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Looking Back on Childhood’s Eden

There is much debate in Buddhist circles (at least among the unenlightened) as to what enlightenment or nirvana would look like.  There is a similar debate in Christian circles about the nature of heaven.  Carl Jung had no doubt that it consists of going back to the childlike wonder we had about the world when we were very young, and Jung maintains that this is particularly important in our elder years.  “Proper development in the last part of your life is to rediscover the child you left behind when you commenced your apprenticeship.”

Who is the “child you left behind” before you embarked on your apprenticeship of fear and sophistication? How far back do your earliest memories go?  Psychologists used to say it was four or five years old, but now have pushed it back as early as two and a half.  Lots of us have what we think are very early memories, but turn out to just be recollections of experiences we were told about in our childhoods.  A more important question might be: what did your earliest memories consist of?  For most of us, the world of our childhood was full of bright colors and smells and fascinating experiences. While childhood is a world that fades, it is surely worth recalling.

Wordsworth famously struggled with this in his “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Novelists too have tried to grasp what has been lost in the accumulations of time.  In the beginnings of both Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Dickens has his main characters struggle to recoup old memories:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood. (from David Copperfield)

Then there is James Joyce at the beginning of Portrait of an Artist, talking about memories of “moo cows” and recalling his earliest sensations: “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it is cold.”  Recently, I read Donal Ryan’s Queen of Dirt Island, which begins with the major character’s earliest memories, when “she was four…, or maybe just turned five.”  The memories then presented are technicolor scenes of grass and cherry blossoms.  Early memories are often magical in sight and sound.  The world was new to us.  In many ways, children are all Adams and Eves waking up to the delights of Eden.

And then there is a story in Sigrid Nunez’s new book, The Vulnerables, about a mother who started to act differently just before her totally unexpected death, in her premonitions acting in a childlike manner:

Whenever I [her daughter] came to visit, we usually took an afternoon walk, and that’s when I noticed something else…Mother kept stopping to point things out – Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house, clouds, squirrels scampering – as if she had never seen such things before.  It reminded me of going out with the kids when they were small and all the world, even the most ordinary things, made them gape. (31)

How wonderful to return to a world where everything can make us gape.  But how to do it?  We all, sometimes, want to return to our childhood Eden, but it is not easy.  James Baldwin puts it best in Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Jung says it is worth the effort to remember. He claims it is the way we were meant to live – not in childish ignorance, but in child-like wonder.  As Wordsworth goes on to say:

 Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind…

It is there, this child-like wonder, in all of us.  It sometimes surfaces in dementia, sometimes a brain injury loosens the gears.  I knew a middle-aged physics professor who had a bad bicycle accident and suddenly began singing the Polish lullabies of his very early youth, before Hitler’s Nazis drove his family out of Europe.  But it is not entirely a matter of memories, I think.  It is a matter of attitude, of what stance we take in this world.  Or refuse to take.

My story, “Like Heaven,” is about an old woman conflating her childhood with her current situation.  Perhaps, in her case, childhood turns out to be the better place to be.

A Last Transitioning

I just returned from visiting a ninety-eight-year-old relative who, although she is weak and has been under hospice care for many months, has never spoken of her own death in my presence. She has never acknowledged her mortality in any way.  However, since the last time we were with her, she has learned a new word for what she feels she is going through: transitioning.  She affirmed quite emphatically that she was in the process of transitioning, that she would be transitioning soon.  There was never any discussion of what she would be transitioning to, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I guess transitioning seems less terminal, more transitive.  For whatever reason, it is a concept, a term, that she is comfortable with.

This terminology, however, made for some humorous conversations. I heard her, for instance, leave a phone message for a financial manager telling him that she wanted to talk to him because she would be “transitioning” soon.  In this day, when “transitioning” is usually used in a different context, it might make people who don’t know her well wonder if she is having a deathbed gender conversion.  But I don’t mean to make light of it; I am grateful that she has found a word to describe her experience, a word that she can be comfortable with.  And the end of life is surely an ongoing transition which must be borne, appreciated, accommodated.

