Will You Love Me When I’m 64? : Sex, Desire, and Intimacy in Aging

Will You Love Me When I’m 64? : Sex, Desire, and Intimacy in Aging
{updated on Feb. 10, 2009 @ 4:20 pm MST} – thanks – Scott Wright}

Again and again, though we know the landscape of love
and the little graveyard with its lamenting names
And the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again we go out in couples, 
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the wild flowers, facing the sky.
          - Rainer Maria Rilke (1914)

The title and the timing of this blog posting is the result of multiple cross-currents and multiple threads at work: Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14), the timing of new books just released that relate to the love and later life, the demographics of an aging population, and finally the on-going philosophical, existential, and just a flat-out sensual and consensual interest in the topic of “sex” across the life course.

What I wish to do with this blog posting is examine the topic from many different angles with more or less depth per “approach” – and then review some selected books on the market for your information (and interest). And then I will finish up with a “hit list” of my own favorites (Scholarly? Yes – necessarily all of them? – No – there are many other examples I have noted at the end of this posting that I think will capture and enlighten the mind, soul, and body) that together represent the kaleidoscopic view of love and aging. I will hope to cover the landscape from the intensely philosophical to the profane, from the sacred to the surreal. As examples, let us quickly (for the purpose of the posting) review several appetizers – starting with the lyrics from Tina Turner’s song:

Oh whats love got to do, got to do with it,
What`s love but a second hand emotion…
What`s love but a sweet old fashioned notion…

And then take Lacan and Ricouer on the subject in general and by gender (and do not shoot the messenger), but first another “look” at the Lacanian “gaze” in the song, Hair of the Dog by Nazareth – where once the man was fooled by her hypnotic charms (yes, even in a double-wide trailer!), but not again –

Talkin jivey, poison ivy
You aint gonna cling to me
Man taker, born faker
I aint so blind I cant see

And then in movie, The Last of the Mohicans -

Cora Munro: What are you looking at, sir?
Hawkeye: I’m looking at you, miss.

Well, pardon my French – No shit.
Miss Munro (played by Madeleine Stowe) is worth the gaze -

And speaking of French- back to Lacan et al.,

“Women defines as a desire-to-have that which she lacks, and a man as a desire-to-be that which he is not” (Karl Simms, 2007 – p. 139)

“What does the other want of me?” (Lacanian thoery) is sexually focused and internal to self; whereas, “What can I do for the other?” (Ricoeur) – external to self.

“Love is giving something one does not have – to someone who does not want it.” (Lacan via Slavoj Žižek).

Well, be that as it may – that kind of discussion on the topic can make the flesh numb and the spirit unwilling – and then if I may double the pun with “Lord, make chaste, and now is a good time.” That is, until you read Andre’ Breton’s poetry – “Free Union” -1931

My wife whose shoulders are champagne
Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins under the ice…
My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses…
My wife with the sex of an iris
With eyes of savannahs…. 

Breton’s poetry are touchstones are the surrealist movement where imagery bypasses the cerebral and locks right into
the neurons that feed the flesh and the aesthetic. But yet, still a philosophy…..

Philosophy? Are you sure?  Yes – and may I suggest then to revisit this book then – Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy by Anne Dufourmantelle (2007). When the book says, “Philosophy has never gone to bed,” – and  then promptly does through the textual synthesis of Dufourmatelle – we are hooked, and then some. Now this is more like it. Read this book and become alive again with the notion of the intellect and body as one fiber optic relaying the sensory data of touch and smoldering hunger for the mystery of coupling. When you realize the light and flame of it all – and to the point that it can affect even the most troubling of souls like Nietzsche:

“From what star have we fallen together here?” Nietzsche to Lou, the first time he saw her.

Now compare that to some lines in the movie Titanic –

Jack: Where to, Miss?
Rose: To the stars.

Hmmm, no wonder the notion of being “starry-eyed” is associated with love. But then there are the “star-crossed lovers” (when the astrological signs just don’t match up for the lovers – thus they are doomed from the get go). And to John Donne, The Ecstasy, where the gaze elevates into another realm –

            “This ecstasy doth unperplex”
            (We said) “and tell us what we love.
            We see by this, it was not sex;
            We see, we saw not what did move…

Alright –let’s forget the stars and the gaze and the phenomenological concerns and back in to the primal level with The Doors – Love Me Two Time
and toward Chaka Khan -

Chaka khan, let me rock you
Let me rock you, chaka khan
I wouldn’t lie to you, baby
I’m physically attracted to you
This feeling that i got for you, baby
There’s nothing that i wouldn’t do

But even then – with all the organic lust and combustion of body into flames and clouds, there is till the searching and the seeking, because after the energy is spent and fluids exchanged (perhaps) and promises made in the euphoria of the afterglow, Rod Steward wonders about Maggie May (the next day) -

All you did was wreck my bed
And in the morning kick me in the head

Which may be the precursor to Laura Kipnis and her book, Against Love (A Polemic) (2003) who examines the sometimes razor-thin line between the “vicissitudes of desire and social conformity.” She asks, “Will all the adulterers in the room please stand-up?” –Wow – what a way to get the audience going.

Okay, here we are and at: Is this love? When will I know? Is it too late? I hope I get “it” before I get “old” – whatever “it” is – or maybe we really don’t until it is all too late (anyway) -

Thus, the ultimate reflection and Gnostic desire in the power ballad from Foreigner -

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I’m older
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me

Yes, exactly, – “In case I need it when I’m older.” ——-> Which we all will.

Enough – Okay we can now proceed onward.

Yet…… let’s be honest here: the intersect between aging and sexuality (or desire – or intimacy) can be dicey and fraught with tension intra-and inter-personal-generationally speaking. That is, whether the excuse or reason be the working definition of sexuality as something reproductive or something gymnastic or something youthful or something we expect of the raging hormones and lust – and effort – we also associate it with adulthood, but not with older adults or with seniors or (God forbid – but why did I just say that?) with our parents; worse – our grandparents. But why is it seemingly forbidden or the subject of revulsion?

Bio-social and Evolutionary Biology: My DNA (via sperm and egg) Made Me Do It

Perhaps one dimension may be associated with our cognitive maps that refuse to think beyond the reproductive years so that any sexual activity that is post-hoc (post menopausal/manopausal) appears to be an event of dissonance (i.e., Yes, I know, but why? It does not compute…). The activity (desire, lust, infatuation, intercourse, outercourse) goes against any utility function designed by nature, which is geared toward procreation and fertility and fecundity. So sayeth the world of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology where the “strategies of human mating” (see David Buss, 1994, The Evolution of Human Mating) dominate the first half of life (for the most part).

The question, “If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships”? is answered by the paradigm of our evolutionary past (that is still with us) and predicts and reveals why men and women differ in their tactics and strategies – and why the news is not all that good in the pursuit of sexual goals. Buss (1994) does address the post-reproductive phase of life (see “aging”) and offers up the explanation as an hypothesis that, “menopause is a female adaptation that prompts the shift from mating and direct reproduction to parenting, grandparenting, and other forms of investing in kin.” Thus, the emergence of the “grandmother hypothesis” which creates the imagery of an extended network of a woman’s “genetic clan.” There is not much else in terms of the role of grandfathers in this approach – only that men die younger – and appear to be redundant or just plain lucky to see any life (regardless if there is desire or viable sperm left in the system) for themselves beyond 85. Buss (1994) also addresses the issue of the prospects for “lifetime mating” – and while he noted gender differences all along the life course, he does (begrudgingly?) admit that it is possible to witness lifetime mating and the ‘success” of a long marriage, but the impression left with the reader is that it is exceptional – and not the rule. He offered that,

“The lifelong convergence of interests between two individuals who share no genes may be the most remarkable feat in the evolutionary story of human mating.”

The take home message is that human mating and long-term marriage are often at odds, but the odds are that if you make it to later life – some degree of harmony is to be found; which may be the reward for surviving it through the hurly-burly world of the reproductive years where (according to Buss and others) relationships, mating, and commitments are more on the level of a high-stakes chess game than “love” and “intimacy.” But even then – “stuff” happens into later life – just look at the title of this blog posting: Will you still love me when I’m 64? (From – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)) – and then note the karmic fulfillment,

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.

Paul McCartney wrote this song when he was 16 years of age and ironically, the song was often humorously referenced in 2006, when McCartney divorced Heather Mills, ironically, at the age of 64 (Paul will soon be 67 seven years of age this June, 2009). Hmm, at least the bottle of wine is a good idea – right? Even back in 1967, Paul was onto something with the resveratrol “magic bullet (see my earlier blog posting on “Fools Gold for the Silver-Haired.”

Medical approaches: There is (or may be) a pill for everything

Because the optic for sexuality and aging is often reductionized and medicalized downward to the microscopic, there is often the focus on hormones, estrogen, testosterone, the ovaries, the uterus, and the prostate. It is usually not the approach to discover the nuances of desire, romance, or intimacy; yet a lot of issues relating to “love” are usually associated with quality of life and well-being at (and with) the physiological level. For example here is the title of a recent news release from Reuters Health, Women’s low sex drive tied to poor quality of life 2009-02-04 14:19:03 -0400

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Postmenopausal women who have hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) – a low level of sexual desire — have a worse health-related quality of life than their counterparts who are happy with their sex lives, according to a new study. In fact, the researchers say, HSDD can cause in impairments in well-being on par with those seen in chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis and asthma. HSDD, the “persistent lack of sexual desire causing ‘marked stress or interpersonal difficulties,’” is included in the Fourth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists and defines mental illnesses widely accepted by the psychiatric establishment. But questions remain about whether HSDD is a real problem for women or “represents a disorder that has become ‘medicalised’ because of its pharmaceutical market potential,’” Dr. Andrea K. Biddle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues write in Value of Health, a journal published by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. In the current study, Biddle and her team looked at data for 1,189 women who had gone through natural menopause or surgical menopause, in which their ovaries were removed, to test the impact of HSDD on women’s health and well-being. All of the women, who ranged in age from 30 to 70 years, were in a stable relationship for at least 3 months. Among women who underwent natural menopause, 6.6 percent met the criteria for HSDD, while 12.5 percent of women who had surgical menopause met the criteria. Women considered to have HSDD were less satisfied with their home life and their emotional and physical relationship with their sexual partner, and were also more likely to be depressed, the researchers found. They were also about twice as likely to have back pain, fatigue, problems with memory, and depression. The women with HSDD scored lower on several measures of health-related quality of life including mental health, vitality, social function and bodily pain. Overall, the researchers conclude that their findings “suggest that HSDD represents a significant and clinically relevant problem.”

