The Aging of Shakespeare – to ‘Late Style’ – to Catfish: Life as a novel “in progress”

With this blog in (and for) April 2009 I hope to facilitate rapprochement with the importance and influence of William Shakespeare, especially concerning the notion of ‘late style’, and with related concepts in the study of the aging process. But that’s not all, from ‘late style’, I then make the leap to literary work of the late Larry Brown (The Miracle of Catfish).

         

Wow, that is quite the leap. Yep, just another day at the office of Rogue Scholarship on Aging.

You may say: “But excuse me…what does one thing – have to do – with the other?”

Stay with me now and follow the breadcrumbs on how I will connect a path (a way to find ourselves through the fog as it were) on these 3 items:

• the recent unveiling of a portrait that is claimed to be that of William Shakespeare {Dude, is that You?}
• a further look into the notion of “late style” – or late writing (or late anything creatively speaking) for and aging Shakespeare and a few select others
• and then end up paying homage to one of my favorite writers (out of hundreds) – Larry Brown with an evolving and flourishing career of writing magnificent portraits of life itself. Larry Brown had sent the nearly completed manuscript of his sixth novel (The Miracle of Catfish) to his literary agent (Nov. 2004) and a week later was dead at the age 53 due to a massive heart attack.

Bur first a little background {sorry, no brevity, and perhaps no wit}.

Although, I think the collective works of Shakespeare is not ( I repeat – NOT) the best place to go for seeking refuge from the changes of senescence nor is it the first stop for finding sugary platitudes about “getting older.” In fact, there is a certain blunt in-your-face ambivalence and regret about aging throughout most his works. For example, Covey (2000) in a refreshing (because it represents scholarship sui generis) article – “Shakespeare on old age and disability” (Int’l J. of Aging & Human Development) does a good job of creating an selective inventory of how Shakespeare portrayed aging and disability in his works – and the overall assessment is truthful, yet heavy on the negative side of the ledger. For example, if we were to use some lines from Shakespeare for contemporary uses, such as the next time someone wants to accuse me of being “deadwood” in the academy, I would prefer to hear the following (from Henry IV, part 2, act 1, scene 2):

{Scott}…”You are as a candle, the better part burnt out.”  Yes, this paper-dagger I see coming to me in an e-mail from the Dean (at some point) and at least I would take home the message much better (thus the preference), knowing that administration at least used a little Shakespeare to deliver the news.

I could counter that sharp-edged comment by telling them that I am “in transition” and evolving to a “late style” in my works. That my deadwood status is but the winter of my discontent, and that my glorious summer of publications is near (if I can just get through the spring of allergies) -

Scott said, “You know…like Shakespeare did. He, like many others…” – (and here I would reel off the laundry list and heavily borrowed from Edward Said’s (2006) book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain) – “…who took on the second wind, and who delivered the goods while pending “retirement” (or death), and there was also: Claude Debussy, Rembrandt, Matisse, Adorno, Bach, Wagner, Picasso, Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, and the exemplar of all time (perhaps) – of Beethoven.”

And then for the final coup de grace (hmm, maybe poor choice of words here) I would solicit the potential for my possibility by mentioning Kubrick and Polanski in the film domain – not to mention Bergman and Jean-Luc Goddard (see James Morrison in Raritan) –

But alas, their quick and icy rebuttal -as hurtful as the paper wasp sting upon my neck: “All well and good Scott – for them – but for you…’You yourself, sir, shall grow old as I if like a crab could go backward’”.

And that would do it. Game over.
No more “slings and arrows” – no more outrageous fortune – They brought out the big guns with Hamlet.

And speaking of Hamlet, we shall look closer at this business of “late style” with you and me – but we shall use Shakespeare as our north star for the concept – not so much how we wrote about aging per se, but how he, as a writer, might have been influenced by his own aging process.

And why not. April is here! Shakespeare born April 26, 1654 – died April 23, 1616 (or as some would want – pretty much on the same day, close enough) (not to mention that The Tudors start Season 3 on April 5 – lots of fodder for Shakespeare in that series)

 

Hang on a second. Shakespeare? Why? - Well, it’s personal and professional.

It’s necessary and sufficient for ontology and history. And it’s just flat out – THE – source for being human.

Oh, you mean you would you call his writings perfection? Of course not.

But therein does reside the affinity and the perennial attraction that pulls in the vast array of humanity – human comedy and tragedy that defies easy and convenient boxes and labels to use. The works of Shakespeare are not anywhere close to the utilitarian “widget” – rather they combine the earthly organics with a “spiritus mundi.” Using Shakespeare’s works to re-examine and to serve as a touchstone (lux et veritas) for the aging process is a “natural.” Speaking of “natural” – that brings to mind the “dazzling line” (Bloom, 1998) of Shakespeare:

Light seeking light doth light beguile:

I can assure you, my friends, that – light – was all I could think about – as a mantra – as an antidote –as a prayer – to keep me from going over the deep-end as I was exploring a deep cave in Arkansas (The Natural State) with my brothers and we got drop-dead lost – with two out of four headlamps still working.

I will never take for granted light – light seeking light – ever again. And as I spoke the words, I did believe that I would die in a cavern – a natural grave. And I thought of those words and had the epiphany of hell being a place where there was no light – not just me not seeing – but me knowing there was no hope for light –anywhere. Why in the midst of razor panic did a line from Shakespeare come to saturate my brain as I contemplated the utter stupidity of dying with my brothers in the crushing apathy of a limestone cave? –

Well, then it is no wonder that there exists a book (simply a marvel to behold – and to hold and read; especially since we made it out of the cave – hours later) to examine the connection:

The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging. (2003). By Paul Matthews and Jefferey McCain (with forward by Diane Ackerman).

