on the attempt

in the geometry / of knowing / we have no new thing / to tell

I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative of late. I am always thinking about narrative. Please see my as-yet unpublished second book.

There are two bottles of pink champagne in my pantry, at least one of which my mother-in-law gave me for my fortieth, two years ago, still sitting pretty on the shelf. It seemed a good idea at the time to save them. So as not to overcelebrate. After all, I had only aged. We would drink them when I sold the book, or perhaps even the little murder ditty I wrote to keep my mind off not selling the book.

These bottles have ‘expired’. They’ve passed their ‘freshness peak’. Which means that, when we open them, they may be flat. They will have lost their signature sparkle. They may be sour or stale.

I think this is a metaphor for middle age.

‘There’s an essay in that,’ I think. The perennial, hopeful refrain of those of us who pluck words from the world and try to make with them—this verb I borrow from my kids, who ‘make’ with sello tape and paper, their ‘made creation armies’ spilling from our shelves. There is this shared desire: to make. The difference being, they make paper swords and bears and dragons; I write books that no one wants to buy. But we keep making. They keep churning out their cardboard action figures; I keep churning out the narrative. Art is messy. Art is drafts, disaster.

A season ends. A cycle comes complete. My father has been dead five years. I listen to Rose Cousins sing a song about her own dad and time implodes. It has only been five minutes and the grief is effervescent and alive. Please live to be an old man, she begs. And, for a moment, in that dark venue of curtained walls, the world rewinds and he’s alive again, and I’m not forty-two, and everything expands and I can’t breathe.

I feel the urge to put that, also, into narrative. How it’s winter, yet again. My dad is five snows gone. But maybe you’d be bored with that. The seasons, the cycles, the one-note piano of my grief. Late January, every year.

I used to bake bread. Pre-pandemic, before it became the tradwife trend. I moved to Scotland and my starter died, succumbed to Glasgow damp. I tried again. I failed. I’ve tried again, this very morning, and—dear reader, this will surprise exactly no one—the loaf has failed to rise.

‘There’s an essay in that,’ I hear myself repeating, like a pop song, to my students. But what is an essay, they ask, and I say something about formal formlessness, slippery multiplicity, ‘opposed centres of stillness.’ I say, ‘you tell me.’

I am writing a fourth book, which feels somehow more hubristic than drinking the now cursed and flat Lanson Rosé. This time a novel. About perimenopause, and the perceived creative death of middle age.

It feels dank and bubbly, but then again, so did the starter when it doubled, when it promised bread. I think it takes an awful lot of faith, to make. You put it all there, on the page, and hope the centre holds. That all this messy truth might find its own place in some greater gravitational relation. You make words out of feeling and you hope the feeling grows. Often, it falls flat. Often, you fail.

Sometimes we do not rise.

But here I am again, in that tender, frozen, fallow place of possibility. Where in all that wet, brown bleak, the darling buds of may are waiting to be born. I like it better here—the mystery of winter stillness. Before the buds emerge, to fall.

I’m sick to death of narrative. I’m sick of essaying. I will not make a story out of this.

I buy Rose Cousin’s record, play it in the kitchen. Above the din of kids, it almost jars. I hear it differently, when mother ears are perked; it is about their grandfather, for me, but it becomes a prayer to them. Please live, it begs, to each of them. Please live to be an old man. Please sparkle. Please, my dearest little loaves, please rise.