Combien de noël? - Tricot Machine
This song opens with a fragile question: Combien de Noëls aurons-nous encore ensemble?
How many more Christmases will we have together?
When I first got excited about Tricot Machine in high school, one of my friends, forced to sit through the music video for L’ours, said, “Tessa, I am pretty sure this is children’s music”. I was young enough to be embarrassed by accidental associations with children, and probably protested that they were merely extremely twee. (The physical release of their Christmas album included a picture book, so the evidence is not really on the side of teenage Tessa here.)
I remain unsure how badly I want to have children, but resolving that uncertainty feels increasingly urgent. The urgency isn’t biological, exactly; a kind doctor scanned my ovaries last fall and told me I didn’t need to think about freezing eggs for another five years. No, the urgency is more in those fragile questions, the temporal limits of togetherness. One of the best essays I read this year has a gut-punch of a title: Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going To Die. A quote:
This idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out. If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
In a poem called The Long Now, Robin Beth Schaer shows her child the stars. These lines express some of that same harsh truth:
Why is it not all one day you ask
& I cannot answer because all I want
is more of your days. If each life is a single
spoken sentence, then I know how yours
begins, but will never hear it whole.
No people can be together forever, not parents and children, not friends and communities, not lovers. The person I imagined I’d raise children with is dead, and I know that’s where some of my temporal urgency is coming from. Partly because Zach, usually ambivalent, could be shifted to a desire for children just by rereading Mirror Dance and crying when Aral Vorkosigan says that “all true wealth is biological”. Partly because it all feels more fragile now. No guarantees.
We have to build and rebuild the future despite the uncertainty, whether we’re hoping to leave a better world for our own children or for other deserving inheritors. That’s all we can do, right? Try, stubbornly, to make something to look forward to. Every line in this song is a question, and the last one wonders how much happiness hope can bring: Combien de bonheur dans le coeur quand on espère?
I hope you have something to hope for that is meaningful to you.
Merry Christmas,
—Tessa