Heart Appreciation

I am still on my “serenity or die” project.  (Maybe it should be called my “last chance for peace project?”) In any case, rather than my usual course of examining those things that steal my serenity, I have tried to focus on those few moments when I do feel… serene (or something akin to it).  I got this idea from Marion Milner’s wonderful book, A Life of One’s Own, which I have written about before.  Milner uses journaling as an instructional path to serenity, a tool for examining what makes her happy in life.  One of the things that Milner says about her own search for happiness is that it somehow helped if she put her awareness in her heart rather than her head.  She calls it an internal gesture.  “I began to understand that my powers of perceiving could be altered, not by directly trying to look, or trying to listen, but by this special internal gesture.”  Sounds silly, but I encourage you to try this change in perspective.

In ancient times (Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew), people thought the seat of the soul was in the heart rather than the head – the Egyptians even threw out the useless brain during mummification, but left the heart as the departed would have need of it.  Hippocrates thought it was the brain where consciousness occurred, but Aristotle was sure that it was the heart.  Science agreed with Hippocrates.  Descartes even “identified” the soul in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain.  Yet, Pascal reminded us that “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”

Of course, my husband’s recent heart attack has us thinking of that vital organ, of heart rates and blood pressure (which we measure every other day).  And surely the heart responds to our mental moods.  I recalled how, when I first was learning to meditate, an instructor had us hold the bulb of a “hand thermometer” to demonstrate how blood flow increased to the skin as heart rate decreased when we were deep within ourselves.  A calm mind helps the heart function.  Is the reverse also true?

Grace Paley wrote a good and true story about old age called “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” in which the father gives the following advice:

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

Of course, talk of the heart leads me back to the mind/body connection, and the fact that I read over and over again that stress is a killer. “Stress can wreak havoc on your mind and body” says the Mayo Clinic.   It is not great for serenity either.  Stress can be caused by real challenges, but the body reacts just as strongly to the imagined ones – including all our catastrophic thinking.  I have spent a lot of useless time trying to change the nature of my thinking – but after reading how Milner cast her consciousness into her heart (metaphorically), I was ready to try circumventing the brain.  As a frequent victim of migraines, I don’t need to be reminded that the brain can be the enemy.

We all know that our brain cannot reason ourselves out of fear.  Camus told us that, in the eyes of reason, being alive is an absurd project. Reason does not help.  (And for that reason, AI probably isn’t going to help either.)  Hard as my brain has tried, it has been unable to think itself into serenity. Milner’s trick of casting our awareness into the heart is one way to side-step the mind and its Gestapo tactics.  Casting your awareness into another part of your body provides a new focus.  My heart is the part of the body that works best for me in that regard.  It is not a permanent solution, but it is a motivating foretaste of what I am after.

Maybe it’s time to give our head a rest.  “When you get up in the morning you need to take your heart into your two hands.”  And once you have done that, cast your mind into your heart.  It is easier than you think.

For a story about leading with the heart, you might try “The More Loving One.”

 

No Context, No Citation – Lamentations of an Old Meathead

I’ve written often about AI in the last year and vowed not to use it, at least when I know it’s there and when I have a choice.  Little did I realize that, whether I used it or not, it was using me.

But let me back up.  The old lady has another (related) complaint.  Authors – both online and in print – have been getting very sloppy about citing their sources.  I am not talking about plagiarism here.    I am talking about when someone puts quotes around a sentence, perhaps even informs us that these are the words of  Chesterton or the like, but gives us no information as to where the quote came from, and therefore 1) we have no context and 2) have no easy way to get back to the source.  I try to provide citations for things I quote in the blog.  I hope my readers find it useful; it is a good exercise for me and keeps me on the straight and narrow.

I was trained academically to treat the printed word as if it were holy.  It was pounded into me that all references, quotes, paraphrasing needed exact citations.  At the end of writing my dissertation, I spent weeks in the library checking my sources, correcting the footnotes, and making sure that any ideas that were not strictly my own got appropriate recognition.  It was a worthwhile exercise, because I could not only check the citation (down to the page and the year of publication) but also the context – had I used the quote in the sense that it was written, that it was intended?

But now I am often frustrated by blogs, articles, books (after 1990 or so) in this regard.  Google used to help.  With a long quote, I could put it into the search engine and sometimes find out where it originally occurred. But this is less and less the case.  What I usually get these days are 1) an AI summary of what the quote is about, as if I couldn’t comprehend it without help and 2) a list of site after site where the quote is used, still lacking a citation for it is source.  This is particularly true of pithy quotes that are much used, usually for “inspiration” of one type or another.  Such quotes are wonderful, but they are like 30 second ads – and they bounce off us in the same way.  They become meaningless out of context.

