Projections of Old Age

Jenny Joseph was only in her twenties when she wrote her ubiquitous poem “Warning” (“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”).  It projects a feisty version of old age; however, the poems she wrote in her own old age were much more credible.  This is from “A Patient Old Cripple” written when she was in her eighties:

I curse the world that blunders into me, and hurts

But know

Its bad fit is the best we can do.

When Jenny Joseph was very old, according to the BBC she found herself somewhat “annoyed” by the success of her early poem, which overshadowed her whole career.  So, the old ladies in purple dresses and red hats are really the projection of a young adult on how she would like her own old age to be.  What do we think about that?

This got me thinking about the difference between how we thought we would be in old age (or maybe how we hoped to be) and the actuality of our later years. Do our expectations of what it would be like to be old influence what kind of old person we become?  Old age was something I thought about even in middle age.  I was aware that I had been somewhat unconscious (sometimes downright comatose) during my earlier phases – youth, young adulthood, middle age – but I set out to craft a more conscious old age.  To help me think about that, I looked to literature.  And, representations of the old in literature include both those of the young imagining older characters, and old people writing about old characters like themselves.

When we are very lucky, we find authors and other artists who create over a full lifetime.  I find it particularly interesting to examine how their work has changed over the years and have written about that here and here.  Some writers have worked over the decades of a long life, consider the authors Wendell Berry or Marilynne Robinson, the poets Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver, and songwriters Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.

In cases like that of Jenny Joseph, we even have the youthful projections of a young writer as to what old age will be like.  For example, we have Jonathan Swift’s list of life rules, “When I Come to Be Old” (hence the title of this blog), which were written when he was 32 and working as secretary to a much older man.  This old man’s habits are presumably inscribed as “thou shalt nots” on the list, and the notable and scary thing is that contemporary descriptions of Swift’s old age match the negative qualities Swift swears to avoid.  Swift did, however, recognize the futility of such rules in the last rule: “Not to set up for observing all these rules, for fear I should observe none.”  And, of course, Swift was a notoriously difficult old man – how much of his character as an old man was the result of his expectations?  Or out of his control?

Lately we’ve been finally watching Monk, so I’ve had Randy Newman (who does the theme song “It’s a Jungle Out There”) on my mind.  Newman, age 82, is still alive and has had an even longer and diverse career than I was aware of, having written the scores for several of the Pixar movies (which I haven’t seen).  I remember him most fondly for songs like “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” (1968), and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”  He wrote the wonderful “God’s Song” for the hilarious movie Cold Turkey in 1971.  And, of course, he spawned controversy.  Remember “Short People” or the mock xenophobic song “I’m Dreaming of a White President” that he wrote for Barak Obama?  It contains the prescient lyrics:

I’m dreaming of a white President
Just like the ones we’ve always had
A real live white man who knows the score
How to handle money
Or start a war
Wouldn’t even have to tell me
What we were fighting for
He’d be the right man…

Randy Newman wrote an early song (1972), when he was only 29, called “Old Man,” about a dying father – and then another in 2017, about an old man losing his wife: “Lost Without You.”  Newman’s lyrics are always worth paying attention to, and I will decline to post the full lyrics here.  (You can find them by clicking on the song titles above.)  The early song was the words of the young man trying to communicate with his dying old man.  “Can you hear me?” the younger singer repeats over and over again.  He is ruthless.  He assumes the old man does not want to die; he assumes that he could open his eyes if he wanted to.  He reminds the old man that there “Won’t be no God to comfort you / You taught me not to believe that lie” and that “You don’t need anybody, nobody needs you.”  Newman’s tongue might be in his cheek, as it often is, but it is a cruel song.  As an old person, I would have opened my eyes just to tell this impertinent young person to leave my side.  “Don’t cry, everybody dies.”  Yes, everybody dies but almost everyone also cries.

The second song (written when Newman was about 71) is narrated by an old man (perhaps the young man from the earlier song grown old?) who is sitting by his wife’s deathbed.  The children are apparently complaining about their father and the mother rebukes them:

“Make sure he sleeps in his bed at night
Don’t let him sleep in that chair
If he holds out his hand to you, hold it tight
If that makes you uncomfortable
Or if it embarrasses you
I don’t care.”