Yes, good to know, but where is the “heart”, the “soul” of love, sex and aging  – anything else going except pharmacoeconomics or surgery or chronic conditions?

Cinematic Approaches – Film/Movies

Ahhh, much better. Here is where we can examine the good stuff. Now let’s take a look at a movie that goes way back and here the issue is not so much the age of the actors, but the age of the film itself and what it means for us today. Think about what is said – and then what is seen and not explicitly “seen” on the screen when it comes to love and intimacy. The entire story and plot captures the cross-currents of love, historical events, duty, and decisions made that will influence the course of life – forever.

Casablanca –

<Ilsa:> “Put them on the table.”
<Rick> shaking his head “No.”
<Ilsa:> “For the last time, put them on the table.”
<Rick:> “If Laszlo and the cause mean so much to you, you won’t stop at anything. All right, I’ll make it easier for you. Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

Rick walks toward Ilsa. As he reaches her, her hand drops down.
<Ilsa:> almost hysterical “Richard, I tried to stay away. I thought I would never see you again, that you were out of my life. The day you left Paris, if you knew what I went through! If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you!”

Rick has taken Ilsa in his arms. He presses her tight to him and kisses her passionately. She is lost in his embrace.

Here are some comments from Lucius Furius -http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Casablanca.index.html

that I think does a good job at capturing the significance of the scene

“In coming here to get the letters, she realized there was a danger of her succumbing to Rick’s love, a love which offers exactly what her marriage lacks: physical passion, real intimacy — with a man who is, in his own way, every bit as admirable as Victor Laszlo. What makes Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund so compelling? On the surface there’s the interest of Ilsa’s great passion rubbing up against Rick’s rough matter-of-factness (a combination we see in more exaggerated form in The African Queen), but even more compelling is the deathly seriousness underneath — two great actors again and again finding in themselves true feelings which realize the high drama with which the writers have challenged them. The story resumes “sometime later” that same evening. Though they’re still fully dressed, the implication is that there has been some physical intimacy. The production code of that time would not have permitted — in view of the fact that Ilsa was married — anything more overt.”

And to top if off here is an excerpt o a poem from Lucius Furius – Casablanca

           women like Ilsa –
           so beautiful and passionate
           that just the memory of their love, just the shadow,
           is enough.

And then reflect upon the song, “As Time Goes By”

A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

            And don’t forget the novel and the movie: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a review titled, Love conquers ageing – by Anne Hudson Jones in The Lancet (Vol. 370, Issue 9605, Dec.2007/Jan. 2008), the reviewer thought the movie did not completely capture the mood and complexities of the novel (for example – more detailed issues on aging and medicine); yet the love (triangle) story remains:  Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino. After Florentino learns of Urbino’s death (which occurs early in the film), Florentino goes immediately to visit Fermina, telling her that he has waited “faithfully” for 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days to begin his courtship of her again. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. – And then again. In person. And again – in letters. But try again – even over the course of an entire life span. Now that’s romance – and dedication – and “love.”

            Then there is the movie Away From Her (2006) which places the context of 45 years of marriage between Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) into the domain of memory loss and personality change due to the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.  The following is from IMDb: “After Fiona wanders away and is found after being lost, they agree she must go into a nursing home. For the first time in the five decades their relationship has spanned, they are forced to undergo a long-time separation since the nursing home has a “no-visitors” policy for the first 30 days of a patient’s stay, so they can adjust to their new surroundings. When Grant visits Fiona after the orientation period, he is devastated to find out that not only has she seemingly forgotten him, Fiona has transferred her affections to another man. The other man is Aubrey, a wheelchair bound mute patient at the nursing home. As the distance between husband and wife grows, Grant must draw upon his love for Fiona to perform an act of self-sacrifice in order to ensure her happiness (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491747/plotsummary).”

    

          Very powerful performances and Julie Christie is a miracle to behold – in the sense of capturing the essence and beauty of aging – and to portray the role of someone with dementia – was quite remarkable.

I have to admit – as a young man, I thought Julie Christie was one of the most sensual women to see on film – and dream about. I guess remembering about Jennifer O’Neill in The Summer of 42 (1971) didn’t help either (actually it helped, but I suppose it is all fair game for more of the Lacanian “gaze”). 

I guess had the love going way back when I saw the movie Dr. Zhivago – and I thought that I should become a poet – so that I too could capture the heart of a Lara (or in the case of Petrarch – Laura, but more on that later).

  

Here is an excerpt from Boris Pasternak’s book, Dr. Zhivago, from the very end of the book with a listing of The Poems of Yurii Zhivago (from my 1958 copy – Pantheon Publishing).

You shed your coverings in much the same fashion
As this grove sheds it leaves,
Whenever you fall into my embraces
In your dressing gown with its silken tassels.
You are the blessing in a stride toward perdition,
When living sickens more than sickness does itself;
The root of beauty is audacity,
And that is what draws us to each other.

And here I am at 54 – still trying to become the poet – oh well, we shall see.
I shall attempt the same at the end of this blog – you be the judge.

Selected books on the topic:

I highly recommend the book, Love Stories of Later Life: A Narrative Approach to Understanding Romance- Oxford University Press, 2008 –  by Amanda S. Barusch (University of Utah). This is a much needed addition the literature and Barusch presents original research into what love and romance means in senior’s lives. In an article titled, “Old flames: U. researcher says love grows sweeter with time” (Ben Fulton for the Salt Lake Tribune) http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11574461 (2009) it was noted that,

 “…after examining interview responses from 91 people ages 51 to 97, the majority of whom were widowed, followed by married couples and divorcees. While the health, economic and family complications of aging often intruded on romantic satisfaction, Barusch said her respondents “consistently reported that love improved with age.

“With nearly 1 in 5 U.S. residents expected to reach age 65 or older by 2030, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, romance among seniors is here to stay, aided not just by community gathering places such as churches and neighborhood senior centers, but online as well, with targeted sites such as Prime Singles, Senior Friend Finder and SeniorMatch.com.

“One surprising element of Barush’s research: In her survey, widowed women, in general, claimed they were less interested in marrying again. Yet that hardly means that recently widowed older men are at a disadvantage in the dating department. With 67 men per 100 women between the ages of 75 and 84, and only 40 available men per 100 women 85 and older, men have more partners to choose from, said Cherie Brunker, a geriatrician at LDS Hospital and faculty member at the University of Utah’s school of medicine.

“Perhaps most thrilling for anyone who thinks love’s embers never start fires later in life were Barusch’s findings that people over 50 in new relationships “reported the highest overall romantic intensity,” as well as “measures of physical and emotional intensity,” compared with their younger counterparts in new relationships.”

Another high-level recommendation goes to “The New Love and Sex After 60” (3^rd edition –rev.) 2002 co-authored by the top people in the field of gerontology: Robert Bulter and Myrna Lewis. In a review from the Library Journal -

“…here is thorough coverage of the standard topics: the effects of normal aging, medical problems, and drugs on sexuality and how to overcome roadblocks; physical and emotional sexual fitness; singlehood and relationships; sexual enhancement tips; dating, remarriage, and one’s children; and finding help. This new edition incorporates same-sex relationships more equitably. In addition, readers are given permission not to be strongly interested in sex a refreshing change from the “super-orgasms can change your life!” approach of so many sex manuals.”

Just added: AS TIME GOES BY - Boomerang Marriages, Serial Spouses, Throwback Couples, and Other Romantic Adventures in an Age of Longevity - By Abigail Trafford - Basic.

Here is another title to consider: Love & Sex: Are We Ever Too Old? by Nieli Langer, Trafford Publishing (September 8, 2006) – and a blurb about the contents -

“Our parents and grandparents do have sex! There, I’ve said it! Love and Sex: Are We Ever Too Old?!? is an opportunity to revisit the idea that the need for love and sex regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation or marital status is normal and natural. The book is a collage of photos of older couples, cartoons, selected poetry about sexuality and couplehood as well as newspaper articles and reviews of books and films that have celebrated late-life love and sexuality. The book is an original way to teach adult children, adult grandchildren and the current cohorts of aging individuals to understand and accept the sexuality of maturing adults. In so doing, they can help transform the meaning of love and sexuality up to the very limits of life itself.”

The Roguish Approach to Aging – Love, Sex, Desire, and Intimacy: The “Hit List”

            Here is where I take great liberty in presenting a line up of personal favorites that have provided a substantive, spiritual, sensual, significant, and serendipitous foundation to my understanding and appreciation for this topic across the life course – and into the later years of life.

• Perhaps it all begins with Mrs. Bacon – my second grade teacher, the Greek goddess made of marble and then onto The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, and I wanted to know about the word – chaste. Lord, make me so, but not yet. But one thing is for sure – into junior high school and high school – I still have my copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (the Grove Press Edition from 1957 – and unexpurgated!); Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund; and then the bombshell – James Joyce – The Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (1968 – Viking Compass Book) so that once I walked on the shore as Stephen Dedalus – and I encountered the “bird girl” – well, it was to be the artist and the scientist – but not as Stephen Dedalus S.J. (the religious path).
     

                 “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life !”

• Then onto – Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rainer Maria  Rilke – but not a damn line of my own to show from my creation. Science trumps all (for a while anyway) – Biology rules – Everything that can be counted – is what matters !
   
