Wounds are not beautiful as a rule. So, yes aging beautifully is a questionable project at best.
But Hugo Simberg catches much of the story in his “Wounded Angel.” The average viewer will see three responses to the wounds, to aging. The boy ecclesiast, marching forward somewhat fatalistically. The angry youth cynically carrying the burden of his future like it’s a big waste of his time; he could be elsewhere enjoying his present. The wounded angel herself as the old man blinded to stroller-like walks by litter conveyance.
All three are missing the alternative path signalled in the natural setting surrounding them. Yes, aging carries one to the mouth of the river. Yes, the larger whole, the body of water that terminates the river, is waiting to receive the part you played, the waters you carried through your life story. But, look at the rivers. With the correct perspective, one cannot know whether one is 10 feet from the end or 10 miles. The meadows, the swamps, the tree-lined banks all continue unabated until the end.
Aging is living with fewer rapids perhaps, a gentler flow through softer fields sometimes. But if you focus more on the living and less on the aging, who’s to say your river might not run white water right up to the fall at the end. Exhilaration! Thunderous roaring fluid violence right up to the very edge.
To age beautifully is to live fully until living stops. Carry the ‘Waste’, endure the ‘Chill,’ stand flat-footed and face the ‘Absence.’
I am so pleased you found the one figure in the painting ignored by almost everyone. The second stretcher-bearer, the one glancing back over his shoulder at the viewer, faintly hostile, as if he’s caught you watching. Simberg painted him looking at us on purpose. That backward glare makes me shiver: He carries the wound and he knows you’re the next one to be carried. He resents that you get to stand there upright and comfortable. This painting accuses, and I’m glad I’ve got to use it to illustrate one of my essays. It is a phenomenal piece of art, and I had the privilege of seeing it in Helsinki in June.
I am impressed that you also caught what I underplayed. I wrote the river as if it slows. But some rivers do the opposite, gathering right before the drop, the last stretch being the loudest water. There’s no rule that the flow has to gentle out. Some of it accelerates into the fall. A natural course we could conclude.
Marilynne Robinson gets near this in “Gilead”, the old minister writing to a son who will read it after he’s gone:
“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? … I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovely, and I hope against hope.”
That’s your white water.
And please, you have to understand that I can’t sign off on ignoring the Waste. Endure the Chill, sure! Ignoring the Waste is what lets it grow while we look the other way. I’d rather stare it down than pretend it isn’ there.
Thank you, Andrew, for making me look at my own river again and notice it was moving faster than I’d let it!
You’ve made me want to look at the river rather than the ending! The idea that we have no clue whether we’re ten feet or ten miles from the fall and that the water can still turn white right up to the edge, yes! I’m taking that with me!
What a beautiful counterpoint to an essay that asks such difficult and uncomfortable questions…it opens the conversation rather than closing it. I’m very glad you added this, Andrew!
Tamara makes her art selections with the same deliberate concision she writes her essays. And although they do not resolve the tensions for the reader either, they very often offer a side entrance into the piece which opens the conversation further, as you say. In this case, the subjects of the Simberg piece reflected the discomfort of the text so precisely, I was compelled to turn my gaze to the setting. There I found my own side exit, the two rivers and the large reservoir they were feeding.
Whether it is her background in ballet I cannot say, but Tamara’s text and art selections do perform a kind of dance. The art elevates her essays’ themes through visuals that keep the reader grounded. Philip Golabuk is the only other serious philosopher I know with a 'danseur' history. And he too writes without resolving from a posture of humility aligned with reality. Perhaps there’s something in the water ballet dancers drink. There is a conviction and precision and depth in these voices, and yet the hubris one often encounters in brilliant essayists is entirely missing.
Thank you so much, Sirens on the Rocks, for being here and contributing your own voice to this dance of fire that Museguided keeps burning.
This is exactly what drew me to Tamara in the first place. The way she brings art into the conversation, not as an illustration of the text but as another way of thinking alongside it. I love the precision of that relationship: the image doesn’t explain the essay, it opens another door into it.
And perhaps that is why your reading of the Simberg piece spoke to me so much. Looking at the setting, finding the rivers and the reservoir, following the thought somewhere the writer didn’t explicitly take us that is such a beautiful way of reading.
