Day

 

Martha Hamilton says the phrase ‘back in the day’ has always intrigued her. Which day would that be? She says it is interesting indeed to accumulate so many days that they are sorted into large groups, as well as the particular present day. I have to agree. I also ponder ‘back in the day’. The phase is used in a glib way, I find. It has about it the disbelieving air of people who haven’t quite processed that they have a past, that time has a way of being different now to what it was then, as if that could happen to someone like them. They feel discountenanced by the use of a verb to describe time’s behaviour. Time moves on, for example. Does it? And did time move on ‘back in the day’? Unlikely. Susan Southall says days may be passed, spent, or seized. Observably, the past is redolent of such action verbs. Diaries go to any lengths to confirm the fact. Historians stay up half the night. But then, ‘back in the day’ seems not to be a simple case of the past. The phrase is cloudy with psychology, hovering with historical hinting. The phrase is often used to indicate another time, when things were normal, or at least normal for them. As Martha Hamilton says, it’s the very vagueness of the day being referred to that is intriguing. The seeming impossibility of dating ‘back in the day’ to a date, or even a timespan, is implicit. And not just impossibility, actual aversion. It would be awfully inappropriate, even transgressive, to locate ‘back in the day’ to an exact day on a calendar. Calendars are for hanging on a hook in the kitchen. Possessors of this period of unaccountable time maintain the appearance of having some kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that is not about to be understood, or appreciated, by those of today. Then again, the very vagueness frequently seems to refer to something as broad as the 1980s, or the Victorian era, or the time before electricity, or clocks. There is an unexplained before-and-after moment that only the cognoscenti grasp. Keeping it unexplained adds to the allure.  Susan Southall is of the view that each of the days has its purpose and each day has its times. This is an antidote, I think, to the anxious nostalgia of ‘back in the day’. It is best to learn from the present and stay there. Knowing that that‘s where you are is a start. Her view is the necessary and necessarily true flipside to sufficient unto the day being the evil thereof. Anyone who hasn’t pondered the truth of that saying could long desperately and long for any kind of ‘back in the day’. What else is there, if the present is inexplicable? Then again, maybe we all have in the back of our minds a ‘back in the day’ quadrant, mulling over memories, not quite sure why what’s happening now is better (or worse) than what happened then, whenever that happened, the calendar in the mind being vaguish.