Tag: Metamorphoses

Old Folks and True Love

Since moving into a neighborhood of mostly retirees, I have been stunned by the exemplars of true love that I have encountered.  Not true love in the sense of mindless passion, but in the sense of real people doing superhuman things for the people that they are committed to.  True love is not determined by wine and roses – or even by white weddings and gender-reveal parties.  True love is sticking with someone you are committed to even when the passion is gone, even when it is not easy, even when they are not exactly sure who you are.

We think of true love as the province of the young; there are few classic stories of old lovers (and there are even fewer rom coms).  But there are some.  In his Metamorphoses, Ovid shares the tale of Baucis and Philemon, an old couple who live together in poverty with their pet goose:

They had married young, they had grown old together

In the same cottage; they were very poor,

But faced their poverty with cheerful spirit

And made the burden light by not complaining.

It would do you little good to ask for servants

Or masters in that household, for the couple

Were all the house; both gave and followed orders. (Humphries translation)

“Both gave and followed orders” – perhaps the recipe for a good  marriage.  Most old marriages do seem to have given up traditional delineations of responsibility – old women mow the lawn, old men run the vacuum.  They do what needs doing.

But, back to Baucis and Philemon.  As in many stories, the gods (Jupiter and Hermes in disguise) come to town and find no hospitality, find no doors open to them, until they get to the old couple, who dig into their meager stores to feed the unexpected guests.  When they realize they are entertaining divinity, they even decide to sacrifice their beloved goose to give the gods a good meal.  Zeus stops them from this act, saves their house when he floods the rest of the inhospitable town, and grants their wish that they may live together until they die, serving the gods.  Then, Philemon makes a final request: that they not outlive each other: “that I may never see the burial of my wife, or she perform that office for me.”  So, in due time, while they are “talking about old times,” they simultaneously metamorphize into trees – an oak and a linden – which stand intertwined.

Now, old couples might hope they die at the same time, but they seldom do.  What usually happens, in stages or spurts, is that one has to take care of the other through physical or mental infirmities.  It is not easy; it is often unbelievably hard.  Newborns and toddlers are tough on a marriage, but we know they are going to grow up (and be difficult teenagers) and eventually leave home.  And we were younger then.

In the enthusiasm of new love, younger folk may say, “I’d do anything for you!”  When they married, they swore to stick it out through sickness and health.  No one had any idea of what that all really might mean. Think of the old man who has to wake up to help his wife to the bathroom or clean up after her if she doesn’t make it.  Think of the old woman who has to tell her spouse for the 100th time that day that she isn’t his mother.  Then think of these same people holding hands on the porch.  This is life for many, and they seldom complain about it and almost never throw in the towel.

The divorce rate for elders has been increasing – from 1.4 to 6 per 1,000 for women and from 1.4 to 8 for men – but the rates for seniors are nothing compared to those for younger folk (which run closer to 20-50 per thousand).  I can’t think of any “gray divorces” among my acquaintances, but I know they do happen.  What happens more often, in my observation, is that commitment deepens with age. Once in a while, perhaps, a spouse gets sent to the memory care home or nursing facility sooner than we might think necessary.  But I never judge.  One cannot know what the demands have been or what the capabilities are.  For the most part, old married people are heroes.

And it is not just the big stuff.  There are also illnesses, joint replacements, falls, cataract surgery, and endless dental work.  There are special diets and walkers and installation of balance bars all over the house.  Sometimes the stress spreads equally over time between the partners; sometimes not.  But let’s call their devotion what it is: true love.

The presence of a purpose often seems to focus the caretaker’s life.  This does not mean it is easy or pleasant; nor should the challenge be underestimated.  Nevertheless, it is a common occurrence that the caretakers themselves do not live long after their duties are ended, their partners are gone.

So watch your romantic comedies, drool over white brides and roses, fixate on Romeo and Juliet.  But I know where the real romance is taking place, where “till death do us part” means something tangible, where “devoted” is a verb and not an adjective.

This week’s story is not about old love – if you want to read about that you might try “Again and Again and Again” or “Slip Slidin’ Away.”  But for a laugh and a ponder, there is this week’s “A Life of Twelve Toes in Six Pages.”  (Don’t ask me where I get these ideas!)

Young to Old – Do People Really Change?

It is a perennial question:  Do people ever really change?  The other night we watched Odd Couple II, a good but inferior sequel (1998) to the original movie (1968) based on the wonderful play by Neil Simon.  Neil Simon also wrote the movie versions.  The whole basis of the sequel is, of course, that Felix and Oscar have not changed over all these years.  They have made small adjustments to life, and life has had to make large adjustments to them. This all makes for good comedy.  But, of course, this is just a movie.  Do real people ever change? Are old people different from their younger selves?