• And then the shock of reading The Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot – and then I had the contra (antithesis) role model for aging ! For the love of God -DO NOT become like Prufrock – “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” – and then it came back to haunt me yet again – in the same poem and at the last lines - 
  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
                    As I measured life in regression analyses and ANOVA tables – I have become Icarus -       

  
   

• Then the book – The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz (1995) reignites the interest in the balance of life – kairos and a re-reading of my portrait of an artist as somewhat older. Thus, a new rule: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted (thanks, Albert Einstein).

• Which reconnected me over to La Vita Nuova by Dante – and then finally a serious go at The Divine Comedy – which was illuminated into another orbit by reading Harriet Rubin’s Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History (2004).  The realized it was like the uroboros – back to where I had started with Ovid and Chaucer and Hesse and Joyce.

• But here it is 2009 – and almost Feb. 14 – Valentine’s Day – what else you got?

• Okay, this has got to be the all time rougish scholarly article that I have ever read (period). Anytime the premise begins with this: Orgasm is pneumatic – well, you just know it’s going to be wild and mind-blowing (pardon the pun). Jouissance, Generation, and the Coming of God. Ralph Norman – 2008 – , Theology & Sexuality, 14(2), 153-180. When you can combine Lacan, Burke, Kant, Schelling, orgasm, jouissance, and the sublime and Hildegard into one article, you deserve the recognition –and at least one read through.

• Now, if that is a little too edgy – may I suggest Thomas Moore’s The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love – which offers a little more practical angle to cultural studies through the optic of spirituality and sexuality.

• The special issue of Lapham’s Quaterly on EROS Vol. II (No.1) Winter 2009. A grand tour of the landscape of love – culturally, historically, and critically – take it!

• Paintings: Ariadne by J.W. Waterhouse – “Theseus – what were you thinking?” Well, that is exactly what inspired me create a work of fiction – Ship of Theseus (see “About Me”) for more info – and then see my verse at the end of this blog – that digs deeper with (and into) this painting.

• The poem that will knock your socks off – and other articles of clothing too, but wait ! – More than that…this poem by Sharon Doubiago is spun feathers upon the map of flesh while performing archeology on the soul. After reading her verse, “How To Make Love to a Man” – I was convinced she had solved the ultimate mystery AND then, epiphany = I just figured out what 100 years of psychotherapy could never fathom – and all this from reading two pages Now if I could reciprocate the creation of similar verse to a woman. We shall see – Her book: Body and Soul (2000), Cedar Hills Publishing, Mena, Arkansas.                    
• With all due respect to Sara Bareilles and her 2008 Grammy-nominated song – Love Song; please consider three more voices to evoke the supernatural power of the song: Now this is my take on it – but I listen to Mary Fahl (and as someone said on the internet, “She could sing the alphabet, and I would probably sit and listen, mesmerized. It has this ability to transport me.”) for earthly sojourns (listen to Mary Fahl with “Take Me As I Am” via October Project) that gives new meaning to Plato’s “cave metaphor”; 

             I listen to Melody Gardot, “Love Me Like A River Does” to drift right into the blissful oceanic nothingness of the place between the frame and the         painting; and finally, when it will be the time for me to fade in final oblivion, I will request two songs = Lisa Gerrard with the song - Cantana - from Towards the Within (Dead Can Dance) as her voice creates molecular tele-transportation from this planet – upward – and beyond; and then onto her other-worldly - Elegy (From Immortal Memory) and just let the music slip into the next track, Sailing to Byzantium to finally understand what Dante was trying to say with the final weaving of Paradise – and what Odysseus was trying to get home to (and for) – after all those years of searching– Penelópē………after you fathom that – then revisit Böcklin’s painting, Isle of the Dead…… (I see me ready – wanting to embrace the atomized breath that is both the vibration of strings and the percussion of eternity – she is calling me from the boat… onto the shore and into a fragmented light and a place where the past is ether – and the future is quicksilver…the journey of the flesh is over – and there is only the immortal memory of sailing with languid breezes and drifting through her gossamer veils…

• Just when you would think that Jean Améry might win the award for the all-time buzz-kill book on aging (full of revolt and resignation – but then again I would prefer the blunt and bone-chilling angst of the actual aging process versus the cotton-candy and rice cake {in other words not much to chew on} writings of modern aging a la Sheehy and any book that begins with “Chicken Soup for the …) – then my good buddy – Michel Houellebecq (author of e.g., Platform and Atomized) comes along with a style of literature to create black holes in the universe (sorry, Schopenhauer, step off – there is a new kid on the block). 
   
• The Possibility of an Island (2005 – Wedenfield & Nicolson, London) is simply a manifesto – a brainiacal rant – about the future of sensual desire and about the scenario of whether or not humans can survive without sex (lust equals life?). I finished this book and then grabbed a nice claw hammer and missed the nail on purpose and as my thumb sang to me in a foreign language – and went back to read Houellebecq’s (Daniel’s last) poem – p. 308 –      
             It was necessary to know
             What is best in our lives,
             When two bodies play at happiness,
             Unite, reborn without end.

                        Entered into complete dependency
                        I know the trembling of being,

                        The hesitation to disappear,
                        Sunlight upon the forest’s edge.

                        And love, where all is easy,

                        Where all is given in the instant;

                        There exists in the midst of time

                        The possibility of an island.

• And speaking of poetry, may I recommend (as I finally begin to close this blog posting of infinite jest – and love:

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin – 2008

Surrealist Love Poems – edited by Mary Anne Caws (2002)

Everything Yearned For: Manhae’s Poem of Love and Longing (Francisca Cho)  - (2005)

The Erotic Spirit edited Sam Hamill (1999)

Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love – edited by Wendy Maltz – (1996).

But the poetry to revisit across the life course (in my opinion) is that of Petrarch.

I have had a book on my shelves titled Petrarch: Selected Poems (1977) translated into English by Anthony Mortimer for many, many years – and I never got too far into the selections because the introduction (preface) seemed to strip away all of the need to go in any further (or deeper) as Petrarch seemed to be a basket-case and “Laura” became an impediment to any spiritual progress – such that the theme seemed “been there and done that” especially after evolving through my bildung with Hermann Hesse’s work. (the flesh versus soul script).  But then there was the remarkable and much needed publication of The Poetry of Petrarch – translated by David Young – 2004, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Introduction (by D. Young) alone is worth the price of the book. My copy is marked up with many selections that would resonate with the aging experience, but Petrarch is for all ages – and for all time.

A few excerpts to state my case – and my rationale for such a claim

30

On fire inside, although my outside’s snow,

Alone with all my thoughts and graying hair,

Weeping forever, traversing each shore,

Hoping that pity might invade the yes

Of someone who may live a thousand years

If that is the true life span of the laurel.

Topaz and gold, in sun, against the snow,

Are less than is the hair and those fair eyes,

That lead my years so swiftly to the shore.

 ——-
361

My faithful mirror tells me very often,

As do my tired spirit, changing skin,

Diminished strength, and slow agility:

“Don’t hide it from yourself now; you are old;

Nature must be obeyed, since time removes

Our power to oppose her or resist her.”

Immediately, as water douses fire,

I waken from a long and heavy sleep,

And I see clearly that our lives fly past,

That we have life just once, and then it’s gone;

And in my heart there sounds a word of her;

The one who loosened from her lovely knot,

Who in her day was such a rarity

That no one else will ever touch her fame.

Yes, Petrarch – and many others to consider – as we travel through time.

            If I can leave you with one final set of words for this posting – a poem – some verse – that tries to consider what I have found on my journey with the writers and poets before me. Love is something that is more than – a thing. It has two sides. It is both a wave and particle, it is both winter and spring, and it is bittersweet. It is Absinthe.

How do I explain it? Hiera picra. Face the keyboard and start typing. 
Chase the dream.
Write to save my life, put it all down as Petrarch did. Novalis and Sophie.
Aging – getting older.
If Dante can write his way out of trouble, then I have to try too. If Rilke can go into the chamber of the rose, I must too. As Yurii Zhivago did for Lara, it was he, a la Pasternak, who proclaimed how certain images created the inspiration, and how his work took possession of him like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, and so my work, like his, yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and still unnamed – the following is excerpted from the book – The Ship of Theseus Vol. III [VITA SENEX] (by Scott D. Wright);

 - Ariadne  {as Theseus leaves on his ship}

the written material is below is copyrighted (Scott D. Wright – 2008) ©

 Straddling two worlds, existing as a traveler with homes on 
both sides of an ocean.

My heart stretched as an arch, a rainbow veiled by summer rain,

and in my soul – a division.

A morality of my duties, a responsibility to flesh and blood,

a most horrific nightmare of splintering

the very tree I have planted. 
And worse still,
my causing a pain deep lasting

in ones I do not wish to offend – and one still I love.

Thus, I loathe myself as hypocrite and schemer,

a profiteer of lives 
I would hold most dearly.

As example, the thought that stops the world spinning:

How shall the living write my epitaph?

They do not deserve my anguished choices 
or the baggage of a fool.

The world appears not to be designed for the fence-walker, 
verily, one must fall

to one side or the other.

Yes, now I know the courage needed to be steadfast,

but like the river must follow

nature’s course, navigation 
depends on the watchful eye.

Life is most precious and carries a host of 
                     
   worries, hopes, fears, loves, and meanings,

each a single blade of grass.

We all share in the pain of loneliness,

a singular energy in a field of numbing weight.

straining higher, bounded by strands below,

yet even the beetle breaks free.

Surrounded by lessons of the frailty in the human heart,

ancient sages tells of stories

of those who reap what is sown,

the very thing not wished for.

Are our couplings judged by lightning strikes?

Or can my soul my not indulge in the full roundness of human embrace?

Aren’t there many expressions of affection amongst the throng of humanity?

Here is the crux:

Is integrity a monologue? 
Can a prince be loyal to other lands?

Let me not subtract from one side, simply to gain for the other.

