I made the mistake of not writing about the feeling while I was feeling it, so now it’s at risk of being intellectualised, memorialised, and/or glorified. But it was simple really, I have been grieving. Rotting in bed for a day and a half. Weeping. Wondering if I was just overtired. Sleeping for ten hours to wake up still feeling the same.
The thing about joy and connection is that they are fleeting, which means they also involve disappointment and loss. I refuse to let this stop me from feeling the depths of joy and from making deep connections, but the grief of joy hit me hard this weekend. I think I need to give you more context, I’m currently in Tartu, Estonia for a conference on the Philosophy of Emotion where I presented my research on queer joy.
In the past day, I’ve said goodbye more times than I can count. I made lots of really hard and fast friends at this conference in ways I could never have expected and I think I am mourning that I have to leave and go back to a very different and far away life. Or maybe, it’s more that I’m now faced with the (im)possible decision of uprooting my life to move here to pursue a precarious, unknown, potential life of which maybe I saw a glimpse this week.
These goodbyes remind me of the other goodbyes, the friends and other loves I have lost. It still confuses me why the loss of past friendships come back to be refelt. Not because it means I still care, caring about these people makes sense. It’s more confusing as to why I still have the impulse to scour through these connections for lessons and growth or messages about myself and my actions. Perhaps, it’s more simple than that; simply that those past friendships remind me of the friendships I formed here.
There was a PhD candidate from Copenhagen who shared not just a similar haircut to an old friend of mine but also their dark humour, depth, and passion that gets read by others and themself (at least when I knew this person) as darkness itself. They presented a paper on queer guilt and we fell in love in some platonic kind of way in about three minutes while chatting in the coffee room and then spent the next three days giggling and provoking each other. I said goodbye to them at a coffee shop this morning.
There was an energetic and incredibly kind academic from New York City. She was bursting with the same level of excitement and enthusiasm as me and so we bonded. She asked amazing questions that I fear I didn’t reciepiate. She offered support in countless ways; I’ll help you with applications for post-grad courses, come stay on my couch, I’ll send you the reading lists for my summer school program on Social Ontology. She was my confidant, I felt immediately comfortable with her to both revel in the excitement and fear to be in the academic space. Across from eachother drinking our coffees, she thanked me for bringing joy to the conference. I don’t remember her exact words, but it was something along the lines of how refreshing it was to have someone break through the faux professional personas that often proliferate in such spaces. I was deeply touched. I remember us rallying the group to go out dancing, running ahead down the street while the others lagged behind chatting about god knows what. I said goodbye to her at the bus station this morning.
Then there was an Estonian drag artist I met last night. They weren’t in drag but were wearing electric blue eyeliner and had the most incredible stage presence just by themselves on the dance floor of the local queer bar. Again, we fell platonically in love in the time it took to dance to three songs (Believe - Cher, Cha cha cha - Käärijä, and an Estonian song that I didn’t know the words to) and the next day (just now) he showed me one of his favourite places along Emajõgi: “the mother river” here in Tartu. In a suburb called Soup City, where all of the streets are named after ingredients for making soup. We went swimming, we talked about queer politics, life, and family. And then we said goodbye.
These are only three examples of many. Of course, there is an added intensity to meeting people while travelling, when both of you know you might not see each other again nor have the chance to slowly build a friendship, you’re more likely to jump in with an open-hearted, full-bellied, commitment for days or sometimes just hours. But there’s also something about this way of connecting that happens more broadly in my life. These fleeting, impermanent, life-changing kinds of connections happen often. A blessing and a burden.
I’m acutely aware of the impermanence of all connection. I’m also furiously independent, which undeniably does sometimes stop me from cultivating long lasting love. This is a gross generalisation, I have many friends who I have loved deeply for many years, you reading this are probably one of them. I know that part of this is just a narrative I tell myself. But I think the most palpable example is my connection to joy.
Joy is inherently fleeting. It comes and goes and I want it to do so. Anyone who has heard me talk about my research knows I don’t want joy to be held in place as an object of desire, and when it is I think it becomes happiness, which is distinct from joy. I want my joy and my connections to remain evanescent, mostly because I know they must; experiencing joy and connection means experiencing their impermanence. But I also can’t deny that I crave stability and longevity, permanency and promise. The loss of joy and connection is so painful. I listen to The Parting Glass sung by the Adelaide Chamber Choir, which was sent to me by my dear friend Caitlin. It’s been years since I heard this very famous Irish song. I sob. They say they know the feeling. That they don’t want to harden to the world and so that means insisting on staying tender but doing so is so tiring. I’m tired too.
I think about Muñoz and his writing on queer utopianism. He wrote that disappointment is an intrinsic part of hope and the utopian imagination. Further, insisted that disappointment shouldn’t discourage us or make us less open to imagining the world otherwise. Being disappointed is just part of it. But he doesn’t tell us how to not let the disappointment corrode our utopianism or exhaust us. Resilience probably has something to do with it, but that’s another term that is used by positive psychology in ways that I don’t like. If you’d like to hear why, I would summarise that it’s because psychology places most (if not all) of the emphasis on the individual. And so, in a psychological framework, it is up to us, in our hyper-individual culture, to be resilient in response to whatever it is we are feeling on a supposed individual level. But I believe we are much more interconnected than this, and we can’t be (or shouldn’t have to be) resilient without a community. In this, I think Muñoz would agree.
