TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about joy. Not the big, cinematic kind, not the kind that arrives with music swelling in the background. I mean something quieter. Something that comes and goes before we even have time to name it.

Joy, or happiness, consists of chemicals in the brain — dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. But these are elements I don’t fully know how to hold. Even in the body, joy is something that moves. It rises, it falls.

Joy can startle us. It asks us to tip the scales in one direction, knowing how sharp the come down can feel afterward. I’m reminded of my baby niece who would cry whenever people laughed too loudly. Maybe she was scared of the sheer noise. Maybe her new body didn’t know how to hold that kind of intensity.

Amid everything unfolding in the world, joy can feel more challenging to access. These days, I am my niece. I feel joy arrive and don’t quite know what to do with it. I feel its overwhelm and suddenness, the way it asks something of me I’m not always prepared to give.

I often hear the phrase “the risk of joy,” and I keep returning to it. Is joy a risk? And if it is, what is it that we are risking? Can I open my chest to joy, knowing it might hurt me if it leaves?

I’m beginning to understand that joy doesn’t exist separate from pain, but in spite of it. It reminds me of the song “Joy and Pain” by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly. The title itself holds two opposite things at once. The existence of one calls the other into being, like sunshine and rain.

Today’s poem leans into that tension. It moves between imagining joy and actually feeling it. It asks us to reach for it, even when we don’t quite know how to keep it.

Against Melancholy
by Nathan McClain

At first it is
Beethoven’s Ninth

I’m thinking of—
not all of it—mostly

the fourth movement,
that rousing crescendo

you might hear
at the end of a movie

where the protagonist
has graduated or overcome 

some great hurdle,
cello, violin, then flute,

brass, layering
one another, swelling

towards that feeling
of triumph

I so rarely seem to have,
but often think about, 

now maybe
because of the shrieks

and cheers from a party
in the courtyard,

drifting into the window
of my room, where

I’m often alone,
laughter rising

like fireworks, then
I’m thinking of

the feeling itself,
joy, how

it almost seems made
of air, like you

can be full of it,
or sometimes

it’s a child’s
red bouncing ball

that somehow gets away
from you, and you

have to chase it
into a busy intersection,

and everyone’s
laying on their horns,

all that air
vibrating and swollen,

your chest swollen, too,
and maybe chasing it

could get you killed
or crippled at best,

but what feels better
than that moment,

when you catch it,
when it’s yours?

"Against Melancholy" by Nathan McClain from PREVIOUSLY OWNED © 2022 Nathan McClain. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.