I seek not more golden things in life, but to immerse my life 
with a limited few then 
you must be at my side as necessary

as the sun to green ivy,

the painter to her canvas,

the falcon to the winds,

the poet to his parchment.

Sands now make haste, through the glass down,

and I can only fathom the present 
knowing that my picture emerges 
slowly complete by the warm connections

of affection and caring among the 
small web of companions.

In the same present, I am aware of the wisdom of death; 
         
   
it is but a sprite of light we live. 


Who shall be illuminated by our souls in the shortest chapter read in the cosmos?

choices . . .

fate . . .

elements . . .

My realm, my tapestry of existence which till now

lived in dreams and private thoughts

is now revealed, but at a risk.

By you reading this, I may have entered the viper’s lair or

I may have finished the circle incomplete.

The words I write with my blood, may be used

as the dagger against me or it may be 
my last gift to life itself. With my soul

exposed, I offer the truest act of faith: 
                                  
my self upon the page.

You could read with compassion or bring me

 to the vultures and carrion crow.

I do not desire you as the missing book upon a shelf,

I wish not to steal your heart, 
nor to gaze solely upon

your heavenly flesh.

As I write what I cannot say: 
I have found myself not be made of granite,

but simply clay.

So, let me express, from afar, how it is between us:

You are the goddess muse and to that . . .  there is no other. 
A singular nugget in a streambed.

Let me confess:

I seek your eyes, swirling radiant hues of 
starships burning through the cosmos.

I desire your lips, to press and crush as

ripe grapes, late summer laden heavy with ambrosia.

I want my ears to collect your voice,

the echoes of nature, river valleys and canyon winds.

I need to lay my head across your dawn-soft

breasts, clouds as spring flowers, to hear your

heart-pulse.

I ache for my hands to travel in your hair silk warm,

exotic, each strand a shoreline breeze.

I would gently hold thigh, knee, calve, and ankle

as though a swan, a bundle of wildflowers.

May I serve to your pleasure, the level of

flames you seek. Take my fingers and strum

your skin as the musician intimately plucks the

stringed cello. May I venture, with you as guide,

to your vineyards and taste the harvest.

I could live as a boulder surrounded by your roots

sinuously intertwined in conjunction over the

seasons that turn with wheel of life – and yet . . .

I am but mortal candlelight. If I were to die today,

my life is made fuller by the experience of you.

I find you rustling

through a brisk October starry night,

corn stalks abound by heavy pumpkins,

 in a snow bank covering a running stream

nestled in by spruce branches, crocus and daffodils,

as trees burst gold green, and in the summer sand

mixing with ocean salt.

This may only be a dream, an intermittent jewel, and an earthly purgatory.

And yet . . .

I drink a bitter essence.

Thanks, Scott D. Wright

{the inspiration of James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} 
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life !” 

Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life: Answering the “So What?”

Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life:
The Gift and Curse of Mnemosyne and Lethe

Section IV – Personal Perspectives (c – Final Installment – I promise!)

To grow old is a great privilege. It allows feedback on a long life that can be relived in retrospect. 
With the years, retrospect becomes more inclusive; scene and action become more real and present. Sometimes the distance, scenes and experiences are close to bewildering, and to relive them in memory is almost overwhelming.
—Joan Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (The Extended Version)

This is final blog installment in this series on remembering and forgetting in later life. I would like to share with you my “Beyond Benjamin Button” exercise (see previous blog post) that attempts to identify a quasi-inventory of cross-cutting influences on my interest in aging, memory, forgetting. I refer to it as the “Beyond Benjamin Button” exercise so as to help burn through the “fog of aging” – so as to create an accounting of life – lived so far, and then to connect it to a quote of Soren Kierkegaard…

“Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards”

So put on your seat belt and down that Mountain Dew with a Red Bull chaser. I promise this is the last blog in this series – and I apologize in advance for this being a bit longer than usual –

            • From Herodotus, I have learned that it is Clio that begins the story. The muse of heroic poetry and history. Okay, he’s not quite the Thucydide…but he gives the full account, with depth and breadth. But it’s still a a murky world out there. We have met the history and it is us.

            • From Augustine, I have learned of the importance of memory and time and in relation to happiness and in the context of personal narrative by a man still grappling with theological tenets, but I have found himself reading one passage several times over trying to make sense of the play-on-words that Augustine presented, which would rival an Escher moebius painting -

So, though memory is in my memory when I remember remembering, both forgetting and remembering are in my memory when I remember forgetting –remembering that I forget, and forgetting what I once remembered. What can forgetting be but a lack of memory? And then how can forgetting be present, for me to remember it, when its very presence makes me lack it? All things we remember are in our memory – and since we must remember forgetting, or we would not know what the word means when we hear it, then forgetting must be in our memory. It is there for us to remember, but its being there means we forget. Or should we say that forgetting is not there itself when we remember it, but only some representation of it, since its being present itself would make us lack memory? Who can fathom such a thing, or make sense of it? (Book Ten # 24).

            •  From Boethius, I have learned of his selected quotes from Homer, his homage to Odysseus in Book IV, his influences on Dante and how both had to deal with their trails and tribulations. One in jail and the other in exile and the rendering of a poetic and a personal statement when facing insurmountable challenges both facing an uphill battle and using Lady Philosophy. Sophia, Beatrice, as their guide to face the capricious Lady Fortune. Carmina Burana – O Fortuna! The wheel in the sky and how in Book I, the verse in VII sounds more like an eastern Zen Buddhistic approach then from a westernized Christian and how Lady Philosophy debates Boethius in relation to “fairness” and “happiness” and the exchange is fresh and alive.

She  says: “If the enjoyment of any earthly blessing brings with it any measure of happiness, the memory of that splendid day can never be destroyed by the burden however great of growing evil” He said in return: “It is the very thing, in fact, which makes me burn with grief as I remember it. In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy.” And she told him to take stock of what he has – and Boethius – get a grip! Human happiness is bitter-sweetness, become the eye of the storm she tells him, – we are but dust in the wind and Lady Philosophy sounds very much like the stoic Marcus Aurelius, as I note this quote for my nascent inventory of threads weaving to become memories - And I can read Goethe in Book III and verse II. I can also now fathom anamnesis, in both Augustine and Boethius. I have learned to love the style, narrative and then verse and them more narrative, and his sharing of wisdom from his vantage point of his own hell. 
Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future, and there is nothing set in time which can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life: it is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday. In this life today you do not live more fully than in that fleeting and transitory moment. (Book V).

    • From Schopenhauer, I have learned that he was not just a crazy old fart (how’s that for being ageist?) – but then again – this is a roguish blog site:

But why is it that to an old man his past life appears so short? For this reason: his memory is short; and so he fancies that his life has been short too. He no longer remembers the insignificant parts of it, and much that was unpleasant is now forgotten; how little, then, there is left! For, in general, a man’s memory is as imperfect as his intellect; and he must make a practice of reflecting upon the lessons he has learned and the events he has experienced, if he does not want them both to sink gradually into the gulf of oblivion. Now, we are unaccustomed to reflect upon matters of no importance, or, as a rule, upon things that we have found disagreeable, and yet that is necessary if the memory of them is to be preserved. But the class of things that may be called insignificant is continually receiving fresh additions: much that wears an air of importance at first, gradually becomes of no consequence at all from the fact of its frequent repetition; so that in the end we actually lose count of the number of times it happens. Hence we are better able to remember the events of our early years than of our later years. The longer we live, the fewer are the things that we can call important or significant enough to deserve further consideration, and by this alone can they be fixed in the memory; in other words, they are forgotten as soon as they are past. Thus it is that time runs on, leaving always fewer traces of its passage (end quote).

• From Montainge – I have learned to be patient. There I was reading the first nineteen chapters and wondering how I was going to get through his mile long essays (like I should talk – guilty too!) and then chapter 20 in Book I. It was Kafka’s ice-axe for my frozen sea. That to philosophize was to learn to die. Boom! The hooks were set. “Wherefore it is as foolish to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years from now as it is to lament that we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Wake up! Long life and short life are made all one by death. Remember Blood, Sweat, and Tears, “If it’s peace you find in dying, well then, let the time be near.” And I learned that Montainge began this Chapter when he was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine! Hell, I will be fifty-four this year. 



Look at what all he has done with his writing. What have I done? Nothing compared to this. Why not? What? Just start writing? Memoirs? Autobiography? That’s pretty vain isn’t it? But I have also learned from Montaigne the value of the essay style. So maybe later – later in life perhaps? And I also wondered did Shakespeare “borrow” from Montaigne? I compared Montainge’s “acts of my comedy” to As You Like It and All the world’s a stage. And I have learned piety, the wisdom of the past from Virgil, Plutarch, Horace, Plato, Lucretius, Juvenal, Cicero, Lucan, St. Augustine, Cato, and the difference between pedantry and pedagogy, a skeptical learning from the classics and the value of practical knowledge applied to the day-to-day human condition. But I have a question – Is it pedantic to use the line from Shakespeare to make my point? “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” Okay, maybe it is. Note to myself. First, kill all of the pompous asses that are condescending and who talk down their noses to their audiences. Rather we should consider transformation, not just information. Consider this: The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Good point. Just like the patterns in parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. And speaking of time, I have learned in Montaigne’s narrative, his essays, the value of honesty and modesty, the doubts, the obsessions and the fears of aging, the blunt proposition to put up or shut up with those who would snipe at the sidelines.“If you have better, bring it out, if not, give in” to show us proofs better woven, and the role of memory a la Cicero.“I remember even what I would not; I cannot forget what I could. And perhaps it is poetry that is really philosophy such that: “Yesterday dies in today, and today will die in tomorrow, and there is nothing that abides and is always the same.” (Apology for Raymond Sebond) And that we must go back to Homer to begin again and that we can be Janus-faced in life. “Let Childhood look ahead, old age backward.” And that in old age our minds can be “like mistletoe on a dead tree.” Consider this: The mind and our experiences as the Golden Bough in later life? And yet, and yet, here is also Venus and love,“the ancient flame.” And so from Montaigne I have learned the importance of balance.“For it is indeed reasonable, as the say, that the body should not follow it s appetites to the disadvantage of the mind; but why is it not also reasonable that the mind should not pursue its appetites to the disadvantage of the body?” And stay not just alive, but to have life in all the days as Montaigne acknowledged the gift of Juvenal, that we are not alone, that there is the knowing that others have dealt with the same issues, time after time, and while we may be dust in the wind, others have faces the same storms -

While hair is freshly gray, old age hale and erect,
 While Lachesis has thread to spin, and while I stand
 - And walk on my own feet, no staff in my right hand.