This book is both bench science and literary alchemy. The authors: Professor of Nuerology and Literary Studies. And then to have Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) write the forward completes the book into one that is one of my most “used” books – off the shelf to reference and reflect – and than back in a reverent spot. I would have never thought to see functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) intersect with the theatre – but it here it makes complete sense (common and lofty both).

So – why? Because –

At every stage of my life, at every transition, at every corner, and as close as my soul and as far as the eye can see on the road that goes on forever, there has been Shakespeare.

At every blessing, at every curse, and with each sin, with the gravity of being first born, and with exoneration, there is Shakespeare.
At every love and with every death, with every birth and at every breath -
At the myriad of jobs – cook, janitor, roofing, farming, and teaching – there is Shakespeare.
And in my current domain – Academics – there too?

Are you kidding me?

There is enough comedy and tragedy in the university system to nourish an entire industry for five more William Shakespeares (and throw in a few more for James Joyce).

Perhaps that is what keeps me going in the circus of wisdom and folly – one can read about the Tudors and the Stuarts – or you can sit in on the Academic Senate or attend a committee meeting deciding the fate of someone’s tenure. You can be assured of the same spectacle. Something is bound to be rotten in the state of the academy – along with plenty of ghosts too – and enough books to make Prospero weep with envy. Ah yes, envy
And greed. But also integrity and bold leadership. Shakespeare as the north star and the lodestar and the sphinx and the chimera.

Shakespeare, that old fool? Really?

Well, listen up you hip/hop texting freak that goes Zen on your head with your veganized multigrain Buddhistic ‘low and slow’ style that be hating them fancy words that don’t mean me nothing – cause I truck the long haul and I ain’t got no time for flowered script as I multitask my family to and from here and there based on the line up that would make the Secretary of State blush out of shame, But still – that dead white guy? Romeo, where art thou? Like who gives a shit. I mean I’m tired of the world, the bosses, the know knothings {sic}, the hacks, the players, the suck-ups, the assholes, the wannabes – I just want to escape to a place where you don’t have to think about money, power, fame, and sometimes even about family – with all its trials and tribulations, or the group and the band…I mean in the end is it all worth It? What’s the point? Do I put up with all this bullshit or just kick back and drown in a fog of smoke or breathe in the elixir of crystal illusion? Or do I cowboy up and face the shit storm? What to do? Take on the bullets and the memos – or drive right off the cliff? Do I still love – if love be just a cruel joke? The machinations and the intrigue. The faded beauty and the pungent sigh of impending death -

Hey, wait a second – are you saying Will Shakespeare talked about those things too? Even way back then? Wow, but here is the big question:

Would Shakespeare Text and Twitter? (WSTT?) If he did, perhaps that ‘person” would reveal through cryptic messaging the truth about the identity “mystery” once and for all!

r u really Oxfordian? Can u get Hamlet down 2 140 characters?

Hold it! Can we move back to the topic?- thnx

Which was connected to William Shakespeare and aging – right?

Correct -

This blog posting is think further about our lives, our creativity, and our desire to engage the mysteries of life while knowing time is of the essence. For some, it is proposed that our creative products and outcome can and will CHANGE with time and that death creates a formidable counter-muse in the sense that the sense of approaching mortality quickens the “style” and changes the content to something althogether different when compared to the oeuvre of work produced so far. This shift and break with the continuity of the past and into something quite novel and unique (bold, daring, abstract) is known as “late style” which has been addressed by many writers for many decades. The question before us is this; is there merit to such a concept in the aging process? Is late style the result of the procerss of aging (stage-theory like) or does it have more to do with mortality – such that DEATH is the key factor (and motivator) rather than age per se.

Case closed: The potentiality for creative ability is to be found and expressed across the life course. How we measure and value creative ability is variable and multifactorial. “Late style” is neither epigenetic nor a universal trait of old age; rather, “late style” may be preferred, rewarded, desired, and above all latent – how and when it may be manifest is as much the gestalt effect as it is organic drive to disrupt the path to oblivion.

With this blog posting we shall take a closer look at these issues – and then end with the case of Larry Brown – whose life ended way too short to express late style – but nevertheless deserves a closer look in terms of the novel – The Miracle of Catfish.

Okay, let’s see how you pull that rabbit out of the hat.

• Bread Crumb # 1: the recent unveiling of a portrait that is claimed to be that of William Shakespeare {Dude, is that You?}

Dude, is that You? – which is my reaction to the primary article which was titled, “Is That Really You, Sweet Prince?” published in the New York Times on March 14, 2009, by Charles McGrath that caught my interest because of my lifelong interest in all things Shakespeare (just this side of Bardolatry).
Why? Well, perhaps it has to do with my involvement (and taking on the role of many secondary parts) in the play Macbeth in the my high school years – and me realizing how that created a interesting connection to several lady friends – but one in particular, who thought I was a “genius” for simply being able to memorize all those lines in the play. Well, I took full advantage of that “opening” which led to me to think I could then actually write sonnets just like “him” (William Shakespeare –and what a joke… but hey, I tried!) and she was thrilled with being the recipient of my amateurish attempts at ‘wooing’ her soul – and her body.

