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A Good Day

Originally Published: April 01, 2020
Lyn Hejinian book titles scrattered on a wood floor.

What goes into having a good day?

As I write this—over a week into self-imposed quarantine and likely to stay more-or-less so until my fortieth birthday rolls past in April—I think about how difficult it’s become for me to answer what should be a simple question. A good day seems to involve a lot of work, and if you have a family or, really, spend any amount of time with any amount of people, you know what happens with even the best-laid plans. “We’re going to have a good day!” I’ve announced to my kids, hours before finding myself inside a windowless thunderdome filled with disco lights, plastic simulations of trees, unidentifiable spots of stickiness, and scores of sugar-pumped children fighting to get ahead in line just so they can throw themselves off the edge of an inflatable cliff. I wrote an advice column in the safety of my head, while eating a lukewarm hot dog: Dear Dante, Is a good day actually a level of hell?

The other side of this is if it’s even worth spending too much time thinking about what it means to “have a good day,” which can feel petty, trivial or banal; the correct term is, of course, quotidian. Have a good day! we say to those people for whom we can’t wish anything more precise or poignant.

What goes into having a truly good day?
And what does that day mean for the next?

If the first months of 2020 have made anything clear to me, it’s that any imaginable future requires reaching some kind of answer. The future, which once seemed so straightforwardly interminable and unfathomable, is suddenly being measured out in decades, due to our relentless destruction of our climate, and now days, due to an unprecedented global pandemic. How many of us, for how long, have woken up each morning with the same question, in equal parts hope and dread: And what’s going to happen today? And if we don’t take the time now to re-think what goes into a good day, how many days can this, and we, go on? 

*

In Positions of the Sun, Lyn Hejinian writes, “Humans are forever creating new allegories out of things they find in the world. A feather, a paper flag on a stick, and an ivory chopstick are stuck beside an upright tulip in a jar.” Imagine, for a moment, that jar represents a day, a succession of different positions of the sun, before the rotation begins again. The feather, the paper flag, the chopstick, and the tulip: they’ve given the jar purpose, we could say, they’ve made the jar a good one. But we could also say that the jar has been made to hold these different things, just because it can, and now we’re trying to convince ourselves it’s all on purpose.

*

We wake up early to finish the work we couldn’t finish last night. Will this go into having a good day? For breakfast we eat granola with chia seeds, matcha powder and organic yogurt bought from the local farmer’s market. We drink a cup of coffee with butter. Will this go into having a good day? We keep the lights out so no one will know that we’re here. Will this go into having a good day? We read our horoscopes online, which tell us to avoid decisions about relationships. Will this go into having a good day? We put on a well-ironed white shirt; a wide, blue-or-red necktie; four-inch stiletto heels; cufflinks inherited from our favorite grandfather; a floral silk scarf given to us by our mother; cologne from an obscure Italian monastery; bright red lipstick. Will this go into having a good day? In our left pocket we carry three crystals: lapis lazuli, rose amethyst, citrine. Will this go into having a good day? We tell our children not to look straight into the policeman’s eyes. Will this go into having a good day? We book tickets to a festival, a flight to Thailand, a hotel room in Palm Beach with swimming pool access, a 14-course dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen. Will this go into having a good day? We post a photo of our dinner on Instagram. Over 200 people “heart” it, and 50 tell us we’re lucky. Will this go into having a good day? We tell a story to comfort our child, who doesn’t know why we can’t go home. Will this go into having a good day? We get an app on our computers that lets us look at Twitter for only 30 minutes a day. Will this go into having a good day? We get an app on our computers that tells us to set 30 minutes a day for our mental well-being. Will this go into having a good day? We report to our managers with an itemized list of how we’ve spent each of our contracted hours. Will this go into having a good day? In our purse we have a $20 bill, a glucose monitor, an insulin pump, and a can of mace. Will this go into having a good day? We worry about how we’ll turn that $20 bill into seven days’ worth of food. Will this go into having a good day? Before bed we take 50mg of an anti-depressant, a birth control pill, and a vitamin for “Hair Nails Skin,” with a glass of red wine. Will this go into having a good day? Our sheets are Egyptian cotton, our beds made of memory foam, our pillows are labelled “versatile.” Will this go into having a good day? We close our eyes and say a prayer for forgiveness, because you never know. Will this go into having a good day?