It is also very close to the way I see the world. Art has always been my way of making sense of things, long before I started writing. Sirens on the Rocks actually began on Instagram through that instinct: putting art, interiors, people and ideas next to each other and seeing what happens in the space between them. For me, art is a kind of emotional intelligence, another language for things we sometimes cannot quite articulate.
And I love that you see that dance in Tamara’s work. Your reading of her has made me look at it again from a slightly different angle, and I think that’s the beauty of a good conversation: it makes you see something you thought you knew a little differently.
Nothing makes me happier than my readers in dialogue with each other and my essays. I’m in awe in front for yours with Andrew. Brava! What a privilege I have to read you both!
The comments section as the actual essay, with mine just the prompt that starts it. I think that's true more often than not here. My readers out-write me in the margins regularly. Grateful to host it, and to be corrected by it.
Gerontologists distinguish between chronological age and what they call "subjective age dissonance", the persistent gap most people report between how old they are and how old they “feel”, which widens with time. It means the mirror stages an argument between two ages that never agree to meet. That gap is usually sold to us as delusion, something to be corrected. I read this as the last honest evidence that the self never actually finishes arriving, right up until the Absence stops asking it to.
Niceeee! The gerontologists frame that gap as error, a lag to be corrected, telling you they’ve mistaken a symptom for a fault. Nobody ever feels their true age because there isn’t one. Briliant! The self runs late by design, always half a step behind the body carrying it. What they diagnose as dissonance is the sound of something still under construction refusing to hear the closing bell. You’ve turned their pathology into evidence of life, Clara! Magistral! That’s a better reading. Thank you for arriving with a magnifying glass and the scalpel at the same time!
The soul is impervious to age…clueless, actually…or perhaps curious to witness how humanity interprets time passing. The gap informs humanity of the promise of a leap ahead, a bridge to somewhere…wherever dreams go…
The soul as the part of you that never got the memo about time, a promise or a cruel design flaw? I lean toward flaw more than you do, I think. That gap between the ageless-feeling thing inside and the body filing its complaints can be a bridge, but it can also just be the ache of a passenger who never agreed to the journey’s terms. Still, curious is better! A soul that watches humanity fumble with time has found the one seat in the house with a view. Grateful you pointed to where the dreams might go.
I love the “seat in the house with a view” point you make - it speaks to my perspective, so vividly visual. I have found my life has been a journey in motion…so much more to learn…stay curious!
From the title, I was expecting an article on wellness; what I got was something closer to the book of Revelation, complete with your own horseman of the apocalypse, except here the end comes in three, not four.
The “chill” for me is both your main and final insight; that the end is coming for us all, and to fail to discern throughout your life is the delusion of thinking that filling the space around you will stopgap the march of time; that most talk of aging “beautifully”, as is the case for most talk of empowerment and abundance, is the denial of death.
We recoil when the horsemen come circling because we’re terrified of catching their gaze, as if the Waste, Chill and Absence are contagious. The way we conduct our lives and specifically the choices we make, are directly affected, consciously or not, by whether we see age and eventually death as natural or apocalyptic; the main flaw with the latter being that the apocalypse comes for us one at a time. So the beautiful way to go, if such a thing exists, is to prepare years and decades prior; not with serums and steroids and seminars, but by leaving as little Waste as possible.
Phenomenal, Tamara. I’m only sorry that I let the title fool me.
Will you believe me if I confessed that the title was meant to fool you on purpose? ohhh God, wellness…. a topic that I despise today, and I even wrote an essay on this last year. Yes, this time the wellness in the title was the bait, in an ironic fashion, and the switch is the argument. Anyone who arrives expecting serums and leaves thinking about Revelation has just lived my essay’s thesis in miniature. You came for the denial and got handed what it denies. Am I smart or what? (and you know I’m joking, but I have to write it here for new readers who might get outraged at my little narcissism number.)
The fourth horseman in John is Death, riding last, with the others as his outriders. War, Famine, Pestilence, then Death bringing up the rear. I dropped him on purpose. Waste, Chill, Absence are the end, already here. No fourth horseman coming over the hill, because there’s no arrival to wait for. The three are the arrival. It’s the slowest apocalypse ever staged, and it’s already underway in the room you’re sitting in. Can you feel it?!
That line about contagion is stunningly good, representing the whole social machinery of how the old get is left out. We look away from dread, pretending to be indifferent, because the face on them is the face for us; averting our eyes feels like cancelling the appointment. It doesn’t.
