Tag: Winter Palace

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.

Amnesty for Amnesia

We have all been deeply schooled in the value of “letting go.”  My Centering Prayer group talks often about “letting go and letting God.”  “Consider the lilies,” says Jesus in answer to two questions about anxiety: “… which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?”  OK, right. “Letting go” is also a pervasive theme in Buddhist meditative practice; I cannot tell you how many dharma talks I have heard on the necessity of letting be and letting go.  “If you let go a little you will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace,” says Ajahn Chah, and I believe him.  The problem is that I still have not been able to let go the of big things, while I am “letting go” of little things constantly.  And I don’t like it.

I let go of small things all the time – mostly names, but sometimes words.  I also let go of objects (reading glasses) or the reason why I walked into the kitchen. The most strange and aggravating thing about these little “forgettings,” these “senior moments,” is that I know the word or answer is buried somewhere in the folds of my grey matter, from whence it eventually surfaces – long after the moment when I need it.  Sometimes it teases me – I can remember that the name starts with an “S” (Sara?  Sally?) but still cannot produce the correct name when we meet up in the grocery store.  It is like when you wake up at the tail end of a dream – you try to grasp it but… it’s gone.  And then, while you are brushing your teeth and not standing in front of a woman trying to remember her name, the answer floats back into your consciousness.  “Stacy,” you say to yourself, “that woman’s name is Stacy.  Where was that name when I needed it?”  Where indeed?

These are small lapses, but it is not an inconsequential matter to me.  My mother spent her last years in a nasty sort of dementia, so every time my brain fumbles, I start to hyperventilate.

It bothered Elizabeth Bishop too, but she turned her lapses into the wonderful poem, “One Art“:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Losing things is an art; it’s going to happen, so we might as well get better at it, “accept the fluster.”  Bishop’s poem is bittersweet, pairing the need for acceptance with the letting go of keys, names, places, and the grief over things that are permanently gone.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Philip Larkin seems to take the letting go of memory as a blessing; the past is what gets in the way of future happiness.  Funny and cynical, in “The Winter Palace” he longs for the peace of an empty mind:

And [I] am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Billy Collins at least has a sense of humor about it:

It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones. (from “Forgetfulness”)

Amnesia and amnesty both come from the Greek word amnestia – meaning oblivion, or forgetting.  Amnesia means “complete or partial memory loss” and amnesty means “a general pardon for offenses.”  Now, it is somewhat paradoxical that I have been working hard at “letting go” for years, and yet – when my brain is ready to part with something, albeit something as trivial as where I hid the extra key, I panic.  Silly.  And, I have been assured that these minor memory lapses are rarely a prelude to true dementia (from the Latin dementia, meaning “out of one’s mind”), which is defined as a condition characterized by progressive, persistent, severe impairment of intellectual capacity. Some self-amnesty for amnesia is in order. Clearly, I need to pair Bishop’s advice about learning the art of losing (“it isn’t hard to master”) with Larkin’s assurance that the less cluttered my mind is, the better.  And add a dash of Collins’ humor.  I just wish I could choose what my mind lets go of.  There’s some stuff I would really like to get rid of, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I have written several other blogs on letting go and memory – if you are interested in the topic you might try “Whispered Words of Wisdom” or “Dementia, Creativity, and Forgetfulness.”

Dementia, Creativity, and Forgetfulness

One thing I have learned from my mother’s dementia is that it is not just about forgetting; her dementia has also brought rich imaginings. Surely, Mom has forgotten much – people, where she is, what day it is, what year it is – but she is also constantly constructing stories. Some of her creative endeavors are complex and intriguing; others are horrifying. There are fictions which seem to be born of paranoia – the first time we knew she had slipped over the edge was when she called to tell me all her money was gone. The government had taken it all. Other tales seem to have been spun to explain inexplicable situations or to shift blame. Once, when she found her gallon of milk frozen solid in the freezer, she told me that a whole tribe of boys had broken into her assisted-living apartment overnight and made a mess and hid her milk. This, of course, despite the fact that she lived in a secure building with no children anywhere around.

Still other stories seem to be created just to make her life more interesting. For a fortnight, she was routinely telling me that she had spent the previous night out on a boat, having been evacuated due to impending floods. Luckily, she thought that everyone had a pretty good time on the mandatory cruise, and she would discuss their revelry at length. She has also recounted visits from friends who are long since dead and relatives who claimed they hadn’t been near her in months. Sometimes she conjures up an answer to a question that puzzles her. If I ask her where a bouquet of flowers or a new blouse comes from, she will tell me she won them in a contest. Some tales are funny, some are scary, and some are so outlandish it is hard to imagine how she ever thought of them.

Two themes come back again and again. Although my mother never had an office job (she was an artist), she often talks about all the paperwork she has to do before they will let her “go home.” As she has fallen farther from reality, Mom shuffles the coloring books in front of her and tells me that unless she finishes all this “work” there won’t be any money to pay her rent. She worries that if she has no money, they will not feed her. As many times as we have all told her that she has no financial worries, that everything is taken care of, she responds with more creative tales of men in suits who have come to take her money away.

And she worries about her mother and father, who have been gone for decades. Who is taking care of them, she’ll ask. Maybe she is really asking who will take care of her. But again the stories get elaborate – her parents live somewhere over the bridge, their phone is broken, they promised to come to visit.

Sometimes it is easy to see what sparks her imagination; other times the tales seem to come out of the ether. The stories are more often worrisome than comforting, but they are her stories and she sticks to them. I have seen various articles about fostering creativity in dementia patients, but little about the very fount of creativity they seem to become. We sometimes think of dementia patients as losing their humanity, but isn’t imagination the very kernel of what makes us human?

I was recently reminded by Lewis Hyde in his new book Primer of Forgetting, that forgetting can also be a creative and useful process. If you think about it, you might agree. There are things that we must forget or we cannot go on – either because the memory is so atrocious or because there is no more room. How many times can you relive that humiliating moment when your first boyfriend dumped you? Or the stupid things you did in your younger days? (“Remember not the sins of my youth,” pleads the Psalmist.) How many phone numbers or passwords can you hold in your head? (I think of the story about Louis Agassiz, who was famous for memorizing all the scientific names for fish and their parts. When Agassiz came to Harvard, he decided to put that prodigious memory to work to remember the names of all the students, at which he proved very successful. However, one day he realized that in memorizing undergraduates he had started to forget the fish. He immediately gave up on the students.)

Someone told me a story about his mother who had grown up in terrible circumstances in Hitler’s Germany during WWII. Her childhood haunted her, was written on her face, until she developed dementia in old age, and then it was somehow …better. I understand this and so does Philip Larkin – read “The Winter Palace” and you will sympathize. There are things my mother has forgotten (she almost never mentions her husband of over fifty years), but memories of her childhood seem to have sprouted from some forgotten seedbed and blossomed in full technicolor. In her own way, she has been creative in her remembering and in her forgetting.

This week’s story, “Slip Slidin’ Away,” is about an older woman with dementia whose imagination might be trying to tell her something.