The Age of Poetry and the Poetry of Age: Reflections from the past, for our future.

So it all started with a review of a book titled, On Poets & Poetry, by William H. Pritchard, in the Wall Street Journal (reading in route on plane back home from a trip this past week) and the review was positive and the contents looked intriguing to me as several names (poets) popped up that are some of my lifelong favorites – thus, I knew I had to check the book out in greater detail.

Here is the WSJ review:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332601721398442.html

After finding the book at the university library this weekend, I was surprised (but then again I am always open to the possibility of synchronicity –

[I know, I know…I can hear you now: ‘you Scott? the man that thrives on reductionistic and soul-less technology and biological mechanics of life (both ontology and ontogeny)?]

…but the news of my complete affinity for the extended phenotype and bio-cognitive dimensions of life has been greatly exaggerated; I am still connected to the metaphysics of aging – and find REFLECTION to be as necessary as the scientific dose of daily bread. By reflection I mean: music, poetry, film – and of course – literature – that weaves a tapestry for understanding the human condition across the life course – but especially into the “second half.”

[Thus, please be on standby with review of the new book {fiction} by James Lee Burke “Rain Gods” with the protagonist as Sheriff Hackberry Holland – a man into his seventies! So rare to read of the main character at that age – and so far the book is outstanding – but more on that later]

So, William Pritchard’s book, On Poets & Poetry (2009) was a well worth the read, but what ignited the synchronicity was Pritchard’s section in the book titled – Hardy’s Poetry of Old Age (pp. 95-115) which covered Hardy’s work past the age of 75. The surprising comment by Pritchard:

“…it was an age that few of his poetic contemporaries and successors survived into and also kept on writing: Yeats died at seventy-four, Eliot at seventy-six but had stopped writing poems; Stevens died at seventy-five; Frost and Pound made it into their eighties, and William Carlos Williams nearly did; Robert Graves reached ninety but had been senile for years. Hardy died short of his eighty-eighth birthday…” (p. 96).

Hardy’s Poetry of Old Age

First of all, I had to stop and think of the name and works that I was familiar with when I think of Thomas Hardy (and to be honest I did not know much of his poetry): Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895) – but poetry?

So I was very attentive to Pritchard’s careful review and analysis of Hardy’s poetry of “old age” and I was delighted and educated to a greater level of appreciation for the age of poetry and the poetry of age via Hardy but I was also struck by the similarities (if I may make the connections) with his work and two other poets – one perhaps not so surprising, and the other to where I make the leap and offer to you a possible (and eerie) bridge between the content, style, and effect.

The two poems that I recommend to you (and two out of several that Pritchard highlights) are “The Missed Train” and “At Castle Boterel.”

Here are some excerpts:

“The Missed Train”

Thus one time to me….

Dim wastes of dead years bar away

Then from now. But such happenings to-day

Fall to lovers, may be!

Years, years as shoaled seas,

Truly, stretch now between! Less and less

Shrink the visions vast in me. –Yes.

Then in me: Now in these.

The effect is (at least to me) the capturing of the weight of the passage of time and an epiphany of looking into the mirror and seeing the person who has aged – not someone else – but you – or me – that person. Me. I. I am the one that this is all happening to…and it did so rather quickly – which is the surprise and the wonderment – and perhaps the regret – and acceptance.

“At Castle Boterel”

It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill’s story? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is – that we too passed.

Well, the mood is reflective and the memory is clear as though it happened just yesterday. But is not that the point? It does not matter – the experience is there – retrievable and temporally in flux – it was then, but it is here – now. Our lives as moments and as years – gone by, but then reawakened into flashes of memory and a welling up of emotions – and the visual theatre – the full screen is before us – that is our lives up there that we see. Who else shall know that this has happened? Your lover – your friend – your spouse – your children? Who else? And perhaps that is the extent of it – even though thousands have done it before – and have already moved on. The dead – and now the living – and shall be dead too – with more living to follow…and so on, but who shall capture it? So that it does not all simply become dust – and leaves that fall onto the ground.

Or perhaps that is it.

As I contemplate the neurons and the genes and the biotechnologies that will forever alter our aging in this century, I will never forget – and I will never let go of how poetry can also alter my life – and hopefully yours – if we shall only take the time to read and reflect.