Worse, some quotes are taken out of context for an ulterior motive.  Easy to do. We have all had it happen to us – your child picks up the stupidest phrase you said in your lecture on keeping his room clean – and turns it back on you. Such are the uses of Bible verses and snippets from Ronald Reagan these days.

This whining about correct attributions is a prelude to something that I discovered about my own work lately.  I was  doing a search on something to do with Spinoza (one of my favorites as my readers are aware), and the AI result (which Google puts front and center, steering us all away from more original results) came back with a close paraphrase of a blog I had published on the same subject.  At the end was a very tiny tag which would take you back to my blog, but why would anyone click on it when AI had summarized it so nicely?  As I entered more topics that I had written on, I found that sometimes AI had even turned them into bullet points!  Thank you AI for providing CliffsNotes for my blog!

Do you remember CliffsNotes?  For my generation of high school students it was a way of cheating, of avoiding reading Great Expectations or whatever work of literature was assigned.  It is no way to learn, but I can’t help thinking we are living in a world of CliffsNotes, where work can be simplified, stupefied, taken out of context – stolen in the interest of speed, ease, and propaganda.  And there is no recourse.

So, thanks for listening to my rant.  I make no money from my writing and have never tried to do so.  The blog, stories, bibliographies, novels – all are there for anyone interested.  Lewis Hyde wrote a wonderful book a number of years ago (The Gift) about the art of sharing, and it is in that spirit I post my blog.   But I do feel sorry for authors, composers, and artists who are dependent on intellectual property rights, who need sales, hits on their website, recognition and acknowledgement.  AI seems intent on summarizing the world for us.  Think about that.  It is hard enough to figure out what life is all about without battling a digital and capitalist machine that is trying to usurp our prerogatives and turn our lives into comforting but meaningless memes.

Sunday’s NYTimes had an article about human brains as “dumb meat computers” – I guess the quote is from Elon Musk originally: “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”  It made me think of Descartes, who thought animals were machines and what made humans superior was that they had something more – a soul, for want of a better word.  To Descartes, it was degrading to think of humans as simply mechanical systems.   I also thought of Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man”: it is a long way from upholding the dignity of human life (“There is nothing to be seen more marvelous than man”) to describing ourselves as “dumb meat computers.”  Meatheads.  Think about it.

We baby-boomers are a Faustian generation.  No generation has ever experienced the technological change that we have – from radio to TV to VCR to PC to CD to e-retail to replacement hips and knees.  We were vaccinated, entertained, and relieved from strenuous work in a way never seen by previous generations.  Technology has fixed our teeth, our eyes, our ears and our mood swings.  We were able to easily access ideas from all over and spread our own ideas.  But it was not free.  And it feels very much like the Devil is determined to get his due.

For a story about the limits of technology, you might try my “Two New Apps.”  Or you could ask AI to summarize it for you!

 

“No More Dying Then” – Resurrections of All Kinds

 

Spring is full of resurrections.  We watch trees come back to life and flowers peek through the dead leaves.  Spring brings Easter, of course, with its stories and promises of resurrection.  This Easter, I reread D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Man Who Died, an alternate spin on the empty tomb, a lovely counter-tale about the missing body of Jesus.  In its way, it is as sacramental as the Biblical version.  Lawrence’s Jesus lies in a farmer’s yard, healing and thinking about his second chance at life, about the trap of language (“The Word is the midge that bites at evening”), and about the release of being reborn (“How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and be beyond it.  Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig-tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich”).  As Jesus hides in the farmyard, he befriends a feisty cock (rooster) that throbs with life – and he heads out for his next chapter with the cock under his arm.  (A little symbolism there!)  Another kind of resurrection.

And there are resurrections closer to home.  After the close call of a cardiac arrest this winter, my husband has taken to calling this his “bonus time.”  Unlike many heart attack victims, he has not seemed to suffer depression, but rather seems to bask in this resurrection time with gratitude.  One more spring.  His appreciation of life has rubbed off on me.

Of course, resurrection does not always happen.  Our granddaughter had the hard experience this year of working over the body of a fellow choir member when he fell beside her as they processed down the aisle. She had been trained in CPR, and if he had survived it might have been a wonderful experience for her.  As it happened, he did not and the death was very hard to process.  But isn’t that why resurrections are so joyful – because they might not have happened?

There are many kinds of resurrections.  In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton said that he became a Roman Catholic because he adored the rites of confession, penitence, and the washing away of sin, a weekly process for the resurrection of the soul:

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning ….  He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in his own image.  He is now a new experiment of the Creator.  He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old…. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

That last bit is lovely with the vision of an oldster facing the world anew, feisty as a young lamb.

