From the point of view we have been taking up until now, life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer – Counsels and Maxims – “The Ages of Life”
From dust to dust …..
( I hope you do not mind that I have woven in some Da Vinci images into the text too)
How does one go from the drawings of Michelangelo to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Jorge Luis Borges and then build a “bridge” from Michelangelo to Darwin and human longevity – and thread in the symbols of “dust” and “time” – and then complete the loop?
In the interdisciplinary field of aging, you never know what interconnections can be woven – like threads – into a tapestry by foraging (I sometimes call it “poaching”) on the array of disciplines, specialties, and professions that can potentially intersect the aging experience. The tapestry is the result of taking (seemingly) disparate pieces of information and then creating illuminating patterns of knowledge that can add to the rich depth and breadth of issues that represent the study of aging. Here is but one example of “weaving” and it is related to the title of this blog post. But along the way with this one thread (which would be the {“warp”}) going down the page:
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there are also several cross-threads that intersect as well (the “weft”). Or going from left to right on this page or across the computer screen. For example, and speaking of threads “weaving together” –
>>>> [Weft] The article by Phiroze Hansotia, MD in Clin Med Res. 2003 October; 1(4): 327–332.
A Neurologist Looks at Mind and Brain: “The Enchanted Loom” >>>>>>>>>>>>>
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I will indicate a few of those, but we shall follow the warp – the thread that would go lengthwise or down this page on your computer screen.
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{Warp} So I started of with the book, How To Use Your Eyes by James Elkins (2000), which caught my eye when browsing the library for new books – and there it was lying face-up in the reshelving area. It had an intriguing cover design – and the inside front cover set the hook,
“Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life. But when we look at them – really look at them-what do we see?”
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So I skimmed through the pages and stopped at the section titled, “How to Look at a Face” (Chapter 19 – pp.146 -153). There were several drawings of both an old and young man to demonstrate that, “Because we attend so closely to people’s expressions, the face is full of names.” Elkins then went on to use the drawing Michelangelo’s study for the Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling to indicate over 25 different features of the face. Elkins noted that the underlying “architecture is provided by the skull, which is especially strong on this wonderful drawing of an old woman {emphasis mine} (Fig. 19.1 in the book). We will come back to this in a moment.
Elkins then used Michelangelo’s drawings to indicate what he called, “some sad observations about aging” –
“As a person ages, the muscles atrophy and the fat migrates, slumping downward until it comes to rest on a facial sheet. The bags and flabby folds of old age are like fat people slumping in hammocks. This mans face (in the book Fig. 19.4) shows all the signs of the impending age.”
Elkins goes on describe in great detail – like a CSI episode – all of the features of the anatomical process in the “aging” face,
“That is what it means to say that gravity takes its toll. Gravity pulls the fat down, revealing the underlying fascia. What was once a network of tissues becomes a series of slumps and slides in ending in hammocks of fascia.” (p. 153).
Okay, that is mildly interesting, if not slightly depressing, about the forces that affect the face that sound more like geological tectonic plates sliding around, but what intrigued me the most was the use of the drawing of the Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling to indicate and exemplify the physiological features of the aging face.
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The Cumaean Sybil? So?
{Warp} What is strangely correlative in Elkins choice of Michelangelo’s drawings for portraying an aging face is that the Cumaean Sybil has an interesting story to tell as it relates to aging.
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Many of you will recall that in the great work of Virgil, The Aeneid, The Cumaean Sybil is the one gives Aeneas a tour of the underworld which are entered into in the land she inhabited (this story is the reason for Dante’s having chosen Virgil as his guide in “The Divine Comedy”).
[Weft]<<<<- The Aeneid – you cannot go wrong with Sarah Ruden’s translation of The Aeneid of Vergil, Yale University Press, 2008;
not to mention Robert Fagles version The Aeneid (Viking, 2006) – and then starting off with Aeneas carrying his father from Troy – >>>>
[Weft] but that is another story –and then don’t get me going on Dante’s work with Virgil as his guide; there is a whole
bunch of threads to aging issues in there (see John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 1986 Harvard University Press;
<<<<<< or Life of Dante by Giovanni Boccaccio).
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{Warp} The Sibyl of Cumae gained her powers by attracting the attention of the sun god Apollo. Apollo offered her anything if she would spend a single night with him. She asked for as many years of life as grains of sand she could squeeze into her hand.
Granted, the sun god said; and Sibyl, glad to win her boon, refused his advances. Thereafter she was cursed with the fulfillment of her wish–eternal life without eternal youth. She slowly shriveled into a frail undying body, so tiny that she fit into a jar.
“I have lived seven hundred years, and to equal the number of the sand-grains, I have still to see three hundred springs and three hundred harvests. My body shrinks up as years increase, and in time, I shall be lost to sight, but my voice will remain, and future ages will respect my sayings.”
An ancient woman doomed to live a thousand years, but without youth, shrinking with age each year until nothing is left of her but her voice — a voice which some say is kept in a jar in the cave, and that others say one can still hear there in her Cumaean grotto.”
