The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging (Section 3)

Section 3

Readers are welcome to use this posting series (No. 1) for educational purposes and I welcome the proper citation/reference back to this source:

Wright, S. (2008). The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging, Occasional Paper Series, (No. 1), December. University of Utah, Gerontology Interdisciplinary Program, Salt Lake City, UT. 84112

Section 3: Continued from Sections 1 and 2 (see previous postings in this series)

The Curious Case of the Arrow of Time: The Vagaries of Preternatural Aging (Section 3)

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Contra-aging (aging-in-reverse) and Time’s Arrow

As a gerontologist, I have always been intrigued by the observation of Hegel in the preface of his book, Philosophy of Right (Wood, 1991) where he stated,

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk (p. 23).

This statement reflects Hegel’s supposition that a culture’s philosophical understanding reaches its peak only when the culture enters its decline. In other words, philosophy is by design “backwards looking” because it is not supposed to be prescriptive (forward-thinking), rather, it understands best while looking into the rearview mirror of time and place. In relation to things gerontological, I have wanted to build a bridge from Hegel’s insight to the interdisciplinary study of aging so that the flight of the “wise” owl of Minerva might have a symbolic significance (and application) for the later stages of human development (into the dusk of life) as well. There is something about the quote that strikes me as less a Hegelian aphorism and instead more about the potential gain or outcome or benefit for living long and reaping the rewards of maturity and the experience of the passage of time.

In other words, the owl of Minerva begins its flight with the onset of the second half of life – and only with time passed through many years of experience. While this proposition has some correlation with the theoretical perspectives of both Jung and Erikson and perhaps to the prospect of “reminiscence work” as described and fleshed out by Gibson (2004), and with Kotre’s (1996) substantive work on the links between generativity and transmitting values through the flow of culture (see also McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1998), and finally with Said’s (2006) “late style,” the key here is that aside from the prospect of later life evolving into living in the land of “geritopia” (see Blechman, 2008), there is the alternative path of social/community/civic engagement to be found in the intimate connections and embeddedness with all generations (Freedman, 2000; 2007).

In the grey of life, the symbolism of both Minerva (Athena) and the Owl connotes a supposed “wisdom” to be had based on the experience flow of time forward, but the wisdom to be had is conditional upon the ability to cultivate cultural treasures via cognitive and emotional discovery through time experienced backward. The literature has addressed the nuances of wisdom as something that is both culturally and contextually bound (Le, 2008), and is not an automatic outcome of old age per se, but takes active cultivation and preparation (Gluck & Baltes, 2006), and can be expressed through competence, pragmatics, integration, interconnections, and the plentitude of critical life events (Webster, 2007). Wisdom, as the possible crown jewel in a life lived long, is understood as a combinational process of many factors over the course of one’s life,but at the end of the day, the likelihood of wisdom increases with age (Gluck & Baltes, 2006) and reflects an Emersonian self-reliance along with an Eriksonian integrity. And even though Bloom (2004) offered that wisdom is to be found in both our sacred and secular contexts, he observed it as something very personal,

The mind always returns to its needs for beauty, truth, and insight. Mortality hovers, and all of us learn the triumph of time. We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more (p. 1).

And so to answer Bloom’s (2004) question: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? - I would offer that wisdom is very much a latent resource in the aged individual and is a gift to be harvested and shared because of time’s arrow. Perhaps this relates closely to Kierkegaard’s aphorism: While life has to be lived forwards, it can only be understood by looking backwards. And again with Schopenhauer’s (2000) insight into the significance of later life as having the potential and ability to weave life experiences, but to also to see the connections that make up the fabric of social interaction and the transmission of culture,

Life can be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which everyone, in the first half of his time can see the top side, but in the second half the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful, but is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together (p. 482).

And these connections are eloquently captured in the insights of Kotre (1996),

Whether one looks at the stories we tell about ourselves or whatever one looks at the marks we leave when we die, culture inevitably appears. In the chill of death, dew forms on the web of significance on which collectively live our lives and for a time reveals its outline (p. 269).