Shakespeare, as usual, has his own take on resurrection and immortality.  We think of his sonnets as love letters, but there are a very few that tackle other challenges of life.  I think most often in this regard of Sonnett 146, one of my favorites:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

I like Shakespeare’s form of “resurrection” because it is an awakening to a new way of life, that not only frees us from the hold of the body and other earthly possessions, but simultaneously frees us from fear of death.  The imperative, “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross,” could be a touchstone for one’s entire life! I love the way the final couplet takes a sharp turn from fear of death (“that feeds on men”) to a kind of immortality where death has no sting (“no more dying then”).  I might note that there was an error in the second line of the original printing of this poem, so we are left to guess what the Bard meant to say.  You will see many versions out there, but I prefer this one.

So, may we all have a resurrection of sorts this spring.  May we value properly our “hours of dross” and wash away our sins and cares.  Do you remember, as Chesterton seems to, what it felt like to be five years old in a field full of daisies and dandelions?

For perhaps real resurrection – enlightenment, peace, whatever you want to call it – comes not from rising from the dead, but from escaping from the fear of death and all the death-like things – past mistakes, regrets, losses and future fears of all kinds.   Old age brings us both closer to the brink and possibly closer to acceptance. Once we get past our terror of the end, we are the (resurrected) fearless five-year-old again.  May it be so for you.

For other kinds of resurrection, you might try my tales, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse” or “A Balm in Gilead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Serenity as Swan Song

I have written here more than once about the value of projects in old age.  Simone de Beauvoir says pursuing a project is essential.  Some people have long term projects that they continue to pursue (thinking of my husband and his study of Greek), while others are encouraged to learn a language or new instrument.

In a published dialogue, Jorges Borges talks a little about his own project for old age.  At the time, he was about to turn 85 and just a couple of years from his death.  He says that he used to want to be a “fascinating tragic character but not anymore”:

I resign myself to not being interesting, to being insipid, but also on being serene or trying to be serene which is no less important.  Serenity is something to aspire to always. Perhaps we do not attain it completely but it’s easier to attain in old age rather than youth.  And serenity is the greatest good.  That is not my original idea – the Epicureans and the Stoics thought that there were no original ideas.  But, why not emulate those illustrious Greeks?  What more could we want?

Various cultures have held out the idea of serenity in old age.  Elderly Buddhists have a practice called “going forth” as sannyasin, holy old beggars.  In the Middle Ages, older people often retired to convents or monasteries to find God before they died.  One might remember Queen Guinevere retiring to the convent after the death of Arthur, to “repent and find God.”  In our culture, the ideal of serenity has been crowded out by bucket lists, senior activity centers, “educational” cruises, and exhortations for the old to keep busy in any number of ways.

For some reason this notion of serenity in old age got me thinking about the trope of the “swan song.”  It shows up in Ovid, Aesop, Aeschylus and Plato, who has Socrates say this as he is about to face his death: “You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die they sing most and most beautifully.”  Biologists tell us that this is not true, but it shows up again and again, and is a phrase still much in current use to describe the last performance of an actor or singer, or the last speech of a politician.

One of the most famous madrigals of the Renaissance was “The Silver Swan” by Orlando Gibbons:

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”

The last line makes it perfect for our time.  There has been much discussion about whether the song is a song of joy or of resignation.  I would hope that it was both – joy in the life and resignation to the reality of old age and death.  But, that brings us back to serenity.

Science tells us that the swan song is a myth and not based in any kind of reality.  There is also disagreement about whether the swan sings so sweetly because it is about to shrug off the challenges of life or because life has been so good.  I would like to think that the swan sings because it has finally discovered that serenity is the answer to life and to death.  As worries are about to vanish, our swan wonders why he had ever worried.

This brings me to one of my favorite Schopenhauer passages:

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error… the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence… hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.

Schopenhauer can be a depressing old coot, but he points out why we should look for serenity instead of happiness.  Serenity involves renouncing happiness in favor of acceptance.  And serenity is defined as the state of being “calm, peaceful, and untroubled.”  Tranquillity is also “a peaceful, calm state,” but it is “without noise, violence, worry.”  Tranquillity is the absence of trouble; serenity is not letting trouble bother us.  I cannot remake the world so that it is tranquil, but I can live in the world in a state of serenity.  Or so I hope.

I have always craved serenity, peace.  Who hasn’t?  I have written many stories where the characters find a level of peace.  Once upon a time stories.  I want it for real.  If you want to read a story about old age projects in search of serenity you might look at “A Spoonful of Sugar” or “Again and Again and Again.”  But in these stories, the search is oblique.  I want something more direct.