Thank you for reading in order to notice what I subtracted, Andrew! As always, remarkable!
You write about aging without consoling while most writing in this genre tries to soften the blow with boring wisdom or contrived gratitude.
Aging for me is a form of loss of editing time. Any long-term practice like for instance restoration, archiving, whatever preserves things against decay, teaches you the same lesson, that the fewer revisions you have left, the more each one costs, and the more it costs, the more you’re tempted to skip the hard cut and leave the flawed version standing because redoing it feels unbearable. Pure economics you would say. Your “waste” is what happens when you keep the flawed version because you’ve run out of drafts. Concision then is what’s left when the editing budget runs out and you’re finally forced to only keep the essential .
I love that you wrote about decline without once flattering the reader that they’ll transcend it. Nearly every essay on aging smuggles in an escape hatch, we all know the drill, legacy, memory, some spiritual upgrade. But you would never do something so boring and predictable. You let your reader look at their own future face and find no exit. How many writers are capable of such magic?!
“The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognised for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” (John Berger, from Ways of Seeing)
Your model is better than my Waste, I have to agree. Cleaner mechanism. But the cruelty Berger points at, the flawed version you’re too tired to cut starts rewriting the earlier drafts behind you.
Thank you for reading the way you do, Alexander, in such an artistic fashion!
The cruel thing is that they are the one crowd exempt from the mirror. Office keeps handing them fresh reasons to stay vague, so the concision I’m after never has to arrive. Everyone else ages into fewer options. They age into more, and get photographed doing it. Grateful you read it sideways like that, I wasn’t thinking of them at all. Thank you so much, Gerry!
I don't know how close you and I are in age (I'm 65), but interestingly enough, the more I age the more freedom I feel that I have. Don't get me wrong; I don't look forward to dying, but I actually feel more and more free. I feel less and less a need to prove anything to anyone else. It hasn't gone away completely, but it gets smaller all the time. And I find myself thinking less and less that the end is actually the end. I know that this incarnation will change, but I also know that that's the way it goes. My main desire is moving deeper into who I've been and who I am. I won't say I'm not frightened sometimes. But I will say that aging is just a threshold, and I won't be gone; I'll just be something else.
The shrinking need to prove anything is real. Though I read it differently. That freedom is the residue of everything you’ve already refused over 65 years, finally outweighing what still pulls at you. You built it.
You feel the something-else on the far side but I can’t follow you across. I don’t know that anything waits. But the person who lives believing it’s a threshold ages differently from the one braced against a wall. You’ve stopped needing the options I described. That answers what my essay left open.
Miguel, I agree with you in theory 100%. I love the freedom you describe, especially the bit about no longer needing to prove yourself. In practice, I’m a work in progress…still curious how easy it is to feel that free when the physical reality of ageing starts to kick in. That’s the part I’m still figuring out…
Full disclosure, I'm not always so cavalier about the eventual end of my present existence. Not infrequently, I feel like a failure in various areas--or at least that I could (should?) have done. But the Buddhists increasingly convince me that I need to make peace with the aspects I can't control. To pretend that I can direct outcomes that I can't really change is above my pay grade. Part of the reality of living involves letting go. Emotionally, I want to resist that truth, but deep down I believe there's nothing to gain by pretending..
The failure feeling and the letting-go practice aren’t opponents, though it feels like they must be. Maybe the regret is just the part of you still auditing outcomes it once thought it controlled, and the Buddhist move isn’t to silence that auditor but to demote it. You don’t stop feeling the shortfall. But you stop granting it jurisdiction over what’s already sealed. Peace doesn’t agree you didn’t fail. It declines to keep prosecuting a case that has no defendant left. Grateful for the honesty under the disclosure.
This is a propitious essay. I was thinking about age earlier today, and how it relates to honesty, at least socially. The inward zone journey and introspection are separate matters.
I was looking at how my favourite musicians are performing when scrolling through short videos on social media: Robert Smith of The Cure; Diamanda Galás; Tori Amos; Tomas Haugen of the band Emperor; David Gilmour, still releasing and writing great music in his eighties - and how they all “let” their gray hairs and their wrinkles show in their performances, and yet still perform (as they are able) to the best of their abilities as though time *is* breaking them at the same time that it is *not*.