And the old man speaks of his fears:

Even if I knew which way the wind was blowing
Even if I knew this road would lead me home
Even if I knew for once where I was going
I’m lost out here
Baby, I’m lost out here
I’m lost out here without you…

The older Newman is definitely on the side of the old folks – the old dying woman who wants to make sure someone will take care of the love of her life and the old man who is “lost out here without you.”  Newman has come a long way from “You don’t need anybody.”  These are real people who are really dying, and they are not afraid of dying – they are just afraid they will not be able to take care of each other anymore.  And we feel that now he knows what it feels like to be the elder.

I encourage you to read the books of the old – not just about old people but written by the old themselves.  I will try to create a list of recommendations and post it.  I would also recommend an article that appeared in 2015 in the NYTimes, “What Old Age is Really Like,” written by a young author trying to write about old people, and to whom I owe the credit for steering me to the poetry of Jenny Joseph’s old age.  For a fairy tale of how we project and stereotype old age, try my story “Tale of Two Grannies.”

The Old Age of Odysseus

Everywhere I go, people are talking about Nolan’s The Odyssey.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a deep love for the text and wonder how many people realize that it is a book about old age?

Of course, Homer’s epic is about many things.  Most obviously, it is about a man trying to get home.  When I first read it, it reminded me of a recurring dream where I am trying to get somewhere and obstacles keep stopping me.  When I was a student, I was trying to get to class to take an exam in the dream.  As a young mother, I was trying to get home to feed some starving animals in my dream.  I think this interrupted journey is a kind of universal dream theme.  But in reading The Odyssey in my old age, it is evident to me that this is also a story of old age, a dream of… what?

Everyone agrees that Odysseus is an old man for his time (between 55 and 60) when he finally arrives back in Ithaca after many storms and seductions to impede his progress.  He is obviously still a strong and vital man, especially when contrasted with his wonderful old dog and his ancient father – who must have been about 80.  He battles the suitors, and then the relatives of the slain, until the gods negotiate a peace, and finally… what?  Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The text itself gives one answer.  When Odysseus is in the underworld he converses with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him exactly what will and should happen:

But once you have killed those suitors in your halls – /by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze – /go forth once more, you must … /carry your well-planed oar until you come /to a race of people who know nothing of the sea…. And here is your sign –/ unmistakable, dear, so clear you cannot miss it: /When another traveler falls in with you and calls /that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,/ then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon…/ And at last your own death will steal upon you … /a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age /with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (Book XI, Fagles translation)

Toward the end of the Odyssey (Book 23), Odysseus repeats Tiresias’s entire prophesy to Penelope, including the manner of his death.  His wife takes it as a good omen:

“And so,” Penelope said, in her great wisdom,

“If the gods will really grant a happier old age,

There’s hope that we’ll escape our trials at last. (Fagles translation)

But the Western world was not content for Odysseus to fade into a peaceful old age.  In the Inferno, Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for his “horse’s fraud that caused a breach” and other deceptions, and out of the burning flame where he is locked for eternity, he tells Dante and Virgil that he couldn’t stand a peaceful old age in Ithaca:

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

Was able to defeat me in the longing I had… (Mandelbaum translation)

So, Dante’s Odysseus gathered up his old comrades (the few that were left) and told them they were “not made to give your lives as brutes” but to follow a higher calling – and they followed him right out of the Mediterranean, into the southern hemisphere, and to their death in an eddy of the deep sea.  And what is the lesson there?

The lesson for Tennyson, when he penned his great poem “Ulysses” was that old men should be adventurers.  He starts his poem with Ulysses being bored with a peaceful life in Ithaca:

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

And so he riles up the old guys to take to the sea again:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There is a contradiction – the old men are to acknowledge what they “are,” but to override their age and weakness to strive and “not to yield.”  There is no acceptance here.  The deceptive Odysseus thinks he can somehow put one over on the natural order of things.  In our world of old men who seem determined “not to yield,” to fight one last war, and to build monuments of many kinds to themselves, Tennyson’s poem leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  If some of these old men went a little gentler, whole civilizations might be saved.