“The eventual disappointment of hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical thought process, in the same way that even though we can know in advance that felicity of language ultimately falters, it is nonetheless essential.
The moment in which I write this book the critical imagination is in peril. The dominant academic climate into which this book is attempting to intervene is dominated by a dismissal of political idealism. Shouting down utopia is an easy move.” — José Esteban Muñoz, Queering Utopia, Page 10.
I’m sitting in a park as I write this. I’m exhausted, waiting for the time to pass between having to check out and get to the train back to Tallinn (the capital of Estonia). I’m scrolling Instagram when I see a post from the queer party I was at on Saturday night. I translate the post, and it says that marriage equality has just passed in Estonia. I have many mixed feelings about gay marriage, obviously largely informed by the traumatic debates that happened in Australia in 2016. But also informed by the radicalism I relish in queer theory, which pushes against assimilationist activism such as marriage equality. However, the feeling of surreal relief in the queer Estonians I talk to about it is refreshing. “Finally” is the overwhelming energy. While they have had a debate here, it has been different. Estonia is one of the least religious countries on the planet, or rather they have the highest rates of Atheism, I should say. So it’s different.
My Tartu friend told me that during Baltic pride, which was the week before I was here, the only Christian event was one about queer Christians. He went on to tell me that someone rocked up to the event and threatened the priest with a knife. We talk about how strange it is for a religion supposedly about loving others, to have members so often turn to violence in its name. He tells me about how he struggles to see himself in a lot of queer media, music, and art because religion is often used as an explanation for hatred. But it’s not like that here. People are still prejudiced and it can’t be explained or reclaimed with the imagery and sentiment of religion. Since talking about this with him, I notice religiosity in everything. The music I find myself in and my own writing in particular. In my last post, I even referred to him as “moving as if heaven could be a body”. I stand by this statement but I wonder if he would feel uncomfortable being described in this way. Maybe I should’ve said “moving as if love could be a body”. I wonder if there’s a better way of saying what I mean in Estonian?
Last night when I was in the throws of my grief, I stumbled across the new Youth Lagoon album Heaven is a Junkyard. I’ve been listening to it on repeat ever since. The first two songs on the album are cool; quite mellow and matched my mood but the third — Prizefighter — did something to my heart.
“I got the world, so I’ll be fine / I got the sunshine to figure me out”
Yes, I think. I dance around my apartment in my underwear. I finally get the energy to bare packing my bags, do my laundry and even have leftovers for a walk around the neighbourhood in the 9 pm sunlight.
A few songs later, the song Mercury seems to almost undo the sunny joy in Prizefighter:
“I’m afraid of all the lives that I made in a world I won’t stay”
And it hits me; that’s what I’m feeling.
Some people I really admire (namely Lauren Berlant) write about how inconvenient our connections to others are. They are messy and make us feel and reflect and often get the ick and want to run from the messiness of needing others. Or even claim that we don’t need others to avoid experiencing the inconvenience. And I’ve definitely felt that. But more often than that, I’m afraid of all the lives and connections I make in worlds where I cannot stay. I cannot stay in this cramped studio apartment outside Tartu. I can’t stay in the strobe lights with my angel. I can’t stay submerged under the surface of Emajõgi / The Mother River. I can’t stay in the world of academia. I can’t stay in Europe. I’m not sure I can stay in Australia; which means I can’t stay in the small slice of stability I’ve made.
It’s all up in the air, but it’s also not. I have my first full-time job lined up back in Aus, and when I stop to think about it I’m filled with dread. I want to read and make knowledge. It feels strange to have the ability to make knowledge and not use it, commit myself to it. But I want this work to be sustainable and I want to be supported to do it. I don’t care to struggle for anything. I don’t care for a career in academia, I tell myself. But my heart drops every time the conversation with academics becomes about the instability, the fragility, the stress, the lack of money, which it almost always does: “I’m thirty and I haven’t got any savings”, “If I can get a three-year post-doc that would be a miracle”, “I’m entering my seventh year of my PhD because I’ve had to teach so much”. And it goes on like this. Is the world and its sunshine enough?
When I tell an academic that I loved her presentation on humiliation she thanks me and asks what my research is on. When I say joy, she glows; “you know, my first supervisor used to always tell me to pick a topic that I want to dream about”. She laughs saying she didn’t follow his advice but might one day. “You should continue to write on joy” she encourages me. How can I write about joy while living with joy? I want to ask but I don’t.
In the midst of my joy comedown, I get an email from Daniela: the Buddhist I met in Genova (read more about her here). The email simply says “yours” and attached is a picture of flowers bursting. They’re the flowers I bought for Riccardo, my bnb host, which have since been planted on his rooftop garden.
I have to believe we always take and leave something behind in our connections, no matter how fleeting they are. To be open to changing and being changed by someone in a matter of days or hours is a wild thing to do. But we are constellations of everyone we have touched or gardens watered by those who have touched us. I’ve got the world, so I’ll be alright. And the worlds I leave, retain my joy and connection in some sense. This sunshine can be enough; because it must.
With joy,
From Roisin
Because it must!