Authors: Lynne Segal
In Calasanti’s initial formulation – a reflexive way of siding with the elderly–we are all basically the same, and that sameness means we must all ‘really’ be young. Unwittingly, this is seen as the only means of avoiding the stigma of ‘demented oldies’ that others unashamedly broadcast. The British sociologist Molly Andrews, whose interviews with ageing political activists we looked at in the last chapter, had earlier made the same point even more forcefully in her article ‘The Seductiveness of Agelessness’. Researchers on ageing, she argues, must resist the temptation of agelessness, suggesting that this denial of difference ‘strips the old of their history and leaves them with nothing to offer but a mimicry of their youth … pitting body and soul against each other as if they were not part of one whole’.
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Surveying the difference ageing makes will mean accepting that new forms of dependence are increasingly likely, without this necessitating the dread men have proclaimed, echoing Larkin’s howl in his poem, ‘The Old Fools’: ‘why aren’t they screaming?’
Yet, for all the differences we need to acknowledge, denying agelessness should not mean downplaying the continuities, alongside the changes. This is elegantly illustrated in the
beautiful poem by Stanley Kunitz, ‘The Layers’, that I mentioned earlier. It was written when he was in his seventies:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
The poem concluded with the thought:
‘Live in the layers,
not on the litter.’
Though I lack the art
To decipher it,
No doubt the next chapter
In my book of transformations
Is already written
I am not done with my changes.
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Interestingly, Kunitz was a poet who had thought about old age all his life, claiming that even in youth he always saw ‘death and life as inextricably bound to each other’.
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Indeed, in his thirties, Kunitz had written the extraordinary poem, ‘I Dreamed That I Was Old’:
I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.
This poem concluded with the stanza:
I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,
And cozy women dead that by my side
Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not
Remembering how in my youth I cried.
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At the end of his long life, we know this old man did, in fact, remember, at least some of both the continuities and the changes of his journey.
Most people are inclined to think of ageing in terms of the loss of power, or ways of shoring up impending loss. But things are not quite so simple, especially when confronting that devious coupling, age and power. It is from literature that we might learn that even in old age, even with extreme forms of bodily decay and facing death – indeed, beyond death itself – the old may still continue to exert power over those who have loved, feared, or cared for them. The maddened and dethroned King Lear is not the only patriarch in literature, and his fate required extreme and grotesque departures from normal patterns of familial interdependence.
Deliberately turning Lear’s fate on its head, Mexico’s best-known writer, Carlos Fuentes, one of the most revered authors in the Spanish-speaking world (who died shortly after I wrote this), published the powerful short story ‘Eternal Father’ in the collection he ironically entitled
Happy Families
, written in his late seventies. In this compelling narrative, middle-aged daughters, although all successful and financially independent in their different professions, have continued to abide by their father’s characteristically tyrannical wishes right up to and now long after their father’s death, agreeing to meet up once a year as
their father had ordered them to do in his will, in order to gain their inheritance. None of them wishes to do this, nor do they need his money, yet they cannot escape his legacy, or envisage him as other than he was in his powerful prime. As Augusta, the sister who considers herself his true heir, reflects after the latest annual gathering is over: ‘Let them run from their father. As if they could get away from him … What an idea.’
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The hold of the old on the young is not always easily shaken, although hopefully, as in Barthes’ love for his mother, their enduring, perhaps even posthumous, power is not always so tyrannical.
Youth may be a cherished state many mourn, the object of unrequited desire, the image some wish to hold on to at almost any cost, as the leisure and cosmetic industries grow fat from our yearnings to appear forever fit and beautiful. Yet, compared with many of the young who currently face joblessness and other constraints as a result of the economic downturn, a significant minority in Western contexts have gained greater access to financial power and other benefits with the passage of time, and negotiated continued social standing in old age.
As we have seen before, it is thus the gulf between old people themselves that is so evident today, should we care to look for it. On the one had, 20 per cent of Britain’s ageing population are living in poverty, suffering from all the related humiliations that amplify with ageing, with the recession thought to have had a particularly devastating impact on men over fifty-five, whose suicide rate has risen by 12 per cent over the past decade, according to the latest data from the British Office for National Statistics, while the rate among young men has fallen.
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On the other hand, 25 per cent of people over fifty-five can be found in the top fifth of the population’s income groups, many of them with access to the levels of control over their lives that money
can buy and experience assist, whatever their needs.
