Tag: Parabola of life

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  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death: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.”

 

 

 

 

Dante’s Parabola

 

In this pleasing contrite wood-life which god allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not.

– Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days with a new baby, a lovely new baby. This special infant evoked lucid memories: adults making fools of themselves, the smells of spit-up and sweet baby skin, the rule of chaos in everything including time, and the utter vulnerability in which our species is born. But this time I noticed something else too. The little baby boy was staring very intently at one thing after another. Trying to make sense of the world.

Wordsworth claims that babies come into the world “trailing clouds of glory” and that former babies forget as the shabby realities of the world override the wonders of heaven. Be that as it may, surely babies are trying to make sense of what must seem like a confusing world. And we big folks work to convince them it’s a noble effort and that there is any sense to it all. We teach them labels for things (“Mama”) and, when they respond, we think they’ve really learned something. Maybe. In any case, babies often look intent and perplexed. This one certainly did.

In some cases it seemed the baby had figured things out – or been born knowing them. Our grandson certainly was able to communicate hunger or discomfort of any kind. And we watched him testing how much control he had over his own body – although whether he differentiated his body from his mother’s was unclear. Mostly our baby had a curious and puzzled look on his little face – and that got me thinking again about Dante’s parabola of human life.

If life is a parabola (related to the Greek word parabolē, which also gave us parable), it might be an interesting exercise to ponder the mathematical definition of a parabola, which is: “a curve where any point is an equal distance from a fixed point (interestingly call the focus) and a fixed line (called the directrix).” You can see a good diagram of this here.

In such a model, our lives would travel through time along what we would normally call the x-axis, which in this case is called the directrix – from birth to the left through death to the right. And we might note here that directrix is the archaic feminine form of the director. The directrix is the feminine axis of time. The three Fates were also women: Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos, the unturnable.

So, if time (the directrix) is the horizontal axis, what is the vertical axis?   If Dante is right, it is the measure of perfection. And he says that it crests in the thirty-fourth year. Maybe true, at least in Dante’s day. Or might it be that with better sanitation and medical help, the peak might have migrated a little to the right? Does it matter? The point is that life’s trajectory goes up – and then goes down. But whatever we call it – growth, development, maturity – it goes through the same levels (think y-axis) going down as it went through going up.

Here’s another way to look at it: the distance from the focus is always changing, but there is always one point going up and one coming down where the distance is the same. A correspondence with an identical point on the y-axis. Birth with death, for instance. And certainly poets have been known to compare the process, the labor of being born with the labor of dying. Could there be other correspondences – menopause and adolescence, for example? Marriage with widowhood or divorce? Steady debilitation in old age with the steady development of children? Can we make comparisons? Can we take lessons from the first time we crossed these vertical markers and use them when we are on the same level on our way down? And what is that still point in the middle, the focus, from which all is measured?

One might think of the Buddha’s enlightenment. After trying to gain nirvana (or at least lasting peace and happiness) through severe ascetic practice – starving himself until he would touch his spine by putting his hand on his stomach – he suddenly remembered a moment from his childhood. As a young child, Siddhartha went to a ploughing festival with his father and was left to sit in “the cool shade of a rose-apple tree” – alone and safe and soon in a kind of self-induced rapture. It was not a rapture born of deprivation; it was a function of deep contentment. And in his adulthood he remembered and re-learned this lesson from his youth. He went back to learn something which taught him how to go forward. The rose-apple tree turned into the bodhi tree. An even better example might be Proust and the memory of the taste of a cookie he dipped in tea when a child. This memory at age fifty-one triggered the Remembrance of Things Past, a review of his life and a masterpiece. A taste and a memory. Parallel moments. Baudelaire said genius was “nothing more than childhood recovered at will.”   Think about that.

And think about the newest baby in our family trying to make sense of the world and more than a little perplexed by it all. And about the oldest member of our family who is also perplexed and getting more so every day. At the same horizontal point on the parabola perhaps, but headed in different directions.

I have attached a story, “Like Heaven,” about a woman at two points on her own parabola. I wrote this tale long ago when I was first thinking about the parabola parable. I am currently working on a novel where I pair diary entries over the course of a lifetime to explore whether the same issues come up as we rise along the arc of life and as we venture down the other side. It isn’t scientific and I’m not even sure the metaphor even holds, but, as I said, it is worth thinking about.