For lack of a natural memory I make one of paper, and as some new symptom occurs in my disease, I write it down. Whence it comes that at the present moment, when I have passed through virtually every sort of experience, if some grave stroke threatens me, by glancing through these little notes, disconnected like the Sibyl’s leaves, I never fail to find grounds for comfort in some favorable prognostic from my past experience (Of Experience – Book III p. 1021).

 

The Fates again. And may Atropos be on vacation for a while longer. And as Montaigne talks of memory and written notes, I also think of and make connections to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the character Dr. Juvenal Urbino and how the Doctor had, ”Compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memory by scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets . . .” Do I begin to start to writing this blog for capturing memories? Or are the notes, my writings, a method to offset the loss of memory? Or is it really to leave behind bread crumbs? A thread to my find my way out of the labyrinth? –

          •  From John Bunyan, I have learned that the best way to start writing, is to start at the beginning and to keep going and that the story is something that emerges, by Fate, by Fortune, by Providence. We are the yeast for the dough. We the arrow that leaves the bow string. The end result is in our hands as we pull the on threads to see what pattern unfolds -

When at the first I took my Pen in hand,
 Thus for to write; I did not understand
 That I at all should make a little Book
 In such a mode; Nay I had undertook
 To make another, which when almost done,
 Before I was aware, I this begun.

Thus I set Pen to Paper with delight,
 And quickly had my thoughts in black and white.
 For having now my Method by the end,
 Still as I pull’d, it came; and so I penn’d
It down, until it came at last to be
 For length and breadth the bigness which you see

    To tell a story of the journey, no less than Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s Divine Comedy or Virgil’s Aeneid or Virgil Caine’s who served on the Danville train, from jail or from exile or from the train or from the boat or from the back porch or from pen or from typewriter or from keyboard strokes on your computer. It is a dream? Does your story start in dark woods? Does it start in a wilderness? Que scay-je? And I might as well add this too. What shall I do? – Mark Twain gave a speech whereupon he remarked that “when my mother got to be eighty-five years old her memory failed her. She forgot little threads that hold life’s patches of meaning together” (threads again) – and that memory was of such great interest to Twain so much so that he had patented his Memory-Builder ***** —— a game board aimed at developing memory for dates and facts}

            • From Walter Benjamin, I have learned this: Thank God, I’m reading ‘Illuminations’ first because I don’t have the time to get through A la Recherché du temps perdu, which is all the more ironic. Not enough time to get into the original source. Not yet. There’s no time left for Proust, who evidently writes a lot on both topics. So what I have is a great metaphor offered by Hannah Arendt in the Introduction on “thinking poetically” about fragments form the past and bringing to the surface the ‘rich and the strange’ so that memory is the epic faculty par excellence (p.97). Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation [but this assumes a two-way street – what if one generation wants to pass on the memories, but the other generation finds it all boring as hell and irrelevant? Sweet muse Mnemosyne, perhaps you are at work in George Lucas and Steven Spielberg? Are in the song by Bryan Adams and 'Summer of 69'. We see the movies and listen to music and it beings up pearls and corals from the depths] For Proust, as I understand it, the taste of a pastry called madeleine and he is transported back to the town of Combray [Stop here ----and I go back in time to open up the suntan lotion and close my eyes and smell the fragrance, the warm breezes of the Gulf, sand, shark’s teeth, fishing, skim boarding, she is walking away from me in a lemon yellow bikini, lemonade, the bite of crab claws on my feet, jellyfish alert, in the surf as I watch a gift from heaven appear before me with her bikini top knocked off by a large wave, I am sorry, but the gods do work in mysterious ways, refreshing iced tea, flying kites, higher and higher in the glare of the noon day sun. Okay back to work] “We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it remembered by the one who had lived it” (p.202) And how did he do that? He was able to weave his memory, “The Penelope work of recollection” [Penelope at the loom with her threads awaiting Ulysses – re-collecting], a Schopenhauer tapestry, so that the threads are like text. Benjamin reminded me of this: textum is the Latin word for “web” [Holy shit! – text = web = weaving = the World Wide Web = threads of text woven together = hypertext = blogging !And then I became lost in the reading of a certain section {so was that then a flow experience?) “Befriending Clio” – Clio the eldest daughter of Mnemosyne (Memory). The two together history and memory, like this blog series. Oh I see, got ya. I see the connection with clarity –

• “Proust had brought off the tremendous feat of letting the whole world go by a lifetime in an instant.^☼ But this very concentration in which things that normally just fade and slumber consume themselves in a flash is called rejuvenation . . . the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness . . .

  ^☼ To which brings to my mind – John Lennon singing about Instant Karma's gonna get you, momento mori, think Rembrandt's etching of 'Faust', or Jaun de Valdes Leal and 'The Allegory of Death' - Ω - in octu oculi -

   . . . The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home”. (p.212-213)

   Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it up to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past-but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea change” ^ψ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as “thought fragments” as something “rich and strange”, and perhaps even as everlasting Urphanomene. ^~ (p. 51).

                          ^~ Archetypes. Or perhaps I could offer = perennial threads? 
                       ^ψ From the Shakespeare’s – The Tempest, I, 2 ☈

  In a sense, every individual is a historian of his or her own personal experience . . . .This task of making sense of the past again becomes important in old age. . . . Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. . . . It makes it possible to select and preserve in memory events that are especially pleasant and meaningful, and so to ‘create’ a past that will help us deal with the future. Of course such a past may not be literally true. But then the past can never be literally true in memory: it must be continuously edited, and the question is only whether we take creative control of the editing or not.” (p. 132-133). Csikszentmihalyi  - FLOW - And Cole presents the metaphor of life as a journey. And there is Odysseus again and Sophocles and the riddle of the Sphinx. Again, there is the wheel of life and the wheel of fortune. And Time moving from seasonal/circular to linear/clock-bound. Father Time (Chrono–Saturn). The circle was broken and the stages of life in lock-step sequence becomes dominant, revisiting old friends again. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and then oddly enough the similarity with the author’s name Thomas Cole’s paintings from The Voyage of Life and I almost fall out my chair when Thomas R. Cole (the author) also included a reference to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes titled,  “The Chambered Nautilus” as a symbolic metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage of life. The Nautilus again! I remember the first time I saw the beauty of its design in my biology class many years ago - My path was altered and it was biology that captured my soul and later Holmes’s essays, “Over Tea Cups” are discussed and that is where several threads [memory + Nautilus + time] became  interwoven:

  Unlike his expansive, forward-looking vision in ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ (1857-58), the chambers of eighty-year old Holmes’s consciousness centered on memory: “In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of extreme age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the happy moments and days and years of times long past.” (p. 157). Moreover, Holmes argued that the mind in deep old age did not expand progressively like ‘the Chambered Nautilus’, leaving its past behind. Rather, mentation consisted of recollecting, repeating, and reweaving the material of lifetime” (p. 157).

  <Switching gears in my thought process. On another track> ========

  

  A slight digression to clarify something here !

              Hold it! Stop!  Not quite right, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Cole. I see your point and I concede that the chambers of the Nautilus give the appearance of looking forward, especially with the fact the animal, Nautilus pompilius, lives only in the last chamber, but in fact, the other chambers are not left behind, they are not completely sealed off because the walls (septa) dividing the chambers are actually pierced by a tube (siphuncle), much like a thread connecting the different chambers together, they are interconnected, so that gas and liquid exchange occurs through the siphuncle and it is in fact the way the Nautilus can regulate its buoyancy. Yes, it appears forward-looking but it is still connected to the past chambers and the connections to its past, its history in a sense, threads connected to the past, enable the Nautilus can be effectively  mobile in the ocean. <Janus-faced, beginnings and endings, Janus-faced> We don’t see the siphuncle, the inner thread, but without it, would there be the wonderment of the creature and beauty of the shell? Moving forward, but still carrying with us the chambers of buoyancy, connected by the thread, Ariadne’s thread, out of the labyrinth and through Picasso’s painting, “Minotaur Moving His House” and into Jasper John’s series of paintings, “The Seasons”, the ladder and rope. I believe, No, wait! It is more that that  - It was also there in the Rooke’s chapter where she wrote the profile. Here it is in my notes -

  The task of the Vollendungsroman is to discover for its protagonist and for the reader some kind of affirmation in the face of loss . . . Out lives are temporary; all are circumscribed by the reality of death. But this is felt more strongly in fiction concerned with old age, so that a special intensity, resulting from the darkness to darkness, characterizes the Vollendungsroman. The writer’s imagination is challenged by the prospect of the character’s demise and by the need to ‘capture’ a life before it vanishes. (p.248).

             Constance Rooke (1992). In Cole, Van Tasel, and Kastenbaum (Eds.). Handbook of the Humanities and Aging. Springer                                     Publishing Co.

  Capture a life before it vanishes. Hey, that’s it! This blog series – Damn, there it is.

  One must wrestle with the experiences of life and at some point along the way we may find that a reweaving a collective past into the present and reweaving a personal past into each stage of life are essential means of preparing for one’s journey into the unknown future (p. 250). 

  • From Giambattista Vico, I have learned that our history and our “times” are a worthy object and subject {a play on words perhaps?} of human knowledge and thus, verum factum, can be found in mythology, Chronos or Saturn and tradition and language.