One of my prized possessions is – Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired [abridged] by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor (2006). I fell off my chair laughing at their “reduced message” about the tragedy King Lear:

One-sentence plot encapsulation: Lear tries to control his daughters and ends up losing them all.
Moral: It’s hell getting old.
Essay Question: How far along are you in your estate planning? Do you have a will or trust?

Good one. I needed the (gerontological) laugh after reading King Lear (see Garber’s 2008 book – listed below for a little bit more on King Lear; especially as it relates to aging).

One of my other prized possessions is the book (published in 1911), The Tudor Shakespeare – MACBETH edited by Arthur C.L. Brown by Macmillan & Co. New York. Of course, I also say that about And I will always know that it was the Three Witches that open the play (see The Three Fates above) – and that I had the pleasure of opening up the whole damn thing with my role and my line(s):

Where shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain?

Like many others before me, I was accustomed to only a few “images” of what William Shakespeare might have looked like, and I was none too impressed with some of the portrayals. For example, this engraved portrait of Shakespeare makes him look like and appear to be some foppish bean-counter at AIG – no thanks, this guy could write himself out of wet paper bag – no way. Crome-dome with the pencil thin mustache and a look that makes George Costanza look like George Clooney.

{from Holden’s (1999) book: “…Martin Droeshout’s portrait, the only image of Shakespeare approved by those who knew him.”}

Hah!… We shall see about that…..

Unfortunately, this image shows up as the front cover for several books in my library (now I do this listing and inventory not to showboat, but to provide evidence for how insane this obsession is with things Shakespeare – I can’t help it; see the book, buy the book, read the book, add it to the shelf) such as:
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623. Routledge, New York (which strangely enough lists the THE TEMPEST first in all of the works – when in many others books the Tempest is treated as one of the last (LATE STYLE) works of Shakespeare). This image is also on the front of The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum (2006) and for Anthony Holden’s William Shakepseare: The Man Behind the Genius (1999).

What else you got?

Then there is the ‘Flower Portrait’ with a dubious provenance but shows up on the cover of a great book by A.D. Nuttall (2007) Shakespeare –The Thinker, Yale University Press. Which is a slight improvement, but still we have Shakespeare as more the tax accountant, the glorified chancellor, than the man about the world.

What else?

Then there is the Chandos portrait which elevates the stature and the man to a level that says – “ I write the comedies and the tragedies. It is a vast improvement (at least to me) and carries the more classical, studious, and hint of the rogue going with the “pirate” look which says “been there and done that.”

This image (to some degree or another) was used on several books such as Shakespeare and the Arts of Language by Russ McDonald (2001); Players: The Mysterious Idenity of William Shakespeare by Bertram Fields (2005) but on the inside the image ‘regresses’ to the Droeshout portrait. It appears on the cover of Michael Wood’s (2003) book Shakespeare (the companion book to the PBS series); on Stephen Greenblatt’s (2004) book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, and the awesome publication by Stanley Wells (2003) Shakespeare for All Time.

Okay, I’m with you so far – the Chandros Portrait…robust, earthly, and looks like a writer (for God’s sake) – even though this portrait is still a stretch to the “movie” imagery from the film, “Shakespeare in Love”

and then having represented Will in this fashion – {Joseph Fiennes}

but then – no wonder William Shakespeare could crank out the sonnets and the plays and bazillion lines of verse of comedy and tragedy – the Muse was The Swan – the Angel – a goddess – she was….{the Swan Muse – Gwenyth Paltrow}

Now, here is where you supply the songs – Strawberry Letter No. 23 by The Brothers Johnson and then play – “Use Me” by Bill Withers – then go to the YouTube video for Bruce Springsteen “Fire” -

Romeo and Juliet….
Baby you can bet their love they didnt deny…

Well, enough said there. It was time to write – early style, middle, or late – hell, it didn’t matter – just write.

I think I knew at that point that writing is the essence of being possessed by dæmons (of ancient origin) that could help 

   (The Three Fates) 

energize and maximize one to float effortlessly above the keyboard and where the fingers could not keep up (or just barely) with the mind and its thoughts – and it connections – and its drive – (and pardon the pun here) the Will – to weave enchantment and romance and grief and hate and revenge and lust and sorrow – and love. Demons, you say? – Yes, the sense that one cannot but help to place pen upon paper, keystrokes to move the cursor onward while behind its blinking pace – waiting- the crystals, the seeds, the bricks, the country lanes, and star tracks of the mind mixed with the heat of the blood.

(A quick break from flow of blog – and a proposal = someone should do the screenplay Dante in Love and create the movie; my resume for wannabe writer is available upon request; and may I suggest Eva Green as Beatrice;

      

I’m also available to play the role of Dante (in the middle years – and of course “lost, in a dark woods” – searching….for Beatrice).

(sorry Scarlett Johansson, you had your painting completed by Vermeer).

Okay, where was I, ah yes. Dæmons and the Muse. But before I get too carried away with that factor in writing – let us not forget two other books that bring the microscope closer in own William Shakespeare and his “intimate” connections: one fiction and the other a monumental revisit to the marriage of Will and Anne Hathaway. Muses? You be the judge. The work of fiction is titled Mistress Shakespeare by Karen Harper (2009) and the other selected as The New York Times Book Review – Notable book of the Year by Germaine Greer’s (2009, paperback edition) Shakespeare’s Wife.

Back to images and few other books of note.

Stephen Orgel’s book, Imagining Shakepeare is highly recommended with a great chapter on on Shakeapseran portraiture and just when I thought that Droeshout’s portrait was the low bar (in my opinion) of representation – that was then I saw (or it was a revisit) to the funeral omunment to Shakepseare at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-Upon-Avon.