But I am also in agreement with Said (2006) who offered that wisdom in later life does not necessarily always lead to reconciliation, resolution, and serenity; rather, there may be a desired dialectical tension and an “unproductive productiveness going against…”. In other words, wisdom can raise more questions than answers; there is heroism, but there is also a degree of intransigence. There may not be transcendence involved nor may there be any great epiphany or grand unity discovered. In fact, for Said, “late style” may actually reflect and encourage anachronistic creative behavior so that “late style is in, but oddly apart from the present.” (p. 24). Said’s “late style” helps us to understand the role of being a part of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) and the sharing in cultural progression, yet also trying to maintain a creative “self-making” in the flow of time. It is an expression of stepping outside of time all the while acknowledging the fate of one’s being – as time will (and does) end.

And it is here I am making the invocation to the grand quintessence a long-lived life and the establishment of the fruits and the crystallization of time’s arrow in human developmentthat inspire a theoretical and assumed higher order of contemplation, insight and eudaimonia for the benefit of the individual, for the peer cohort, and for generations to follow (Freedman, 2000; 2007; Kotre, 1996; Roszak, 1998; 2001).

A few examples of how the cinema has addressed the mythic qualities of a long life and the older adult as the fountain of wisdom (and tall tales) can be found in Jack Crabb in the film Little Big Man (1970) based on the book by Thomas Berger (1964) and it is believed that Dustin Hoffman holds the record for portraying the greatest age span of a single character, playing Jack Crabb from the age of 17 to 121. And there was Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977) with Merlin mentoring Arthur in Excalibur (1981) and Gandalf (the Grey) in the Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) trilogy.

But if wisdom is proposed to be honorific laurel wreath of time’s arrow in the aging process, it is also no surprise that the allure of reversing time’s arrow (contretemps: contra + temps = against time) such that one could trade-in all of the wisdom and laurel wreaths of the world for a chance to go back in time. It is a measurable and sustainable theme in both the literature and cinema. Although related, I am not referring to the reversal of time’s arrow in terms of short-term memory loss as portrayed by Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento (2000) where Christopher Nolan (the director) has offered a backwards-moving plot (through time?) with the color scenes told in reverse chronological order while the black and white scenes are done in chronological order. In essence, the viewer is caught up in a “remembering the future” experience (see Goh, 2008; Heise, 2000; Parker, 2004). ⁵ A similar theme is found in story told backwards through time with Ray in Reverse written by Daniel Wallace (2000) ⁶ where the main character, Ray Williams, is in heaven trying to sort out the significant events in his life going back to about ten years old (or young).

But these are not necessarily artistic examples of reversing time’s arrow in the context of the aging process. As you recall, I began this essay with a brief look at two movies that have been recently released (but both based on books published many years ago) that portray a reversal in time’s arrow and thus a movement backwards through time from senescence and toward youth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Youth Without Youth). And I presented them as benchmarks for our targeted discussion. And so, we arrive closer to the mark with the example of Martin Amis’s (1991) book,Time’s Arrow, with its short-on-pages but long on fictive plot considering the thermodynamics of history where the protagonist and the narrator share the same body and experience time passing in reverse. The beginning of the book is the death of the main character (the doctor Tod T. Friendly, and then into others: John Young, Hamilton de Souza and Odilo Unverdorben) but becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel and the ending of the story is when he enters his mother’s womb. But it is the story in between the start and the end, which has the doctor revisiting the Auschwitz death camp, and with twisted logic, and the backward narration, history is indeed vastly different and the narrator “dies” when the protagonist is born (see Glaz, 2006; Menke, 1998).

And closer still to our target of portraying a comprehensive (but not quite) reversal in aging is found in the book The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer (2004). Greer has created in Max a character who is born quite old and ages backward physically (thus getting younger each year), but mentally and emotionally he progresses forward as do other children. In this case, Max Tivoli was born in San Francisco in 1871 looking like a 70 year old man, but on the inside still a child. John Updike (2004) provided an interesting book review on Greer’s work and noted that, “Max differs from Benjamin Button in that Button begins with a fully stocked old brain and ends with newborn’s tabula rasa; whereas Max learns as he goes, as do those of us not condemned to age in reverse.” The meaning (and the confusion) of it all is that Max’s condition is both a blessing and a curse (“Inside this wretched body, I grow old. But outside – in every part of me but my mind and soul – I grow young,” p. 5), especially as he tries to navigate the turbulence of love (with Alice) and all the while, as Updike (2004) phrased it, “growing against the grain of time.”