So that is my major project for the next segment of my old age.  I will still write here, practice piano, go to French classes, and try to get enough exercise.  But above all, I want to find serenity.  And perhaps renounce the avoidable things that steal it away.  I’ll give you progress reports.

 

“When Will They (We) Ever Learn?”

In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”

 

 

 

 

Last Days – “When the Cranes Fly South”

Have you ever wondered what your last days will look like?  For most people, death is a process and not a moment.  Authors have tried to capture that experience – one thinks of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych – but not from experience.  Jorge Borges tries to image meeting his own dying self in “August 25, 1983.” No one gets to look back on their own end times; few of us can reliably predict when it will happen.  Borges was off by three years to the good.

I am often skeptical about books about old age, books with elderly protagonists, which are written by young people.  But Lisa Ridzén’s novel, When the Cranes Fly South, rings true.  The author says that she was inspired by the case notes she found from her grandfather’s carers during the end of his life.  She gives us what feels like a true picture of the messiness, the inevitability, and the release of death.  It is a lovely book.  I was also deeply impressed by the Swedish health care/home care system, which faithfully provides for visits four times a day.  The carers feed the grandfather, take care of the dog, bring in firewood – and generally do whatever is necessary to put an old man’s mind to rest.

But, of course, the old man’s mind does not rest, he does not go easy into that good night.  His wonderful canine companion, Sixten, is a large elkhound and the subject of controversy with Hans, his son, who thinks it is not fair to the dog or the caregivers to confine the dog with a sick old man.  Hans also insists that his father (Bo) take regular visits to his wife, who is in the deep haze of dementia and has been in a memory care home for a couple of years.  Bo can see no point in visiting the “husk” of his lifelong love, and when his poor wife throws them out of her room at the care home, we sympathize with Bo, who knows enough to keep memories separate from the current realities of his life.  Bo preserves one of his wife’s favorite scarves in a canning jar, so that he can occasionally open it to get a whiff of how she used to smell and think about how things used to be.  He loves his wife; he treasures his memories.  In his weakened state, he cannot reconcile the reality of her dementia with the warm feeling he gets every time he opens the canning jar.

Two of the passages which rang true for me had to with Hans, Bo’s son.  Hans is trying to do right by his father while working a demanding job and mourning the end of his marriage.  Bo wishes he could help Hans put all these challenges into perspective:

Despite everything, I wish there was something I could say to help Hans.  To make him realize he can stop stressing.  Maybe he would stop thinking about Sixten if he just relaxed a little.  But I don’t know what I can do about his restlessness.

Bo thinks about the fact that Hans will be in his place someday, dying and at the mercy of his daughter and the caregivers:

How will he react when Ellinor [Hans’s daughter] tells him he is no longer capable of taking care of himself?  Who will he be once he stops working, once his body  starts to give up the way they always do?   Right then, I realize that he might end up like you [Bo’s wife/Hans’ mother], forgetting Ellinor and drifting from one day to the next, and I pull a face and shake my head.

Of course, Hans cannot imagine himself in his father’s place, but the truth is that both things – the stress today and the inevitability of aging tomorrow – are related.  If death and old age were constant companions, were realized as inevitabilities, perhaps the stresses of the present moment would diminish in proportion.

This book was a huge bestseller and award-winner in Sweden.  Recently, I wrote about the Swedish bestseller about “death cleaning.”  Clearly, Swedish readers are eager for real discussions about old age and preparations for the end of life.  This is to their credit.  When the Cranes Fly South is not an easy book in some ways; death is often messy and Ridzén gives us clear images of incontinence, falls, nostalgia, grief – losses of all kinds.  We get the picture of a man who knows he has to leave, but clings to those things that give his life meaning – his dog, his woods, the scent of his wife’s scarf – as long as he can.  While we feel for him and with him, he is not an object of pity by the reader, by his caretakers, or by himself.

For most of the book, we are in Bo’s head.  Again, I was suspicious of a first novel by a 36-year-old which tried to enter the mind of a dying 89-year-old.  Who am I to say if it is accurate?  But it feels right, and it got me thinking about how I would handle my own last days, what needs to be discarded, and what needs to be held onto until the very end.  Highly recommended.

Death is a major (and the final) life event.  We have elaborate rituals for childbirth, fairy-tale weddings, graduations, and other major life events.  But it is much harder to orchestrate death.  In the Middle Ages, it was very important to have a “good death,” shriven of our sins, family around, comfortable in one’s own bed.  There was even a term for the art of ending your life well: ars moriendi.  By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, however, death had become a more private and hidden affair.  People today plan their funerals, create bucket lists, and do extensive estate planning, but do they think about their actual death?  Of course, it is not easy.  My husband was recently in the hospital again, and there is nothing more impersonal than a hospital.  But that is where a lot of dying happens.