This is one of the many facets of my affinity with music lain bare: it is an honest extension of humanity, and not just an impetuous, pediocentric, market-driven set of commodities that implore people to try to foolishly maintain the illusion that they are somehow not letting time break them. In some cases, it actually does transpire that way - Madonna and Joan Rivers are examples - but I would contend they are more commodity than music.
I remember, and I know I may be haphazardly confessorial here, being in my twenties and wishing to be deceased before my forties. I was gonna go out like a rock star. I was heeding to the notion that what I was then was going to break down before I made it to where I am now, in my forties. I clearly don’t feel that way now, and I now have no shortfall of examples to draw upon should I ever need to. The prospect of “growing out” of music used to horrify me, until I discovered that it is not a necessary rite of passage into the successive breakpoints and rollbacks of the tides of life.
Perhaps aging beautifully is a conceit, or an ideal. Maybe it’s best to just - age. Know that it will happen, resolve it, accept it, and function within the vicissitudes of an aging life. We, wonderful, flawed creatures, first crawling, then toddling, then running, then skipping, then walking, then ambling, and finally creeping into inevitability, our humanity defined by the messages that emit from us along the way, be they strong or weak.
The twenties death-wish is the sneakiest commodity of all. The young corpse sells better than any living artist. Dean, the 27 club, frozen at peak value, never made to find out if they could mean the song at sixty. You outlived the most sellable script going. The shaking live version carries what the record can’t. But you don’t get to just age. Acceptance is passive, and passivity hands the Absence its chair. Keep refusing. Fewer things, chosen harder!
Thank you for the confession, Ian, and for making me go to old music and listen to it!
“The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche (of course it is!)
Actually, contrary to popular belief, I think some of these artists are making some of the best music in their *older* years. David Gilmour was sixty-two when he released On An Island, and I heard it when I was twenty-three, and it made a great impact on me. Of course, there are a great number of those who won’t give it a listen because it’s “not Pink Floyd”. I’m inclined to think they’re listening improperly.
Same with David Bowie. His final two albums - The Next Day and Blackstar, respectively - are among my favourite in his oeuvre. It’s because you could hear him singing about things he never would have known about when he and Iggy Pop were stoned in the Alps and Berlin.
So maybe “just aging” is an infelicitous way to frame it. Maybe it’s best to frame it as *becoming* first, and then letting what has become subject to the ravages of aging, like a safe that one has emptied of valuables before eventually succumbing to the temptations of burglars.
Nietzsche is cheating a bit, though. The safe emptied of treasure, the thief robbing an empty box. Consoling, but only if you believe the work carries you out whole, and I don’t. The safe is never quite empty, there’s always the piece you never managed to get onto the page, and that’s the one time steals clean.
Blackstar is fuller. He knew the thing he was writing about was arriving, and the record shakes with knowledge the young man never had access to. Not a safe being robbed. A last deposit, made in the dark, on the way out.
The final song fits nicely into your assessment of the safe: there is always something left. “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. Literally about all the things he can’t give away. It can choke you up to think of it.
Maybe that’s a fitting coda that testifies to never being able to transplant any more than a silhouette of your humanity. After all: it does stand to reason that the gestalt of a life is more than the sum of what is absorbed and interpreted by others.
But all those moments are eventually lost, in time,
Closing on Roy Batty… can it be more stunning that that? His tears-in-rain speech is itself the thing it mourns. The words survive, the moments they name don’t, and the gap between the two is Bowie’s silhouette. The shape of the loss transplants, never the loss itself. Choke-worthy, yes!
Philip Roth put it amazingly: "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre." Nine words, and they undo the whole fantasy of "aging beautifully". No strategy that wins a massacre, only how you carry yourself while it happens.
Concision and refusal aren't victories. They're just how some people choose to fall, deliberately, awake, still choosing something, right up to the moment choosing stops to matter. Not dignity earned. Dignity as the only decision left when every other one has been taken from you.
Roth is unanswerable on this, so I won’t even try :))) But notice he wrote it in “The Dying Animal”, through Kepesh, a man whose entire creed was appetite and conquest. The massacre line works because it comes from someone who spent his whole life believing pleasure was a form of winning, and only at the end admits there was never a war he could win, only a rout he was always inside. The concision is what’s left when you finally stop pretending there was a battle to lose. Grateful for Roth, and for you, Céline!