  

With all due respect – and I am talking about THE MAN here – this does not capture the writer at all – even with writing instrument in hand. It seems to me cartoonish – and I keep waiting to hear that the monument will have William saying something (from an audio recording within) and the mouth moving like a bad scene with ventriloquism – and to top if off, you could toss coins in to make a wish.

Moving on.

Other books to complete the profile and lead onward via the bread crumbs – Chasing Shakespeare (2003) by Sarah Smith (fiction); Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage by Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman.

Now I confess to having the super-density book – Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (1998) and the postlude companion piece of Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom (2003) – automatic reading to being with you if you plan on being a castaway in the still-vexed Bermoothes, but yet these three must be there as well (what do I got now? 2 + 3 = 50 +) and they would be: Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays by Colin McGinn (2006) with the great cover design of Vanitas (the requisite skull placed on top of books – how much better can you get with “meaning” ?) and these two that must – I beseech you ! – be on your shelf – Shakespeare: Above All by Marjorie Garber (2004) and then Shakespeare and Modern Culture also by Marjorie Garber (2008). Garber (2008) has a great chapter on the imagery of Shakespeare and presents the Sanders portrait as the template for the Joseph Fiennes avatar.

Which then leads to the catalyst for the current blog topic and psot – as I have already mentioned, it was the article: “Is That Really You, Sweet Prince?” that was published in the New York Times on March 14, 2009, Charles McGrath {for an interesting video clip – movie – go to the iTunes store and see the University of Warwick production with commentary by Stanley Wells}

“We know so little about Shakespeare that we don’t even know for sure what he looked like. Scholars have been quarreling over various purported portraits of him for years. The latest, the so-called Cobbe portrait, was unveiled last week by the Shakespeare expert Stanley Wells, who claimed that it was the only authentic likeness to have been painted in Shakespeare’s lifetime, igniting yet another fuss among the dissenters….That Droeshout engraving has always been a bit of a downer; if it is a likeness of Shakespeare, it’s a likeness of the cranky, worn-out Shakespeare who had stopped writing and retired to Stratford to carry on lawsuits. The Cobbe portrait, like the Donne painting and some portraits of the poet courtier Philip Sydney, is of a young man full of himself in the best sense. We can believe he has the whole world stored inside that high, capacious forehead.”

So this contrast, this “apple” to the left and the “orange” to the right clicked into a series of neuronic firings – a synaptic firestorm (fMRI style) – that created the catalyst to blog on Shakespeare NOT as the person in the “Droeshout engraving as a cranky, worn-out Shakespeare who had stopped writing and retired (emphasis mine) to Stratford to carry on lawsuits”, but rather as the person in the Cobbe portrait who went on to shatter the myth of ‘retirement’ (or being put out to pasture by the upstarts in London) by seeking a new path in writing – a late style – or better yet – late writing. All of which could say to you and I: Writing is ninety percent attitude; the other half is mental (apologies to Yogi Berra).

• Bread Crumb # 2: a further look into the notion of “late style” – or late writing (or late anything creatively speaking) for Shakespeare and a few select others

Bread Crumb 2 then lead me to two books on “late style” because I had an interest in what motivated, inspired, or otherwise influenced Shakespaere into the “later years” of his life as an “aging individual.” Did he just want to fade into sunset-upon-Avon and collect from his substantial Elizabethan 401-K? Was it time to disengage and rest on one’s laurels (contra Petrarch)?

Did he decide to hang up his pen and paper and then fulfill the autumnal decline in Sonnet 73 as though a bare tree now a heap of ashes? When I see the Droeshout portrait, I see the resignation and the condo on the Gulf shores of Tampa-St.Petersburg, the early-bird special, the white belt and shoes, matching the cheesy polyester pants.

 

With the Chandos or Cobbe portrait, I see someone who would say, “To hell with the critics and spies, blast the bank and shoal of time, I shall smash the cage that holds the Free Bird (thanks Lynyrd Skynyrd ! – and you thought I would never connect Ronnie van Zant with King Lear) – Once more into the breech, sure a little slower, but I hear the blast of retirement and I become the tiger of Borges, I stand like greyhounds in the slips, no better make that like a Rottweiler on guard, and you ask me, but surely the fire has gone out? The flesh less than willing? And I say, remember what I wrote when I was of youth – I am still a bolt of lightning looking for a place to strike! – And wisdom say you – What’s wisdom to me, or I to wisdom?”

Well, therein lies the rub….

The questions are for us – you and me: Is there the potential for a “late style” – as we age? Can we break out of the patterned expectations and round out the journey of life with something different in our writing, painting, and music – any artistic endeavor? Some may say, well, what does it matter? There was never any style or creative activity to begin with, it’s too late, why bother with it at this point? Even if there was, I ain’t no Shakespeare.

Okay, fair enough, but:

To thine own self be true.

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie;
Which we ascribe to heaven.

Our doubts are traitors,
And makes us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.

And even if the goal is modest and manageable, then make it so. And as Edward Said would see it happen, it does not even have to be the stereotypic late work that people assume to be at the magnum opus level nor works that necessarily,

“reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality…Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of “ripeness is all.”…I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against.”

To which Edward Said did in his book, On Late Style, thus the notion of going against the grain. Then back to Shakespeare. What was his style in the late period? In the mature years? As he aged? Did Shakespeare go all Finnegan’s Wake on us?

Or was the late writing like the early writing and like the middle writing – Alls well that ends well?

