16 minute read
joy as an act of resistance
HARRISON LANE
The idea of joy, the feeling of joy, and the experiences with it are something I am deeply interested in and I have a feeling that you all might be, too. I also have this feeling that as we are wading through it all — the wake of the pandemic, major social injustices, the world on fire, my dog peed on the carpet, am I killing all the bees by not having wildflower gardens? Oh no, is there lactose in this? — it has become difficult to remain, or even want to be, joy-full. Joy, fun, play, or even laughter are almost punk rock in their defiance of the weight of all other issues we collectively and individually shoulder. So, my leather jacket-metal stud-teenage angst-loud music-sweeping bangsesque response to this feeling is: What does joy look like while it resists? When it defies convention, plays with archetypes, and has fun with an idea? The answer lies in the things that make me happy: imagining, drawing and building. Here, I want to understand joy through a series of pointed questions about what joy even is, then rendered through the conduit of resistance to explore how it can manifest or come to be understood physically through built works.
what happens when you feel joy?
When people experience joy, a symphony of physiological responses occurs which radiate out through the body. Exactly which area of the brain is difficult to point to, there might be a few actually, but we all know what it feels like, right? Our hearts beat faster, we start to sweat, and our faces flush revealing rosy cheeks to the world. It might be at times a little embarrassing, but our bodies can often reveal how we’re feeling: our central nervous system signals our brain that what we’re experiencing is joyful. The brain responds to the effect of Tom Cruise in the 1988 cinematic masterpiece, Cocktail, releasing a mixture of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin into the rest of the body, changing the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, hence the flush as your heart rate increases, even the perception of temperature within the fingers.
If this all sounds rather lovey-dovey, that’s definitely because it is. Oxytocin is associated with the deep and highly soughtafter sensation we call love. Released when breastfeeding, while in labour, engaging in romantic activity, oxytocin is relatively new to the evolutionary drink list of hormonal responses and is thought to have been developed to remedy a myriad of survival and reproductive challenges. A flurry of wellness and nature-supportive websites regale the public that it is thought to even be released while hugging a tree, with the scientific world more hesitant to agree. Despite this, the benefits of being in nature are undeniable and Canadian healthcare professionals nationwide are seeing what it’s all about, with over 10,000 of them actually prescribing nature to help what ails you, including stress and anxiety disorders.
thinking happy thoughts
Being in nature is important, barring that hugging a tree might make you fall in love, but it can help soothe sometimes debilitating conditions. We owe these new or unconventional treatments to research in a continually diversifying field of psychology. It is impossible to research the field of happiness without at least mentioning Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. A professor of psychology at University of California Riverside, she has authored numerous papers and books regarding happiness, ways to achieve it and ways to keep it. She was also the first to posit the happiness pie chart, where she discovered that 50% of someone’s overall long-term happiness is inherited, and circumstantial influences like salary account for only 10%. The remaining 40% is what we can actively change, like committing to a goal, expressing gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, all categorised in the intentional activity section. But what about people who don’t need much help with the hard stuff? Resiliency, a word I kind of loathe, is critical in enduring the times between the high points. Overall, individuals who demonstrate greater resilience will be more active in the cognitive control area of the prefrontal cortex and less so in areas associated with processing emotions. So how do you foster it? Can you really learn to be resilient? The answer is: sort of, yeah. It takes a bit of work, can be difficult to achieve if you’ve got a lifetime of hardship; however, the building of resilience is totally accessible. Number one is having a strong support network around you for when you stumble. It doesn’t necessarily need to be family, it can also be a chosen family or some combination of the two. This, and several other criteria like physical activity, selflessness, and mindfulness basically ensure that a person will be and remain resilient.
Conveniently, the same criteria may also lend well to longevity. Currently, there are five locations around the globe identified for a seemingly miraculous effect on the length of life. Known as blue zones, people of vastly different cultural and economic backgrounds live way longer, happier lives than most other places due to interpersonal connections and a healthy (ish) lifestyle (I say -ish because in the Netflix mini-series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, a particularly honest centenarian reveals that the tea linked to her long life was in fact her family’s recipe for wine). Interestingly, these Blue Zones are hyper-focused and cannot be examined at a regional scale, but at that of the city, village or island. Beyond strong interpersonal connections, blue zone people have a continued purpose even if no longer working (though some just seemingly don’t stop and terms like work seem inappropriate in place of vocation or raison d’etre), and sustained physical activity.
One response to joy which I haven’t mentioned yet might be the most recognisable one: laughter. While the cliché ‘laughter is the best medicine’ does hold some merit to beneficial mental health outcomes, it is also examined closely by sociologists and psychoanalysts alike. Laughter of course is generally the response to something humorous. Two main theories of humour, superiority and incongruity, differ slightly, however their overarching ideals are that within a joke a winner and loser exist (superiority), and that for something to be humorous it must be incongruous (incongruity theory) in relation to an object or concept. Laughter is the result of this incongruity.
but who’s thought a lot about jo y?
Now, a shift from the physical effects of joy to the metaphysical concepts of joy through an extensive skimming of philosophical thought of the people who think and write extensively on the subject of human existence, happiness and attaining it.
Although philosophers have been grouped according to commonalities of their observed views, while some are aligned geographically like Plato and Aristotle, the mind map’s organisation is primarily thematic. Overall, Transcendentalist thought paired well with several Daoists, and overall spirituality hugged the perimeter of Buddha, Rumi and even Emerson (who was particularly prickly in terms of placement and I am neither satisfied nor happy about where he ended up). Marx, Durkheim, and Adam Smith are by no means shockingly grouped, as they all held that a real Protestant work ethic would result in pure joy. The Bummer category holds Kant, Voltaire, Huxley and Nietsche all aligned in that joy is simply a fallacy. The shrug guy ¯\_( : J )_/¯ emoji section comprises individuals who seemingly can’t make up their minds and/or are the real mavericks in thinking and thus do not really align with anyone. Naturally, this section is what I most closely align with on a personal level. In the following section Kant, Camus, and Locke will be explained further.
Have I mentioned that I am a builder of sorts? Well, I am. It’s something I really enjoy doing and have come to find particular value in the flow state I enter while executing a project, which is in fact about a hundred thousand little puzzles and processes in part of a much larger goal. I wondered if I could synthesise or come to understand the complexities of the theories laid out in the psychology and philosophy section in greater detail through building. These meditative practices on joy garnered the names Weirdo 001-010, and are rendered thematically by colour according to philosophical interpretations (red), psychological (yellow), and humour (blue), i.e. weirdo 001, left. Of these weirdo interpretations, four have been physically constructed. In ideation, the weirdos as a whole were meant to challenge and resist conventional ways of building, either known by me or overall in the realm of woodworking and furniture design. To do so, a series of obstructions were laid out for each, which force innovative previously unforeseen opportunities. In essence, the obstructions disrupt and resist convention. Metaphorically, they’re meant to make me fumble around in a room I’ve never been in, desperately looking for the light switch, only for the lights to reveal a chair.
weirdo 003 was the first to be constructed and encapsulates the psychological theory of intentional activity, namely goal setting and to a lesser degree, mindfulness (through flow state). The goal-setting theme was then deployed for myself and the user, where the chair was to be made of found material exclusively, had to be finished within a single eight-hour period, and the occupant would be asked to balance for as long as possible which I believe to be either highly difficult, or bordering on damn near impossible.
The materials were gleaned from a neighbouring dumpster of the community-based woodshop (Ottawa City Woodshop) where I mostly work. Collecting usable material proved difficult however I set to work after approximately 30 minutes of rummaging. The seat and fulcrum were milled and glued first as they would require considerable gluing time to be viable. Flattening, trimming, and planing to desired and uniform thickness ran the clock down about 30 minutes as well, with gluing eating up another 15. The backrest and crest were then constructed in tandem, which of course meant more milling, trimming and flattening. The spindles of the backrest required extra thought and a somewhat creative solution to uniformity with the lathe as a natural option however, the speed at which I was moving led me to use a filleting bit and a router table. By this point, the seat had been resting for approximately one hour and could be dressed and cut to accept the fulcrum. To round the base of the fulcrum a lathe was used in a somewhat unconventional manner, a term known as off-axis turning which I will go into more detail when describing weirdo 010. I checked the clock and 55 minutes had passed totalling five hours. “What?! That can’t be right.” It is amazing how much time can hemorrhage away from you while changing blades, explaining to confused onlookers that this is a rocking chair and is about goal setting and joy, you’re desperately looking for glue, and cursing a forgotten pencil across the room. With the holes drilled to accept the backrest into the seat and into the crest, and the fulcrum sized appropriately to be laid into the base of the seat, I pre-sanded all components and then glued it all together. All in all, this chair took seven and a quarter hours to complete and the users of the chair adorned nothing but smiles despite falling drastically short of their goals. Success!
The following construction, weirdo 005b, examined John Locke’s belief that the pursuit of happiness is the foundation of true liberty and thus, happiness. Here, joy is interpreted as comfort while the canted-curved plane of the day bed invites the user to pursue it. Due to the proportions and ergonomics of the piece, only a short time of repose is found before a shift would be needed to regain comfort. To achieve a compound curvilinear form, kerf bending of oriented strand board (OSB) was chosen as the construction method, as I had never attempted it before. Of what I had seen and read, kerf bending is used with plywood, where the grain orientation of each layer rests perpendicular to the layer before it, allowing for equal strength longitudinally and transverse across the sheet. It is also generally used with uniform bends and I can honestly say, never with complex compound curvatures. OSB was chosen as the best material due to the ungovernable,
general mayhem of the grain direction, which was thought to allow for more complex curvatures. The kerfs were set at 12mm, fanning to 50mm at the opposite side with a depth of approximately 9mm of the total 11.10mm sheets. Each sheet was then liberally coated with glue and a horrifyingly stressful duo of ratchet straps were used to pull into the desired form. In the past, my overindulgence of clamps has been noted and this was no exception, with about 15 all employed to calm my nerves and sustain required pressure to make sure this weirdo didn’t end up especially weird. After 24 hours, the clamps were removed and despite my suspicions, the form endured. Because of the varied modes of occupation I could imagine, and all that I couldn’t, the legs were set into the plane of the lounge at haphazard angles to suppress a myriad of force vectors someone might transfer while continually shifting, chasing the carrot of happiness on weirdo 005b.
French philosopher Albert Camus, found within the shrug guy section, posits that the search for meaning can corrupt one’s chance at meaningful happiness. It is inherent to the human condition to seek this meaning within the universe however, only through an ongoing acceptance of absurdity can one find purpose and meaning and thus attain joy. For Camus, this vision of happiness can be described by imagining Sisyphus, doomed to forever roll his precious rock up a mountain, to be actually enjoying this absurd task. While I may not roll a rock up a mountain, I do continuously, almost feverishly sketch chair designs. Relegated to the margins of my notebooks, the crumpled napkins on flights, and sometimes even the surfaces of the desks on which I work, half-baked elevations of chairs can be found. I cannot stop doing this and only after reading Camus did I realize that the designs are all pretty similar. For weirdo 006b, the endless design I keep working out has finally been made. It is a Windsor chair, more specifically an American Windsor, my favourite and astonishingly difficult to make. The difficulty lies in the legs, which are turned by hand using a lathe. The tenons at the pinnacle of the leg, which are accepted by the seat, are conical and must be made exactly
the same angle and width as the others, as any difference in dimension will result in a leg too far up or too far down in the seat, compromising the structural integrity of the whole. For reasons unknown to myself now, I decided that at no point would I use a measuring device of any kind throughout the construction of a chair that requires almost surgical precision. It is clear to me now that I am a fool. Eyeballing everything, I attempted to match the angles and proportions of all four of the legs as best I could. The first leg is by far the easiest, but each subsequent leg leads to minor deviations which can completely derail the success of a chair. By the fourth leg, the pressure amounts to metric tonnes. Miraculously, they fit into the seat fairly well. The backrest spindles were constructed similarly to weirdo 003 and a router table. Emboldened by my success with the legs, my choice of drill bit versus the spindle diameter was about 1mm off resulting in some looseness. While the absurdity of designing and building a chair without a measuring device is certainly absurd, to really send it home all the effort and stress was for a chair that can’t be used because it is without a seat.
The last weirdo to be completed was weirdo 010 and it is representative of this Emanuel Kant quote: ‘Unfortunately, the notion of happiness is so indeterminate that although every human being wishes to attain it, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills.’ 1 For Kant, happiness isn’t really there, mostly because we can’t define it for what it is. What a bummer. The results of this construction were then determined to be indeterminate, sort of. I devised a game which, by chance, would dictate what I made through off-axis turning on a lathe. Six intersecting lines at either end of a square piece of lumber were randomly assigned numbers by Michael Utley and Evan Kettler and would become corresponding positions between points on the lathe. Cards were then drawn which would dictate the position, causing the piece of lumber to swing closer and then farther away than the depth of cut by the chisel held by yours truly. In the end, the sculptural form was enjoyably made by chance, is objectively pleasing to look at (as determined by the fact that people keep offering to purchase it from me), and yet serves no real purpose and while they are sought after, I have also been asked multiple times what exactly they are.
1 McLaughlin, Jeff, editor ‘Immanuel Kant - On Moral Principles’ Jeff McLaughlin, editor. The Originals: Classic Readings in Western Philosophy. Kamloops/Victoria, BC: Thompson River University, 2017. pp, 276–77
Well, that’s it, so to speak. I am by no means a philosopher nor psychologist and these interpretations may prove to be really, really far off according to any authority on the subject or upon reflection some years down the line. Despite this likelihood, I embarked on this journey to synthesise these diverse perspectives and theories through tangible manifestations— enter the weirdos, to better understand what may be the most complex faculty of existence. In the end, as I reflect on the joy found in the creation of these unconventional, sometimes useless pieces, I am reminded that joy itself is somewhat of a weirdo; resilient, ever-evolving and pretty hard to define. It is in our acts of resistance, our pursuit of meaning amidst absurdity, and our willingness to embrace the unexpected that joy finds its most vibrant expressions. So, as we continue to navigate the complexities of life, let us carry with us the spirit of the weirdos—an ode to joy that resists, questions, and, above all, persists.
Long live the resistance.
HARRISON LANE is a furniture designer, builder, and currently completing a Master’s thesis in architecture at Carleton University. instagram: @hdslaneoh