So what other two poets did I find similarities with Thomas Hardy (and the review and analysis of Pritchard) and his poetry of old age?

1)    T.S. Eliot – and Four Quartets –, which should be, required reading for every gerontologist – and required reading for every person with their own discovery of aging.

2)    Rainier Maria Rilke – and many of his works; for example – I choose this one, but it only illustrates and does not exhaust the possibilities –

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.

Aging is both microscopic and macroscopic. For every telomere and mitochondria analyzed, I will need to have the works of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach synthesized. As I learn more of my genomic landscape, I will need to have the painting of Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead” as the landscape too.

If I read an article in JAMA or JAGS or JoG:B, then I will listen to J.S. Bach: Prelude, From Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 In G Major by Yo-Yo Ma            to counterweight – for the aging body – and brain – and soul.

For every scientific discovery – I will also need the poetic reflection.

Thanks, Scott Wright

From Dust to Dust: Michelangelo to T.S. Eliot to Borges to Darwin and Human Longevity (Just another day on the job in the field of aging)

From the point of view we have been taking up until now, life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together. 
~ Arthur Schopenhauer – Counsels and Maxims – “The Ages of Life”

      

  From dust to dust …..

  
 ( I hope you do not mind that I have woven in some Da Vinci images into the text too)

          How does one go from the drawings of Michelangelo to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Jorge Luis Borges and then build a “bridge” from Michelangelo to Darwin and human longevity – and thread in the symbols of “dust” and “time” – and then complete the loop?

            In the interdisciplinary field of aging, you never know what interconnections can be woven – like threads – into a tapestry by foraging (I sometimes call it “poaching”) on the array of disciplines, specialties, and professions that can potentially intersect the aging experience. The tapestry is the result of taking (seemingly) disparate pieces of information and then creating illuminating patterns of knowledge that can add to the rich depth and breadth of issues that represent the study of aging. Here is but one example of “weaving” and it is related to the title of this blog post. But along the way with this one thread (which would be the {“warp”}) going down the page:

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there are also several cross-threads that intersect as well (the “weft”). Or going from left to right on this page or across the computer screen. For example, and speaking of threads “weaving together” –

>>>> [Weft]  The article by Phiroze Hansotia, MD in  Clin Med Res. 2003 October; 1(4): 327–332.
A Neurologist Looks at Mind and Brain: “The Enchanted Loom” >>>>>>>>>>>>>

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I will indicate a few of those, but we shall follow the warp – the thread that would go lengthwise or down this page on your computer screen.

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{Warp}  So I started of with the book, How To Use Your Eyes by James Elkins (2000), which caught my eye when browsing the library for new books – and there it was lying face-up in the reshelving area. It had an intriguing cover design – and the inside front cover set the hook,

“Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life. But when we look at them – really look at them-what do we see?”

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So I skimmed through the pages and stopped at the section titled, “How to Look at a Face” (Chapter 19 – pp.146 -153).  There were several drawings of both an old and young man to demonstrate that, “Because we attend so closely to people’s expressions, the face is full of names.” Elkins then went on to use the drawing Michelangelo’s study for the Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling to indicate over 25 different features of the face. Elkins noted that the underlying “architecture is provided by the skull, which is especially strong on this wonderful drawing of an old woman {emphasis mine} (Fig. 19.1 in the book). We will come back to this in a moment.

Elkins then used Michelangelo’s drawings to indicate what he called, “some sad observations about aging” –

“As a person ages, the muscles atrophy and the fat migrates, slumping downward until it comes to rest on a facial sheet. The bags and flabby folds of old age are like fat people slumping in hammocks. This mans face (in the book Fig. 19.4) shows all the signs of the impending age.”

Elkins goes on describe in great detail – like a CSI episode – all of the features of the anatomical process in the “aging” face,

“That is what it means to say that gravity takes its toll. Gravity pulls the fat down, revealing the underlying fascia. What was once a network of tissues becomes a series of slumps and slides in ending in hammocks of fascia.” (p. 153).

Okay, that is mildly interesting, if not slightly depressing, about the forces that affect the face that sound more like geological tectonic plates sliding around,  but what intrigued me the most was the use of the drawing of the Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling to indicate and exemplify the physiological features of the aging face.