1. Don’t pretend death isn’t coming. Embrace it – just not yet. “It’s useful to know our lives are bookended,” says Honoré. “When time is running out, it becomes more precious. It gives life shape and, in some ways, meaning.” Don’t dwell morbidly on it, but don’t shy away from it either. The closer you get to it, the less you are likely to fear it and the greater your focus will be on the things that really matter.
2. Try to stay healthy. Eat well and take lots of exercise – it’s good for brain and body. Exercise doesn’t have to mean playing competitive ice hockey; the odd brisk walk will keep you in shape.
Ps: … and subscribe Museguide Tamara (words are tools and Tamara essay can help to slow the process of getting older;)
I’ll take Honoré’s first. The bookend does concentrate things. I distrust the second one a little. Walking is fine but the promise smuggled underneath it, that if you eat well and keep moving, feels like you bought a discount on the ending. You haven’t. The healthiest body in the room is still on the same errand as the rest. The walk buys is a better present, not a delayed exit, and that’s worth doing for its own sake without the bargain attached.
I was just about to write you, Tamara ... as I went today to the Calder expo ... and as I walked along the halls, looking at the wonderful world of Calder, I had this thought that everyone here looked beautiful ... strange, no ? Grace and charm seemed to envelop everyone, and it made me think of you ... I must confess, I did not read your essay here ... enough to see it had to do with beauty and its tribulations throughout the years ... I believe that beauty appears to those who look outside of themselves ... as you do ... as the crowd that was there did ... They looked out to beauty and to playful inventions, and this reflected in them and made them beautiful. 🦋
Funny, I was there on Wednesday. Whole afternoon, and I left lighter than I came. Art has this effect on me. Calder makes it impossible to look inward, that’s the trick of him. You can’t stand in front of a mobile and brood. The thing keeps moving and you have to keep watching. Attention pointed away from the self is maybe the only cosmetic that works. The room agreed with you. So did I, apparently, without knowing you’d been thinking it too. Thank you for this, André!
Calder reminded me of an expression you said a few weeks ago "la ligne juste" except in his case it would be "la légèreté juste" ... L'art de la légèreté ...
I was a little horrified by some of the statements on first read - especially losing the desire to remain awake and present. But I was looking through a spiritual lens and to me "awake" and "present" are spiritual capacities that often increase with age - albeit only for those of us who have "taken the journey."
Ageing beautifully has a completely different meaning when used by those who have an over attachment to the identity and appearance of youth, fear preventing the embrace and curiosity of each life stage. Unrecognised fear manifesting as denial of mortality is problematic.
As a person prepared to accept mortality and attempting to age consciously, I still have fear. My strategy is to create a type of partnership with that fear, get to know it, so it doesn't stop me fearing life or finding the gifts and beauty in each life stage. (Current challenge is fear associated with an impending hip replacement.)
To be present is to acknowledge that fear and grief/loss are an inherent part of ageing.
You always write such thought provoking essays, delivered with such an eye for the detail found in the underbelly of life, balanced always by appreciation of beauty. Thank you Tamara. With love.
I can understand the clash you felt on the first read. I won’t deny it, I think it’s real, and I don’t want to dissolve it quickly. I never do that when my readers are startled. I also think we mean two different things by “awake”, both true. I meant it almost physiologically, the body’s dimming, the literal pull toward sleep and vagueness that comes with the years. I believe you mean it spiritually, the awareness that can sharpen as the body softens. Those two curves cross. The animal alertness fades as the contemplative kind can deepen, and old age is the strange place where you’re going dim and lucid at the same time, in different registers. Neither of us is wrong, we describe the two ends of one person.
Your partnership with fear is the wisest strategy. Fear you try to eliminate goes underground and runs the show from there, the unrecognised denial you mention in the youth-clingers.
The hip is not abstract, and I won’t pretend the philosophy touches it where it actually hurts. A joint being replaced is the body admitting it’s a thing that wears. Frightening because it’s so literal. I hope the surgery is clean and the recovery kind. Walk out the far side of that one and you’ll have rehearsed something no essay could teach you. And that is so valuable. Experience is priceless, what’s why I love the elders… they feed my imagination with their real life.
Thank you, Catherine, for reading with both lenses and telling me where they collided! It’s then that I learn about myself and about my writing at the same time. My readers represent mirrors and when we don’t agree, I generally grow and evolve. With love returned.
