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FINDING JOY IN A GANNET
Joy and Happiness. Are these the most important things in life – apart from survival – to make one’s lifetime goal? Probably not. Even though the American Constitution has embalmed “the pursuit of happiness” as a fundamental right (while ignoring pursuit of almost all the virtues and basic values, such as charity, honesty and caring about others).
Yet pursuit of happiness seems a pretty damn good idea, once you have sufficient time, confidence and opportunity to indulge in it. Obviously you need to be careful. Look at Oscar Wilde, and what happened to his Dorian Gray. You’ll remember that the Faustian character did a deal with the Devil to keep his youth – then went on a lifetime bender of debauchery, raves, orgies, alcoholic and morphine bouts without ever turning a hair, catching the pox, losing his liver or creasing his brow. It seemed to be the most successful pursuit ever. . . until Mr Gray had to pay, while still a young man, the Devil’s bill in one foul instalment. Oscar Wilde’s famous story suggests that he himself, aware of the risks of self-indulgent pursuits, was a very brave, if reckless, individual.
Finding joy and happiness remains an idyllic quest, I think, provided it is an occupation short of a prime obsession.
It should rank just below dangerously obsessive hobbies such as golf or gaming; birding or bridge, running or writing. But where will you find real joy?
Where will you begin "pursuit of happiness"?
I read recently an article on the subject that quoted William Blake’s poem Infant Joy. Its images provides a clue. Here is the first stanza:-
I have no name
I am but two days old –
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name -
Sweet joy befall thee!
No, the clue is not in the happiness of a parent whose child has saved it the rigors of naming it by doing the task itself. Let the author of the article (quoting Jean Giono and other erudite sources) explain:.
“What makes Infant Joy such a marvelously subtle and complex poem, in spite of its extreme brevity and apparent simplicity, is the interplay between the two voices, the voice of the infant (a literal impossibility, of course) and the voice of the adult poet, and the way the word ‘joy’ passes and echoes between them.
“You sense that the adult poet is shaken and chastened to the core by the power and vulnerability of the infant’s joy. Unlike the infant, which merely radiates joy, the adult knows what may happen in a human life, which is all too infrequently joyful . . .
Joy, for Blake and Giono, doesn’t just mean contentment or security. That, together with their insight that joy comes before society, makes their message revolutionary in a world that for all its technical sophistication often seems to set its horizons below the level of joy.”
Okay, so perhaps I should not let the author explain it.
The innocent joy of a laughing baby as it communicates with an adult who, in that shared moment of joy, is able momentarily to forget all about life’s worries and failures, doesn’t need to be explained. The moment, plus an awareness of pre-life as well as of a brand-new gurgling life filled with hope, are beyond description.
What Jean Giono in his book Weight of Heaven is saying – I think – is that to find sheer joy or moments of complete happiness, you must look beyond technology, materialism, and communal or cultural bonds - beyond yourself if you can. You will find it, if I may be so trite, ‘in Nature’.
The sound and sight of wheeling, diving terns, perhaps. Or watching a steenbok emerge quietly from the shrubbery and step delicately through the morning dew.
As I write I see, at this very moment through my window, a gannet wheel in the sky and plunge from sixty feet, creating a white fountain in the intensely blue ocean as it dives for prey. Cruel perhaps; yet if it were seen in uninterrupted solitude from some faraway cliff, it might, for the observer, have been a moment of pure joy.
I’m sure I’ve said enough, but I’d like to add one memory of something seen; heard; smelt; tasted, that afforded a personal moment of undiluted joy. . . .
Yes, I remember the taste of a tannin-green mountain stream once, as I bent down to quench my thirst on a solo walk near Maanskynkop. I remember the sound of trickling and falling water; the twitter – even the song – of birds. And then I looked up and noticed four/five/six species, gathered in their own little groups, waiting for their turn to splash and wriggle and wash in a small basin in the rocks.
Oh God, there must be less obvious examples than that. Walking silently with one/two/three of my adult children through a forest, perhaps.
Anyway. . . it is miraculous to know that it is so easy to have Joy and Happiness. All you have to do is be aware of it when you come upon it.
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