  Our mythologies agree with the institutions under consideration, not by force and distortion, but directly, easily, and naturally. They will be seen to be civil histories of the first peoples, who were everywhere naturally poets (#353),

  We made our history. Our sense of chronology, ingenium, thus why can we not understand it as such? It’s not some mysterious unknown. We have met the history and it is us. Not just cogito ergo sum but the importance of place and time, embedded in the swirling mix of what humans have made. Contra the Cartesian Cogito. Start with history and work from there, best stated by Vico:

  The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored” (# 357 – the New Science).

  But with his focus on integration and synthesis, I have also wondered, was the work of Vico not only underestimated —– but considered anachronistic during his time? Which would be ironic. Or like Dr. John would say: I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time.

  which brings me to Julia Kristeva’s book, Proust and the Sense of Time.  It was here that he discovered the notion of Proustian time, and metamorphosis, an embodied imagination, and an interesting declaration by the author:

  Memory is but the servant of imagination: it performs an alchemical role in soldering the reality of things to their spiritual equivalent (p. 90)

  And from Barbara G. Meyerhoff,

  Memory is a continuum ranging from vague, dim shadows to the brightest, most vivid totality. It may offer opportunity not merely to recall the past but to relive it, in all its original freshness, unaltered by intervening changes and reflections . . . Remembering is requisite to sense and order. Through it, a life is given shape that extends back in the past and forward to the future, a simplified, edited tale where completeness may be sacrificed for moral and aesthetic purposes. Then history approaches art, myth, and ritual. Perhaps this is why Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is the mother of Muses. Without Remembering, we lose our history and ourselves (p. 383). 


  Is it interesting that Jean Amery in his book on Aging – opens up with a passage from Proust – from his book Time Regained -

  I had lived like a painter
  climbing a road overhanging a lake, a view
  of which is hidden from him by a curtain of rocks and
  trees. Through a gap he catches a glimpse of the lake, with
  its whole expanse before him, and he takes up his brushes.
  But already the night is coming, the night in which he will not be able to print anymore
  and upon which no day will follow.

  • From Timeshifting by Stephan Rechtschaffen

  What lingers in the memory are only those moments when we’re truly present, whether those moments were momentous or ordinary. The rest of the time, when we’re doing things just to get them finished, simply going through the motions of life—all of those days, months, years, recede into a gray blur (p. 191).

  A gray blur. There is something about that phase that I like and I believe I have come across that feeling and that expression before. Remember the Proust and Hegel connection? Gray on gray and Montainge’s expression, hair freshly gray, and while Lachesis has thread to spin, and there is George Gray in Spoon River Anthology. Gray – grey. I can feel it, it’s right there. What is it? What am I trying to get a handle on with this? Gray and getting older, not black and white, but gray And what? What about the gray? What does it mean? There is something there but just out of reach. Maybe it will manifest later and at the right time. In the mean time, perhaps the message in the movie Gattaca was meaningful enough. We can still aspire to great things and overcome the limits in front of us. If there is no gene for fate or the human spirit, we can, despite our flaws and limitations, grow the wings of Daedalus and take flight. We can change and yet still be the same -

  

  -       And what was it about that time in and around the year 1922? The creative energy. The literary works produced in that year – Ulysses, The Waste Land, Siddhartha, Dunio Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Golden Bough, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – and in that same year Marcel Proust died. À la recherche du temps perdu. And so where did the time go on June 16, 1904? It depends. There is Leopold Bloom walking, thinking, reflecting back and forth in time to where time it mashed and melted and reconstructed. Joyce’s words float, they ebb and flow, and drift suspended, like Dali clocks made of wax, persistent yet disintegrated, streams of life, steams of consciousness. Whose consciousness I wonder? Leopold Bloom’s? Molly’s? Stephen’s? All three intertwined? Proust with tea and madeleine and Bloom with his soap. A Gordian knot. A uroboros. A labyrinth. Yes, it is quite gray. Gray searching eyes, gray clouds, gray clothes, gray flags, and ineluctable modality. History, which Stephen is trying escape from. But not quite like the crab of history that Nietzsche talked about in the Twilight of the Idols where one who looks backward also believes in backward-ness. No it is memory which Joyce is trying create. That becomes the art of the story. The story has wings to escape the labyrinth up and over. Joyce you are the fabulous artificer. You escaped your nightmare and awoke the history within us. And we ask – how to escape time? One way is to create the text and to create the story. Our history is but the story we create. Habent sua fata libelli. The layers of the pearl. The gray pearl. Our memory the nacre. Vita brevis ars longa and if that is the case then I better get moving. One thing is certain, at least subjectively, is that it all moves even faster with each year that goes by. Or is it that the momento mori, which was relegated to the back row in youth, is now our walking shadow? Yes, the shadows dancing. The celestial light in the mirror. In ictu oculi. We strut and fret into our middle years and now afraid that our story will heard no more for fear that it was all for naught. La vida es sueno. The things that do not last. Vanitas. Dust in the wind. And what did it signify? – littera scripta manet –

              • Α - From Şterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristran Shandy, Gentleman, I have learned that time [chronological and chrono-illogical] and the written word —– (Are Sterne’s writings really more like conversations¹ as Russian nesting dolls?^Ю ) can be both magical ***** and a source of confusion and chaos. Who is on first? I mean that in a typographical sense and I do believe but cannot prove it at this point that the writings of Mark Twain’s [Let’s say, for example taking the hybrid cross {χ} between A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court + Huckleberry Finn and of James Joyce [using The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the example {but then again my only one so far}] share a lot in common with Sterne’s style of narrative and text pauses, leaps, and sidebars ▓ – but that is all assumption, by the bye, about writers in a time future beyond Sterne’s, whereas I can see his legacy grounded in Rabelais and Cervantes (neither of which I have read) {but I make note that I should} and he also makes mention of Pilgrim’s Progress and Montaigne.  I have also learned that words (sub-atomic), and the sentences (atomic), and the paragraphs (the elements), and the Chapters (Solar System), and the Volumes (galaxies) are more like a spider’s web, and all interconnected joined together and just when you think the solipsistic Black Widow may appear, Sterne pulls you into his demolition derby. Even the very critics who don’t believe that the sermon should be lingua interruptus – will be nevertheless converted to his helter-skelter ∆ style of combining Ekphrasis and reminiscence scattered about like buckshot; with story lines twisted and folded like moebius strips and Necker tubes —- and yet I wonder? –

              • Is Tristam Shandy ± Laurence Stern ≥ a philosophical romantic and/or comic after all?§ Or was it just a cock and bull story

  1 – see first sentence Volume 11 -Chapter XI

  ^‡ Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; _____they are the life, the soul of reading; —take them out of this book for instance, –you might as well take the book along with them; (Volume 1; Chapter XXII).

  ^Ю  . . . I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going,— (Volume 1; Chapter XXII).

  ▓  Could a histographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, _____ straight forward; —-for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, ____ he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to the journey’s end; —-but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; (Volume I; Chapter XIV).

  And this my favorite:

  Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! Than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more____ everything presses on_____while thou are twisting that lock,_____see!, it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make (Volume IX; Chapter VIII).

  But I digress – Back to the Stendhal and The Red and the Black, like a roulette wheel, his chapters as pockets, the Wheel in the Sky, or cups that alternate in a balanced symmetry, as black and red alternate, a Wheel of Fortune, but leave it to E Pluribus Unum {Duo} to create higher edge to the house with more green. Spinning Wheel – 0-32-15-19-4-21-2-25-17-34-6-27-13-36↓ -11-30-8-23- 10-5-24-16-33-1-20-14-31-9-22-18-29-7-28-12-35-3-26 – And Julien is helplessly a Romantic, lost in the irony of not sure which path to take, Napoleonic army or Spiritual pastor or remain a discontent in civilization.  And again there is emotion and reason in conflict, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But Stendhal holds up the mirror to my life as well. Narcissus and Goldmund. It was easier to see the portrait of me as a young man – but now? What have I been doing? Is there anything authentic in all of this? I feel I have been wasting time. Playing games, involved in opportunistic bullshit. But nothing like the guillotine to make one an existentialist and ponder the following:

  A mayfly born at nine in the morning, during the summer’s long days, and dying at five that evening: How could it comprehend the word night? (Chapter 44).

  And I have learned that Julien Sorel is on the journey, like Dante, like Voltaire’s Candide, and Homer’s Ulysses, but Stendhal has presented Julien’s life as one of choices in the binomial mode. Red or Black. The damned dichotomy again. Platonist or Aristotelian? Vita active or vita Comtempliva? Beavis or Butthead? Which is the stairway to heaven? And now I hear the song of Led Zeppelin in my head – because there are two paths to go by and now I am haunted by the Road Not Taken and I hear Frost telling us with a sigh, two roads diverged in a wood, and I 
I took the one that everyone said to take, and now instead of divergence, I am asked to look at convergence, but be careful because not all that glitters is gold, right Emperor Aurelius? –

              • From Collingwood, I have learned —- Question: “How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past?” Answer: “the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind” and that Occam had his razor, but Descartes had his machete, and that “history” may be seen not as a circle, ♁ cyclical movement, yes, but as a spiral  ^Ө—- and that the historian is to show how the present has come into existence and not what the future will be and contra Hegel {one thread = ♕political history} and Marx {one thread = ♔economic history}, rather there are many threads to discover, not just one, out of the labyrinth . . . but it is still the way we conceive the world *—- sub specie praeteritorum. It is the world, the world of ideas—-

  ^Ө History, on the contrary, never repeats itself; its movements travel not in circles, but in spirals, ^§ and apparent repetitions are always differentiated by having acquired something new. (p.114 – The Idea of History. Oxford at the Clarendon Press.1951 – London. Great Britain. R.G. Collingwood).

                    ^§ Have not come across my friend Nautilus pompilius in a while – Logarithmic 
spirals and instead of Roulette numbers. Could it be Fibonacci numbers?