Our culture has many euphemisms for death; Wikipedia can give you more than fifty.  Many have religious connotations: “going to heaven;” some are earthy: “kick the bucket;” some are transactional: “checking out.”  But we are loath to look at death directly.  Irvin Yalom, my favorite psychiatrist/author, wrote a book entitled Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.  The title comes from a quote from La Rochefoucauld: “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”   Yes, and despite the optimistic title of Yalom’s book and the advice he provides, facing our mortality never seems to get much easier.

Literature gives us many images of death, with deathbed scenes ranging from the horror of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich to the sweet demise of Dicken’s Little Nell.  But, today, I am more interested in poetry, and no one can confront the truth like Philip Larkin.  He wrote an aubade, a poem about early morning hours in bed, in which he talks about lying in the dark facing “the dread of dying, and being dead,” thoughts which “hold and horrify.”  Aubades are usually romantic poems, about lovers having to leave each other at sunrise after a blissful night.  Larkin fixates only on his fear of having to, inevitably, leave life.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

I have known people who claimed they had no fear of death; I never believed them.  I know other people who say they are afraid of the process of dying, but not death itself.  I can almost believe them.  Clearly my skepticism is deeply colored by my own fear of annihilation.

There are other views of death in poetry.  Stevie Smith calls death “Black March” in her poem of that title; she thinks of death as an “old friend,” “a breath of fresh air,” “a change.”  She looks forward to thinking of a visit from her old friend; she seemingly cannot face life without knowing he is somewhere, cloaked in grey chiffon, waiting for her.  “I have a friend/ At the end of the world. / His name is a breath/ Of fresh air.”

And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent most of his life struggling gallantly with tuberculosis, but has no intention of resisting death when it comes:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

I may never have Stevenson’s openness to death, but I sincerely hope to have Stevie Smith’s confidence that, at some point in my life, death will be a friend.  And I will lose my fear about a final transition.

If you want to contemplate death through some of my fiction, you might try “And Now, A Word from Dead Barry,” or “Tale of Two Grannies.”

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.”

Puttering Around

When I was a child, my father “puttered” in his free time.  This had nothing to do with golf; it had a lot to do with a form of relaxation we don’t see much of anymore.  The extinction of puttering has a lot to do with some fundamental changes in our lifetimes.  Let me explain.

To putter is defined thus: to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely, casual, or ineffective manner: e.g. to putter in the garden.  Leisurely, casual, and especially ineffective.  In his puttering, my father considered many projects and chores; few of them materialized. Puttering was not meant to be productive; it was meant to be an antidote to hard work and productivity.

My father had special clothes for puttering.  He wore, for years and years, the army fatigues he had brought home from his stint in the military sometime between WWII and Korea.  Those clothes lasted forever and were eventually stained by every kind of oil and paint known to our household.  Long after the shirts fell apart, the pants remained.  Dad called them his “putter pants.”  Now, there are “putter pants” on the market, designed with an elastic waist for old guys.  It would have been anathema to my father to buy something special to putter in.  When the last of the “military” putter pants bit the dust (probably disappeared by my mother), he started buying putter pants at tag sales – castoff military wear if he could get it.

Dad puttered on weekends and most of the summer.  (He was a college professor.)  He made no lists, but just wandered from one thing to another.  It was therapeutic rather than effective.  He would do it alone or with a child.  His grandchildren enjoyed puttering with him until they reached puberty, then they had “better” things to “do.”  So, Dad went back to puttering alone.  Such puttering is a lost art.

Dad sometimes did more than putter – in his younger days, he built two houses and repaired our cars and boats.  But when there was not something special and demanding on his plate – he puttered.  You could tell he enjoyed it because he sang or hummed the whole time.  Frank Sinatra and Patti Page hits when I was young; later it was Roger Whittaker.