*

A week before many of the schools and universities throughout Europe suspended in-person instruction, I met in my department’s lounge with the four students writing “Individual Assignments” in creative writing. Roos is working on a multilingual children’s story about a witch journeying through the Netherlands. Indie is writing a series of persona poems that critique the male gaze. Elsbeth takes non-literary forms of writing, such as the recipe, as the blueprint for her autobiographical poetry. And Sven’s text is composed of a series of sections totaling the number of years in their life, beginning with their birth as a twin and how their identity comes to diverge (or has always diverged) from their brother. I had to laugh when Sven told me they were thinking of calling it My Life. “Every name is an event,” the writer of another work called My Life once said.

From what I can tell, Roos, Sven, Indie and Elsbeth are not obvious friends. Still, they like each other, and they read each other critically and generously. Their writing reveals their scars, but their camaraderie shows their capacity for pleasure. They laugh, they make each other laugh. A group of open, kind people; work they care about and want to share; a safe place to be; time. Maybe that’s all it takes. That night before bed I said to my spouse, “Today was a good day.”

*

 “They’re all living lives, and I’m living a life, and isn’t that weird? But it’s also extremely touching.” This is a quote from Lyn I’ve written down in a bright pink notebook, which I mention because that particular pink, whenever I see it, inexplicably gives me pleasure. Should I call her “Lyn” here, or “Hejinian?” What do I do with a writer who is also inextricably a person to me?

The quote doesn’t come from a book. The next part I can only paraphrase: There are two ways to understand this weird, touching fact that all of us are living lives simultaneous to and in parallel with each other. We might say, “It’s all magnificently meaningless,” or the complete opposite, the second part to the correlative, “It’s all completely valuable.”

A month before many of the schools and universities throughout Europe suspended in-person instruction, I sat for two days in the back corner of a classroom filled to capacity at the Université Paris Diderot, trying to write down everything Lyn was saying about what it means to interpret and narrativize our lives. As part of the Poets and Critics series organized by Abigail Lang, Vincent Broqua, and Olivier Brossard, Lyn had travelled from Berkeley to Paris to spend a couple days fielding questions about poetics, reading from her recent work, recounting the One Thousand and One Nights, and gently disclosing bits of Language gossip to a group of writers, artists, and scholars, who themselves had come from all over France, Europe, the UK, and the United States. The virus was already on the continent, but it felt far enough away that whenever it came up, someone inevitably would say, “You know, more people die of the flu each year…”

The Saturday after the symposium ended, Lyn, Obe Alkema, and I walked through Paris, with a loose plan to visit the Louvre. On the Rue de Rivoli we encountered a group of marchers followed by police buses. The buses lined up along the street, and what seemed like hundreds of policeman came running out of them. Obe searched on his phone and suggested the marchers were gilet jaunes, making their way to Bastille. I thought, marchers and policemen alike, I don’t want to be on a street filled with angry men. Lyn looked like she would have followed them to find out what was really going on, if she hadn’t already promised us to go look at paintings.  

At the corner of Rue de Rivoli and Place du Châtelet, a dozen boys on BMX bikes rode past us, doing wheelies and bunny hops. They looked just a bit older than my nine-year-old son. Were they with the marchers, or had they just decided to take advantage of the emptied street? The best word to describe them is ebullient. I don’t know what their intention was, but I understood this collective performance to mean, Don’t be afraid

During the symposium, Lyn directly connected the weird, touching fact of all of us living our lives to activism. She observed that the thing about marches, protests, and other forms of activism is that they are not always, and not even likely to be, successful. We might say then, “It’s all magnificently meaningless.” Or we might say, “It’s all completely valuable.” If you’ve been to a march or participated in some kind of collective action, Lyn said, you’ll find that whether or not the objective is achieved, people have gathered to try to do something together, and in the end they have a great day, a really good day, among the limited number of days they have. Isn’t that also significant? It’s true that, whatever the outcome, those protestors clearly looked like they were having a better day than the police that were sent in by the state to suppress them. Through the windows of the buses, it was hard to tell if they were the enforcers or the ones being enforced. But those boys on the bikes had the best day of all.

Seeing those boys, I felt like the first time I read the book Happily. You only need to observe the capacity for joy, connectedness and care put into her writing to know that Lyn Hejinian, the person, is a radical. By my count, Lyn is approaching 80, and yet the grassroots work she does as an activist and advocate remains tireless. She’s not the kind of poetry figure who writes splashy essays for magazines on “What the Left Needs to Be Doing Right Now,” travels to conferences to argue why the innovative aesthetics of her and her friends’ work are also the most politically radical, or spends half her time on Twitter calling out others’ “bad politics.” But none of the hours of her day are idle; imagine what Lyn does during all those hours we can’t witness online. And, most importantly, those she supports, protects, and helps mobilize are often those people her peers are likely to overlook or to abstract. Maybe the reason she does this so effectively is because she cares deeply but refuses to be dogmatic.