I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s movie – I am waiting for it to come to my small screen where the violence will be less overwhelming.  It is my understanding that Nolan’s version has it’s very own ending, perhaps a little softened and de-misogynized for the modern viewer.  I will continue to believe that Tiresias knew what would and should happen.  Odysseus would turn his back on the sea, make sacrifices to appease the gods that haunted with him, and rule in Ithaca.  And then, like all men he would die.  And, like lucky men and women, he would die at peace with his family and the world.

For an excellent supplement to any reading of The Odyssey, try Helen Luke’s essay in Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity.   For reading about how The Odyssey can affect your life, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic and Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life are both highly recommended.  Keep a copy of The Odyssey close at hand when you are reading, of course!

 

 

 

 

 

Constructive Forgetting

I’m still thinking about single-pointedness and the mass of things we need to “unlearn” in our old age.  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints… (“The Winter Palace”)

“Unlearning” sounds like something bad, a sin against progress – and yet it is probably the only way to comprehend and accept old age and death.  And one of the things we have to unlearn is both the ability and the desire to multitask.

Our generation learned to multitask with a vengeance.  Women (like me) were trying to figure out how to raise kids and have a career, while dealing with cascading technology – all at the same time.  Men were discovering that they weren’t married to their mothers and that they had no models for the new family life.  Frequent divorces amongst the baby boomers (the highest rate of any generation) meant that single parents had to figure out yet another set of staggering complexities.  Radios and televisions were constantly on – radios in the car and TVs at home – adding a level of input to already frenetic lives.  We were (at the same time) proud of our ability to talk to the babysitter on the phone while writing a report at work, yet increasingly frantic about coping.

When the kids left home (if they did), life got a little easier, but not much.  There was always a new computer system to learn at work, social media emerged as a distraction, and life was still messy.  And finally, we retired.  Time to meditate, concentrate on the important things – except we had forgotten how.

I don’t know about you, but my ability to be single-minded, one-pointed, to concentrate over long periods of time was shot.  I am fine doing Wordle, making supper, or doing other “short” tasks, but even with lots of quiet time on my hands, I have trouble sustaining “long” concentration. and I am not the only one.  Elizabeth Bishop bemoaned the “Art of Losing” as one grew older, but I put my hat in Larkin’s ring.  There are many things I would like to lose.

Many elders do continue to proudly multitask, as we keep ourselves busy juggling our pickleball, travel schedule, volunteer jobs, and Botox appointments.  Or we throw ourselves into the lives of our children and grandchildren. And remember that even having the TV on in the background puts you in multi-tasking mode! There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but I’m not sure that it really helps us to “know more as [we] get older.”

In his Convivio, Dante pictures the course of life as a parabola. We go up and we come down.  The “high point” of the parabola is around age thirty-five, a date Dante arrives at based on Christ’s death in this thirty-fourth year. “It was not fitting that his divinity should be present in something that was in decline.”  What, exactly, is “in decline” in the latter part of life?  What is “diminishing”?  I can give you a long list: teeth, endurance, bone density, strength – and you may add your own infirmities.  But, is there something waxing that compensates for that which is waning?  There is nothing very positive about losing your hair or teeth, but in losing reflexive multi-tasking, I think there is a gain.

My grandparents were wary of new technology; they finally bought a black and white TV, but it wasn’t on often and they spent hours just sitting on the back porch.  Papa often smoked his pipe and Nana picked at some knitting or embroidery, but for long periods of time the pipe and the needles just sat on their laps.  As a child, I couldn’t begin to imagine what they were thinking about.  Now I wish I could ask them.

Looking back over experience is one thing that time and concentration allow.  In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the “slow” review of experience is extolled:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.”