There are two books that recommend for you to consider in this regard:

1. Shakespeare’s Late Style by Russ McDonald (2006). Cambridge University Press.
2. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing by Gordon McMullan (2007). Cambridge University Press.

The territory of works for what constitutes the portfolio of Shakespeare’s “late style” is controversial and problematic. Many people (and naturally so – given the symbolism of the ‘end of the road’ for writing) would assume that THE TEMPEST as the final say on the matter – that is, the last hurrah, the swan song of Shakespeare given the tone of Prospero (and thus synecdoche for whole lot of Shakespeare and his works?) – and then with added of bonus of picturing Sir Arthur John Gielgud in the role – to the point that some probably thought Geilgud was Shakespeare – or Shakespeare was Geilgud – and no wonder that the late Geilgud (as the late Shakespeare?) is on the cover of McMullan’s book !

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
                             The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

Boy, that sure sounds like THE END {as the curtains close}.

But not so fast Horatio. The Tempest was not the last work per se – not finis. In fact, Russ McDonald groups Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII {side note – HENRY VIII – yes, you could watch The Tudors on Showtime/DVD/On Demand, and did I mention Season 3 begins on April 5 , but still….

and The Two Noble Kinsman as the plays of the “late style.” McDonald also notes that when all is said and done,

“Shakespeare’s style still seems elliptical, roundabout, crowded, and extravagant, but he sense of possibility no longer appears to obtain. He seems to be changing his mind again” (p. 254).

I recommend McDonald’s book for when you need the microscope for analyzing Shakespeare’s “late style”, but if you prefer (which I do0 the landscape, the macro-perspective, and the larger context of things with Shakespeare, then go with McMullan’s book, “Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing.” In fact, it should be on the shelf of all gerontologists and all person interested in the intersect of art, writing, authorship and aging. This is an outstanding book. In fact, the roguish style of McMullan offers a contrarian view (but not outlandish) of the whole notion of “late style.’ There is the direct challenge that it is not OLD AGE that is the catalyst, but rather – proximity to DEATH.

“Quite the contray to the claims of Woodward and the humanistic gerontologists, it appears to be not old age itself, but proximity to death at any age – along, perhaps, with an awareness of that proximity – that is the key to late style.” (p. 273).

Agreed. But it is hard to grasp the sheer power of this proposal by McMullan, that is – until you think of the personal instance by which you had the close brush with death – the near death experience – or the instance where life vanished with a loved one – or the witnessing of the tragic accident in which the numbers of the dead and dying overwhelm the comfortable footing of life….

I have often thought: what is it that INSPIRES the writing? Why?

Money? Fame? – You have got to be kidding –

Is there a MUSE? Yes, of course. And in the spirit of Dante and Petrarch, I can see how a woman can make the soul of a man catch fire with the essence of creative fuel – the words are effortless and flowing, the symmetry natural, the blood boils into the brain – and the neocortex enters into new realms powered by the limbic system – the gray matter is awash in fireworks thanks to the endorphin rush of lust and desire.

But there is something else. There is Death – there is mortality. And there is the finiteness of it all – where the terrible certainty of the “undiscovered country” is your map – the knowing – the earnestness of death (thanks Kierkegaard!) is now your propeller.

Please do not think there is the obsession and the fear that permeates all; rather, it is the needed and necessary spark to cut complacency in half.

Procrastination? – Fuggetaboutit

Inspiration? – you are running out time; if you are gonna do it, now is the time.

Why? – see Dylan Thomas -

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Oh man, what a weird coincidence – dying of light – Light seeking light doth light beguile: holy crap! – that near death thing in the cave – when all was lost. I tasted it – the gray murky cave that oozed apathy to me and my brothers – death was so clean and real; it was laughing – mocking me with disdain; what did it care? You are going to fucking die – right here – and right now. This is this – one shot (see The Deer Hunter); I sat there on a rock in the middle of cavern that was a tomb. One minute it was all joking and shooting the shit about the mud and quartz crystal formations- the next minute we were scanning our lives for meaning and significance to counterweight the heaviness of the monochromatic rock – like a gravestone.

  Scott w/ brother Donald leaving “hell” – to the “light”

When I escaped certain stupid death, I fell to the ground outside the cave – the green of the plants, the shocking blue of the sky, I even saw ants on the ground – every little freakin one of them – a beautiful mystery, a blessing, their bodies seemed to be glowing – my eyes were glowing because of the LIGHT.

Late Style. I got it. When I was 51 years of age. Outside the cave. Never again to take “it” for granted. Time for something different. Against the grain? Not quite. Time to write about the glowing presence of life in light. Don’t wait. Just get to it. Better late than never…

Who else showed me the way? A much needed catalyst? Meet Mr. Larry Brown.
An author who poured his heart and soul into the written word – as though late style – was every day. The words are filled with direct connection to life and the unfolding of the subtance of what matters – no really – what really matters. Day to day. There is both against the grain and with the grain. There is a little William Blake set in the deep south with Larry Brown –

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

• Bread Crumb # 3: An homage to one of my favorite writers (out of hundreds) – Larry Brown with an evolving and flourishing career of writing magnificent portraits of life itself. Larry Brown had sent the nearly completed manuscript of his sixth novel (The Miracle of Catfish) to his literary agent (Nov. 2004) and a week later was dead at the age 53 due to a massive heart attack.

My first encounter with the writing style of Larry Brown was with Father and Son (1996) {winner of the Southern Book Award} and was stunned. The writing was crisp and austere but visceral and too authentic to be fiction – but was. From there I went back to earlier works – and then awaited the latest.