I thought of this recently when I came across an article about Jeff Bezos and his habit of rising early and “puttering” until 10AM.  Good for him.  But the gist of the article was that Mr. Bezos was sure that his puttering made him more effective and more creative.  The author of the article tried it, and, sure enough, it helped him get things done.  I guess everything has to serve the Goddess of Productivity.  But that is not what puttering is supposed to be all about.  It is not supposed to be scheduled or weighted for effectiveness or participated in wearing specially designed pants.  Thoreau (one of the great putterers) would certainly assure us that there are not supposed to be new clothes for it.

Men of my father’s generation puttered.  What do they do now?  Is surfing the net or watching nonstop sports or playing video games the new form of puttering?  Do women putter?  I do it on occasion, but not with the joie de vivre and lack of purpose with which my father did it.  Even in retirement, I find myself pondering whether there is something specific I should be doing, somewhere I should be, some news I should catch up with.   Even if I am willing, even eager, to be decadent, there are many alluring alternatives calling to me – funny videos, silly text exchanges, countless errands.  I hope we have not lost the art of puttering – for it is an art.  And art is done for art’s sake.  It is not supposed to be a productive activity in any way – Jeff Bezos notwithstanding.

Perhaps this piece of writing is an example of puttering.  You might also look at an example of my puttering at fiction.  Talking about Thoreau and the advent of autumn reminded me of “Again and Again and Again.”

Heraclitus, Change, and an Elegy for Netflix DVDs

There was an article in the Opinion section of last week’s Sunday New York Times entitled, “Stop Resisting Change.”  Presumably, the author used the imperative tense to try to shake his readers loose from their attachments to things, rituals, schedules – you name it.  The essay was written by Brad Stulberg, who appears to be some kind of “performance coach” and wants to tell us that change is a “force for growth.” He reminds us that, even 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus knew you can’t step into the same river twice.  Stulberg asserts that “adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or even try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it.”  Allostasis/allostatic is apparently a new coinage for our times and posits “a healthy baseline as being a moving target.”  Sounds too much like dodge ball to me.

This is what performance coach Stulberg says in the end:

To thrive in our lifetimes – and not just survive – we need to transform our relationship with change, leaving behind rigidity and resistance in favor of a new nimbleness, a means of viewing more of what life throws at us as something to participate in, rather than fight.  We are always shaping and being shaped by change, often at the very same time.

I’m guessing that, in my case, it might be too late for a “new nimbleness,” but I certainly admit that change is a constant challenge.  Recently our smart TV lost some of its smarts, and I had to figure out how to reboot it and wasted almost an entire day before I decided it was a hopeless endeavor.  Like most baby-boomers, I have spent years of my working life learning new computer systems, trying to figure out the best way to use email or social media, and remembering that my cell phone needs to be charged.  I have been forced to change, but I am not convinced it has done good things for me.

Lately, I have been wondering whether society would be better served if we didn’t assume that change is good and that we should learn to “cope” with it.  Isn’t “coping” how we ended up with climate chaos and mechanical voices on the doctor’s phone line?  With children who hold conversations with one eye on their cell phones? Perhaps continued “nimbleness” is a mistake.  Perhaps a little resistance is in order.  Perhaps a lot of resistance is overdue.  Maybe we should just enjoy sitting by Heraclitus’s river and feel no need to wade into it.

I am particularly thinking about change today because I am mourning the passing of the Netflix DVD program at the end of this month.  For many years, we have spent many Saturday nights with a DVD movie, espresso, and dessert.  And yes, I have learned to stream movies over the past year, but there was something about that red envelope arriving in the mail and waiting on the counter to be inserted into a simple machine for Saturday night watching.  Once in while the disc was defective, but we never missed our movie because I didn’t know how to work the technology.  On the envelope was useful information – who was in the movie, how long it was, and whether it was too sexy for 17-year-olds.  It was, as far as I was concerned, a perfect technology.  When I went out to get the Sunday Times in the morning, I put the disc in the mail and waited until Thursday or Friday to discover what from our wish list would arrive for the next weekend.  Such are the simple date nights of seventy-somethings.