How about Age Entelechially? The oak dosen't bemoan its aging, why, it keeps growing till its limit is reached, that is if the acorn gets that far and doesn't get eaten by a squirrel first!
Jung's notion "It is the priviledge of a lifetime to become who you truly are." Somewhere else he mentions re: the Waste, not to sweat it because the real journey is just what his quote alludes to, and whether one is middle aged or older, the second half of life is all about finding the meaning for the first half, completing the circle of one's life as a spiral beginning again from where we started at a higher octave of coherence.
Or Shakespeare's As You Like It, presents the Seven stages of Man in Jaques All the world's a stage monologue ending in the famous lines, "That last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childhood and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, san taste, sans everything."
And finally, Hillman: "We must learn the art of dying (Ars Moriendi) by building our own "ship of death"...Dying "in character" facing death directly and with our own unique style, rather trying to rise above it or deny it." And along the way, "accepting the gravity of aging and the twisted branches of our personal history...allowing the soul to find its roots, accepting that necessity and fate shape our lives, including our deaths."
Another ride around Michael’s intellectual-adventure-land. Ohhh I love this because you took me to my realm with your references. Entelechy has one flaw the oak hides, and it’s the flaw your own squirrel already hints at. The oak has a form to complete, encoded in the acorn and it grows toward it without the option of getting it wrong. We don’t have that. There’s no telos stamped in us that aging simply unfolds. And that’s why the squirrel matters more than a throwaway. The acorn eaten halfway is closer to the human case than the full oak. So interruption is the medium we grow in. By the way, one of my dearest friends compares me to a squirrel, so it’s fitting and it makes me smile.
I see Jung’s spiral but I need to make one little adjustment. The second half completing the first sounds too much like the circle actually closes. I think you keep going back to the start because it never resolves. And the higher octave is just the same unanswered question sung louder. Coherence is an excellent quality of not-knowing.
Dying in character is the refusal I was clumsily trying to emphasise. Not rising above death, not denying it but building the specific ship that only you could build, out of the twisted branches, roots and all. Jaques gives you the 7 ages as a stage everyone shuffles through identically, sans everything. Hillman answers him… the sans-everything is universal, but the ship is yours alone. How you go is the last authored thing.
Thank you for 4 thinkers in one comment and not a wasted line among them, Michael!
This is an interesting thematic, if nature all around us is "in gear", entelechy-wise, and Gaia is geodynamically aligned for the long haul, till the sun blinks out in some future astronomical eternity, then it is us hominid-humans homo-faber/cybernaut dwellers parsed out on the land, with the 10k civilisational modu operandi evolving to where we find ourselves presently tiered on its shoulders, who are the wild card genetically speaking, without a place to rest our itinerant, aging, individual, and species-beings heads?
I am slow, a 71 year old back at the start as a 17 year old, not-knowing like you said so well, at a higher octave maybe but more curiously at a time when the human species globally is in a similar point of not-knowing as well?
I was given the first copy of a local guide for the island waters where I've lived for 25+years to peruse and comment on, by the highly proficient water expert Dr. Lovelace and his co-author another Ph.D fellow Dr. Haskill, the former who's also the elder of our men's circle and a leader at the Unity Church where I've been going for the last three months since my wife's passing.
Here on Whidbey, it is all about this moment we are at now, when our island waters, from a sole source aquifer, is at a crossroads, from a past where individuals were on their own, or in HOA's and small municipalities, for accessing the waters in wells, to today when it is critical that there is a unified approach to assure there is a sustainable future for drinking water, with the challenge from years of population growth and aging infrastructures, pollutant run-offs, combining with rising sea levels and dryer years from climate change.
So it seems we humans have to come spiraling around, me first, to where we started, as if for the first time, with fresh eyes and an open mind and sense "que la diferencia", with gratitude yes for all of what went before, for the most part, but now with what we've learned from the first go round, or is it the thousandth, to step with fortitude and begin to make the moves necessary to go forward with a thoroughly hatched out and vetted protocol for our participatory convening on what really matters here locally with our water, and soon as well for our planetary habitat for life with all our relations to be able to make it through an existentially challenging passage into the future, that has us in it, me as well.