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The old are very far from all being in the same situation in their need for physical and emotional attention. Those in greatest need of care certainly include, but are far from confined to, the elderly. However, for those of us wanting to confront the most damaging clichés of ageing, we can at least begin by querying the cultural obsession with notions of ‘independence’ in favour of acknowledging the value of our life-long mutual dependence. This is the human condition. Recognizing it might help us to see that those most disparaged in the circuit of human interdependence, or worse, largely abandoned within it, call into question the humanity of all of us.
Saving the Moment
I have frequently expressed suspicion of claims that old people are no longer at the mercy of desire, especially sexual desire. It is a claim made far more often about, and indeed by, older women. However, the fact that it also reflects the drastic curtailing of choice open to older women, above all in forming new heterosexual relationships, accompanied by a clear cultural disdain for their physicality, suggested to me the likelihood of many women’s self-protective renunciation of sexual desire in old age. Here, among other sources, I have dared to draw upon the evidence of my own experience, as in my late sixties I find that desire for the admiring attention and tender touch of another has shown little sign of abating. I also still often mourn the physical presence of the last person I loved and lost. Such thoughts come to me, especially, when I retire at night or wake in the morning. Indeed, I can tell when some new person
fascinates me in the present, for then such thoughts disappear, and are replaced by others. I have been lucky enough to love and be loved anew in my sixties, in a relationship that continues to this day, although we live apart. As a few other women have found in old age, they have not only been able to love again, but to love differently, experiencing, as I have, new sources of erotic pleasure and satisfaction. A poem by the Black American writer, Alice Walker, now in her late sixties, posted in her blog in 2011, asks the question ‘What Do I Get for Getting Old? A Picture Story for the Curious! (You supply the pictures!)’. These are some of her thoughts:
I get to meditate
In a chair!
Or against the wall
with my legs
stretched out
…
I get to spend time with myself
whenever I want!
…
I get to snuggle all
morning
with my snuggler
of choice:
counting the hours
by how many times
we get up
to pee!
I get to spend time with myself
whenever I want!
…
I get to see
& feel
the suffering
of the whole
world
& to take
a nap
when I feel
like it
anyway!
I get to spend time with myself
whenever I want!
I get to feel
more love
than I ever thought
existed!
…
I feel this
especially for You! Though I may not remember
exactly which You
you are!
How cool is this!
Still, I get to spend time with myself
whenever I want!
And that is just a taste
As the old people used to say
down in Georgia
when I was a child
of what you get
for getting old.
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Interestingly, Walker’s poems today could hardly be in sharper contrast with the sense of rage, anger, disappointment and betrayal that she once described as the experiences of so many young black women in her early writing. Back then, she wrote of women who were often caught up in the civil rights movement, as Walker herself was in the 1960s, and who suffered not just from the poisons of American racism, but from the intense sexism of the very men they tried hardest to love. Suicidal despair pervades this early writing. In the short story ‘Her Sweet Jerome’, the woman protagonist can never please the schoolteacher she married. As the husband reads his books, excludes her from his meetings, and beats her, she decides to destroy the thing that enslaves her by burning herself to death: ‘she screamed against the roaring fire, backing enraged and trembling into a darkened corner of the room, not near the open door’.
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In her interviews over the last decade and more, Walker still passionately laments the injustice, racism and violence in the world, and remains an active protester, but the mood she conveys is very different. She spelt this out when preparing to sail to Gaza in July 2011 to breach the Israeli blockade and bring messages of hope to its besieged people: ‘I am in my sixty-seventh year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content. It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the
young.’
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Walker knows something about the layers of determined self-invention that boost her contentment nowadays, and so we hear nothing from her about the inevitable losses of ageing. Whatever these might be, Walker presents herself enjoying solitude, still engaged with the world, while occasionally able to spend time with her ‘snuggler of choice’.
Clearly, affirming any sort of desire, sexual or otherwise, can prove a volatile, fragile thing, so I would always distrust any generalizations about it. Perhaps also I employ a more open and fluid notion of desire than others. I have little problem agreeing, at least partially, that we may desire somewhat differently, maybe even less urgently, as we dwell in old age, especially if the focus is exclusively upon genital penetration, with all its symbolic excess. This could be why many older women, including some of my own friends, insist that they feel a new freedom from the turbulent sexual desires of their youth. In a letter to Freud written in 1927, Lou Andreas-Salomé commented on her own experience of old age, at sixty-six: