You Say You Want a Resolution

The year is one week old.  If it were a newborn, it would be home from the hospital by now, adjusting to the quiet of a room, bonding with a mother, trying out its voice and perhaps discovering its own tiny hands. As a segment of time, it has already grown familiar and we forget to light candles or say prayers and simply let the hours accommodate football and leftovers and bad habits.  Work.  We are as we were, most of us, carrying our resolutions in our pockets or wearing them like bracelets, or setting them free like balloons in the unseasonably warm January wind.

Digitally speaking, or relating to photography, resolution has to do with clarity of image-- the distinction of objects against a background.  New Year' s Day for me seems sharp... it is deceptively new and manageable and stands out.  I usually hoard alone-time, visit the same bookshop or church... I walk in the evening clarity and replay things.  It occurred to me this year that my memories are vertical-- they stack, by date or event... and while distant recalls are blurry-- I can flip through past December 31sts like a box of postcards.  The early ones-- middle school and teenage nights--- I'd tag along with my older sister to a movie... or we'd be grouped in some neighbor's home-- whoever had a live-in babysitter or nanny... while our parents went out en masse and celebrated or got drunk. But as we grew older-- this night was well-planned and meaningful. We anticipated it.  I had a dress-- an early Betsey Johnson slinky black thing-- I wore it year after year... I felt tall and grown up and sexy and photographable.  Boys wrapped me in their arms and danced... spilled champagne on it... I closed my eyes and held the moment.  

In college I often traveled during Christmas break and ended up in El Salvador watching beach-fireworks or in Stockholm with the Auroras and explosions against the freezing black Scandinavian sky. My first year in Manhattan after graduation, I partied at an apartment on the Upper West side... it belonged to some preppy drug dealer and it was fantastically crowded with all kinds of bohemians and art students and the sound of classic soul blasting through a spectacular stereo system.  Someone popped a champagne cork in their eye... after an ER visit some of us ended up at the Corso on East 86th Street, dancing to Tito Puente until past noon on the 1st.  We all vowed we would spend every New Year's Eve together--- forever. I never saw most of those people again, despite the best intentions... 

Once I became a musician there were the gigs-- many, many- -some in dive bars, some in fancy venues and hotels... Chinese restaurants, the Tribeca Grill with Hiram Bullock, a Led Zeppelin tribute set once with some society orchestra... one at Caroline's, many at BB King's... and I would wheel equipment home in the early hours, my pockets stuffed with cash which seemed all wrong, because it was I who'd had the fun.  Or I'd take a subway with wilting revelers, exhausted waitresses and bus-boys... way past all closing time, watching new couples succumbing to passion among the drunks and vomiters...  At home there would be either a sleeping child or quiet rooms to welcome me-- maybe a message from my mother, and I indulged in what I perceived as the religion of January 1-- the resolution of day from year.  It seemed sacred and fragile.

In Sweden on New Year's Day, the whole country in unison watches Walt Disney.  Huddled and hungover under blankets, you can see in every candled window the television sets in synch.  Rituals. Breakfasts-- special pastries in Italy, and fish courses.  

This year, as the last two, I missed Alan Merrill.  Not only were we bandmates and spectators at our own revelry, but we were like brother and sister... we could wink or blink and the other would understand.  I saluted him as I stacked the vertical layers of the holiday one on top of the other, and things bled out.  The 'odds', the tiny movies of our lives which escape but remain at these moments-- they come back like fairy smoke and deceive us with their narcotic aura.  Modeling, as a child in a frock on some runway in the Catskills... or wearing a narrow skirt and a tank top later in a photo session, realizing I am not a model...  I don't belong here.  The perfect romance I had once in an elevator trip in the old music building at 3 AM... the laundry room at college one magical night... these deviations or vacations from our life-narrative that we have neither integrated nor fully dismissed.  Like an 8-ball, these moments enter the glass octagon window of our vision with a kind of clarity, and then disappear.  

I read a definition of music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color."  It made sense to me... what I do needs to have some kind of idea, or emotion.  How to use 'music' in a sentence?  One cannot.  I remember when I arrived in the UK, with my pop-hooks and predictable lyrics... realizing it was all useless and meaningless.  I talked with Lou Reed, I watched young bands smash one another until they bled... I slept with punks, I tore my clothes-- I smoked and used a plectrum.  I read, I dismantled myself and examined the pieces by the neon light of a pub across from my London flat.  

Gradually I began to become who I am.  My bass playing was characterized not by the way I struck the strings but the way I released them.  Music wrapped itself around my limbs like a lover.  It bled.  

I realize I am aging but I am still becoming.  I stack the movies of my days-- the lyrics and the pictures... like vertical chapters of some continuum that relentlessly goes forward.  One week-- like a thin slice of layer cake, the rest of which will be devoured, while it sags and grows stale and the icing melts and discolors.  Memories occupy more space than my present or my future... I wander among these columns of my life... I visit scenes of passion-- of birth, of pain, of joy... most of all the tiny narratives that were discarded from the essential manuscript but seem to have special 'resolution' among the privileged moments of one's life.  As we accumulate time, we peel off as well... the irony of gaining days and losing time.  

Once again I enter the third year without Alan, the sixth without my mother, the 28th without my baby girl; the losses mount as we gather a dwindling future.  We grow old and cannot make new life; we cannot replace. Someone at this ungodly hour is composing, someone is painting, someone is inventing.  These things go on in the city-- beneath the digital webs and networks-- the texts and signals... we are human, we are wounded and vulnerable.  We weep and we love, we mourn and we pray.  I am determined to discover something this year, even if it is myself in yet a new decade, should I be so lucky. I will leave some poetry and some music as defined and hope it will resolve into a life beyond mine, that it will find resolution.