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So there is the thread of aging content from Elkins to Michelangelo (via the Cumaean Sybil – with some ultra-aging issues going on – like forever!) and then it connects T. S. Eliot’s great poem – The Waste Land.
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“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα
τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.”
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{Warp} This is the epigram (Latin and Greek – From the Satyricon of Petronius (d. A.D. 66), chapter 48) at the very beginning of The Waste Land and strangely enough – the passage refers to the Cumaean Sybil and her plight.
<<<< [Weft] But of course, that depends on what version you want to start with when it comes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
I highly recommend – “A facsimile and transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound,
Edited and with an introduction by Valerie Eliot” (1971) – which indicated another epigram by Joseph Conrad
relating to “The Horror- The Horror” – which then could weft all the
way over to the movie Apocalypse Now (see Marlon Brando – but we will not go there – for now) >>>>
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{Warp} So, the epigram for the “post Ezra Pound” The Waste Land (1922) translates into:
With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: “[Sybil, what do you want?]” she replied, “[I want to die.]“
And knowing of her curse – eternal life without youth –
[Weft] <<< Relating to other works of fiction such as Youth Without Youth (Mircea Eliade and movie by Francis Ford Coppola)
and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (short story F. Scott Fitzgerald and then movie) >>>>
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is one of those mythological stories that offered a lesson about “be careful what you wish for” even when you hold what you think is lot of years (a handful or a thousand) in your life – what matters is the quality of the time that you have – and that eternity can be a double-edged sword if not structured in the right way.
[Weft] <<<<< Which is related to another story in Greek mythology, Tithonus was a handsome mortal who fell
in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos realized that her beloved Tithonus was destined to age and die.
She begged Zeus to grant her lover immortal life. Zeus was a jealous god, prone to acts of deception in order to seduce
beautiful gods and mortals, and he was not pleased with Eos’s infatuation with a rival. Zeus granted Eos’s wish – literally.
He made Tithonus immortal, but did not grant him eternal youth. As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly
debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling.
In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper.>>>>
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- Time becomes the ultimate curse in that one must suffer it relentlessly – without end. What do you want? – To die. If not to make the present moment much more important and ecstatic – more so than the next – and the next because they are finite and each one a gift.
[Weft] – <<<<< So much so that we are reminded of T.S. Eliot’s other works of poetry as they relate to the aging experience –
with the same dry and ‘dusty’ grains of sand to measure out one’s life like in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock where strangely enough, “In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo.” (emphasis added). And where Prufrock said, “I have measured my life out in coffee spoons.” >>>>
And later, the quote, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” is
spoken by American photo-journalist (played by Dennis Hopper) in the movie, Apocalypse Now
[which ironically – is based loosely on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which goes back to the opening lines in the The Waste Land pre Ezra pound!] who worships the enigmatic, genius “poet-warrior” Kurtz as a personal god and
expounds Kurtz’s cause: “You don’t talk to the Colonel, well, you listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind.
He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense…I’m a little man.
He’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas.
[These lines were taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]
I mean…He can be terrible and he can be mean and he can be right. He’s fighting the war. He’s a great man.”
[Notice the graffiti title to the film on the temple's stone blocks.].
In the poem, Prufrock announces to the world, “I grow old…I grow old…” and one can feel the existential angst and regret –
swimming in a dry, dusty sand dune, drowning, sinking below the surface. >>>>
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And the symbolic weight of the metaphor continues into T.S. Eliot’s other enigmatic verse, Gerontion, which opens with the epigram,
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
And the first line of that verse is:
Here I am. An old man in a dry month.
And ends with this line:
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
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[Warp] Which can also connect to T. S. Eliot’s magnificent Four Quartets (to which I could use an entire gerontological course in one semester dedicated just to it alone) – and its weaving with the Cumaean Sybil and dust and endless time – and the flow of life – Linear? Circular? – Infinite? It is no wonder Eliot is intrigued with the story of the Sybil as it appears and is a part of his textual weaving in many of his works -
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
In my beginning is my end.
As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, Of dead and living. Not the intense moment, Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.
And this to me seems to carry the essence of the comparison to the Cumaean Sybil forever trapped in infinite “aging” – in a cage – and the message of The Waste Land – and Four Quartets – of being lost without a compass or map – as we engage in our journey of life in the modern (and post-modern) era. But there is the lesson to be learned – with hope after all – for us, in this regard.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
[Weft] >>>> And another cross-cutting theme for the aging process is the “journey of life” as noted in
Thomas R. Cole’s book: The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
or the painter Thomas Cole and the Voyage of Life (see The Voyage of Life Old Age, Oil on canvas, 133.4 × 196.2 cm (52 ½ × 77 ¼ inches);
and the book The Human Odyssey by Thomas Armstrong (2007)
which relates to metaphor of the ship on a voyage – visualizing like T.S. Eliot verse, >>>>
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
>>>>> which relates to Homer’s The Odyssey and the journey of Odysseus –
and his travels back to home –
to arrive at the place where he (we) started, and know the place {Ithaca} for the first time. <<<<<<<
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[Warp] and we are back to TIME. And speaking of time – and dust – like the Cumaean Sybil – of which both notions run rampant throughout Eliot’s Four Quartets –
Time past and time future, Allow but a little consciousness.