Plus, Netflix had a good selection of old movies including our favorite Powell and Pressburger productions and the silly 1950’s comedies that have picked up our spirits at the end of some hard weeks.  Our generation has seen the demise of tube televisions, rotor antennas, VCR’s, 8 tracks, cassettes, Walkmans, and I fear, eventually our CD’s and DVD’s.  In our lifetime, we learned to type on mechanical typewriters, then electric typewriters, then word processors.  We have learned to make our own travel reservations online and print our own boarding passes.  And those are only minor examples.  Make your own list of how you did things in the 50s or 60s.  Reflect on how life has changed, the new technology you had to learn in order to cope with that change, the continual upending of the patterns of daily life. I know I sound like the old lady that I am, but old people are supposed to have garnered a little wisdom over time.  My learnings include this:  some technology and related change was for the good, no doubt – but none of it was unalloyed good, and we should keep that foremost in our minds as AI creeps up on us.  How do we even know that so much change is good for us?  This assumption that constant adaptation is a good thing seems to be a social experiment on a grand scale (without a control group), and we are the white rats being encouraged to keep up with the program.  (Now I sound and feel like a grumpy old lady.)

It often seems that it is only when I finally learn to adequately use the new technology that it disappears.  I am sure we will not be the only ones who will be desolate at the end of the month when our last movie arrives.  The good news is that, rather than destroying their inventory, Netflix will empty its warehouses by sending multiple DVDs to their subscribers.  I hope they include our favorites.  And I hope someone keeps making DVD players.

To think about ways to resist change, you might try my story, “Nothing New.”

Bad Grandmothers and Wallowing in Old Age

Good grandmothers, society’s traditional grandmothers, have been defined by Hallmark: they bake cookies, love their grandchildren above all else, and are always available to babysit.  There are plenty of these good grandmothers in literature, but it is a welcome change to read about bad grandmothers.  Some bad grandmothers are selfish, some are just self-protective, but they all warm my heart.

First, the disclaimer.  I have eight grandchildren and I love them all.  But there are limits.  When they visit us, we put them (and their parents) in a hotel.  We refrain from birthday gift wish items of which we do not approve.  We almost never babysit.  On the other hand, we have traveled a lot over the years in order to have an opportunity to know them, for them to know us, and to watch them grow.

In our neighborhood, where there are many grandmothers, we sometimes take note of those grandmothers who stay home for Christmas instead of visiting progeny during the most hectic travel season.  Sometimes I am in that group and sometimes not.  We joke about it and call ourselves the “bad grandmas” as we sip our holiday eggnog, but it is humor tinged with guilt.  Aren’t we supposed to be hopelessly devoted to our offspring once and twice removed?  What is Christmas without greedy children hanging their stockings, crowded airports, and airlines losing your luggage?

But, back to fictitious grandmothers.  I just finished Margaret Drabble’s Witch of Exmoor.  You guessed it – the “witch” of the title is the grandmother, Frieda.  Frieda, who never had an excess of maternal feelings, has increased her distance from her offspring by buying a big, gothic, hard-to-get-to seaside house and then disappearing into it.  Her three adult children are angry, confused, and worried about their mother and about her will.  While Frieda does not have much in the way of traditional motherly love, she does appear to have money.  She published some successful books in her day, one of which is being turned into a movie if only they can find the author to sign the contract.

Frieda’s grandchildren see her disappearance as just another example of adults acting in inexplicable ways.  As Drabble explains, Frieda’s adult children have a more personal view:

…Frieda has turned the tables on them this time.  They are surrounded by friends who complain at length about the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer’s, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining about the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them.  It is against the natural order.

Frieda has made clear that she is fine on her own, and they pretty much leave her that way.  She is a delightful character, and it is a pity that she disappears in the middle of the book. (It turns out she has fallen off a cliff and drowned.) She has not stopped being a bad actor, though, as she leaves her fortune (not as large as her children suspected) to only one of four grandchildren.  Not only does this arouse outrage in the children, but it almost ruins the life of the one member of the family it was designed to benefit.  No one is happy.  (There is a lesson there.)

Frieda is a more malicious version of my very favorite “bad grandmother,” Lady Slane of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  After years as the wife of a statesman, Lady Slane becomes a widow.  She has had it with adult children, big houses, and social obligations.  She remembers a lovely little house she once saw from a train, goes back to find it, buys it and moves in with her maid (of course, she has a maid).  She tells her family to stay away unless invited.  And then she spends her time entertaining a small circle of elderly men and sitting in deep revery about the life she has led.  It is one of the most delightful books of old age.  A fairy tale of senescence.  As in the Witch of Exmoor, we read much about the consternation of the adult children.  Who does their mother think she is anyway?  Doesn’t she know she owes them something?  No, Lady Slane acknowledges no unpaid debts; she has raised her children and now she is done, thank you very much.  After offers from her daughter to visit frequently and bring the grandchildren, Lady Slane answers firmly:

“…that is another thing on which I have made up my mind.  You see, Carrie, I am going to be completely self-indulgent.  I am going to wallow in old age.  No grandchildren.  They are too young.  No great-grandchildren either; that would be worse.  I want no strenuous young people, who are not content with doing a thing, but must needs know why they do it…. I want no one around me except those who are nearer to their death than their birth.

“I am going to wallow in old age.”  I love that woman.

But let me say this.  In these days when so many grandparents end up raising grandchildren because they have no other choice, perhaps it is unfeeling to exalt selfish grandmothers.  I honor the sacrifice that is made when old people do not have the luxury of carving out some space for themselves at the end of their lives.  There are many such grandparents, and I commend them.  They may not be blessed, but they are a blessing.

I do not really want to emulate Frieda or Lady Slane, but they are fun to read about.  There is something heady, especially for older women, about protecting the space we have finally “earned” after a lifetime of careers and child-raising.  When I look back on my days of rushing from work to daycare to the kitchen to feed my brood, I don’t know how I did it.  I’m enjoying a rest and some space in which to contemplate what has been and what is.  Children read about superheroes, even though they cannot really emulate them.   I read about feisty old women who have thrown guilt out the window.  It is a vicarious pleasure.

I have written about grandmothers many times before – you might look at “The Age of Grandmothers” or “A Grandmother’s Despair.”

Old People and Artificial Intelligence

I have just finished reading Stacy Abrams’ new mystery, Rogue Justice; among other cultural and political trends, she tackles Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and she has made me ponder what it means when reality starts to warp on us.  In Abrams’ novel, people are threatened with videos of themselves saying and doing things they never did – created images which pass all reality tests.  The targeted people actually start to question their own memories.  Is this what AI will do to us – make us doubt our very sense of reality?  It occurred to me that old folks (maybe all folks) have their own experiences with bent realities.

There is, of course, dementia.  When my mother called me to tell me that little boys had ransacked her apartment overnight and put her milk in the freezer, she was sure it was true.  In fact, she was indignant when I suggested that perhaps she absent-mindedly had put the milk in the freezer herself.  So we know the mind is capable of creating realities that are not real, not true.

And alternate realities are not just a problem for oldsters.  I can remember trying to convince my young son that the monster he saw in his nightmare was not hiding in the house somewhere.  We all know those moments after a bad dream when we have to convince ourselves the nightmare is not true – we didn’t really miss that train or that exam, we aren’t naked at a podium with nothing to say.  Our brains are capable of fooling us.  And such delusions scare us in more than one way: we are twice scared – once in the imaginings, and a second time in the realization that our own brains could do such things to us.

