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When I'm on the verge of Death, filling bedpan after bedpan with bile-blood-spittle, I'm going to manage, in between heaves, to pen a Children's Book about the Passage of Time. I know Seuss or Sendak did something along those lines, among others, but I don't want to cheer or spare the child— I want to prepare him, morally and martially. To say at points
"When you are a child, Adulthood will seem like an unimaginably wide sea, buffering Death. But the moment you wade into the waters, you clearly see the other shore approaching."
Or "you will hear older people say that Time passes faster as you grow older, and you will think that they're just speaking loosely, figuratively. They're not. The Passage of Time will accelerate to such a degree that it induces a panic. What you see, in the desperation of the Aging, is people responding to this panic rather than just the Passage of Time itself."
Or, "your peers will always appear to be the Neutral Reasonably Median Age. Younger people will always look like Children, even when those younger people are in their forties. Older people will always seem fully matured, even in Fifth Grade. This illusion never subsides. It's something metabolic."
Because Childhood is still the time before Time, only in Adulthood do we start feeling the Passage of Time in full force, in that second sense, only with an added silent outrage over its irreversibility. The feeling of being pushed through a room by a moving wall. Once out of Adolescence, one of the greatest, secret fantasies we have is the cessation of Time— for that moving wall of Common Time to halt. This desire is expressed not just personally but in ahistorical, atemporal longings. Childhood, and even Adolescence, has little such fantasy except for a teeny-bopping "nostalgia for the present." We get this elation in viewing something like Groundhog's Day, an elation aside from just the empowerment we feel from his foreknowledge of events. Bill Murray is experiencing the ultimate fantasy, the cessation of Time.
The Passage of Time ceases long enough for him to master the moment: our ultimate fantasy, the pointless fantasy of re-living life from birth with all your current, accumulated wisdom. Or just having a few years, outside of Time, just to catch up.
But I think, experientially, most problems related with Aging are dispositional— anxious reactions to the Passage of Time rather than anything hard and necessary. In reality, the consequences of Aging— death, disease, and degeneration— are not until the near-end. Still, not counting the age-angst of the young— "I'm not old enough to stay up and watch Saturday Night Live"— our age-angst, begins thirty and forty years before degeneration, on the doorstep of adulthood, or even with the End of Childhood. I wrote about this before, about the meanings of Childhood, and how its perspectives are suppressed— or dismissed— because, one, adult wisdoms follow childhood wisdoms, and thus are seen as superior rather than just horizontally different in a Gadamerian way.
And two, because Children are a disempowered, marginalized voice— one of the only groups whose disempowerment is publicly acceptable and lauded— and therefore add less to the common perspectival Horizon. They're clumped in with the mad, the retarded, animals, and everything else "lacking in reason." But I think the Childhood perspective is vastly under-appreciated— belittled, made quaint— because it contradicts Adulthood prejudices. This is the same dismissal that, flowing from the Paternal Sovereign, was and is directed toward the Maternal Figure. And this dismissal badly distorts the human personality which, s Freud said, is mostly formed in childhood. What is critical for the personality is a rich synthesis of these life-epochs, in again the Gadamerian sense.
"Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because it separates, but it is actually the supportive ground of process in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must set ourselves within the spirit of the age, and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance towards historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognise the distance in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which all that is handed down presents itself to us."— Gadamer.
Interpret this with historical age being substituted by personal age, and the "naive assumption of historicism" being translated into the common injunction to act your age. I think the Young and Old should work together more, to remind and warn one another, for a better, richer, healthier synthesis. I'm s guilty of this as anyone, allowing my early distrust of other parents generalize into a wariness of my elders.
Which brings me to other questions concerning Age as strata, and the stratification of generations. Why are Children and the Elderly rarely friends, in any real way? In what ways is this Passage of Time something metabolic, bound with health? Can we make sense of life-epochs without universal rites-of-passage, like bad marriages and early retirement? Why do these temper the anxieties, if they mark the slipping of Time, just as birthdays do?
What intrigues me, as well, is this idea as age groups as cultures— comparable to ethnic, religious, or regional cultures. The passage of Time forces your emigration from cultures; an emigration across Time rather than Space. Age-anxieties are, then, a form of culture shock; and nostalgia, a form of homesickness, a Ulyssean longing.
So it seems that, after our third Philosophical Research Group, I have a clearer picture of my own yearnings, here. What I wanted was a boldly-rendered sketch of an ager exemplar, a hero-model who shrewdly transcends the strata of human aging; someone who combines the virtues of youth and old age, and avoids— as much as humanly possible— their hideous vices.
