Month: November 2023

I Am What I Am

 

When I was a small child in Rhode Island, Salty Brine and his collie named Jeff hosted a children’s program which, among other entertainments, ran the black and white cartoons of an indomitable, spinach-eating sailor.  Popeye had made his own peace with life and sang out his philosophy: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am, I’m Popeye the sailor man.”  Of course, in Popeye’s seagoing dialect, it came out “I yam what I yam,” which is how Robin Williams sang it when he played Popeye in 1980.  As a child, I loved Popeye and hated Bluto.  Life was simpler then.

But the phrase, “I am what I am,” has been rattling around in my head again lately.  It is, of course, primarily Biblical.  When Moses beholds the burning bush and talks to his Maker, he is concerned about how to convey the reality of his theodicy to his fellow Hebrews. “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”  Then, in case Moses is still confused, God adds: “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”  Poor Moses took this strange message down to the people.

We get the phrase again in the New Testament – this time from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”  Paul is talking about the fact that Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus.  It seems a strange statement, for surely we all are what we are?  What does he mean?  One might wonder.  Ben Franklin seems to have his tongue firmly in his cheek when he asks: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am and if I’m supposed to be somebody else, why do I look like me?” 

But the speaker of this phrase that I have mostly been fixated on for the past week is that of Jonathan Swift.  As many of you know, I have spent much of my life pondering Swift; this blog is titled after his own resolutions about old age. But that list was compiled long before Swift entered his own raving and often very public senescence. Here is a story from the year before he died, recounted by his grandnephew, Deane Swift:

On Sunday the 17th of March [1744], as he [Jonathan Swift] sat in his chair, upon the housekeeper’s moving a knife from him as he was going to catch at it, he shrugged his shoulders, and rocking himself, said I am what I am, I am what I am: and, about six minutes afterwards, repeated the same words two or three times over.

Swift’s cry seems to erupt from someone who does not feel understood and yet wants to be accepted. It is the cry of someone who has changed beyond even his own recognition, but wants to find peace.   Swift raged in Biblical language because it is his language – he is the Rector of St. Patrick’s, after all, and well steeped in the King James Bible.  While God knows that Moses can never understand God’s nature but yet wants a relationship with him, Swift cries out in the same way to the people around him.

 Jorge Borges was also intrigued by Swift’s words.  Borges lists the following possibilities: “He may have felt, I will be miserable but I am, and I am a part of the universe, as inevitable and necessary as the others, and I am what God wants me to be, I am what the universal laws have made of me, and perhaps To be is to be all.” Borges combines these interpretations with the inclusive and; all possibilities are accepted (including that of being miserable) and all possibilities include acceptance of the inevitable.  One might take this existential statement to indicate that Swift has accepted his fate, the face in the mirror.  But he does not necessarily like it.  While God’s “I am” is presumably a statement of changelessness, Swift’s is perhaps the acceptance of change.  When Swift was a bit younger, he told a fellow writer that he was like some trees, in that he would “die from the top.”  One might wonder if he knew what was happening to him.

I think that “I am what I am” is a strong phrase, but it is painfully close to a phrase I hate: “It is what it is.”  When the latter slogan became ubiquitous at the turn of the twenty-first century, the word-czar William Safire coined the term “tautophrase” to describe such a self-evident statement.  “Facts are facts,” “what’s done is done,” and “it is what it is” are all inane tautophrases.  And so is, “I am what I am.”  And yet.  The phrase elicits some essence of our being that withstands age and circumstance.  It also calls for acceptance of all these things: our essence, our age, and our circumstances.  “I am what I am,” says the old lady.  “Obviously,” says William Safire.

 

Old Age, Jonathan Swift, and Me

When I was in my fifties, I decided to finish my doctorate in English literature.  I was working in college administration as a Chief Financial Officer, and had accumulated a BA and MA in literature, an MBA, and completed various coursework and other prerequisites for a PhD but realized that I would need a year or two of full-time effort to complete coursework and a dissertation.  I had the good fortune of being able to do this, and I joined a small cohort of much younger students in trying to complete this hurdle (more on that cohort later).

I decided to research the changes (as I perceived them) in the portrayal of old age in literature during the Enlightenment era (sound impressive?), and I elected to do this through the lens of a writer who experienced an infamous old age himself, and who wrote his most famous book at about my age – Jonathan Swift.  During Swift’s lifetime, science was turning old age from a theological phenomenon to a pathological one; statistics of life expectancy were just beginning to be accumulated, and increasing literacy was displacing old memories as the source of history and information.  It turned out to be an interesting study (abstract found here).  Now, almost twenty years later, I find myself revisiting some of my conclusions and wondering if I would have a different perspective now.

I might have been middle-aged when I finished graduate school, but being thrown in with a cohort of twenty-somethings made me feel older.  I never felt that they were that much brighter than I was (although some surely were), but I was massively more effectual.  I turned papers in on time while my classmates had a sea of incompletes.  I got my dissertation chapters and rewrites to my committee faster than they probably wanted and had no problems ticking off the hurdles to getting to my final defense.  I researched all my own citations and even word-processed my final document myself (in compliance with the University’s picky standards).  Research and study were so much easier than working that it was during this period of time that I also started writing fiction.  It was a happy time.

The issues of aging I identified in Swift’s writing and in his life are still with us.  Gulliver’s episode with the immortal but aging Struldbruggs depict what happens when longevity outraces competence, when technology, language, and culture leave the long-lived behind.  The Enlightenment era saw the first spate of self-help books on extending one’s life span and the implied assumption that, perhaps, the length of your life span was within your control and not necessarily the total prerogative of the Almighty.  Swift himself lived to be 77, and before he died, he lost most of his friends, his lady-love Stella, and just enough of his mind that he had trouble communicating but seemed to be aware of that sad fact.  Swift was a difficult character all his life, but, as I age, I have more sympathy for him. When he was sixty-four, he wrote his own humorous elegy in almost 500 lines of rhyme, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”  The poem is hilarious and humbling.

Besides, his memory decays:

He recollects not what he says;

He cannot call his friends to mind:

Forgets the place where last he din’d;

Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;

He told them fifty times before.

How does he fancy we can sit

To hear his out-of-fashion’d wit?

Swift was not overly lovable, but how can you not have a soft spot for a man who looks so calmly into the face of the eccentricities of his own old age?  I ended up being fond of the pompous old geezer and was loathe to part with him when my academic work was over.

I turned some of my knowledge of Swift into a draft novel, What Shall I Say First?   In it, a middle-aged academic is visited by the ghost of the old Dean himself.  But again, this was written a number of years ago.  I may revisit that manuscript and my dissertation to see if, twenty years later, Jonathan Swift, Dean of Saint Patrick’s, has anything new to teach me.  Can old dogs teach old dogs? Stay tuned.  Meanwhile, read the Struldbrugg episode in Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X) and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”