The Tonic Note

Finding Resolution in an Unresolvable World

Image of a diorama from the Santa Fe International Museum of Folk Art

“Raise your hand if you used to think most things in your life would truly get resolved,” I heard myself saying to an audience at a reading recently. Hands went up. We laughed. Not that nothing gets resolved. I mean, sometimes I have a false charge on my bank statement and get it removed. Satisfying and irritating at the same time. But most of the big things linger. Anyone who’s a had a romantic relationship that’s ended knows this. Most leave a trace. Even if you’d never want to be with that person again, you might have regrets, or a feeling of what you wish might have gone differently. People and things that make an impression make us pay attention to the story enough that we contemplate possible outcomes.

I thought about how in music there’s a tonic note, the one that makes the melody feel complete, resolved. According to Google, “the tonic is the fundamental or home note of a key or scale, serving as the primary point of stability and resolution. It's the first note in the scale and often the note the music will end on. The tonic is considered the most important note in a key and is the name of the scale itself.”

And yet, we so seldom experience its equivalent here in the wilds of actual life. Things begin. They end. Sometimes chaotically. Especially our lives. I wrote a poem about this some years ago, inspired the woman I mention in the first stanza. Here it is:

Corpse Pose

Lying on the floor, I think of a woman I know

whose ailing father came to her house to die,

but kept on living. He’d putter around the house,

fix the refrigerator, tinker with the water heater,

patch the peeling plaster in the kitchen.

And though he suffered—was in pain—there always

seemed to be something else to do. Dad, she said,

after months of hearing him complain,

why don’t you try lying down? Which did the trick.

He took to bed and soon he was gone.

I’d always imagined the end a symphony—

a crescendo, the conductor’s arms raised

in that elegant, final pause. But now I see

how little gets resolved. The ceiling leaks,

the novel sits in a drawer, unfinished. And desire,

that constant companion, keeps tossing us

another bone. Like when a woman

told my friend, who was on his deathbed,

that she’d always had a crush on him.

Me, too, he said, (and after a pause),

funny we should mention it now.

True stories! Both of them. The woman with the dying father and the woman with a crush. Somehow, both struck me as funny, in a slightly twisted way. The near-joke of suggesting that a dying person lie down to accelerate the process, followed by the controlled understatement of the other dying man’s observation. (I should mention here that he was English, so that you get the full sense of tone) Awkward, funny, deeply ironic. How simple things are. Or should be. And yet we complicate our lives beyond the most basic impulses, lose sight of the truth that is right in front of us.

When I asked the listeners the question about resolution, I riffed a bit and found myself saying, “Maybe there is no tonic note. We can strive to become the tonic note ourselves. That’s the closest we get.” And instead of feeling sad, I felt hopeful. At least it’s something I can practice. I can’t stop someone from yelling at me, say, but I can take a deep breath. I can’t finish everything in my to do box every day, but I can check off a few items, have a bath and call it a night, then look back over my life and see its ragged edges, knowing they’re just about as ragged as they should be.

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