There is more than memory than one-pointedness allows, but it is hard to get there.  For reading, it is recommended that longer and more difficult books be tried in stages.  And so it is with concentration.  It is not a matter of fighting distractions.  It is a matter of acknowledging them and putting them away as no longer needed, I think.  But any suggestions are welcome.  I’ll leave you with this excerpt from “New Year’s Resolve” by May Sarton:

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

I am in constant search of “still water.”

For a story about remembering and forgetting, you might try my “Amnesia at the Airport.”

 

 

 

 

What’s the Point? Where is the Perspective of Old Age?

In conjunction with my old age “serenity project,” I have been working more diligently on my meditation, trying to get to a “one-pointed” concentration.  I am actually very disciplined about meditation – an hour in the morning and another forty-five minutes in the afternoon, but “showing up” does not always mean progress.  To meditate, one can start by focusing on almost anything – your breath, the sound of the birds, bodily sensations – but the key is to limit intrusions of memories, worries, plans – and this is a challenge for me.  T. S. Eliot reminds us that it is the “still point of the turning earth,” where “the dance is.” This sounds surprisingly similar to what the Taoists say about a “single-pointed” mind: “A mind that is clearly focused, however, receives all things and can abide in utter tranquility. It is no exaggeration to say that its world revolves around it.”   If we could only get our minds down to that one, still point.

Pinhole cameras are a good metaphor for one-pointedness.  Such cameras were widely used in the 19th century, but even before that, artists used pinhole mechanisms to reflect subjects and scenes onto paper for tracing.  The principle is the same as that of a camera obscura, in which a pinhole lets in a sliver of light which opens into an upside-down image of whatever it is pointed at.  A few years ago I visited one of the world’s oldest camera obscuras in a windmill in Dumphries, Scotland.  That camera projects inverted images of the whole city in a darkened room and has been in continuous operation since 1836.

For our metaphor, it is relevant that the images from a pinhole are upside down.  In old age, aren’t we looking at life from an upside-down and backward position?  We are remembering  more than planning, we are trying to distill sense out of what has already happened rather than struggling to make things happen. To do this, we need to get down to that single point, and after a lifetime of striving to multi-task, this is not easy.

For pinhole cameras or camera obscuras, the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image.  And so it seems to be with concentration.  To really look at life, we need to narrow our gaze steadily until things come into focus, to be prepared to look at things from a whole different perspective.  Upside down and backwards.

Here’s a secret that I discovered about meditation, from Ayya Khema via Leigh Brasington.  One-pointedness will not only result in better concentration, but if the “pinhole” is small enough, one may enter the first jhana.  This state includes a kind of physical and mental rapture or pīti. The fact that our body gives us this pleasing sensation in exchange for finally centering our mind is proof enough that there is much to be gained by making our attention a steady lens on one particular thing.  Such are the rewards of focusing.  When I first encountered pīti, I described it as the tingling sensation after sneezing – but stronger.  Others have compared it to a runner’s high.

The purpose of the first jhana is not the bliss, though. Bliss is just the carrot. The purpose is to focus and steady the mind in preparation for insight, to eventually understand one’s own mind, to glimpse… nirvana.  There is a whole series of jhanas, which become more abstract, but knowing about the first one is enough to realize that any serenity project must begin with steering the mind to single-pointedness.  And if you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know that your mind doesn’t think that you are its master.  It’s hard.  How do we have any hope of avoiding the aggressive distractions of Capitalism 2.0 when we can’t even limit the distractions manufactured by our own minds?

My point is not that everyone needs to meditate.  But everyone does need a point from which to focus on their lives.  Euclid started his Elements with the definition of a point:  “that which has no part,” something without width, length, or breadth, but with an indivisible location.

When Spinoza (you didn’t think you would escape without a dose of Spinoza, did you?) constructed his philosophical system (based on the methodology of Euclid), he reasoned that he first had to find:

…some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness.

Perhaps, almost anything we can concentrate on “singly” can be the start to Spinoza’s extravagant goals. If we are trying to make sense of life, come to terms with life, live with serenity – we need to identify a single point on which to build our understanding.  Though not easy, it is worthy of trial and consideration.  As Spinoza says at the end of his Ethics, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

By the way, if you go to Dumphries for the camera obscura or any of a number of other good reasons, eat at Bruno’s.  You will not be disappointed.