  * If I look at the sun and am dazzled, ☀ my being dazzled is here only, in me and not the sun; but in so far as I perceive the sun, by thinking ‘what dazzles me is there in the sky’, I perceive it as there, away from me. Similarly the historian thinks of his object as there, or rather then, away from him in time; and because history is knowledge and not mere experience, he can experience both as  then and as now: now in the immediacy of historical experience, but then in its mediacy (p. 158).

              • From Wilhelm Dilthey, I have learned <and in the interest of time I my readings were focused on key chapters only> —–that Dilthey talks of fog banks [to which I say – ‘he should know’ – given that his writings are as dense as Augustine], but in the context of the flow of time, this emerges as a powerful ‘thought fragment’ to add to the weaving of a palimpsest - 

  As a state of consciousness the past is distinguished from the present by all the traits that distinguish memories from lived experiences. The future is indeterminate merely in terms of imaginary representations. It is a world of possibilities constantly pursuing us like fog banks ^♒ when we look down from the Alps. But these possibilities are images connected with the attitude of expectation. The dawning future always influences the changeable consciousness of the present in terms of a mood – great happiness, imminent death, the tragic feeling of life with old age in Faust, Part II (Vol. 1; Book Four; Chapter 4; p. 382).

  ^◘ Make cross-reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above a Sea of Fog”; and remember Elijah Browning? – from  Master’s Spoon River Anthology – “And I saw the mists below me hiding all below them” 

  

         - And what exactly is being woven here? Okay there is the representations of the past and the future, but as we sit here in the present, there should be the Proustian recognition of the details, the moment as it exists before it becomes the past or lost in the mists of the future. But something else is present above the sea of fog ? ♒ The wanderer is reaching for the star. What is being woven here is perhaps Bildungsroman. Yes, what I have learned from Dilthey is that notion of that our lives can, perhaps, be structured as Bildungsroman. Holderin. Hyperion. Novalis. Ofterdingen. Goethe. Wilhelm Meister. What a minute! Whose life are we talking about? And are the threads the same for other people too? How in the hell can that be? Those are just stories from the past. What could they possibly offer to me a white – middle-class male, and born in the middle of the previous century, a baby boomer, and looking ahead in this century too. And here is Dilthey proposing that -

  “ . . . the Bildungsroman is distinguished from all previous biographical compositions in that it intentionally and artistically depicts that which is universally human in such a life course? . . . .Life’s dissonances and conflicts appear as necessary transitions to be withstood by the individual on his way towards maturity and harmony.”   (Vol. 5, Part II; pp. 273-274)

   A universally human in a life course? How can the lived experience – Erlebnis – be universal? Or are there patterns, traits, experiences that are common threads? And across the generations? I doubt it. Everything seems to be about wiping the slate clean, ❏ a new start by throwing out the old dogma and the old rules of the few and elite. Born the USA means never having to say ‘just because,’ because it’s the big Etch-A-Sketch in the sky. But yet, regardless of culture, gender, race, income, age or cohort group. Are there universals for all us? I’m confused as hell here. I see more and more bifurcation and choice and possibilities and endless branching of roads not taken, and in the end, when it is time to look back, ☚ the Eriksonian ‘integrity’ of it all, we ask ourselves – No regrets? Or the regret that there was not enough time spent at bringing up the pearls and the coral. In other words, too much time spent in Groundhog Day? And then when the end appeared on the horizon or just over our shoulder one day – Boom! Kierkegaard’s sledgehammer writings on the earnestness of death, but by then too late, game over, and right there on the edge is when I ask for a reprieve, a second chance, to reset the clock, to begin again, when in quick flashes I all I can see are the straight lines ═ carved by the Corps of Engineers, no digressions, no sidebars, no curves, no back eddies. 

  It’s like the joke I have heard before, ‘Why is it, and maybe it is the only time it will ever happen, that you get a police escort and get to run through all the red lights, is only after you are dead on the way to your own funeral? Yep ’straight to the grave’ and all that time your life was spent at stop lights and you waiting to get moving again. I could have used that time for more digressions and ‘fifty deviations’ from the planned trip ahead. But if that lesson and all of those lessons from the past are still present and available, then why have we not increased our individual and collective wisdom about the precious pearls and coral brought up from the depths? How can you read this from Tristram Shandy and not pause to reflect, ‘days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny! Than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more.’ Just one more moment more to reflect or give pause on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius? Or all the rest that has passed before me? Maybe because it is the past and it is all still broken! Here we are in 2008/2009 and still no great revelations about ‘how we made to the promised land.’ Nope, we are still digging around, scratching and clawing through the muck, and mucking through it. All that literature, all of the stories, all of the epic poems, all of the biographies, all of the memoirs, all of the journals and dairies, notebooks and post-it notes. Toward what? Tell me! Damn it. What is it?  And please don’t tell me just ‘dust in the wind’ Or even the Nan-ism, which only a grandmother could possible come up with, ‘Someday you’ll know.’  If I don’t know by now, I never will ❮as he reflects upon the scope of his metaphysical questions ~ he then quickly decides not to go onto the slippery slopes of an ontological solioquium, but keeps the blogging soliloquy going❯ Is it all a complete unknown? Like a rolling stone. Shit, here we go again. Through the past darkly ☁, but dandelions don’t care about the time. Really? I am the walrus – koo-koo-ka-choo -

  So let me re-group – huddle up. The past is a representation and tolerable and sometimes instructive via the Schopenhaurian tapestry flipped over and then to love and to work, to harmonize passion and reason, to be ready for the ‘sea-change,’ but the “sea-change” will occur with more attention to detail, and our focus on thinking poetically. God, I’m tired just thinking about it. Is not it easier just being comfortably numb. I wonder, if Pink Floyd thinking about the movie ‘The Graduate’? Or television in general? As I kid I could spend hours and hours putting together the plastic model airplanes and battleships. There were tons of pieces, but no problem, for tt was heaven in the moment of seeing it all in parts and then bringing it together, with every decal just right, the dollop of glue just right, the paints brushed on just so – comfortably numb? No, something else. But it’s been a while since I felt that intense, that focused. It was a happy innocence and I remember the adventures of traveling to the mountains. I was King Arthur in search of sweet maidens and to the beach in search of mermaids. I was the brave Ulysses and now I remember the song by Cream, ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’  and then the sensory experience of Stephen Dedalus and girl on the beach. O heavenly God! The hopes and dreams, the possibilities, all before me. But now? What has happened? Can I retrieve all of that from my past? Is any of it worth putting to text? Into a web of connections? Can I weave the threads? Better yet, can I flip into the second half and be ready to show how they all create. Wait! Better yet still, can I recreate the spark and the fire of all the colors and designs from the second half? And would it be worth the energy and the time? But all of it for whom? Can my singularity, my individual live experience be of any worth to anyone beyond me? I mean who cares? And I’m just as guilty, because do I really want to wade through all the gravel of other people’s lives? Give me the biographical CliffsNotes. Just give me the gold nuggets, just show me the instructive threads. I don’t need to see the whole showroom of carpet – I don’t have the time.

              • From Theodore Adorno, I have learned, to appreciate the beauty —-and the art —-of writing so cleanly [God knows ---- I am still the pilgrim and have a long ways to go] and his adept way of presenting the critique with precise scalpel cuts and you are left in the hands of the most competent surgeon – when it comes to repairing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities –

  The simplest reflection on the life of consciousness would teach us to what a slight extent insights, which are by now means arbitrary hunches, can be fully captured within the net of science. The work of Marcel Proust, which is no more lacking in a scientific-positivist elements than Bergson’s, is an attempt to express necessary and compelling insights into human beings and social relations that are not readily accommodated within science and scholarship, despite the fact that their claim to objectivity is neither diminished nor abandoned to a vague plausibility (Notes to Literature; the Essay as Form; Vol. I. p.

  
And how does one attempt to express the necessary and compelling insights into human beings? —-Well, I am glad you asked bon ami [see Sieur de Montaigne]—-One way is through text [the essay form]and the narrative of memory and time —-and we need it now more than ever but it has become an anachronism {so sayeth Adorno} – Yes it has the ability to engage in weaving the interconnections – and it’s formal law is heresy (so sayeth Adorno}; heresy against orthodoxy and is skeptical of lofty ideals. Yet, and yet again, if the essay, if the narrative, if the text, can aspire to the enthusiastic fragment ^! of Nietzsche:

  If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither is us ourselves nor in things: and if our soul had trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event (Nietzsche; from Vol. I; p. 23)

  

  ^! Maybe that it was I have been searching for in all of the readings (?)

  And I have learned of an interesting connection: Theodor Adorno writing about Thomas Mann who died in 1955 and written for Hermann Hesse on July 2, 1962 [Vol. 2] July 2, 1962? What the . . . .? – I was seven years old, the Berlin Wall went up. John Glenn and then Cuban Missile Crisis began to roll. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, but written for Hesse? I don’t get it. Hermann Hesse died in 1962, but I thought Hesse died in August? What did Adorno know on July 2, 1962? –

  I have also learned of Adorno’s love for books and his analysis – No—-I take that back {is it too late?} —-his sensitive insights toward Proust and what is at stake in Remembrance of Things Past –

  The sense that he [Proust] emanates of something familiar in the midst of what is most out of the ordinary is due to the unparalleled discipline with which he handles things every individual once knew, in childhood, and the unrepressed, things that now return to him with the force of the familiar. What seems so extremely individuated in Proust is not inherently individuated; it seems so only because we no longer dare to react this way; or are capable of doing so. Actually Proust restores the promise of the universality we were cheated of. In his texts it makes us blush, like the mention of name carefully kept secret (Vol. II – Appendix- On Proust – p. 316).