And I knew this was writing was from the gut – honest and riveting. When John Grisham said of Larry Brown that,

“He has an ear for the way people talk, an eye for their habits and manners, a heart for their frailties and foibles, and a love for their struggles and triumphs.”

I also was able to build an emerging bridge back to the style of Shakespeare. And before you start screaming heresy and reaching for the pitchforks and begin setting up the guillotine for my head – ease down. Trust me. Larry Brown is not too happy about it either – I can see him reaching for his side-by-side with birdshot.

Larry Brown? Really? Stay with me now.

Larry Brown’s style was at the edge – always at the edge. As though the minutes left in life could be counted on one hand – and writing was the “quintessence of dust.” Mr. Brown seemed to me to have answered the question for Hamlet and as Hamlet – “ To be…every day…that is the way…until there is no more.” As William Shakespeare covered his domain and “created the human” (a la Bloom), I believe Brown has taken the geography of the Deep South with all it’s rhythms and nuances to create an attentive and razor-sharp prose that is genuinely human in every way. Brown never moved from Oxford, Mississippi, where he was born. He served in the Marines and then came home and became a fireman.
Although I am a huge fan of Daniel Woodrell (see Give Us a Kiss – A Country Noir, 1996) for delivering the southern flavor (Ozark-style), Larry Brown has given us – all of us – the comedy and tragedy that will stand the test of time – both as timeless and timely. And alas, Larry Brown is dead.

His writing style ended at the age of 53 (in 2004). And as David Abrams expressed it so well, the unexpected loss is best captured as, “The Day the Words Died.” And I wonder – and as I reflect more – on the book previously mentioned, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing by Gordon McMullan (2007), and his proposal that it is the sense of death – the proximity of death – that serves as catalyst for “late style.” But even after Brown’s death, readers were given the chance to read more of his heart and soul – as his publisher, Algonquin Books, delivered his nearly finished sixth novel, The Miracle of Catfish (2007) to us about three years later.

And it is this book that will help to connect all three breadcrumbs we have followed so far.

From (1) Shakespeare to (2) late style to (3) catfish.

Beverly Lowry, in a review of the book in the New York Times (and ironically published on April 29, 2007 – going with my April “coincidence” here) wrote,

“A Miracle of Catfish’ takes place in Larry Brown’s world, northern Mississippi. He begins by tracking the thoughts of an old farmer who, while in his fields dodging copperheads and bashing at spiderwebs, envisions the catfish pond he plans to have dug and stocked on his land. In the South, catfish ponds were big business for a while, and to the 72-year-old Cortez Sharp, this plan represents a new prosperity and, at his age, a triumphant adventure. Not that Sharp gives much to age. He raises okra and tomatoes, operates a tractor and Bush Hog, milks and breeds cows, shoots deer that invade his vegetable garden, cares for his wife, who uses a wheelchair, and worries about his daughter’s life in Atlanta with a man who as Tourette’s syndrome.”

For someone who would find exemplars within the intergenerational tensions in King Lear and the inner turmoil of the psyche in Hamlet and the evil and the consequences that haunt us as in Macbeth – and many others – as key elements in one’s literary experience and development, then may I also suggest reading Larry Brown’s novels as out contextual and conceptural equivalent.

The Miracle of Catfish was Brown’s last work, but was it really a “late style”? Not a first glance. There is much artisitic continuity – theads from across all of his previous novels that were present in his last book, but yet….I wonder.

I find it intriguing, at least from a gerontological perspective, that Brown was working on his sixth-novel and was writing about a 72 year old man {Cortez Sharp} – a figure well into the “lateness of life.” And this leads to an interesting insight by Rick Bass in a tribute (from The Southern Review) to Larry Brown,

“I have always found great affinity with Larry’s keen regard for a certain rightness of things his respect for the elegance and sophistication and just plain mystery of a wilder, farther nature so much older than our own.”

So much older than our own. And indeed that is what makes Brown’s words as quintessence – as natural as breathe – one can read and feel and see and believe in the connections between people and their immediate milieu – their world as big as a pond with catfish. And all else whirls about – the seasons and the stars.

It is signficiant to me that the book ends “unfinished” and the publisher has left only hints as to what was to come. I now see it as a perfect “ending” – the real “late style” – a representation that we all wished for more – for the words not to die.

But look at the inside title page for The Miracle of Catfish where it says, “A novel in progress”
And how ironic. Such is our life at any stage – a work in progress.

And perhaps even after we are long gone.

From portraits that have recently emerged of William Shakespeare to the notion of a late style in writing, to the boat that rides upon a pond full of catfish. We drift on the waters – and I can see Larry Brown with a fishing pole sitting in a wooden boat…dreaming of catfish…a miracle.

Words. Goodnight sweet prince.

May we all see the lesson here: “where are your “words?” Begin now…it is all a novel in progress – even if unfinished.

Better late, than never – at any age.