Greer further builds an interesting bridge (see page 5) via a connection to the Shakespearean play Hamlet by having Max see his condition as similar to the “ancient curse” as highlighted in the odd and cryptic dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius in Act II, Scene II where Hamlet is reading from a book (“words, words, words”) and Polonius wants to know more about the book that ostensibly has so much of Hamlet’s attention. The book that Hamlet had his nose in was claimed to be a satire of old age and Hamlet (after some ageist commentary) then says to Polonius,

“…for you yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.”

Despite the temporal paradox within Hamlet’s lines, the crab is an interesting allegorical device (to which Polonius thought at least representing method in the madness of even thinking about it) to dramatically capture the motion and symbolism of going backwards and is portrayed in Greer’s novel and in Shakespeare’s play (at least) as a bittersweet experience (at least) and as a curse (at most). Going backwards and against the grain is bound to create an “out of joint” existence for the individual within time’s arrow, which brings along all else with it: family, friends, culture, and social structures, except the protagonist. The crab motif in effect conveys a going against nature and an oddity that is exceptional in life, and yet, not at all pleasing or desired. For example, I think of the derogatory comment to describe the person in the later years of life (a crabby old man/woman) who is unwilling, reluctant, irritable, dour, and basically an unpleasant person. Too much concern with going back and embracing backwardness reminds me of Nietzsche’s aphorism, “By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward.”

I also interpret being-as-a-crab as someone who cannot break out of their shell and move forward; instead, the person is perceived to be “holed up” and Rip van Winkle like, out of date and out of time. The crab image and its attendant allegorical layers have also eerily served as prominent threads to several temporal issues in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock (see also North, 2001 and comment about connection Marvell’s poetry). For example, Eliot’s verse about Prufrock (who also ironically said that he was “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”) is at once sad and frail in its connotations, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” in large part as it seems to me, because there is the inability of Prufrock to connect with others, and thus is disconnected with intimacy. He is seemingly crustacean-like in his inability to cultivate relationships and instead is only aware of the minutiae in his life as his life as it is “measured out in coffee spoons.” Eliot also makes reference to things crab-like (along with our elemental words of “dust” and “sand”) “An old crab with barnacles on its back,” from the poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (see Eliot, 1991) which only reinforces Eliot’s preoccupation with the themes of time, aging and the spectacle of existential angst and catharsis (“I grow old…I grow old…”) into the landscape of the second half of life. The cross-weaving of these themes are like flares in the sky to indicate a lesson, a warning, a message about the aging process that carries with it both loss and fragility, but there is also the opportunity to exact what makes us (more) human as we age (forward) and to re-examine our lives and redefine superannuation. The point here is that there has been much written about the allure of shifting time’s arrow by contemplating the journey of life in reverse and that the voyage back (theoretically) in time is much more “rewarding” than movement toward the inevitability of decline and death.

Ah yes, to be young again – to be vigorous and splendid in physical perfection (think of the The Eagles song “Twenty-One” and “strong as I can be and there is no reason why – I should ever want to die”). Instead of wondering, like The Beatles (1967) did, if someone will still need me when I’m sixty-four, we could, instead, go the route of Nirvana (1991) and don’t care or mind if we’re old. Or better yet, is there a way to have both the wisdom and peak of physicality so that George Bernard Shaw’s assertion, “Youth is wasted on the young,” could be flipped on its head by expressing it this way, “Wisdom is wasted on the old.” Could we reap the rewards of time’s arrow and yet have it reversed so that we can have our cake and eat it too? This is not just averting “this bank and shoal of time” by holding back the years as sung by Simply Red (1985; see also Templeton, 2007) or like jumping in swimming pools with cocoons (in Florida – of course!) from extraterrestrials (Antereans) in order to escape “the mortal coil” (see Haycock, 2008) of illness, aging, and mortality (see movies, Cocoon, 1985 and Cocoon: The Return, 1988). Even though Epstein (2007) describes the aging process as where Narcissus has been asked to leave the pool (“time passes, the day darkens, the grave yawns”), in contrast, the people of the high country town of Springhill, Colorado, and based on the novel by Clifford Irving (1996), The Spring, were really doing quite well despite their “age” and have decided to stay in the pool a little longer (maybe something in the water?).