People do make major changes in their exterior life.  They change careers, spouses, location.  They give up drinking, take up religion.  But do they really change?  We have all seen many dry drunks and unmerciful Christians.  Is there an age after which our personality loses much of its plasticity?  Everyone has friends who married people hoping to change them – often with disastrous results.  Change is not easy. 

If you have occasion to meet someone after many years (think of class reunions), you might converse with them as if it were yesterday, and remark – as if it were a compliment – that they “haven’t changed a bit.”  High school reunions are full of women who still act like beauty queens long after their looks are gone, and former athletes who have dropped the habit of exercise but retained the bravado of the football field.

Novels have been written about characters who only appear to change.  In Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, the mayor starts out bad, appears to reform, and ends up in the despicable state in which he started.  Shakespeare’s characters seldom change – Iago is Iago until the end, regardless of the consequences.  In Marilynne Robinson’s Gideon novels, the character Jack is a winsome man who makes other people suffer.  Such he is as a child and such he is until the end.  Jack is sorry sometimes, but he does not change.

There is some literature in which characters change – there is even a word for such characters in writer’s jargon.  They are called dynamic.  Some examples might be Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations or Eliot’s Silas Marner.  We like these stories (or the Hallmark versions of them) because we want to believe that people can change, that we ourselves can change.

I have often thought that in old age certain characteristics refine and crystallize themselves.  A frugal man becomes a tyrant over the purse strings and won’t permit so much as a tablespoon of mayonnaise to be wasted.  A woman who has spent most of her life worrying about how she looks, indulges in plastic surgery and spa treatments as the sags.  Worried young people become fretful elders.  I have a number of friends I have known since they were young; few have changed much and for that I am mostly grateful.

The brain is an amazing instrument.  In it are trapped all we have learned, all the tracks of our habits, and all the memories of the pleasant and painful.  If you have loved anyone with dementia, you know that the brain can change, personality can change – all without the consent of the individual.  AA says that sometimes drunks have to hit bottom to change.  Saints often changed after some kind of mystical experience.  Near collisions with death have known to be effective. But how much change can we control?  Interesting question.

I’ve written many stories about change, including a series modeled after the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which people literally change into other beings based on their just desserts in the minds of the gods.  The introduction to those stories is here; an example is my tale “What Crime is There in Error.”   Most of my stories, though, do not assume that the people change; characters often have realizations about themselves and others, but there are no miraculous conversions on the road to Damascus – or the road to old age. 

Metamorphoses, Reason and Another of Life’s Paradoxes

“My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms; the gods, who made the changes, will help me–or I hope so–with a poem that runs from the world’s beginning to our own days.” Ovid, Metamorphoses

While my stories are generally realistic (at least they are about the kinds of things which occur in my reality), I have also written many tales of wondrous changes – young men turning into dogs, old ladies into songbirds, middle-aged women into foxes. I have been inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and impelled by the need for profound metaphors when words themselves don’t seem comprehensive enough. Most of what is below was written as a tentative introduction to a never-completed collection of those stories, and yet it seems to have a lot to do with old age and so here it is.

We know that life is change; we see it all around us. Yet, we value permanency, dream about the forever after. Marriage promises that we will always love each other. Children mean that there will always be someone there for us, someone to remember us. We go to the doctor to preserve our bodies and to the dentist so that we can keep our teeth. We celebrate great birthdays, long tenures at jobs, endurance in marriages. Individually, we want to remain the same and we want the people in our life to be unchanged. Our fairy tales end with life happily ever after and our doxologies with world without end. But, of course, life is not like that, and our beliefs and desires for constancy set up a basic paradox which is the cause of much anxiety.

Intellectually, of course, we know that things change. After Darwin and Lyell, we know that transformations happen on such large and slow scales that we can’t even notice them. (Global warming may be speeding such transformations up to the point of getting our attention.) But we also know from our own observations that people grow up, have children, age, suffer tragedies, cope or fail to cope, suffer good fortune or bad, age, and die. Yet, we choose to worship the illusive stability rather than the pervasive change. In our culture we have very few metaphors for the benefits of change; it is good to be as solid and stable as a rock, but it is not usually a compliment to be a chameleon or a shape-changer. And woe to the politician who admits to changing his mind – flip-flopper comes to mind. Would we really want to live a life where we never change our mind? (Think of your first spouse.) Perhaps the wise have always known that sometimes only change can save us.