You don't have to read or reply to this Tamara, I just needed to write it out after our wonderfully, small is beautiful, Sunday church meeting at Unity of Whidbey today, (with left over chocolate birthday cake with lemon curd filling) whose female elder, Joanne gave a talk just about this spiralling around to a see anew from a higher octave of not-knowing, where we/I started, and now, what might be a recursive path that fits us for the future, with all our Gaian relations, and with borders which bring us together rather than separate us from one another. (Great cake, I must be writing this from the thick chocolate frosting rush? Time for a Sunday, 2 mile stroll around the lake.) Merci!
The wild-card intuition inverts my essay. Every other creature ages inside a form it can’t fall out of, while we author the passage with no template, alone and collectively at once. No telos to unfold. Just improvisation. Your water gives it a floor. The aquifer doesn’t care about octaves. It needs the shift from every-well-for-itself to shared protocol, the same move a person makes ageing well. Concision at civilisational scale.
The chocolate frosting under the cosmology is the most human line in the thread. Go, take the stroll. You’ve earned the lake, Michael!
Without an indelible acorn entelechy uniformly given species-wide maybe, but ours is a daimon-contoured architecture of one's calling, vis-a-vis our soul's imprimatur, vested in the very conditions of one's life, and the path one is on belongs to the soul in it's mythic personifications enfolding into a lived story bespeaking of the drama of our becoming, from the inscrutible design of an "acornation" that has found the soil, daimon-protected for a squirrel-free moment, to put down roots, in the world that is the anima mundi? (Hillman)
Careful, though, or Hillman hands the acorn back through the side door I just walked it out of! The daimon, the soul’s code, the calling vested before you arrive, is entelechy again disguised as myth, a telos smuggled back as imprimatur. I love it as story and distrust it as claim. If the pattern’s already written in the soul, the not-knowing I prized becomes mere ignorance of a fixed script, not genuine authorship. I’d keep the anima mundi and lose the imprimatur. Root in the soil, yes! But no design waiting to be obeyed.
Yes, thank you! He actually posits that "the soul is not a pre-existing unity to be discovered, but something built shard by broken shard, through the very experience of fragmentation." (Which was just "used" in my comment on your inner light note.) He goes on to say of the soul, its work cannot be commodified because "it is an end in itself (autotelic), not a means of accumulation", so is useless to the money machine of global capital/social media, and out of governmental control. :)
I can think of three practices that must be started early to age beautifully: two tips and one insight.
One, you can’t retroactively take care of your skin.
Two, you have to keep training your fast-twitch muscle fibers so you don’t fall down easily.
Three, you must die while you’re alive.
Memento mori is the only rehearsal we get. Everything we gain, we lose. We are born blind and die blind, at least symbolically if not in fact. We all have the same origin and destination. Now we’re just quibbling about the dramatic shape of the curve.
My father, looking up to his hale and hardworking Uncle “Whip,” once asked him, “Have you found there are things you can’t do as you’ve gotten older?”
His uncle replied that he could still do everything, just a bit slower.
My dad found that comforting, and if he hadn’t already told me, I would have found that comforting too.
The problem is that our perception operates on thresholds. Losing 1% of your eyesight each year is probably manageable. It’s when you don’t notice for a decade that you suddenly freak out as though your eyesight became 10% worse overnight.
Or you “suddenly” lost your looks.
Or your friends.
And this is where I think your word “concision” and its strategy are most important. Look in the mirror and see what is. Deal with that. Let the rest go as best you can.
You’re here now. How you arrived is anecdotal compared to the solidity of this moment.
Uncle Whip is unknowingly the best evidence for your threshold theory… “everything, just a bit slower”, a man says when the decline is finally happening below his own detection limit. The slowness is the whole plot, arriving in a register too gradual for him to register. Your dad found it comforting, and so did you, and that transmitted comfort is how the threshold does its work across generations. Nobody lies. Everybody just reads a curve too slow to feel. The mirror won’t alarm you in time. You have to check the instruments on purpose. Grateful for this, Guy!
"Check the instruments" — you implicitly bring up a good point: while most people don't check the instruments on purpose often enough, some waste life by checking them too much. I know people of my parents' generation that consult obituaries more than they call the living. Their concision boiled it down to the wrong thing.
Right, and that's the failure mode I under-warned about. The obituary-readers have mistaken monitoring for living, as if surveillance of the end were a way of preparing for it. You known instruments tell you how to fly, they aren't the flight. Check them to correct course, then look back out the window. Concision aimed at death instead of at life just builds a tidier waiting room. Grateful for the correction.
