...Because I'm Happy
An eight-person orchestra eked out Happy by Pharrell Williams. In any other setting the musicians might have appeared more impressive, comforting even. I had not heard live music in so long. The dulled music was not a lack of talent on the musician’s side, the sound just wasn’t big enough to fill the space of the Jacob Javits Center, whose immensity dampened their efforts. I was touched by the musicians. They were trying to do an impossible thing, and I couldn’t help but identify with their struggle. This feeling was different from happiness, but close.
The Javits, named after the founder of the NYU School of Law, is the largest convention center in Manhattan. Built in 1980, the building expanded as the first stage in a massive rezoning project in 2013. Long finished, the building now sits like a billowing cloud of windows on 11th Avenue, grazing the ever-busy West Side Highway of Manhattan. Beside the Javits, mock buildings, with the same cold glass, rise ever more quickly on Hudson Yards: a dystopic obsceneland of wealth that has fruited all over the island of Manhattan, but with a distinct crystallization in this locale.
I never mean to go to The Javits Center, but find myself there every several years. Once I was a guest of a friend whose mother’s company was in the toy fair. Before that I had gone in by way of friends of family, to the book fair. Before that I graduated, threw my hat into the air and sat next to a guy I slept with once whose last name also started with the letter ‘L’. Each time I walk through these halls I feel what people who first entered cathedrals must have felt: to move anything within this space must be an act of god or wealth, or connections the extent of which I can barely imagine. This time it was for my first dose of covid-19 vaccine.
My shoes tapped quickly on stone to keep a six-foot distance from the person behind me as we snaked through the Javits. It felt like a 1940’s period piece, a time I was always taught to be in the distant past, when things were harder. Which is, of course, nonsense. But it still felt like I was walking onto a movie set: into the moment of crisis that stops so many lives in their tracks. That infamous virus gripped my arm and my mind began to spin as I sat in the 15-minute observation area: am I the one in how many million who will react poorly to the vaccine? What is that taste in the back of my throat? People sat like houseplants, each in their own folding chair, together and separate across the landscape of an otherwise entirely empty room. Earlier I was wished a happy early birthday by the nurse. This was how my birthday month started: following the long line of soldiers whose temporary job it was to guide us along taped arrows on the ground. “Happy birthday” was a small gesture, but it made me feel seen.
I looked at my phone. After weeks of trial, Derrick Chauvin was convicted. I was thinking about the difference between force and power. Force is a push. Power is a magic trick. I try these thoughts on and they surprise me by making a bit of sense. Upon a smattering of research, indeed, force is an interaction between two objects. Power a measurement: the rate at which work is done.
After a long silence - the orchestra began again: New York, New York. I thought about that story, or maybe it was just the scene in a movie, where the orchestra played while the Titanic sank. I imagined the music as the ship sank, the notes sweeping away into the tragic night. What’s sinking with this music now? After enough people sit in these socially distanced chairs, we’ll just go back to how things were, back on this sinking ship. If anything, this very location beside the new over-extravagant Hudson Yards, is sinking. Homeless people used to live in, around, and under Penn Station. Now, the new Penn Station is eerily empty. That cold static silence insisting on the illusion that these people’s issues do not exist. It took how many millions people making art, using their voices, using fire to convict that man on that day. When the homeless population of single adults living in shelters spiked in 2020. These issues are related, covered over by the silence of ‘business as usual.’ Overall this homeless rate is some of the highest it has been since 2015, according to data presented by Coalition for the Homeless. And with the joyful refrain of New York, New York, the urge to be taken away with a single major chord and let problems go with one pebble of a solution makes the act of forgetting appear easy with a little change in spotlight. But the memories grow mold around the blots of forgetfulness.
On the one hand, the verdict was a relief. But there was an overwhelming amount of energy, force pushing into this decision. If Chauvin had not been convicted, Minneapolis would have been set ablaze again - and who knows where else. The streets were ready. And let them always be ready. To be ready is to be aware, to be alive, to have the wind at your back. Mostly, to turn the perspective away from the structure of the ship, and towards one another.