We might start by trying to imagine what kind of death we would have, what we would want.  You might try, as Borges did, to write a story about the end of your life.  Where do you think you’ll be?  Who will be there?  What will you be thinking about?  We have little control about our dying, but conjuring up the end might give us a little more clarity on the things we can control.

In When the Cranes Fly South, Bo has a good death.  He has the people he loves around him and his hand on the head of his beloved elkhound.  “Everything is crystal clear,” he thinks.  At least, that is the way our author imagined it would happen.  May everything be “crystal clear” for you in your last moments.  I often wonder if, at that moment when everything extraneous fades away, we will see more clearly.  May it be so for all of us.

 

 

 

Spinoza of Market Street – “Forgive Me, I Have Become a Fool”

A week or so ago, I was googling a Spinoza citation (regular readers know I’m a big Spinoza fan), and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Spinoza of Market Street” popped up in my search results.  Now, I vaguely remember reading that story sometime in my distant past, but had no real recollection of it.   So, I pulled it up and was glad I did.

A digression here.  I am constantly amazed at how little I remember of things I read decades ago.  Unless I have reread or thoroughly studied the texts, I might be able to recall some themes, whether I liked the piece or not, a few memorable scenes or tidbits, who wrote it, but that’s about it.  It is a mixed blessing, as I can enjoy some really fine works as if for the first time.  I can even reread classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh.  But really – where did it all go?  What else has been lost over the years besides the knowledge of “who done it”?

Needless to say, the Singer story was “new” to me, and it made an overwhelming impression this time.  Truthfully, besides the memory problem, when I read it for the first time, I was not old and surely did not appreciate old age (or Spinoza) as I do now.  The story is about an elderly and impoverished man, Dr. Fischelson, who has spent his whole life studying Spinoza.  He has written notes and stupendous amounts of commentary, but – at the end of his life – he cloisters himself in a small attic room in Warsaw trying to make ends meet.  He has dedicated his life to trying to live the kind of life Spinoza recommended, to be the “free man” that Spinoza describes in his Ethics.  He has forgone marriage, children, regular employment for this ideal. 

Spinoza does not protect the aging scholar from the vagaries of life, however.  Dr. Fischelson gets deathly ill in his attic room, and would have succumbed had not his neighbor, an old crone called “Black Dobe,” suddenly needed someone to translate a letter she got from a relative in America.  Black Dobe is an aging spinster, described as “tall and lean, and black as a baker’s shovel.  She had a broken nose and there was a mustache on her upper lip.  She spoke with the hoarse voice of a man and she wore men’s shoes.”  And yet, this old crone nurses the Spinoza scholar back to health.  They talk to each other about their lives – for the first time in many years somebody is interested in what they have to say. Black Dobe knows nothing about Spinoza, but she cares about Fischelson’s childhood, about his thoughts.  And he reciprocates.  Eventually, they visit the Rabbi and say that they want to get married.  The people on Market Street are amazed and pack into the Rabbi’s chamber for the wedding.  The wedding night is better than expected.   “What happened that night could be called a miracle.  If Dr. Fischelson hadn’t been convinced that every occurrence is in accordance with the laws of nature, he would have thought that Black Dobe had bewitched him.”  Good for them.

But here’s the thing.  Dr. Fischelson thinks he has broken faith with Spinoza.  He has failed to lead the kind of “life based on reason” that Spinoza has recommended.  As the sun rises on the morning after his wedding night, the old, old man looks up at the sky and pleads, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me.  I have become a fool.” Is rationality really the answer or do the fools really have the answer in the end?  Does one preclude the other?  One thinks of the Death of Ivan Ilych and the happiness of the servant Gerasim as opposed to the severe angst of his dying master.  Is being in love with (or at least comforted by) an old ugly spinster a sin against Spinoza?  Surely not.

While Spinoza himself led a solitary life, it does not seem to have been lonely.   Spinoza boarded with a family, he had friends, he had a large correspondence with other philosophers.   And one point that Dr. Fischelson seems to have missed in modeling his life after Spinoza’s precepts, is that – above all – Spinoza believed in cheerfulness.  Other emotions could be tolerated as long as they were not in excess, but “of cheerfulness, there could be no excess.”