You might also look at my short story “Nothing New” for an alternative way to help limit distractions and narrow the aperture into the mind.

 

Can Music Sooth the Savage Old Breast (Beast)?

The other day while I was baking cookies, I put on the greatest hits of Donovan.  Remember him?  I hadn’t listened to “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” or “Mellow Yellow” for years, but I found that I could remember all the lyrics.  Soon the baking was done and I was still humming.  And I was in a great mood.

Congreve coined the line “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast” in a seventeenth-century play.   Somewhere along the line, breast morphed into beast – but the quote works either way.  This all got me thinking about my “serenity in old age” project and about the uses of music in summoning memory (“Blue Velvet” puts me right back to “slow dancing” in a Junior High gym), or quickening the blood (Country Joe’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” makes me want to challenge the “man”), or motivating (“I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” propelled me through my early career) and, especially, music’s power to soothe.  Think of lullabies.  Or hymns.  When I am really upset, nothing soothes me like belting out old hymns on the piano.  When I just need some peace, I put on Gregorian chants.  In my working days, I often played chanting as background music in my office, giving me an undeserved reputation for being very religious.  I might not have the serenity of the monks or nuns who are singing, but their calm certitude washed over me and often seemed to defuse the kind of angry people my position sometimes exposed me to.

The songs of the baby boomers’ youth were not, largely, soothing songs.  They tended to be about unrequited love, break-ups of all kinds, the frustrations of growing up, and the obtuseness of adults. Yet, we still cling to them.  Psychologists and marketing experts know that there is a “reminiscence bump” for music that we listened to when we were between ages ten and thirty.  Grocery stores play oldies in the morning when the retirees are in the market and switch to newer and newer music as the day goes on.  Automobile manufacturers’ ads feature songs from the youths of their target audiences.  Do these old songs work because they make us feel young again or just because they are so familiar?  Surely a little of both.

Music also helps to prevent dementia.  In 2025, the National Endowment for the Arts published a study, Strength in Numbers: Large Study Suggests Role for Music in Preventing Dementia, came to the following (quoted) conclusions of how music helps us elders:

  • The greatest benefit was experienced by older adults who “always” listened to music. Their risk for dementia was 39 percent lower than that of adults who “never,” “rarely,” or “sometimes” listened to music. They also had 17 percent lower risk for other types of cognitive impairment, and better cognition and memory scores overall.
  • Playing a musical instrument “often or always” was linked with a 35 percent lower risk for dementia, though there were no associations with reduced risk of cognitive impairment, and no changes in cognitive test scores over time.
  • Frequently listening to music and playing an instrument was associated not only with a 33 percent lower incidence of dementia, but also with a 22 percent lower incidence of other types of cognitive impairment.

In this study, “voice” counted as an instrument.  And, in my opinion, singing or humming along to whatever music you are listening to helps – even if you’re out of tune.  Growing up, everyone in my family sang – even when they couldn’t hit the right notes.  When large groups of my relatives got together, they sang. For hours.  And I have no doubt that they were happier and got along better than families who discussed politics!

So, it would seem that music is a tool that we could use – for both serenity and brain exercise.  In these days of 24-hour news cycles, it is hard to remember to turn off the news or the podcast and turn on the music, but it is a worthwhile practice.  And think of all the music that is at our disposal.  What calms you?  What makes you feel alert but not agitated?  For myself, it is Bach, Gregorian chants, and Leonard Cohen.  For you, it might be a Disney soundtrack. (Did you know that much of the music in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty  came from Tchaikovsky’s ballet music?)  Just like the other things that lead to serenity, the point is to make a conscious choice.  Proactive rather than reactive. More on that later, because I have found that do be an important mantra for my serenity project.

I once posted a story (“It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) about the effect of music on a young woman.  The story’s sad ending reminds us that music is not a panacea; it is not reality.  But it can, perhaps, put us on an even keel so that we can cope with confronting the real challenges to our enjoyment of these precious days.

 

 

 

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.”