I am moved to link two concepts, one ofAngela Davis’ “Freedom is a Constant Struggle,” and the other, of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Tsing in her book, “Mushroom at the End of the World” describes precarity as a place of generativity. Indeed, to step with courage into each moment with all its uncertainty, is a moment of freedom. And, Davis, “[working] even when we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon” (Davis, 32) of a world that does not manufacture the kind of wealth displayed on the Hudson Yards block, and abolishes the racist structures and institutions to which this wealth is linked - and growing.
The island of Manhattan has a thousand ports that frey into the water from the gridded streets like torn fabric. On the narrow land, no matter where you go, you are never far from a river, you can smell the trade like the prick of sap. Sometimes all I want to do is go into a store here and buy, like $2000 worth of shoes I’ll wear a few times and think nothing of it. That feeling tastes bitter as sap in the back of my throat. I can’t describe it, but it sticks. Hudson Yards and the Javits Center sit on landfill, not uncommon for the city, which has steamrolled streams, and ponds, and downed small hills. The only sense of land you get are sharp inclines and declines which - to me, at least - always come as a surprise: Murray Hill, The Bronx, Washington Heights, and that hill on 110th which comes from nowhere like the back of a whale. And the landfill: which expands the island from the 40’s on the west side, all the way down to the battery.
After existing since the late 1800’s as a railroad hub, Hudson Yards was considered in a 2005 rezoning report “the last frontier available in Manhattan”. How many ways manifest destiny plays both across the continent, within the city. And closer? Sometimes I feel it working its long arms, tapping the soul inside me as well.
Which brings me to the word happy. Pharrel Williams sings “because I’m happy…” in a gospel-inspired good feeling song that was not captured at the Javits when I was vaccinated. As I listened in that folding chair the orchestral struggle could only be described as sad. Which brought the word happy, and it’s meaning into a sharp focus.
In the US, happy is thrown around to uplift a perfectly mundane day, but also to describe an entire life. Happy is returned to each year: a birthday, holidays, sometimes a single boozy hour is labeled happy. But most insidious, of course, is the constant pursuit, as written in the nation’s Declaration of Independence: of happiness. And, as far as I have always been concerned, happiness was a perfectly legitimate goal in life. And indeed, would, in the end, be proof of living well and reaching my goals.
The word Happy has a couple of ancient strands, the most common of which is “luck”, “good fortune”, or “chance” from various Proto-Germanic and Norse roots, “hap” like happen. Which may also wedge the word in time. They were first recorded in the 14th century. Throughout Europe, from Greece through Scandinavia, versions of the word happy meant lucky, with a distinct nod to financial good fortune. A dismal thing to hang one’s hat on. It seems the pursuit of this happiness must breed a life of precarity. No wonder the pursuit leaves one particularly ragged. To choose a life in the pursuit of happiness is to choose the life of a gambler, it appears.
I am not going to judge the priorities of happiness in anyone’s life. It is more than a person’s right, and of course there is a place for happiness. But let happiness not be confused with freedom, nor joy. If happiness is related in its origins to financial success it defines a major vein of the US ethos. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” echoes within the very structure of the US identity. But it’s the word pursuit that gets to me. Deep on a Tuesday night, long after I should been asleep, John Oliver, in a show about the complexities of Asian American identity in the United States, exemplified an advertisement for Filipino nurses to come to the United States to “chase happiness all over.” Which sounds more like a threat than an opportunity. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
It is a particularly capitalist buy-in to the myth of manifest destiny, and defines the ongoing, foolish, dogged exhaustion baked into the pursuit of the American dream, the outcome of which will bring will bring a euphoric (I say euphoric because because it is directly talking about the individual, and not about many people) happiness.
I walked out into the sunlight. My arm aching, and a massive something shifting within that was the shape of the past year. I felt light in a way, I felt a little engine spark: I felt happy? Yes, joy? A bit. Satisfaction? slightly. There in the center of disgusting wealth, on a saturated island in the ruins of capitalism I had the desire to throw the bird-donned mask, with the light blue I have loved so much into the air and scream stupidly, thoughtlessly, with no direction of how or why, into the roofless, barenaked sky: The world is going to change! while I took a step into the street.