in that — and also believes in the thing. The book itself believes that it’s elbowing its neighbor and being like, “Right? Look at all this. What do you love? What do you love?”

Tippett: There’s this line, this famous line from Cornel West that justice is love made public, which I think has wisdom in it, and I also don’t think it’s a big enough statement. And I feel like you put — in your writing, in your other writing and your work like The Tenderness Project — I feel like what you’re trying to do with that is, let’s give some complexity and some texture to what love made public is and how it works. And just that simple word, “justice,” doesn’t do it.

So The Tenderness Project. Talk about that.

Gay: My friend Shayla and I were talking about just what might be a nice project to do these days, and so we decided to start this thing called The Tenderness Project. And it’s — every ten days or so, someone will release a “tenderness,” we call them. And they can be a little essay, or —

Tippett: Tendernesses.

Gay: Tendernesses.

Tippett: I think the website is tendernesses.com.

Gay: And it can be an essay or a poem or a little film or something. But it’s just small. You know, I get a lot of emails that are not, “Here’s a tenderness.” A lot of them are like, “Watch out!” And when you see one that says, “Here’s a tenderness,” it’s like, oh wow. That’s OK.

Tippett: And that’s also just such a good example of — because we are riveted by this idea, I think everybody in this room — just, “Oh, yeah, tenderness. Tendernesses.” But it’s a softer place in us.

Gay: It’s many things. That’s the thing, too, right? Tenderness, it is a softer place in us —

Tippett: I mean the part of us that gets interested in it.

Gay: Totally, exactly. Right. And sometimes we’re probably skeptical of it, and we defend against it in ourselves and others, for sure.

But I love the word “tender” because it is — it implies the softness, I would say, the vulnerability. It also implies one who tends. It also is an exchange. So “tender” is many things. To be tender, to be engaged in tenderness, is many things.

And those things are — they also imply, I think, an other. If you’re tender, you’re tender because you know that there are other things. There are other people or other …

Tippett: I also feel like I think almost anybody would have — I think there are memories in my body. So, when the language of tenderness comes up, it is transformative. It’s one of those ordinary, transformative experiences.

Gay: The experience of tenderness.

Tippett: Of either receiving it or showing it.

Gay: Yeah. I often think, when I think of tenderness, I think of my father. We had years we didn’t get along at all. But he could not not put his hand in my hair and move my head around. And I just — we mostly didn’t talk for a while, but he couldn’t not touch me. And then we could go on and on and on and on and on and on with that.

Tippett: I also want to note that you also write a lot about football. And you played football.

Gay: [laughs] I did.

Tippett: And so you think about tenderness very much in touch with a culture of violence that we also live with and that’s strangely intertwined with fun and joy and love and all these beautiful things.

Gay: Yeah, I played college football. And I got a scholarship because I could hurt people. Basically, that’s what it is. [laughs] Sometimes people are like, “Well, aren’t you skilled at the game?” No. I mean, yeah, but because I could hurt people. That’s what it is.

And in the midst of that, as well, in addition to all kinds of brutality and stupidity, is all this tenderness. In fact, some of the tenderness I think of is having my right MCL blown out by a good chop block from someone, and my buddy Glenn running — running! — to pick me up. So you’re right. It’s very much entwined in the way, probably, I’ve been thinking about it for most of my life, because for most of my life I’ve been deeply engaged in thinking about sport and the violence in sport. I’ve been in sport, or I’ve been thinking about sport and the many things that sport is.

[music: “Children of Lemuel” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with writer and community gardener Ross Gay.

[music: “Children of Lemuel” by Blue Dot Sessions]

We want to hear some more of you. But just before that, also, you did write this — I think more on this theme, “justice is love made public,” but more contour to “love made public.” And you’ve also been writing about mercy. You wrote this beautiful piece in The Sun. I just want to spend a couple minutes on this. It was so striking to me — back to your garden — because it starts with you doing potatoes and chard and garlic, and your back seizes up. And you realize eventually that that has to do with an experience that you had — that your body is taking in this experience you had with the police the night before.

But where you go with mercy, like with tenderness, is that it may be the only — that we have to say everything that needs to be said and reveal everything that needs to be revealed and then make this other move, which again is that beyond of mere justice. I don’t know. How would you …

Gay: Say it again. Would you? Would you ask it again?

Tippett: Well, where could — I’m sure somebody’s asked you this. It’s like how can you use a word like “joy” right now? How can you use a word like “mercy” right now? Being a black man and doing nothing wrong and having to constantly think about what’s gonna happen when you see a policeman, for example.

Gay: I don’t know, you know. That piece remains a puzzle to me. And what’s interesting to me about that essay is that there aren’t answers. There’s a fundamental question, which is, we ought to know each other better.

Tippett: Yes, but that’s a different move. There’s no answer, but there’s a move. I mean, here’s a little piece of it: “What if we honestly assessed what we have come to believe about ourselves and each other, and how those beliefs shape our lives? And what if we did it with generosity and forgiveness? What if we did it with mercy?” And you’re talking about really hard, inexcusable things in our history and our present.

And you wrote, “The corrupt imagination might become visible. Inequalities might become visible. Violence might become visible. Terror might become visible. And the things we’ve been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don’t want to do such things to each other, might become visible. If we don’t, we will all remain phantoms — and, as it turns out, it’s hard for phantoms to care for one another, let alone love one another.”

Gay: Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say. [laughs]

[laughter]

[applause]

That’s it. [laughs]

Tippett: I often ask the question about — of somebody at the end of an interview — what’s making you despair today, and where are you finding hope? And I don’t want to ask you about despair. What is giving you delight, today? Is there any little thing? Think of something small or large. What comes to mind?

Gay: The way these lights are working is pretty amazing, some of the reflections up there. There was someone up here who had a very precise, beautiful laugh that was — that’s kind of nice, just to be in a room with people laughing. There was a couch in the room back there, in the not quite the changing room, but it’s a very nice-looking couch, I thought. I had a nice little rest before I came over here, over at the green room, I guess they call that. Those were all delightful things.

Tippett: Have you done kettlebells today?

Gay: [laughs] I was hoping you were gonna ask. I didn’t know if that was off-limits.

Tippett: We realized this is something we have in common. Can’t talk about it, we don’t have time, but that would be a delight. [laughs]

Gay: Yeah, totally. I did not do kettlebells today, but I will, probably, tomorrow.

Tippett: Oh good. Would you read just from here on page 49, and just to the end of that? This is from The Book of Delights.

Gay: “Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

“And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

“Is sorrow the true wild?

“And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

“For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

“What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

“I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

Tippett: Ross Gay, thank you.

Gay: Thank you.

[applause]

Tippett: Ross Gay lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he’s a professor of English at Indiana University. His books include the poetry collection Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude and a book of essays, The Book of Delights. He co-founded The Tenderness Project together with Shayla Lawson.