Fundamentalists, zealots of all kinds, tend to squeeze the joy out of life. There is no room for frivolous emotions in a single-issue mind. Dr. Fischelson was a zealot of Spinoza, but led a cheerless life.  He thinks he has failed in the end, but perhaps – for the first time – he has gotten it right.  Marrying Black Dobe was both a rational and joyful act.  One does not preclude the other.

And here’s the thing that got me.  When Black Dobe asks Fischelson why he doesn’t go to temple, he tells her that “God is everywhere.  In the synagogue, in this very room.  We ourselves are part of God.”  This completely frightens the old lady.  “Don’t say such things,” she tells him.  The odd thing is that he says them but does not act as if they are true, and Black Dobe is frightened by the very thought and yet treats even a dirty old man as if he were sacred.  Amen.

T. S. Eliot said it well in “East Coker”: “Do not let me hear /Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.”  Ah, yes.  And let us find reasons to be cheerful in our old age.

For a humorous look at love in old age, you might look at my stories, “Livability” or “The Case of the Missing Husband.”  For more of Spinoza, you could try an earlier blog, “Smile for Spinoza.” Be of good cheer.

An Old Gorilla Talks to An Old Lady

If you are close to my age, you might remember reading Ishmael when you were in your 30s or 40s.  The novel by Daniel Quinn won the Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, a prize created by Ted Turner and awarded (only once) for fiction offering “creative and positive solutions to global problems.”  It is a readable book and lovely in its conception.

Ishmael is an elderly gorilla who communicates through telepathy and has a novel way of looking at human history and where “it all went wrong.”  He posits that mankind took a fatal turn when they turned into “Takers” rather than “Leavers,” several thousand years ago in the fertile crescent.  He retells the Genesis story as a prophecy of how humans started on a trajectory that would end up destroying humankind and much of the world around us.  He never mentions Faust, but it is definitely the story of a Faustian bargain – according to which we are granted the knowledge and mastery of our lives and of the earth.  Anything is permitted if it makes life easier for humans.  But, as in any Faustian bargain, there is a cost.

I was impressed with Ishmael in my 40s and am still intrigued and impressed in my 70s.  While you can argue with many of Quinn’s conclusions, Ishmael is a rare phenomenon – a totally fresh look at what humans call “progress.”  In these days of AI and a return to a nuclear arms race, I am thinking about this more and more.

The whole notion of progress is different when you are old.  At the time I first read Ishmael – still in my prime, raising kids, building a career, learning new technologies – my world was progressing and I was progressing too.  We all jogged, took up Pilates and yoga, ate yogurt, and were convinced that ours was the generation that would never age or turn into shrunken old people. In my 70s, I realize that – from a bodily standpoint and notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary – progress is eventually replaced by regress. One hopes for plateaus rather than higher and higher levels of function – and one fears for the abyss. Whether or not the world around us is “progressing,” we are doing something else.

For the past few decades, we elders told ourselves that while we aren’t keeping up with technology (partly because we might not want to), we still had some basic skills and experience which had some worth – experience, verbal and mathematical literacy, a developed sense for human interaction.  Artificial intelligence seeks to replace those things, and while I still believe it cannot, there is some heavy betting that it can.

Our faith in the progress of the world around us has likewise been undermined by reality; “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  That is what Quinn’s book is about.  And when I read Ishmael again, I saw his argument from a much different standpoint.  I had gotten old and the world had gotten damaged.

Here is his argument (but please read the book).  At some point (and Quinn places that point ten millennia ago), humanity took a step in the wrong direction, mostly through the growth of what he calls aggressive agriculturalism – which led to one culture replacing other more sustainable cultures through the seizure of lands and spectacular population growth.  (There is much more to the story, of course.) And now the greatest threat we have as a species is…ourselves.  I would hardly call that progress.

Even for us Sputnik kids, science no longer looks like a source of unqualified progress – is AI an achievement or a threat?  Ecological damage which, truthfully, we were pretty blind to in the 1950s and 60s, has become so obvious that it is amazing that so many people are still resisting the facts.  The world population has progressed in numbers – from about 2.5 billion when I was born to over 8.3 billion (think about it!), but this can hardly be called progress by the millions scrambling for sustenance on this planet. But every time the notion of progress (as we have defined it since the Enlightenment) is challenged, our culture just doubles down.  Think of the denial of climate change or the recent disagreement between the Pentagon and Anthropic over whether there should be any guardrails on AI.

Chesterton complained that “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  Do we even have a vision? Is it a sustainable vision?  Are emotion and commerce (or more specifically commerce using the impetus of emotion) changing the goal to meet the product?  Spinoza said that progress happened when we went from being dominated by the emotions and were guided by the rational, by the thing that makes us human.  I have seen little sign of this lately.  And a couple of days ago we all woke up to the news of yet another war in the Middle East.  No matter how you define progress, it does not feel like this is it.

Early in Ishmael, there is this exchange between Ishmael (who speaks telepathically because, of course, gorillas can’t talk) and the unnamed narrator.  It is worth thinking about.

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

Our “civilization system” is looking rocky from the perch of old age.  Our generation is grappling with its deeply rooted faith in progress in ways that previous generations maybe did not.

Once we could console ourselves with the thought that we had left our progeny a better world, even though our personal world and body were falling apart.  Our generation has no such consolation.  And we cannot comfort ourselves that it will be better for our children.  Our children are not doing as well as we were at their age, and it looks even worse for our grandchildren.  In general, they are not as well educated – language and math scores are at their lowest point in two decades – and their prospects for good jobs, home ownership, debt relief, and eventually a comfortable retirement, seem dim indeed.

And it is made worse by our cultish attachment to the concept of “progress.”  The stock market goes up, Silicone Valley comes out with a new gadget, we can stream anything anytime – we follow the breadcrumbs and never think that we might end up at the witch’s house.

Anyway, these were all things I thought about when I reread Ishmael in my old age, and I am pretty sure they were more coherent thoughts than I had when I first read it in my forties.  So maybe I have made some kind of progress.

 

 

“Our Elders Are Books”

I recently read Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – a memoir of sorts about his removal to a small homestead in Ireland to practice self-sufficiency and environmental integrity, and perhaps to escape the culture that he has become increasingly disaffected with.  Part of that culture, he realizes, is the written word, the words he reads and the words he writes.  Words are the “savage gods” referred to in the title.  “I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.”  Much of the book is a discussion of writing and words; we forget that they are only symbols; misplaced emphasis on words pulls us away from a direct connection with the world. 

All this was very interesting, but it was his quote from Gary Snyder that really got my attention:  “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”  What does this mean?  Does it mean that our books are our shamans, priests, wise men?  It surely discounts personal experience, oral history, and common sense.  And, if it’s true, it surely discounts the elders.  I had trouble finding the exact citation from Snyder when I went to look for the source, but I did find this in Snyder’s essay “Tawny Grammar”: “In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”  Think about that.

Before a general level of literacy, experience had real and appreciated value.  Elders had knowledge about the best time to plant the crops, best way to make a mattress, best chance to find a wife.  They were the repository of the history of a family, a district, a craft, a people.  Even when their bodies started to fail, they could provide expertise and counsel that was valued. In early (non-literate) cultures, the memory of the elders was a critical asset, a form of social capital. And it was largely the written word that changed this. 

What did an increase in literacy mean for the elderly?  It might have meant that other, often younger, members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher.  One could imagine that, rather than tales told around the hearth by the oldest member of the group (the member with the longest memory and the most to “tell”), the literate were now reading to the illiterate. For these reasons, communal value increased for someone who could read to the group or could manage the new insistence on written legal documents – usually the junior members of the group.  One might think about how we rely on the young to fix our computers or set up our smart TVs.

Is it good or bad that the books are our elders?  Not so good for the elders and maybe not always so good for the readers.  In many ways, books are an easy out for all of us.  We think we have the answers in our hand.  In the Bible, the beleaguered and bewildered Job says that he wishes that “mine adversary had written a book” – meaning that he would then be able to understand, anticipate, and solve his problems if he only had a book to tell him what he needed to know.  We all think the right book can solve our problems.

I am particularly guilty in this regard; the answer is always going to be in the next book.  I inherited this from my father, who was adamant that everything that one needed to know could be found in a book.   Sometimes though, the nuances are more subtle than words.  He once built a stone fireplace with plans from a book – and he was completely confounded when it didn’t draw well and smoked up the room.  An old chimney sweep was able to tell him where he went wrong – but a little too late.

There are many differences between advice from books and advice from elders.  There is the nuance and the dialectic of human interaction.  There is the sharing of emotion from one who is struggling and one who has put the struggles of youth and doing behind them.  Human beings can provide counsel for the heart that supplements the advice for the work of the hands or the brain.  And the testimony of the old people – especially when they speak of their youth – reminds people of all ages that, with good fortune, we will all be old some day and we might look to our elders for models.  Blake put it this way in “The Ecchoing Green”:

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Besides their advice and their memories, old folks like Old John provide models for aging to all who come in contact with them.

And now we are taking another step away from any such real interaction between generations with the advent of AI.  There was a story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes last week about an elderly woman who gets an AI companion.  She shares her life, her stories, with the glowing machine.  This may be comforting to her – and I hope it is – but it makes me sad.  The machine can respond to her, help her organize her day, notify the proper people if she is ill, but it is a machine, an algorithm, a pricey way for families and communities to absolve some of their guilt for not being there.