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The Cumaean Sybil? So?

{Warp}  What is strangely correlative in Elkins choice of Michelangelo’s drawings for portraying an aging face is that the Cumaean Sybil has an interesting story to tell as it relates to aging.

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Many of you will recall that in the great work of Virgil, The Aeneid, The Cumaean Sybil is the one gives Aeneas a tour of the underworld which are entered into in the land she inhabited (this story is the reason for Dante’s having chosen Virgil as his guide in “The Divine Comedy”).

[Weft]<<<<- The Aeneid – you cannot go wrong with Sarah Ruden’s translation of The Aeneid of Vergil, Yale University Press, 2008;
not to mention Robert Fagles version The Aeneid (Viking, 2006) – and then starting off with Aeneas carrying his father from Troy –  >>>>

                

[Weft]  but that is another story –and then don’t get me going on Dante’s work with Virgil as his guide; there is a whole
bunch of threads to aging issues in there (see John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 1986 Harvard University Press;
<<<<<<   or Life of Dante by Giovanni Boccaccio).

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{Warp}  The Sibyl of Cumae gained her powers by attracting the attention of the sun god Apollo. Apollo offered her anything if she would spend a single night with him. She asked for as many years of life as grains of sand she could squeeze into her hand.

Granted, the sun god said; and Sibyl, glad to win her boon, refused his advances. Thereafter she was cursed with the fulfillment of her wish–eternal life without eternal youth. She slowly shriveled into a frail undying body, so tiny that she fit into a jar.

“I have lived seven hundred years, and to equal the number of the sand-grains, I have still to see three hundred springs and three hundred harvests. My body shrinks up as years increase, and in time, I shall be lost to sight, but my voice will remain, and future ages will respect my sayings.”

An ancient woman doomed to live a thousand years, but without youth, shrinking with age each year until nothing is left of her but her voice — a voice which some say is kept in a jar in the cave, and that others say one can still hear there in her Cumaean grotto.”

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So there is the thread of aging content from Elkins to Michelangelo (via the Cumaean Sybil – with some ultra-aging issues going on – like forever!) and then it connects T. S. Eliot’s great poem – The Waste Land.

  

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“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα
τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.”

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{Warp} This is the epigram (Latin and Greek – From the Satyricon of Petronius (d. A.D. 66), chapter 48) at the very beginning of The Waste Land and strangely enough – the passage refers to the Cumaean Sybil and her plight.

<<<< [Weft] But of course, that depends on what version you want to start with when it comes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
I highly recommend – “A facsimile and transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound,
Edited and with an introduction by Valerie Eliot” (1971) – which indicated another epigram by Joseph Conrad
relating to “The Horror- The Horror” – which then could weft all the
way over to the movie Apocalypse Now (see Marlon Brando – but we will not go there – for now)    >>>>

                

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            {Warp} So, the epigram for the “post Ezra Pound” The Waste Land (1922) translates into:

With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: “[Sybil, what do you want?]” she replied, “[I want to die.]“

            And knowing of her curse – eternal life without youth –

[Weft] <<< Relating to other works of fiction such as Youth Without Youth (Mircea Eliade and movie by Francis Ford Coppola)
and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (short story F. Scott  Fitzgerald and then movie) >>>>

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is one of those mythological stories that offered a lesson about “be careful what you wish for” even when you hold what you think is lot of years (a handful or a thousand) in your life – what matters is the quality of the time that you have – and that eternity can be a double-edged sword if not structured in the right way.

[Weft] <<<<< Which is related to another story in  Greek mythology, Tithonus was a handsome mortal who fell
in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos realized that her beloved Tithonus was destined to age and die.
She begged Zeus to grant her lover immortal life. Zeus was a jealous god, prone to acts of deception in order to seduce
beautiful gods and mortals, and he was not pleased with Eos’s infatuation with a rival. Zeus granted Eos’s wish – literally.
He made Tithonus immortal, but did not grant him eternal youth. As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly
debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling.
In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper.>>>>

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- Time becomes the ultimate curse in that one must suffer it relentlessly – without end. What do you want? – To die.  If not to make the present moment much more important and ecstatic – more so than the next – and the next because they are finite and each one a gift.