From the very start of all this agespeak, what I wanted to articulate is how much our mode-of-living is bent and conditioned by the demographics of our years, and also how much the extent of this conditioning is chalked up to a bogus naturalness of age. Age seems biological enough— because the physiological maturity of the body is biological. Age however— the concept that sieves the boy from the man, that grid and way in which we partition social groups, the guide to what we like and how we comport ourselves— is decidedly cultural. Something that shifts and switches and loosens throughout different circles, times, and civilizations.
Age is membership in a specific culture, as I said, and as with all memberships, cultures, and we-intentions, there are certain stated and unstated mores, rules, and sociological structures. These forces create the possibility of transgression and shame. And our man-child exemplar will cheerfully commit plenty of these transgressions, but the shame, for whatever reason, just won't stick for very long. He will glide between sensibilities with ease and incorrigibility. He will be able to absorb the positive charge and bright-sky vision of children on Monday, screw around downtown with his peers on Wednesday, and have deathbed conversations with his elders on Friday.
In the end, he will synthesize the wisdom of each, as much as his perspective will allow, and shed the unnecessary fretting for a more productive strategy. This strategy is simply put: age should never be parameter of action. Health may be. The law may be. Biology may be. But Age is a spook, a false anxiety— a regrettably insular cluster of sensibilities. People are blind to the sociological forces of age because of its bogus naturalness. It nevertheless exerts enormous pressure on our courses of life.
My exemplar is close to the man-child Baudelaire describes in "The Painter of Modern Life," as someone in whom "genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed." We all know what we mean by this, the "drinking in shape and colour" in childhood without, as Gavin Riley put it, the fixations of adulthood. The adulthood fixations that consume all our energies while accomplishing nothing. What we struggled with, in the Philosophical Research Group, was whether these all-consuming fixations inherently came with the mantle of responsibility. This is a question more serious than it first seems: can we do the trick Baudelaire describes? Can we fully enact the genius of childhood or does commitment nag it to death? The question seems a little old, but I think there are newer, more satisfactory answers.
But, to continue on, the playground that best suits this man-child exemplar was something I was rather ambiguously calling "Culture," something that contained everything that was not directly implicated by Necessity. This meant the high-cultural fare such as philosophy and literature, middlebrow play like movies and street fashion, and even professional wrestling and rawer ghettoisms— all of this fell under the category of Culture, for me... Make-believe translated. But to push the idea of Culture as being "what is not implicated by Necessity," the idea of Culture as freeplay, I think that there's also the figure of homo ludens as this man-child. Man the Player. And the figure who plays more directly with Necessity itself— including playing around with age and all its sociological structure.
Many in my pantheon were undoubtably manchildren, but I have trouble discerning who triumphed over the distinction and who simply suffered the brunt, forever unsure how to successfully synthesize their childhood, adolescent, adult, and elderly impulses. Henry Darger, Hunter Thompson, and Andy Kaufman all failed and flailed in the comprehension of Age, especially in regard to Death and its preparations. Darger— poor Darger— tried to interpret the ugly world through the mythos of childhood, despite their irreconcilability, and never did understand the collision of innocence and experience, or of abuse and marvel. Thompson had outgrown his eternal youth, and could make no sense of old age. He had made no room in the self for such a thing. And provided that we believe that Kaufman is truly dead, we can surmise from biography that he was caught completely unprepared for Death, and regressed into an infantile, screaming, crying, unsheathed expression of the Id. He hadn't crossed over the threshold of adulthood yet, what sense could he possibly make of Death?
But the comprehension of Age is not equivalent to the confrontation of Death. Aging is not the same process as the Heideggerean Being-unto-Death, as it's sometimes conceived. Except for those of us lucky enough to outlive our own dignity and usefulness, Death is still the interruption of a process. It can come at anytime— one false move and you're dead. It may be heartwarming to think of Death as the culmination of Life, but I'm not sure I agree. However, old age is more easily seen as the culmination of a Life, a recap, a chance to lend the world your magnum opus or final opinions. The endpoint on a long timeline of growth-for-growth's-sake. Or, as Baudelaire said, a chance to bring "order to the sum of experience."
This dynamic may help explain why adolescence has become so elastic in recent times, or why age is less divisive among gays and lesbians. The blurring and slurring of Generation.