Ovid, of course, knew. He was at the end of an era which internalized myths wherein physical metamorphoses were used to demonstrate the power – for good and bad – of change. His tales are full of transformation, starting from the changes that formed the earth and ending with the alterations in his own world and contemplations of the changes that death will make in his own body. He puts the most direct sermon on the subject of change, however, in the mouth of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher of music, vegetarianism, and reincarnation, who admonishes us:

                                                    Remember this:
The heavens and all below them, earth and her creatures,
All change, and we, part of creation, also
Must suffer change.

Ovid relates tales of change, and while they may begin as stories of psychological or spiritual change, they end as stories of physical change. The intangible becomes manifest. He believed that to truly understand the change that happens to another person, we readers need a material phenomenon. Why? Again, perhaps we need such a transformation because we are programmed to look for, to hope for, to believe in permanence. It takes powerful evidence to remind us that stability is an illusion. Perhaps the fantastic is necessary for us to comprehend that reality is a constantly metamorphosing world around us. And sometimes it takes a fantastic view of the world to make us take a fresh assessment of normality.  (Think of Gulliver’s Travels.) It is a paradox.

While comprehension of such extraordinary changes requires use of the fantastic, the fantastic requires metaphors.  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “enlightened” western world lost one set of metaphors, but soon replaced them with new ones. The void must be filled. Metaphors of progress replaced those of redemption. (Think the Wall Street bull vs. the sacrificial lamb.) We tend to think we are in the Age of Reason; reason would figure everything out and solve our problems. But maybe that hasn’t worked out so well. We might remember that even Milton calls the imagination (fancy in 17th century language) the most important faculty serving reason:

But know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties that serve
Reason as chief, among these fancy next
Her office holds.

This is something that even the ancient Greeks knew, but we seem to have forgotten.

This week’s story is “What Crime Is There in Error?” Other stories in my Metamorphoses series available on this site include “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind,” “Gift to the Widows,” and “Fable About a Soccer Mom.” Let your fancy roam and then see if it can bring anything back for your reason.

Metamorphoses

We know that life is change; we see it all around us. Yet, we value permanency, dream about lasting bliss. We celebrate significant birthdays, long tenures at jobs, endurance in marriages.   Individually, we want to remain the same and we want the people in our life to be stable and unaltered. Our fairy tales end with life happily ever after and our doxologies envision a world without end. But, of course, life is not like that, and our beliefs and desires for constancy set up a basic paradox that is the cause of much anxiety. And this may be particularly true regarding the changes of aging.

Intellectually, of course, we know that things change. After Darwin and Lyell, we learned transformation happens on a large and slow scale to the world around us.  (Although global warming may be speeding things up.) We know from our own observations that babies grow up, have children,  suffer successes and tragedies, cope or fail to cope,  and age. Yet, we choose to worship the illusive stability rather than the pervasive change. In our culture we have very few metaphors for the benefits of change; it is good to be as solid and stable as a rock, but it is not usually a compliment to be a chameleon or a shape-changer. And woe to the politician who admits to changing his mind! But – if we haven’t learned the lesson in earlier years – aging teaches us change in inevitable.

Ovid, of course, knew. He was at the end of an era which internalized myths in which physical metamorphoses were used to demonstrate the power – for good and bad – of change.   His tales (Metamorphoses) are full of transformation, starting from the changes that formed the earth, moving through the conversion of people to trees, birds, deer, and ending with alterations in his own world, including contemplations of the changes death will make on his own body. Ovid puts the most direct sermon on the subject of change, however, in the mouth of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher of music, vegetarianism, and reincarnation who admonishes us (and note the word suffer in the last line):

                                                Remember this:
The heavens and all below them, earth and her creatures,
All change, and we, part of creation, also
Must suffer change.

            Ovid’s Metamorphoses are tales of change; while they may signify psychological or spiritual change, they are mostly stories of physical change. The intangible becomes manifest. Perhaps to understand change, we need a material phenomenon. Perhaps it takes powerful evidence to remind us that stability is an illusion. The fantastic is necessary for us to comprehend that reality is a constantly metamorphosing world around us. It is a paradox.

Ovid’s extraordinary changes also remind us that we cannot live without metaphors. (In another post, I will explore how metaphors for aging have changed over the years.) In the seventeenth century, the western world lost one set of metaphors, but eventually new ones appeared. The void must be filled. There are things that we cannot understand by thinking about them in abstract terms; we need metaphors and the imagination. Milton calls the imagination as the chief faculty serving reason:

But know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these fancy next
Her office holds. (Paradise Lost V)

Of course, we must remember that metaphors are simply correspondences, Correspondences that require imagination (fancy). Ovid inspired me to write a number of stories of metamorphoses set in the current era. I have started by posting “Gift to the Widows.” Let your fancy roam and see if it can bring anything back to nourish your reason. And feel free to chortle.