Thanks, Scott D. Wright

Remembering and Forgetting in Later Life – Section II

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

Section II – Biomedical Perspectives

When he became aware of his first bouts of forgetfulness, he had recoursed to a tactic he had heard about from one of his teachers at the medical School:
“The man who has no memory makes one out of paper.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera 

Remembering the past is a form of mental time travel; it frees us from the constraints of time and space and allows us to move freely along completely different dimensions.—Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory,  2006

The literature in relation to memory in journals on aging are represented by studies on iconic memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, spatial memory, discourse memory, memory failure, memory complaint, visual integration, processing implicit information, reaction times, and then there is what I consider the ultimate expression of scientific discovery in this domain – “everyday memory” – Does that mean there might be an “every other day” memory? Or an ‘every now and then memory’? Or how about ‘special day memory?” Oh man, what’s next? –

So here I am writing a blog about on memory issues while listening to a guest speaker on the topic of cognitive impairments in older adults. I am writing this blog while observing a series of colorful Powerpoint slides flash on the screen at the front of the room. My prefrontal cortex (working memory) is processing the information, as we visually glide (via the presentation slides) into the cerebellum and I am taking notes (skill) and then we move into some MRI images (sagittal, axial, and coronal) then we are viewing the medial temporal lobes (MTL) appear: the cingulum – cornus ammonis 3 and 3 (CA2 and CA3), entorhinal region, and then the dentate gyrus.

And then we are looking at the hippocampus, long-term memory, the mother lode, the gateway, the pearly gates. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, damage to the hippocampus usually results in profound difficulties in forming new memories, like Leonard in the movie Memento, anterograde amnesia (but more on that in a later posting in this series). Yet, some say there is evidence of neurogenesis in the hippocampus, yet there is atrophy with Alzheimer’s disease, and there are two of them for each hemisphere: hippocampi. The sea monster, the sea horse, St. Augustine of Hippo, the river horse, Hippopatomus, Greek, Patmos, St. John, wort, Hypericum perforatum, serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline (norepinephrine), which leads to a brief discussion of LeDoux’s new book, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, and I am lost in a world of biomedicalists. And here I am: the self. My self: is a space between neurons? My life story in a nutshell, almond shaped, the amygdala, uh mig’ dull uh, I’m a dullah, Don De Lillo, Armadillo, Amarillo, I am synapses, therefore I am. Oh come on, life at the molecular level is fascinating, I agree, but what part of the elephant are they touching? I want to step back and get out of the microscopic. Enough of the PowerPoint slides of the axons and dendrites. I need to get some air. There needs to be a balance here – at least for me. So, I’m turning to Shakespeare for contrast (as the speaker continues on…)

Let us briefly review what Shakespeare has written in relation to this topic, and we have Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest engaged in dialogue (as the speaker goes to the next slide).

            Prospero:            Canst thou remember

                                            A time before we came unto this cell?
                                            I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
                                           Out three years old.


            Miranda:            Certainly, sir, I can.


            Prospero:         By what? by any other house or person?
                                        Of any thing the image tell me, that
                                        Hath kept thy remembrance.


            Miranda:          ‘Tis far off,
                                          And rather like a dream than an assurance
                                          That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
                                          Four of five women once that tended me?

            Prospero:          Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
                                          That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
                                           In the dark backward and abysm of time?

But as I consider that mental escape from the presentation, I am back to listening about structural equation modeling in the presentation – and so I am reminding myself of the Faustian bargain. It was the caveat of Mephistopheles all wrapped up in a Latent Difference Score Model for episodic and semantic memory where the speaker is citing the authors Lovden, Ronnlund, Wahlin, Backman, Nyberg, and Nilsson (2004),

Lovden, M. Ronnlund, M., Wahlin, A., Backman, L., Nyberg, L., & Nilsson, L. (2004), “The extent of stability of change in eipisodic and semantic memory in old age: Demographic predictors of level and change.” The Journals of Gerontology. Psychological Sciences, 59B: p130-134.

By which their study demonstrated that,

…longitudinal configural and metric invariance of a declarative memory model, a strong association between changes in semantic and episodic memory, a tendency for dedifferentiation, evidence for small but reliable interindividual differences in change in declarative memory, and higher stability coefficients for semantic than for episodic memory. Together, these findings depict relatively high degrees of structural stability and stability of interindividual differences in declarative memory performance in a sample of older adults relatively free pathology (p.133).

            WTF? Excuse me? Can I have that in English?

Okay, I can live with that. But let me get this straight. And so I have all the parts in my hand. Right? I then now have many empirical indicators of memory and change over time. I can even rest easy with all of the statistical tests, χ² , root mean square error of approximation, factor loadings, stability coefficients, skewness and kurtosis, but yet something is still missing. It is the essence of aging, the flesh and blood (in the age of reason) and time, and memory. Yes, all parts are there . . . minus only the spiritual band, the living threads (thanks Goethe !)

But the speaker goes on to the next slide and yet another citation: it is from the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, and on the topic of “Self-Discipline and Self-Consciousness Predict Subjective Memory in Older Adults.”

Pearman, A. & Storandt, M., “Self-Discipline and Self-Consciousness Predict Subjective memory in Older Adults.” Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, Vol. 60B, No. 3 (2005): p153-157.

OK , this is slightly more engaging, I suppose. But then I am wandering off again, and thinking of The Mysterious Flame by Umberto Eco which is about a bookdealer that loses his memory, and there is also another book: Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey.

Uh oh…back to the slides again. What do we have here? A quote: “Age-associated cognitive-impairment has been described in a variety of species, including rats, macaque monkeys and humans (Sandi, 2007).

Sandi, C. (2007). Memory impairments associated with stress and aging. In  F. Bermudez-Rattoni (Ed.) Neural Plasticity and memory: From Genes to Brain Imaging. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press (Taylor & Francis).

And then, I hear the magic words (the signal we are almost done) from the speaker: “In summary, let me present the findings from the latest study…” which is from  The Journal of Neuroscience, November 26, 2008, 28(48):12820-12824. 