This seems to me to be the harder position to inhabit. There will be no revolution based on dogma without a deeper development of how we practice care. As Claudia Rankine has written, “Happily presents us with a world that allows the breath between ‘this is’ and ‘happening’ to govern… Happily is the experience of the mind's flourishing toward a life that remains larger than our reason can imbue or imbrue.” In other words, “They’re all living lives, and I’m living a life, and isn’t that weird?” And still, even in self-quarantine, our lives are touching. 

*

Six weeks before many of the schools and universities throughout Europe suspended in-person instruction, my father-in-law, Henri van der Velden, passed away at 87-years-old. He had had serious complications with his lungs for over two decades, but he loved being alive, he recognized joy, and he had a vast capacity for pleasure. Every time he was hospitalized, and we worried it was the end, he managed to pull through. My spouse called him “the comeback kid.”

Henri lived his whole life in Brabant, a southern province of the Netherlands, and I grew up flying between South Korea and the United States. He didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Dutch very easily. We hardly had anything in common. But he liked it when I would have a glass of red wine with him, even if we just sat there smiling at each other. He is the grandfather my children will remember from their childhoods, because my own father hasn’t been around. He is the father I will remember who helped me become a mother.

This time, when it was clear his condition was critical, Henri refused to go to the hospital. He announced on Monday that he knew he was going to die. His son, my spouse, went to his childhood home, where his parents still lived, to take care of him. Henri had built this house for his family, laying the wood floors in the living room with his own hands.

Although he hadn’t been eating or drinking for days, on Friday he said, “I know this is my last day, so I want a glass of red wine.”

That night he took his last breath while he was in his son’s arms, with his wife and his other son next to him. He was in the bedroom that he had slept in for nearly six decades.

I like to think, I need to think, that Henri figured it all out, and that day was a good day.

*

Lyn, Obe, and I never made it inside the Louvre. The line was too long, and the sun was too bright. Instead we walked up and down the Seine, looked at the scaffolds on Notre Dame, stopped to drink water on a café terrace, plotted a writing exercise that involved tarot and index cards, and talked about poetry. We ended the day with a glass of wine by her hotel, where I gave her the lapis lazuli bracelet I had been wearing and she kept admiring. I had found it while spending time in Amsterdam with CAConrad, who told me lapis lazuli was the stone of poetry and gave strict instructions about leaving it in a bed of salt overnight and then flushing that salt down the toilet.

From the beginning I had planned to wear the bracelet while finishing my next poetry book (or with the hope of finishing my next poetry book) and then to present it to Lyn when I went to Berkeley in April, for a conference planned in her honor. The conference, “Poetics and Its Contexts,” would have coincided with my fortieth birthday.

In Korea, you eat seaweed soup on your birthday to honor your mother’s labor. I was carrying the stone of poetry on my wrist to honor my mentor’s labor. Somehow in Paris she seemed to know that bracelet was meant for her. It called to her, as CA might say. Giving it to Lyn then felt like the right way to conclude our good day.

*

Just wakin’ up in the morning, gotta thank God.
I don’t know, but today seems kinda odd.

Reflecting on his song, “It Was a Good Day,” Ice Cube said in an interview with Blender, “It was the summer of ’92… I remember thinking, ‘Okay, there’s been the riots, people know I will deal with that. That’s a given. But I rap all this gangsta stuff — what about all the good days I had?’”

Over a week into self-imposed quarantine, and likely to stay so until my fortieth birthday rolls past in April, I want to start thinking about the good days I’ve had, because I find I can no longer imagine a future built upon anger. Anger is useful for identifying the stakes of what we do with our lives; for letting go of the habits, routines, and expectations that imprison us; and for prompting us to action. As Audre Lorde has written in “The Uses of Anger,” “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being.”

But anger must also be met with pleasure, joy, and tenderness. Every woman, myself included, is only human. Anger can light a spark, but it also burns us out. And it’s clear how this burn-out can so easily become a weapon used against us; think of how often—personally, professionally and politically—our outrage actually ends up distracting and exhausting us.   

“Lives are practices, saying just enough of what they do,” writes Lyn in Positions of the Sun. My life, our lives, are changing right now in ways we never expected a few months or even weeks ago. It’s clear to me, however, that in order to flourish toward any life, I need to think hard on what to care about and what not, and how to care for and be cared for more deeply. For now, all I need for this is a safe place to be and time. Maybe this is all anyone needs, and we should take care that all can have it.

I gotta say, I’m ready for a good day.

 

Mia You was born in Seoul, South Korea, grew up in Northern California, and now lives in Utrecht, The...

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