[Weft] – <<<<< So much so that we are reminded of T.S. Eliot’s other works of poetry as they relate to the aging experience –
with the same dry and ‘dusty’ grains of sand to measure out one’s life like in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock where strangely enough, “In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo.” (emphasis added). And where Prufrock said, “I have measured my life out in coffee spoons.”    >>>>
And later, the quote, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” is
spoken by American photo-journalist (played by Dennis Hopper) in the movie, Apocalypse Now
[which ironically – is based loosely on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which goes back to the opening lines in the The Waste Land pre Ezra pound!] who worships the enigmatic, genius “poet-warrior” Kurtz as a personal god and
expounds Kurtz’s cause: “You don’t talk to the Colonel, well, you listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind.
He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense…I’m a little man.
He’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas.
[These lines were taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]
I mean…He can be terrible and he can be mean and he can be right. He’s fighting the war. He’s a great man.”
[Notice the graffiti title to the film on the temple's stone blocks.].
In the poem, Prufrock announces to the world, “I grow old…I grow old…” and one can feel the existential angst and regret –
swimming in a dry, dusty sand dune, drowning, sinking below the surface. >>>>

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And the symbolic weight of the metaphor continues into T.S. Eliot’s other enigmatic verse, Gerontion, which opens with the epigram,

Thou hast nor youth nor age
 But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

And the first line of that verse is:

Here I am. An old man in a dry month.

And ends with this line:

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

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[Warp] Which can also connect to T. S. Eliot’s magnificent Four Quartets (to which I could use an entire gerontological course in one semester dedicated just to it alone) – and its weaving with the Cumaean Sybil and dust and endless time – and the flow of life – Linear? Circular? – Infinite? It is no wonder Eliot is intrigued with the story of the Sybil as it appears and is a part of his textual weaving in many of his works -

            Time present and time past
           Are both perhaps present in time future,
           And time future contained in time past.
            In my beginning is my end.

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, Of dead and living. Not the intense moment, Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.

And this to me seems to carry the essence of the comparison to the Cumaean Sybil forever trapped in infinite “aging” – in a cage – and the message of The Waste Land – and Four Quartets – of being lost without a compass or map – as we engage in our journey of life in the modern (and post-modern) era. But there is the lesson to be learned – with hope after all – for us, in this regard.

            Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

            We shall not cease from exploration
            And the end of all our exploring
            Will be to arrive where we started
             And know the place for the first time.

[Weft] >>>> And another cross-cutting theme for the aging process is the “journey of life” as noted in
Thomas R. Cole’s book: The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
or the painter Thomas Cole and the Voyage of Life (see The Voyage of Life Old Age, Oil on canvas, 133.4 × 196.2 cm (52 ½ × 77 ¼ inches);
and the book The Human Odyssey by Thomas Armstrong (2007)
which relates to metaphor of the ship on a voyage – visualizing like T.S. Eliot verse, >>>>

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

>>>>> which relates to Homer’s The Odyssey and the journey of Odysseus –
and his travels back to home –
to arrive at the place where he (we) started, and know the place {Ithaca} for the first time. <<<<<<<

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            [Warp] and we are back to TIME. And speaking of time – and dust – like the Cumaean Sybil – of which both notions run rampant throughout Eliot’s Four Quartets –

Time past and time future, Allow but a little consciousness.

Ash on an old man’s sleeves
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where the story ended.

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But not yet. The story goes on for a bit longer.

And TIME weaves through to Jorge Luis Borges who also takes the warp and weft of previous threads discussed – and creates the tapestry with his verse and makes reference to the sand and dust as mirrors of the aging experience,

                            

Just so, but time discovered in the deserts
Another substance, smooth and of some weight,
That seemed to have been specifically imagined
For measuring out the ages of the dead (from The Hourglass)

Perhaps in death when the dust
Is dust, we will be forever
This undecipherable root,
From which will grow forever,
serene or horrible,
our solitary heaven or hell (from Someone)

I am not even dust. I am a dream
That weaves itself in sleep and wakefulness (from I Am Not even Dust)

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What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.