Ash on an old man’s sleeves
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where the story ended.
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But not yet. The story goes on for a bit longer.
And TIME weaves through to Jorge Luis Borges who also takes the warp and weft of previous threads discussed – and creates the tapestry with his verse and makes reference to the sand and dust as mirrors of the aging experience,
Just so, but time discovered in the deserts
Another substance, smooth and of some weight,
That seemed to have been specifically imagined
For measuring out the ages of the dead (from The Hourglass)
Perhaps in death when the dust
Is dust, we will be forever
This undecipherable root,
From which will grow forever,
serene or horrible,
our solitary heaven or hell (from Someone)
I am not even dust. I am a dream
That weaves itself in sleep and wakefulness (from I Am Not even Dust)
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What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.
(From Jorge Luis Borges (2000) Collected Poems. Edited by Alexander Coleman. Penguin Edition. New York).
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Reading this passage from Borges was a strange experience of déjà vu – and to me – it was though he had channeled the voice and the steam of consciousness of the Cumaean Sybil – who had to forever live (but forever aging) out the years as counted by dust and sand (as much as a hand could hold) – but forever aging – and then wanting to die – “to sink into death.” Oblivion.
The dusty Waste Land of Human Longevity.
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{Warp} Which brings us to the last (at least for now – the thread can keep going, I’m sure) segment, but strangely enough – full circle and back to Michelangelo. It is an article by S. Jay Olshanksy (2003) – From Michelangelo to Darwin: The Evolution of Human Longevity (IMAJ 2003;5:00±00). This article discusses the prospects for human longevity for us in the decades to come. The irony is that Olshanksy’s perspective (using an evolutionary biological framework) will complement the mythology and the stories that surround the notion of living longer – or forever – as something “we” in our new world of biotechnology – will not have the benefit (or curse ?) of knowing.
Olshanksy (2003) starts of his commentary talking about the artist in our initial thread “at the beginning” of this post and the moves forward to the perspectives of Charles Darwin,
“When Michelangelo painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome in the 16th century, he portrayed the Renaissance view of mankind as having been molded by the hand of its creator, in his image, as a ‘perfect’ physical specimen.”
[Weft] >>>> For a more in-depth look at Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and for some intriguing commentary on the controversial issues surrounding the painting of all the sibyls – and in particular – the prophetess: Cumaea,
please see pp170-174 in Ross King’s book (2003), Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling. Walker & Co. New York.>>>>>>
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Olshanksy (2003) continues,
“When Charles Darwin was drafting his theory of evolution in the late 19th century, it was ironically the imperfections in the anatomic structures and functions of humans and other living things that were presented as the strongest evidence for his theory [12]. Based on theoretic and empiric evidence from modern evolution biology and biogerontology, it now appears that both Michelangelo and Darwin were right.
“The artistic-like perfection of the human body is exemplified by the near flawless maintenance and perpetuation of the immortal germ line through sexual reproduction. However, the price paid for this form of immortality is a suite of anatomic structures and functions that, when used beyond what may be thought of as their biological or Darwinian warranty period inevitably lead to many of the diseases and disorders now commonly associated with aging or senescence. The divergent but intimately linked views of Michelangelo and Darwin exemplify the importance of a biological perspective on aging, the diseases that accompany it, and ultimately the forces that influence and limit the duration of life of individuals and populations.
“In effect, we are inappropriately held responsible for many of the diseases and disorders that we experience as we age, and more importantly, are led to believe that aging and the diseases that accompany it are largely avoidable. An evolutionary view leads to the realization that even though aging, disease, and death are not programmed into our genes, once the engine of life is switched on at conception, our destiny as an aging animal is written in stone. Our bodies fail over time not because they were designed to fall victim to aging and disease at a predetermined age [22], or because of the acquisition of decadent lifestyles, but because they were not designed for extended use.
“Although it may eventually become possible to alter the biological processes that contribute to aging, that day has not yet dawned.”
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We shall see.
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In the mean time, we began with the drawings of Michelangelo and “aging faces” and threaded to the Cumaean Sybil and the to T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land and then Jorge Luis Borges which then brought us to Olshansky’s journal article addressing the prospects of human longevity from Michelangelo and Darwin. Along the way there were a host of potential [weft] related diversions (in a positive sense), but for this blog the focus was the rich and diverse threads that intersect in biology and the humanities – with an enhanced of examination of the aging experience – as the resulting tapestry – both sides offering illumination and understanding.
From dust to dust …..
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>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thanks, Scott D. Wright <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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Marcus Aurelius
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