After hearing the title and authors: A Neural Mechanism Underlying Memory Failure in Older Adults; W. Dale Stevens,  Lynn Hasher, Kimberly S. Chiew, and Cheryl L. Grady – the audience is given a brief overview (I guess it is from the abstract):

Older adults have reduced memory, primarily for recall, but also for recognition (Craik and McDowd, 1987), particularly for unfamiliar faces (Bartlett et al., 1989). Behavioral studies have shown that age-related memory declines are due in part to distraction from impaired inhibition of task-irrelevant input during encoding (Healey et al., 2008). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to uncover the sources of memory deficits associated with aging. To date, this work has focused on successful encoding, while the neural correlates of unsuccessful encoding are unknown. Here, we provide novel evidence of a neural mechanism underlying memory failures exclusively affecting older adults. Whereas both younger and older adults showed reduced activation of brain regions important for encoding (e.g., hippocampus) during unsuccessful encoding, only older adults showed increased activity in brain regions mediating distraction (e.g., auditory cortex) and in left prefrontal cortex. Further, these regions were functionally connected with medial parietal areas, previously identified as default mode regions (Raichle and Snyder, 2007), which may reflect environmental monitoring. Our results suggest that increased distraction from task-irrelevant input (auditory in this case), associated with the unfamiliar and noisy fMRI environment, may increase environmental monitoring. This in turn could hinder suppression of default mode processing, resulting in memory failures in older adults. These findings provide novel evidence of a brain mechanism underlying the behavioral evidence that impaired inhibition of extraneous input during encoding leads to memory failure in older adults and may have implications for the ubiquitous use of fMRI for investigating neurocognitive aging.

OK, I like the biomedical approach and I find the fMRI to be a damn interesting piece of testing equipment, but then I keep turning back to other complementary perspectives on this topic – for balance and for insight.  So I drift from the microscopic >> back to the macroscopic. For example, Landesberg has argued, (at the time of her dissertation project in 1996 and then later in the publication of her book in 2004)

^ς Alison Landesberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004).

that past experiences would become commoditized and offered to all and anyone. In other words, a sort of a cafeteria-style memory buffet. She proposed the notion of an emergent “prosthetic memory” in the lives of citizens of a technology-saturated society. There would no direct experience necessary as historical memories could be vicariously experienced so as to reflect an enriched phenomenological thrill ride. And movies have been one the most efficient and stylized version of reinventing and repackaging history, as Forrest Gump was there in Vietnam, talking with JFK and LBJ, or at a Black Panther party or at the Watergate hotel, playing football with Bear Bryant and ping-pong with the Chinese, and when it was all said and done with his shrimp-boat philosophy (shit happens!), the process went right down the rabbit hole with the simulacra of the computer-generated dream world of the blue pill that you swallowed with Blade Runner and Total Recall and with Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Stone’s JFK and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The boundary of memories – what really happended – had become blurred, and many were not even sure if it happened or not.

WYTYSIWYTYG = What You Think You See Is What You Think You Get.

Was it authentic or real? You better say it right up front, get the caveat emptor explicit,  just like The Dramatics (think Soul Train) sang about people made of plastic, wood, stone, and lies in Whatcha see is whatcha get. Or is it? Were the memories real, embellished, enhanced, or fabricated?

 It is no wonder then – that a book titled Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (McHugh, 2008 – Dana Press) has emerged to investigate certain trends in psychotherapy (in the 1990s) where a number of patients began accusing their parents and other close relatives of sexual abuse, as a result of false “recovered memories” urged onto them by therapists practicing new methods of treatment.  McHugh explains why trendy diagnoses and misguided treatments have repeatedly taken over psychotherapy. He recounts his participation in court battles that erupted over diagnoses of recovered memories and the frequent companion diagnoses of multiple-personality disorders. He argues that both the public and psychiatric professionals must raise their standards for psychotherapy, in order to ensure that the incorrect designation of memory as the root cause of disorders does not occur again.

So as we “try to remember” what happended (in oue own way), try to remember the song too ——- OK aging baby-boomers – Can you?

The song was written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt composed the music.

Try To Remember…… according to the Wikipedia reference:

Try to Remember was originally sung by Jerry Orbach in the Original Off Broadway production of The Fantasticks. “Try To Remember” made the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart three times in 1965 in versions by Ed Ames, Roger Williams and the Brothers Four.

1965 ? – Holy shit – I was ten years old. Over forty years ago – and here it is almost the start of another year 2009 – and onward we go >>>> 

And since it is now the month of December (2008), how fitting that a section of the lyrics captures the season of winter,

Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,

Although you know the snow will follow.

Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,

Without a hurt the heart is hollow….

As for me – I sort of remember it…well, barely. 

Maybe I didn’t want to remember that song, maybe it was too “old” for me at the time – perhaps it kind of reminded me of my grandmother. Or perhaps The Beatles were overwhelming the music landscape at the time – at least for me. Maybe at my age I can select the memories that are simply necessary – or at least significant than others. 

And then check this out: 

 It turns out there’s a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-coloured glasses. Medical researchers have identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts. These neuroscientists have discovered that older people use their brains differently than younger people when it comes to storing memories, particularly those associated with negative emotions.

Duke University Medical Center (2008, December 20). Aging Brains Allow Negative Memories To Fade. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 20, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081216104025.htm

This is why I find great affinity in examining the process of aging from many different perspectives – the interdiscplinary approach. Next up we will take a look at memory and forgetting in literature, music, and the arts. Stay tuned….

Thanks, Scott D. Wright