Lent began this week.  With my husband recovering and a steady roster of doctors and therapists necessitating a complete change in all of our routines, we are experiencing our own kind of Lent, our own kind of renunciation.  We will learn in the process, and we might even turn to books for help and counsel.  But the kind of change in heart that such upheavals require are not fully relieved by the written word; the reassurance of those that went before is in facial expressions and kind listening.  AI may be able to listen, but it cannot wince or squeeze our hands in the appropriate places.  Neither can books.  Both books and AI minimize the value of individual experience, knowledge and judgment.  We have seen the results of this in recent years.   Not only are we losing the repository held by our elders, but we are losing confidence in our own experience and judgment and placing it in the hands of publishers, AI developers, content providers, media moguls, and spin doctors.  I love books and I don’t hate technology – but neither of those things is going to get us out of our current political dilemma or help me realign my world. 

I have written about books and AI in relation to old folks before. You could try my earlier blogs, Here Be Dragons or Charlotte Bronte, Luddites, and AI on artificial intelligence. On reading, you could look at Teach Your Children Well or Some (Unspoken) Thoughts About Reading Aloud. For a short story about what one generation has to offer another, you might look a “Any Help She Can Get.”

Death Cleaning of the Soul

We have had a major medical challenge.  My husband had a bad fall, which turned out to have been precipitated by a heart attack.  We came home after surgery and a few days in the hospital, only to have to rush back a week later.  Things are better now (which is why I can post this blog), but they are not the same.  I am buffeted between my feelings of gratitude that the love of my life has survived, and my mourning for the way our life used to be.

In the midst of all this and during long hours in the hospital, I finally read the two books on my list by Margareta Magnusson, one about Swedish death cleaning and one about old age.  Both are worth reading, and both insist on the need to peel things away as we get older – tangible things (belongings) and intangible things (beliefs and rituals).  They were good books to turn to as I strove for a way to deal with the hard realities in front of me.  Downsizing of the household is almost impossible, as we all know.  In my case, further physical downsizing is for some later time. Downsizing the soul is harder yet, but necessary in the present moment.  Parting with roles, rituals, and habits is harder than parting with Grandma’s china.  I like to think, however, that it could also be more rewarding in the long run.

We are not used to thinking of losing things as good.  I recently read a book by James Clear about how to use our habits for big gains, how to accrete knowledge and success into our lives a little at a time.  Like most self-help books, it focuses on increases and ignores the possibility that loss could be a good thing. For the latter proposition, one has to look at wisdom literature of all kinds, where renunciation is often seen as a positive thing, a necessary step toward contentment, happiness, and peace.

For example, Joko Beck said that Zen was a process of “wearing away,” or erosion rather than accretion.  We have to let go what we think we know, habits of mind we have acquired. The Tao reminds us:  “Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day.  The practice of Tao consists in subtracting.”  Christianity has a similar message.  Jesus told the rich man that “if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”  At other points in the Gospel, he tells his followers to give up their adult ways and become like children.

The poets have much to teach us in this regard too.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” purports to teach us how easy it is to lose things – homes, keys, people:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But Bishop ends up admitting that loss can also be catastrophic:

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Philip Larkin, in “The Winter Palace” says that he is done with learning:

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

Larkin’s tongue is firmly in his cheek, but he bounces off a truth about the value of discarding what we have, what we know, and what we think we know:

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

 

Both poems are worth reading frequently – one to remind us that loss is inevitable but not easy, and the other to affirm that loss is not all bad.

In reading Magnusson, it also occurred to me that our whole culture could use a Swedish death cleaning, that the Earth might have a chance if we stripped down and lived within limits.  In a recent article (“The Cross and the Machine”) about technology and religion, the wonderful Paul Kingsnorth puts it well:

Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits – limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries – is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative.  There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one that we’re living in.

We’re human beings with limits in a culture that recognizes no limits.  No wonder it is so hard.

So these are just some musings about loss from a new caregiver and a rapidly aging person, who is coming up against the limits of her situation.  I know that limits can be good, less is often more, and worrying is almost useless, but I sometimes still succumb to despair.  I have to read poetry, write in my journal, contemplate Spinoza, talk to others, and take heart.  And I do these things, but – as Elizabeth Bishop says in the end – it is not always easy.  Slowly my husband is improving, and we are getting used to our new limits.

I have written elsewhere about paring life down.  You might look at my blog, “A Diminished Thing?” from several years ago, and my short story “Nothing New.”  Needless to say, any advice is welcome.