(From Jorge Luis Borges (2000) Collected Poems. Edited by Alexander Coleman. Penguin Edition. New York).

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Reading this passage from Borges was a strange experience of déjà vu – and to me – it was though he had channeled the voice and the steam of consciousness of the Cumaean Sybil – who had to forever live (but forever aging) out the years as counted by dust and sand (as much as a hand could hold) – but forever aging – and then wanting to die – “to sink into death.” Oblivion.

The dusty Waste Land of Human Longevity.

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{Warp} Which brings us to the last (at least for now – the thread can keep going, I’m sure) segment, but strangely enough – full circle and back to Michelangelo. It is an article by S. Jay Olshanksy (2003) – From Michelangelo to Darwin: The Evolution of Human Longevity (IMAJ 2003;5:00±00). This article discusses the prospects for human longevity for us in the decades to come. The irony is that Olshanksy’s perspective (using an evolutionary biological framework) will complement the mythology and the stories that surround the notion of living longer – or forever – as something “we” in our new world of biotechnology – will not have the benefit (or curse ?) of knowing.

            Olshanksy (2003) starts of his commentary talking about the artist in our initial thread “at the beginning” of this post and the moves forward to the perspectives of Charles Darwin,

“When Michelangelo painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome in the 16th century, he portrayed the Renaissance view of mankind as having been molded by the hand of its creator, in his image, as a ‘perfect’ physical specimen.”

[Weft] >>>> For a more in-depth look at Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and for some intriguing commentary on the controversial issues surrounding the painting of all the sibyls – and in particular – the prophetess: Cumaea,
please see pp170-174 in Ross King’s book (2003), Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling. Walker & Co. New York.>>>>>> 

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Olshanksy (2003) continues,

“When Charles Darwin was drafting his theory of evolution in the late 19th century, it was ironically the imperfections in the anatomic structures and functions of humans and other living things that were presented as the strongest evidence for his theory [12]. Based on theoretic and empiric evidence from modern evolution biology and biogerontology, it now appears that both Michelangelo and Darwin were right.

“The artistic-like perfection of the human body is exemplified by the near flawless maintenance and perpetuation of the immortal germ line through sexual reproduction. However, the price paid for this form of immortality is a suite of anatomic structures and functions that, when used beyond what may be thought of as their biological or Darwinian warranty period inevitably lead to many of the diseases and disorders now commonly associated with aging or senescence. The divergent but intimately linked views of Michelangelo and Darwin exemplify the importance of a biological perspective on aging, the diseases that accompany it, and ultimately the forces that influence and limit the duration of life of individuals and populations.

“In effect, we are inappropriately held responsible for many of the diseases and disorders that we experience as we age, and more importantly, are led to believe that aging and the diseases that accompany it are largely avoidable. An evolutionary view leads to the realization that even though aging, disease, and death are not programmed into our genes, once the engine of life is switched on at conception, our destiny as an aging animal is written in stone. Our bodies fail over time not because they were designed to fall victim to aging and disease at a predetermined age [22], or because of the acquisition of decadent lifestyles, but because they were not designed for extended use.

“Although it may eventually become possible to alter the biological processes that contribute to aging, that day has not yet dawned.”

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We shall see.

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In the mean time, we began with the drawings of Michelangelo and “aging faces” and threaded to the Cumaean Sybil and the to T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land and then Jorge Luis Borges which then brought us to Olshansky’s journal article addressing the prospects of human longevity from Michelangelo and Darwin. Along the way there were a host of potential [weft] related diversions (in a positive sense), but for this blog the focus was the rich and diverse threads that intersect in biology and the humanities – with an enhanced of examination of the aging experience – as the resulting tapestry – both sides offering illumination and understanding.

From dust to dust …..

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>    Thanks, Scott D. Wright    <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

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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 !” 

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

Section 3

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

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

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

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

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerontology is dead. Long-live gerontology.

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

Dearest son of Aegeus, none but the gods
Escape old age and death: all else 
time in its relentless flood sweeps away.      
                       Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus

Time glides away and we grow older through the silent years;
the days flee away and are restrained by no rein.     
                       Ovid

We shall see – and time will tell.

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

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

 

 For a complete list of references: please contact Scott Wright or please see the full
PDF version of this paper