For instance, there is the more malicious process of gaslighting, where we are convinced by someone (or something) else that what we thought was true was wrong.  Mean teenagers and abusive spouses practice it, and we have all been the victim of this at one time or another.  It is just another example that our grasp of reality is not absolute.  There is even a more subtle form of gaslighting when the myth of a happy family is superimposed upon a family or situation that was anything but happy – something that can happen in real time or in retrospect.

And then there are false memories or suppressed memories.  We all have them.  Who hasn’t been around the table with relatives telling stories about old times and not found out that there are as many versions of past reality as there are individuals?  “That’s not what happened…” responds my brother.  Sometimes there is a way to prove or disprove battling conceptions; more often we have to accept that realities bend in the process of becoming history.

Freud had a lot to say about human limitations in the face of unpleasant realities – he posited, of course, that bad memories were often suppressed and said that none of us really believed in the reality of our own mortality: “No one believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.”  Le Rochefoucauld said, “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”  (I might recommend here Irvin Yalom’s wonderful book about death, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.)

Of course, we sometimes accept artificial realities on a temporary basis.  Coleridge used the term “suspension of disbelief” for what we do while reading a novel or watching an engrossing movie.  For the moment, we let ourselves believe what we know is not true – which is why we jump if someone taps us on the shoulder during a horror movie or cry over the death of an actor who assuredly has not died in real life.  But, as in dreams, we can pause, recalibrate, and know the difference.

But now, here comes the latest version of artificial reality, in which we will not always be able to tell the difference.  AI is a form of gaslighting, in that it is being done to us – and usually not for our own good.  We know we can be tricked, but we don’t know when we are being tricked.   What do we do – disbelieve everything?  Surely, this would be no way to live our lives.

We must remind ourselves that we all use AI everyday – to remind us to take our pills or go to appointments, to spellcheck our messages or documents, to verify prices on an item or hotel room, to get directions.  But, in those cases, we know what is happening. We know that the calm voice giving us directions is not real, nor is Siri our friend.  But my point is that we all have accepted AI to one degree or another – and this makes it even more difficult to draw the line.

And let’s not kid ourselves that we will be able to tell the difference between AI and reality.  We won’t.  But in our latter years, we have (hopefully) had enough experience to know that things can seem to be true that are not. We are going to have to trust ourselves (resist gaslighting in all forms) and arm our minds with a healthy skepticism, especially as to what seems too good or too bad to be true. We need to verify our sources.  It is bad enough when it is our own minds playing tricks on us, but it is even worse when something outside is orchestrating an alternate reality.  Am I worried?  Yes.  Am I scared?  Yes.  And we all should be.

Memento Mori

We all need to be reminded of things, and the older we get the more mnemonic aids are necessary.  We try to put everything on the calendar (and then try to remember to look at the calendar); we set up our computer to remind us of birthdays and anniversaries.  Doctors and dentists send us appointment reminders; Facebook sends us memories.  But, perhaps, what we really need help with are the more important things in life.

I recently re-read Muriel Spark’s wonderful Memento Mori. You probably know Spark from her Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; in Memento Mori she moves her observational skills to wonderful advantage from a Scottish boarding school to a set of oldsters. In the book, the very elderly characters keep getting solemn calls reminding them that they will die – no dates, no threats – just: Remember, you must die.  This, nevertheless, upsets the old people tremendously and they try all means (and suspect all kinds of people) to stop the reminders – the memento moris,  if you will.  Police are called, detectives are hired, snooping abounds.  But nothing can stop the calls.  And here’s the odd thing: the voices on the phone vary with each recipient.

There are rich and poor people in the book; the rich are having a lavish and catered old age, while their former servants live in geriatric wards run by the state.  They all get the calls.  Death is knocking at the door.  Why does it upset them so much?  Why do we know exactly how they feel?

Interestingly, I had just about finished drafting this blog when I read an interview in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review.  The “By the Book” subject was Tara Westover, a historian and the author of the bestseller Educated.  She was asked what classic novel she had only recently read, and answered with Spark’s Memento Mori and described the book:

A bizarre and dark little fable about aging and mortality – about economic abundance and emotional poverty.  I laughed out loud the whole way through.

“I laughed out loud the whole way through.”  This is the comment of a younger person (Westover is 36).  If you are old, you will empathize and perhaps grimace, but you will not laugh out loud.

Freud posited that the reason people felt most alive, most vital, in wartime, was because they were face to face with death all of the time.  Shouldn’t that also be true in very old age?  I wonder.

Memento mori has a long history.  You see skulls added to Dutch paintings to remind the viewer that the end is coming.  Cathedrals often had images of skeletons and the Last Judgement, cemeteries were put next to churches, and Buddhists often meditated in charnel houses – all to remind people that they are mortal.  It seems we have always needed that reminder.

When Longfellow was invited to his 50th class reunion at Bowdoin, he composed a long poem entitled, “Morituri Salutamus,” which means “We who are about to die salute you,” the salutation that the gladiators purportedly greeted their blood-thirsty audiences with.  It is a mediocre poem (for Longfellow at least), but he does exhort his elderly classmates not to forget their mortality and encourages them to look at the bright side:

For age is an opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress.

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Longfellow does not quite identify what the “stars” of old age are, leaving us something to meditate upon.

The Buddha recommended five daily recollections to keep us centered on the truth of our existence and prompted his monks to recite them daily.  They are:

  1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
  2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
  3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
  4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
  5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Pretty negative, one might say.  And yet, doesn’t the transience of life make it more poignant?  Is the true suffering in recognizing that we will die or in spending our old age flailing against that reality?    Marx described religion as the “opiate of the masses” because it distracted people from improving the life in front of them.  Perhaps this is true for both civilizations and for individuals.  But as the mynah bird in Huxley’s utopian Island spent all day crying out “Attention” in order to pull listeners back to the present moment, so perhaps we should have something in our lives to remind us of our mortality.  You could do worse than to start with Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori.

Last Things and Reverse Bucket Lists

“Last things” can be hard to talk about.  We formulate bucket lists of fun and daring things we want to do before we die; generally, though, we assume those are one-time activities.  Just to see the Taj Mahal once, to feel what it is like to jump out of an airplane.  We assume the first time is the last time.  But what about the things we do all the time?  Will we even know when we are doing things for the last time? Most of us remember when we got a driver’s license and took a car out alone for the first time, but will we even know when we make that last trip at the steering wheel?  And surely, we have often had the death of a friend or loved one creep up on us unaware, and never realized that our last dinner with them was the “last” time we would see them.

Christianity says there are four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.  We give the dying faithful last rites, and we recall the last supper. Taverns have a last call  – which Leonard Cohen used metaphorically in his wonderful “Closing Time.” 

Rarely do artists admit that they have completed their last works, but there have been some exceptions.  A .E. Housman had a great success in his thirties with A Shropshire Lad, then did not publish much until Last Poems in his sixties. The latter is not much read, and many of the poems in it are unpublished poems of his younger days.  But this is one of my favorites in this volume from his later years:

When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?

– – To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long ’tis like to be.

This poem is a poem of endings, and our inability to make sense of it all.  Housman was forthright in the introduction to Last Poems; he was done.  Housman wrote:

I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my first book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came; and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation. 

No one wants to think about last things, but we might be happier if we did.  In fact, Housman did write one or two poems after he announced his retirement from the genre (he continued to work on his Latin scholarship).  Would it take the pressure off all of us if we admitted it was time for some “last” things – not in a pessimistic sort of way, but in a “goodbye to all that” kind of way? I had a friend once who – being an ambitious type – was always being tempted into new projects in her retirement.  She put a sign across the top of her computer screen which said, “You’ve already done all of that!”

Harold Bloom compiled a wonderful collection of what he calls A Gathering of Last Poems (highly recommended).  Some have the tone of being final but are not really the last; others were written just days before the poet’s passing.  I especially relished his commentary on Auden’s Aubade.  And there is the “Last Poem” of F. T. Prince which tells us that standing at the grave of “any common man or woman,” their “life becomes a poem.”  Yes.

Ah, but…  Yeats last poem was called “Politics,” but it was about anything but politics and about anything but acceptance and reconciliation with age:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics,

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there’s a politician

That has both read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

One last thought.  I recently read the advice (in What Matters Most by Jim Manney) that we should compose a reverse bucket list – a list of all the things we can jettison from our lives, that we can resolve to have done for the last time.  This makes perfect sense to me.  Old age should be a stripping down.

I’ve written on this subject before (see the post, “A Diminished Thing”) and have posted one short story that captures an attempt to do this, “Nothing New.”  What, in your life, have you done for the last time?  What are you willing to say good-bye to before it is wrested from your arms?

Empty Boats, Mark Salzman, and Life Without Narrative

I have been reading various novels and memoirs by Mark Salzman – all of which I recommend highly.  But the one that has stayed with me longest is his last book, The Man in the Empty Boat, about a devastating year in Salzman’s life and the epiphany that he experienced at the end of it – with the help of a flatulent dog.

Our author explains the Zen parable of the empty boat, which I had remembered from a dharma talk long ago.  It is worth reprinting here:

If a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty.
He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat
Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you. – Chuang Tzu

It is a story worth thinking about, but like most wisdom it probably cannot be internalized unless it is experienced. After a memoir of serious life experiences (births, deaths, success, and failure) – in which our author exposes a fantastic ability to describe such experiences, but a limited capacity for coping with them – Mark Salzman gives us his epiphany as he realizes that his dog is not releasing gas to annoy him, but just because he is… a dog.   The author shares his experience of realizing that all dogs are just dogs, and that all the boats are empty:

My normal sense of being the author of my life-narrative gave way and was replaced by a sense that I was the audience for it.  The author, I felt, had to be the cosmos as a whole, the vast matrix of who knows what and where and why, of which human consciousness is one part.  From that point of view, I could no longer believe that we determine what happens to us or choose who to be; we find out what happens to us.  We do what we must as we fall through time, which means – this is the feel-good part again – that we are doing the best we can, always. (146)

And, perhaps, we should treat everyone else as if they are doing the best they can.  We need to cope with life, of course, but the key lesson is that there is nothing/nobody to get angry at.  The boat is empty. Salzman laughingly calls himself a futilitarian. The interesting thing is that the author’s wife (this is a memoir, remember) refuses to let him teach their daughters about his epiphany – he can’t “deny the existence of human freedom and responsibility in front of the girls until they’ve finished high school.”  Hah!

And then there is this: Salzman’s life-narrative gave way.  Human beings love narrative – when there seems to be no narrative in a situation, we create it.  I have written about this before (insert title), but it seems that old people particularly like stories, narrative – they like to construct stories for their lives in retrospect.  We want it to make sense, and we especially want a happy ending.  Did fairy tales teach us to expect a happy ending?  Because, surely life did not.

So, we look for the happy ending in books, be it novels, spiritual guides, or the latest how-to-fix-your-life from the best seller list.  Salzman says in another wonderful book (The Laughing Sutra), “Enlightenment cannot be found in books.  It must be experienced directly!”  Ironically, of course, he say this in a book.  But for those of us who may have spent our lives trying to find answers in books, the likelihood that this is true hits hard.

Salzman wrote a number of books before he wrote The Empty Boat in 2012 and has published nothing since.  He must be in his sixties now – did he indeed find the answer and give up writing books?  I want to know if his epiphany stuck – I want to know if any epiphanies survive in the face of what life dishes out.   Where are you Mark Salzman?  You might not have all the answers, but you give me something to think about!