  - Guess what? It’s time to wrap this one up. (I wonder if you made it this far – my good reader)

  So when you stop to think about it, all it takes is a little memory, because when we think it is something new and novel, it has probably happened before, twenty-like in 1965, in South Central Los Angeles, Watts, and again that had started on a routine traffic stop. And what were the conclusions from the commission that investigated the Watts riots? Something deeper was out of balance in the cities and it was related to jobs, housing, and schools. Something was also out of balance five years later from the Watts event, on May 4 at Kent State, the National Guards were called in, and then four dead in Ohio. Sometimes the world does change and evolve, but I wonder if the students in my class today know that after the Kent State event. In June of 1970, Congress changed the minimum American voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years of age, leading to the approval of the Twenty-sixth amendment to the constitution. Maybe all of this stuff, Watts, Vietnam, Woodstock, the Apollo mission to the moon, Kent State – all that is already history to them. The past – maybe it’s like what the end of the Korean War was for me. The armistice agreement in 1953, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t born yet, just twenty years difference, but what a difference it makes.  

  Go back twenty years from my birth year in ’55 and you got FDR signing the Social Security Act, and Huey Long – the Kingfish – was assassinated in Baton Rouge. And the Hoover Dam is finally done and I believe Ken Kesey was born then who went on to write,“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” which became a movie in ’75 with Jack Nicholson, and Kesey also wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, which became a movie in ’71 with Paul Newman. Again all of which happened before this year’s freshmen were even born. Or what about Richard Brautigan, again born in 1935, and eh went on to write Trout Fishing in America in ’67 and In Watermelon Sugar in ’68. Elvis was also born in 1935, and so was Sonny Bono, and Gloria Steinem, and Carroll Burnett, and the best pitcher ever in baseball – Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Woody Allen. They were all born in that the year, twenty years early from my birth year when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had died, and so did T.E. Lawrence, who was known as Lawrence of Arabia, who wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, who became the subject for the film directed by David Lean in 1962, who then directed Dr. Zhivagho in 1965, based on the book written by Boris Pasternak, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in ’58, and ten years later, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, 2001: A Space Odyssey at the movies, and so was Planet of the Apes, and then back to the topic of the cold war, when the USS Pueblo was captured by North Koreans, and in ’68  - John Steinbeck died, and I became a teenager of thirteen, and twenty years later, the Summer Olympics were held in Seoul Korea. Pistol Pete Maravich died, the TV show “The Wonder Years” started up, which was really about growing up in the 60s and early 70s, and I got to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marcia Marquez, which was a book about memory and the rivers of time, and the ageless love of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a remembrance of time and love, A la recherche du temps perdu, A Remembrance of Things Past, A searching for time lost, to Sonnet 30, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail me dear’s waste, to the Chicago Transit Authority in 1969, Does anybody really know what time it is? I don’t, but does anybody really care? If so, I can’t imagine why. About time, to Sonnet 19 and the Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, but heading back to 1970, Guess Who? Well, there’s no time left for you, but lots of time for me. I guess that is one thing I will have in a few more months – lots of time. Time to finally read Proust. Damn I got through Dante, so might as well climb another mountain of words, and then back to Dante, Petrarch, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Blake, and Swinburne. Yes, from April to April, and in between Swinburne, and here we are in April, and I have learned about the triumph of time. It is not much that a man can save on the sands of time and in the garden of Proserpine. We are not sure of sorrow and joy was never sure, today will die tomorrow, time stoops to no man’s lure, especially in the Waste Land, Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, we have drunken from things Lethean. 

  Yes, there is passing of the old guard, I can feel it, something new and different on the horizon. Time keeps on slipping into the future, along with me and a bunch of other baby boomers. And I can feel me and us moving into the next bracket. And those ahead of us saw it in a whole different light, and those behind us, in my classes, probably see it way different than me. What’s wrong with them? What do they want? Back in my days. God, I sound just like my father. Same threads, but being woven in different patterns, same fire, but it burns differently for each generation. Sure, it’s didn’t start with the baby boomers like in Billy Joel’s song beginning with Harry Truman in 1949 and going through 1989 with the cola wars because it’s been going for centuries and continues with Noriega, Gorbachev, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Desert Storm, and the Gulf War, but the torch has been passed. I can feel it, I see it in the classrooms.  Do I tell my students about our first color TV in 1965? Well, it was because my old man wanted to see “The F.B.I. Show” with Inspector Lewis Erskine in living color. Maybe Coupland’s had the next group in the relay race figured out with his “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.” Maybe I’m just jacking off with legislated nostalgia, yuppies and slackers, Bonfire of the Vanities, and American Psycho, Bleeding Ponytails and Boomer Envy, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Spin Doctors, and then that freaking song from Pearl Jam. Time, memories, and aging. What the hell am I going to do next? But then again what am I afraid of? I can do just about anything. There won’t even be a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man. Carry on wayward old man. What ever happened to the dreams? And the imagination? And the limitless possibilities? Now there is only the dark wood. The doors are shut. This is the end my beautiful friend. The end of my elaborate plans and end of the soft parade. It started back in ’69, back when I was in high school and I didn’t see the message at that time. All our lives we sweat and save, building for a shallow grave. Must be something else, as Jim Morrison would point out. Apocalypse now or never. Shit – only the good die young. Wow, how fast I’ve gone from Epicurean to Stoic in just a few years –

  Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time’s bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair its passage. – Brian Greene. “The Time We Thought We Knew” (New York Times, January 1, 2004).

  Yes, to celebrate particular moments in time. That is key, isn’t it?

  What alchemy can capture the essence of holding the moment?

  Effortlessly?

  Continually?

  How to recreate the solstice? Tempus-stice the longest day.

  To make every day a Bloomsday.

  How to make time stand still?

  To see illumination in Platonic ideals?

                       By climbing a 5.10b route on granite slab?

  In the electric carnal embrace of skin to skin?

  Skydiving?

  Meditation?

  Good company and a good meal?

  Prayer?

  Bungee jumping?

       It will probably vary for each individual. Just as the string can produce different musical notes. Who can say?

              As in the variations of Orff’s Carmina Burana:

                          Eugene Ormandy Philadelphia Orchestra.

                          Robert Shaw Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus.

                          Chor und Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin/Christian Hielemann

              Will it be the black-and-white photography of Ansel Adams or the color photography of  Galen Rowell?

              Or –

              to catch an artic grayling from a high mountain lake on a wet fly,

              to view Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance,

  

              to watch a cinnamon teal on the fly, 

              to hold your baby grandchild in your arms,

              to view Georgia O’Keefe’s Ram’s Head and Hollyhock,

              to serve barbeque ribs and cold beer,

              to listen to Christopher Hogwood’s rendition of Mozart’s Requiem,

              to eat a fresh sweet corn on the cob,

  listening to Lisa Gerrard’s voice soar in “Elegy” (if that is what I can hear in heaven, count me in) from Immortal Memory,

              hearing the song “White Room” by Cream and not caring what it means

  heading down to Fisherman’s Wharf in the evening, listening to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” on the radio,

  spending the morning beachcombing,

  the smell of lavender,

  listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor,

  the taste of a ripened peach right from the tree,

  to hear Sheila Chandra sing “Ever So Lonely,”

              it will vary according to each vibration of the string.

              Timeless

              time

  In the Zen poetry of Ryokan -

              Months pass, days pile up
  Like one intoxicated dream -
                An old man sighs.

  And Basho -

                    This autumn—
                           why I am growing old
                     Birds disappearing in the clouds.

  I have added (so far) in this blog -  a galaxy of findings and conclusions and statistics, and after I add it all up, what do I have? More science? – Where is the story? Where is the myth? Where is the art?

  I think of what Carol Gilligan has said about the Psyche and Cupid tale –

  Metamorphosis—changing the shape, overcoming the form—is the essence of creativity. It is by its very nature improvisational, taking off from the familiar and heading into the unknown. Like art, like science, like love.

  And here I am returning full circle, back to the beginning, heading into the unknown, to try and understand the life story, to remember, to create text, to weave the story via this blog.

  And why?

  Here I am. Carry on wayward, son, and then to grow old, and so I have contemplated often: Is there wisdom to share? Are there guideposts to describe along the journey? Are there digressions, distractions, adventures to offer as a part of my odyssey?  Which may connect with others along the same lifetime? But why should they care?

  There is death, but there is also love.

  I write this blog because there is death.

  

  The finiteness of time is motivation enough. The earnestness of death and it will happen to me, and I feel its weight now more than ever, and I know this: I know it for me. There is no more bullshit. Memento mori. Dust in the wind, wheel of fortune, ants marching, Vanitas vanitatum, Omnia vanitas, Et in Arcadia Ego, and so I write this blog in the back eddy in the river of history and against the brevity of life.

  

  Yet, while there is life, there is love 

  And so the weaving of the narrative text is the work of the troubadour as memento mori against the nullity of death and the march of time. I have entered into the chambered Nautilus again, moving forward, looking backward, interconnected, brining forth the stories, tied together in threads, and I am but one of many, woven together, generation after generation, through time do we enter mystery, adding layers to the pearl.

  And now it is Petrarch and his reaction to aging,

              Well, let it come. I’m not the only one
               who’s aging. My desire doesn’t age,
         But how much time, I wonder, have I left? 

  And so there it is: my sentiments exactly.

  How much time is left? I don’t know, and that is why I must write and submit these lines as text in this blog series -

  And why? Because there is the muse and my desire doesn’t age and there is love while there is still life, even though love is,

              like snow in the sun, like wax in fire, like clouds before the wind . . .

              The muse is there saying: Write!

  And it is inspiration, but what to say?

  How to capture the time and the memories?

  It is as though Petrarch would say to me or to you that such a task is like trying to capture the notion of her beauty. It is certainly no easier than

              to count the stars and to catch the ocean in a little glass . . .

  So I dream on. But I wonder if the green laurel is within reach. So I type this in large font and print it out from Ricoeur’s book – It will go on my wall.

  Under history, memory and forgetting.

  Under memory and forgetting, life.

  But writing a life is another story.

  Incompletion.
               Paul Ricoeur (2004)

  Thanks – Scott D. Wright