No, instead of fantastical accounts and fairy tales we are seriously exploring the prospect of “the possibility of an island” in time where there is both immortality and the perpetuity of the same, which is beyond Decrepitude and Senioritude, and death itself (see Houellebecq, 2005). We have now reached the point of breaking time’s arrow in half and the crucible for extended and eternal life is no longer science fiction (see Slusser, Westfahl & Rabkin, 1996). The pursuit of prolongevity is now on our doorstep (Cole & Thompson, 2001/2002; Post & Binstock, 2004). And the target of the arrow is no longer found within mythology, fictional stories, and the magic of special effects in film, rather it is purported to be found at the macro and systemic level of the body/mind/spirit connection (see Chopra, 2002), and perhaps deeper into the microbiological and the phylogenetic levels. Whether you belong to the evolutionary or mechanistic camp, (see Hughes & Reynolds, 2005) (or see both as complementary), or you buy into SENS (De Grey, 2007; see also Templeton, 2007) or SENSE (Rose, Rauser, Benford, Matos, & Mueller, 2007; Rose, 2008) as representing the most current scientific revolution in gerontology, or whether you are the futurist, the optimist, or the realist in regards to aging and mortality (Carnes & Olshansky, 2007) the message is clear: time’s arrow in aging may have been seen as thermodynamic, but in the 21^st century we may come to see time’s arrow for the human species become more the domain of biological engineering. Furthermore, it makes me wonder if the primary role of gerontologists in the year 2060 will be to primarily serve as historians of time – in the way that it used to be – back in the old days.

Gerontology is dead. Long-live gerontology.

Speaking of time and aging and going way back, Sophocles and Ovid shall have the closing commentary on our topic,

Oedipus at Colonus

We shall see – and time will tell.

Notes from all sections of posting (1,2,3)

Let us not forget Alan Sokal’s now infamous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” that was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text, and then soon after, revealed to be a hoax. It was deliberate satire and parody. Sokal was apparently exposing the cavalier way in which constructs of science could be twisted and co-opted to fit postmodern rhetorical and political agendas (see Sokal, 2008 for a comprehensive examination of the issue) and as a result there was (and is) the proliferation of the Frankensteinian beast known as “pseudoscience.”
In the edited book by Michael North (2001), The Waste Land: T.S. Eliot, W.W. Norton & Co.; New York, there is a insightful footnote about the connection of verse in Eliot’s “III. The Fire Sermon” and Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress” first published in 1861, where the following lines by Marvell were adapted by Eliot into his poetry, “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
Speaking of eternal recurrence, I reviewed one blogging site that was titled, “Time Loop” and naturally the blog entry presented how the blogger felt like they were going in circles and where “every day is exactly the same” (see Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor from the album “With Teeth”) and the blogger had their entry in a repeating pattern – over and over again – as the web pages were scrolled downward. Absurdly funny and/or ironically apropos.
As creative and insightful examples of capturing the moments of time, I recommend reviewing Thomas Pynchon’s (1997) book, Mason & Dixon,and what I believe to be one of the finest openings to a book and the setting of the stage and scene not only “back in time” but the flowing of time by using a descriptive sequence of words that unfold much like a visual walk using a camera to capture the context and temporal dimensions of the novel. There is also Katagiri’s book (2007), Each Moment is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, where it was stated that Dogen Zenji said that most people are not able to acquire the way-seeking mind of spiritual awareness without deeply understanding that a day consists of 6,400, 099,180 moments. A moment is called ksana in Sanskrit. “The numbers associated with moments in a day are not so important, but we should have a sense of how quickly time goes” (pp. 3-4).
Another movie that grapples with time’s arrow and memory is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004; for a provocative analysis of similar films such as Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and Martin Amis’s book,Time’s Arrow, see Goh, R. (2008). Myths of reversal: Backwards narratives, normative schizophrenia and the culture of causal agnosticism. Social Semiotics, 18, 61-77.
Wallace also wrote the book (1998): Big Fish: A novel of mythic proportions which was used as the basis of the movie by Tim Burton, Big Fish released in 2003 which has its own interesting story of time and reflections on the past.