Whistling Away the Dark

Often I think my poor oldheart
Has given up for good
And then I see a brave new face,
I glimpse some new neighborhood..
– Mancini/Mercer

And here we are again. Another …. New Year?! This is a reportedly cyclical occurrence, begat by an explosion that, for reasons I’ve stopped trying to grasp, gave birth to both Time itself and a universe filled with whirling crockery. All that centrifugal and centripetal spinning gives rise to circles and spheres and orbits and gyre-like galaxies and other cosmic featurettes that drive us to drink. So, yeah – we very recently escorted 2024 out of the building with the usual streamers and laughter, and those damnable festive little poppers whose sudden deployment can make the unbraced partygoer spontaneously incontinent. Or so I’ve read. 

New Year’s Eve is a global celebration of a drifting rock’s return to an arbitrary coordinate on a cosmic circle in deep space. The yearly occasion is also a massive gift to aspirin magnates everywhere. But there’s something else in the mix. New Year’s Eve is a sort of maddened and inarticulate celebration of our own impermanence, the lightning strike we call home. Several days ago we raised our glasses to the temporal brute facts, acknowledging (without saying as much) both the helpless headlong flow of time and the corresponding attraction of the human animal to precious daily life. Life itself is felt most acutely on these time-marking occasions, where – rather than grasp and stare longingly at each other, the furniture, the salami-and-cheese charcuterie mandala, the hurriedly flowing minutes – we gulp emotional accelerants (up, with olives on the side) and yell and wave our arms and pretend to cheer the immediate future as it sidles, on stockinged tippy-toes, into the vanishing present. Whew! Where’d I put my drink?

Neanderthalesque

The border crossing from one Year into the next always occasions strange, expectant jitters and a neanderthalesque (not a real word) instinct to huddle. It is a weird yearly lovefest, often thinly disguised as something else. Large and small gatherings all over the home planet – in huts, palaces, yurts, and overpriced condos – similarly filled up with friends and strangers, exes and lovers-to-be, old pals and new acquaintances. An hour before midnight that chatty, hulking new gym friend, the one you invited in a moment of weakness, timidly arrived with his Gold’s bag slung over his shoulder, wearing a t-shirt so tight it may have been applied by automotive paint robots. You watched him furtively enter and were touched by his reticence. Accompanied by his demure and bespectacled wife, whose tiny hand he clenched in his catcher’s mitt of a paw like a terrified child, the jittery giant glanced once around the room, spotted you in the throng and bounded over like an enormous Irish Setter. His expression lit like a Christmas tree, he held out his fist for a brotherly bump. “Yo, man!”

“Yeah… Yo!” An inexpert bro, your own little fist punched empty air. Your newish gym buddy offered a warm smile of what looked curiously like recognition. Your own champagne-infused smile was less certain. “Yo,” you say again, nodding. 

The Big Confetti

There have been 13.787 billion New Years, we’re told; many of these preceding the invention of paper hats and confetti. That first occasion is believed to have been a riotous thing, spewing out atoms and energy and such. Quantum perturbations (you heard me) caused the later clustering of flung atoms into coherent stars and galaxies and, much later, such magical ephemera as breadboxes and stomach flu. The Big Bang’s headline was arguably its having birthed time – which is both maximum security prison and diamond mine.

Today, the New Year is upon us – bursting forth with less cosmological drama but all the human yearning and heroic frailty the eons have perfected in us. Burt Bacharach, first kisses, and Jimmy Stewart movies aside, our Very Important Planet is but a mossy rock adrift in a vacuum. Thanks to some propellant aspect of the primordial kapow! (use your own sound effect here), our rock is eternally rotating on its axis while simultaneously loping around the sun like a bored donkey on a chain. It’s all very glamorous. We who cover the drifting rock feel deeply the so-called human condition – and frankly can’t shut up about it in our songs, poems, and questionable art. Our spinning rock is impervious to our fancy talk, our heartbreak, our wars and joys, our pretenses, our hopes, our terror. The cold-hearted cosmos is completely unmoved by the vibrantly awful Christmas sweater we’re obliged to don in a maddened panic whenever Aunt Bethany threatens to stop by the house. 

Blue Sapphire

Whether our world is a mere pebble flung out of an improbably exploding singularity, or a blue sapphire hung in the ether with care by an Intelligent Designer, we are individually so tiny and fleeting we verge on the virtual. For all that, we are – each of us – possessed of a depthless self-awareness and agency we haven’t begun to understand, let alone harness. Epoch after epoch, we swarm hopefully over a comparatively small rock as it runs inexhaustible laps around a ball of exhaustible nuclear fire. Whistling away the dark, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered (as they say), we are doing – by definition – the very best we can. 

It’s a brand new year. The crazed and diapered throngs in Times Square, the televised fireworks blossoming over the Sydney Opera House – the New Year rolled like a wave moving across the Earth and the world’s capitals erupted with color. In your own loud room you stood and prepared yourself to receive it. The NYC disco ball shimmied down. Three! Two! One!

It was at that moment – the aptly named present tense – your mesomorph gym friend turned to you with wet eyes. What. The hell. Is this? Your own eyes darkened with moisture. It’s the champagne! At some point he’d slipped away and put on a dress shirt whose panicked-looking buttons seem barely able to hold the thing together. His mildly crumpled necktie appears to have been tied by Ray Charles. His wife looks up at her stricken Giant with a love that is almost tactile and in the New Year’s riot he grabs your arm. “Thanks, man. Thanks for the invite.” You successfully bump fists. And so begins another walk around our favorite star; a heat lamp that seems almost to have been placed there by an interior designer. A largish one. It’s only a fire, but what a lovely, lovely fire it is. See you in the coming circuit.