It’s Getting Old

 Joseph Jefferson as Rip van Winkle (photo by Napoleon Sarony)

There are certain old people who are praised for their voracious appetite for life. They can’t see or hear. They certainly can’t fuck and they're steadily draining the resources of their already cash strapped baby boomer children. Is their desire to live for the sake of it necessarily a good thing which should be praised, the way you praise a child who had done his homework? Should old people necessarily be rewarded simply for their stubborn insistence on living, when many young people who are more worthy candidates for life, have life unjustly taken from them by the ravages of cancer, by accidents or merely from one of the occupational hazards of being young and full of the desire for oblivion, the overdose? Sometimes when you see one of these drooling geezers with their walkers, you’d wish they could give up even a few years of their longevity to some poor kid who dies from say the disease of progeria, whose symptom is premature aging. Scientists may never discover the secret of immortality, but perhaps they will find a way that older people can sell part of their timeshares to those whose youth will enable them to make better use of their bodies. Youth may be wasted on the young, but the purpose of life is sometimes misunderstood by gerontophiles who see nothing wrong with aging opera buffs, who have managed to get coveted seats for Don Giovanni, only to sleep through the entire performance. "An aged man is but a paltry thing/ a tattered cloak upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing..." says Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium." But what if the time for song has past?

Chekhov’s Enlightenment

Flaubert once said “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In an essay entitled “Chekhov’s Enlightenment”(The New Criterion, November 2012) Gary Saul Morson comments, “What really set Chekhov apart from other intellectuals, including most today, were his openly petit-bourgeois values. I can think of no other great writer who so forthrightly defended middle class virtues as a prerequisite for human dignity. Medicine suited him, not only because of his acute sensitivity to human suffering but also because of the high value it accorded to proper habits, respect for one’s surrounding, and, most bourgeois of all good hygiene.” Thus the very title of Morson’s essay should be taken with a grain of salt. Rather than Enlightenment figures like Locke, you might say that Chekhov had more in common with Edmund Burke to the extent that his skepticism and anti-millenarianism were rooted in the doctor’s understanding of the complexity of pathology and the fact there weren’t always simple remedies (a.k.a. enlightened solutions) for every malady. Morson quotes Chekhov thusly on the trendy progressive poseurs of his day, “Our young ladies and political beaux are pure fools…all their inactivity sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naïve sympathies and antipathies to individuals and labels, not to facts. It’s easy to be pure when you hate the Devil you don’t know and love the God you wouldn’t have brains enough to doubt.” Turgenev’s Basarov was the perfect model for this kind of dictatorship of the intellectual. In his famous lines from “The Second Coming,” Yeats iterated the humanity of a similar sensibility, “The best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” 

Lives of Our Leaders: The Republic

Plato believed that poets had no place in his Republic, and he had a point. Would you have wanted Ezra Pound or Marinetti, both fascist sympathizers, making decisions for you? Would you have wanted Eliot, an anti-Semite, as your minister of culture, or Lowell, a resident of McLean Hospital, as your secretary of state, despite his poetic stature and erudition? We love the beats⎯Ginsberg, Baraka, Ferlinghetti and Corso⎯but they were all plainly nuts. Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop were our high priestesses, but they loved poetry more than life itself. Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath all killed themselves, and the Secret Service is better trained to deal with assassination than suicide. OK, Wallace Stevens sold insurance and could qualify as bridging the gap between imagination and reality, but would we really have wanted him as Treasury Secretary or Federal Reserve Chief? (Not that any of the recent occupants of these positions⎯Geithner, Bernanke, Greenspan or Volcker⎯have done better for lacking a muse). And then there is dear old wizened Robert Frost (who turned out to be not so dear) speaking in the snow at JFK’s inauguration. Where would he fit in our less-than-ideal republic? Yes, he knew something about the inner life and the road less travelled, but would that have really qualified him to be Secretary of the Interior or of Transportation? Yes, you have a point if you bring up Yeats. He understood something about the price we pay for our passions, but in the end he was too caught up with his Maud Gonne. Dante, who drew a map of hell with Virgil as his guide, and Homer, who wrote the greatest epic, seem to have possessed divine knowledge, but when push came to shove, would they have been able to apply it to commerce? And then there’s Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali, the Ogden Nash of fighters. He became an elder statesman and prince, but can we ever forgive him for the way he talked to Joe Frazier?

The Age of Acquirius

This could very well be the beginning of a new age! If China revalues the renminbi, the two-state solution finally gains traction in the Middle East, Google acquires the rights to most of human thought, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il finally acknowledges his polymorphic perversity and stops trying to silence critics of his dictatorship, then we can only assume that the problem of cold fusion will soon be cracked. Imagine a world in which energy is no longer something that major powers fight over. As Freud once said about analysis, once it’s over, the real problems begin. If we accept Marx’s analysis, the drive for economic hegemony infuses international politics. Without the struggle for resources, life will lose its meaning and many world leaders will walk around with sunken eyes, like Max Von Sydow losing his game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. 

   

What will this new age be called? The Age of Acquirius. When Wall Street is battered as it was in the past year, analysts say that the market is making an adjustment. Wasn’t Period of Adjustment the name of a Tennessee Williams play, later made into a movie starring Jane Fonda? But what is this new age? Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is still an apt description of the overarching materialism that has spread exponentially in our time. Our economies have grown from the horse drawn chariot of supply and demand to the nuclear powered rockets of computer-generated algorithms. Profits of some hedge funds exceed the GNP of modest countries, while England is referred to as Iceland on the Thames and the entire country of Greece faces the equivalent of a massive foreclosure proceeding. An explosion of information has awakened whole continents of knowledge, yet newspapers are defunct and the democratization of truth via outlets like Wikipedia has crushed the notion of a moral center. Is this the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn was alluding to in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  Yeats’s oft-quoted lines ring true once again: “The best lack all conviction and the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.”