Ben Zamora: WE’VE ALL HAD TOO MUCH SORROW...

This work generously underwritten by The Starbucks Coffee Company. The title of this piece is a reference to the song Joy, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The full lyric states “We’ve all had too much sorrow – now is the time for joy”, as spoken to him by the ghost of his dead son. In his journal, The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave further states, “Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practiced method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost - at least, it can seem that way.” In his poem On Joy and Sorrow, Kahlil Gibran writes “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked”; that when we acknowledge and process our sorrow, we expand our capacity for joy. This piece focuses on the interconnectedness of sorrow and joy; light and dark. The title exists in the in between, in the moment of transition. In this space, we are left with fragments; traces of rooms and memories. Lines of light sear deep on our retinas, leaving behind incomplete segments like sedimentary layers. These shapes remain as amplified echoes in a room exploding with light, reflecting and expanding in the surrounding glass panels when viewed from within. When viewed from the outside, everything appears contained and confined to the volume defined by the surrounding architecture. But it happened again. It happens when we make bottomless love — there follows a bottomless sadness which is not despair but its nameless opposite. It has nothing to do with the passing of time. It’s not about loss. It’s about two seemingly parallel lines suddenly coming together inside us, in some place that is still wilderness. Joy, joy, the sopranos sing, reaching for the shimmering notes while our eyes fill with tears. - Excerpt from JOY by Lisel Mueller