Your uncle Whip may have thought the same I do (I wonder how old he was when he said that to your father): I can do most of the things I used to do, but the recovery is much longer.
There are fewer sudden losses than gradual, though as you note sudden realization of a gradual decline manifests in the mind as sudden loss. Your words are rich and complex. My thanks.
I appreciate that! I've been trying to figure out those age differences, but it's going to be a forensic endeavor. I know my Great Uncle Whip built his own modest house not as a young man, and my dad was on the roof clearing out leaves and also replacing kitchen flooring in his early seventies, so that seems to bode well for me. I still lift heavy weights but I'm not shy about taking a nap afterward.
I really loved this, Tamara. Such an unsettling subject, but you’ve written about it with such clarity and imagination! “The Absence” is such a powerful way of describing what happens, when parts of ourselves slowly disappear…
I really like the idea that we have to practise ageing long before we actually get there, but I wonder: can we really prepare for something we can only understand once we’re living it?
I hope I can put some of what you say here into practice and perhaps even surprise it back.😊
Your question is the right objection. I don’t have a clean answer, only a hunch. You can’t rehearse the content of old age, no! The specific losses arrive unrehearsed and unrecognisable. But you can rehearse the posture toward loss, that’s transferable. Someone who practised refusing, choosing, letting things go while it was still cheap, meets the unfamiliar thing with a trained reflex rather than a panic, not preparation for the event, but for the flinch. That’s the most I’d claim. Surprise it back, yes, exactly, that’s the spirit I couldn’t fit into my essay.! Thank you for this!
And this is exactly why I enjoy reading you! The essay opens the door, and then the conversation gives me a glimpse into the thinking behind it. Your world is fascinating, and I love getting these little peeks into it. “Practising the posture toward loss” is such a beautiful way of putting it!
Hmmm. Many of the older men I know are still measuring themselves against other men. When they walk into a room, they try to figure out where they are in the wolf pack. Do women also do this? Yes. Of course. But I am privileged to know several women who have said to the world: "This is who I am. Accept it or not...I don't give a damn." They are...in every way...beautiful.
The pack instinct in old men has a cruelty built in that they rarely see. The ranking never stops, but the prize disappears. You keep measuring for a contest that ended, jostling for position in a hierarchy nobody’s scoring anymore. The women didn’t win that game, they only walked off the field entirely, the only move that was ever available and the one almost nobody makes. Refusing to be ranked is a harder discipline than climbing. Grateful you brought them into the room, John! They belong in my essay more than most of what I put in it.
A few years ago, I went to an event in New York City to see a friend's child get an acting award. I left early once the award was given and ran into Isabella Rossellini. Her car hadn't arrived and it took me five minutes to find her a cab. She radiated confidence and beauty. In contrast, there is nothing more depressing than running into a man who used to have power because of his role, but now that's over...you encounter a ghost mulling over past victories. Tiresome.
Beauty in her case was always a way of looking outward, at a person, a room, a lens, so age just redirected the gaze without emptying it. The powerful man ran on position, and position is borrowed, always on loan from an institution that eventually asks for it back. When it’s recalled he’s got nothing of his own left to stand on, so he stands on the memory instead. She carried her source with her. He rented his. That’s the difference between the radiance and the ghost. Thank you for this, John!
For me the first question is this "what is beautiful? Thus what means aging beautifully?". Isnt it, that we get served a certain idea what beauty is- which is in our societies: the young, flourishing,striving, the blossoming flower, the sharp mind with massive accumulated knowledge at best, the peachlike face and so on. There is no space for ambuigity, for confusion, for forgettfulness, for wrinkles, for scars, lines, edges and absence (we could call that space too). With this limitation we loose curiosity I feel. As I see my parents age, I see- and do talk about with them- what I call "split between hadbeen and is". Between spirit (not necessarily mind) and body. I am regularly amazed by the resilience within a faster and faster progressing frailty. Maybe it is generally that we do not have a very natural relationship to natural decay? And no curiosity about it, because what we see is us too. And that is threatening. We- too- are about to decay and end.
And what I could see too, in 70, 80 years old people who cultivated their curiosity over a lifetime- they are different. It's like a fresh lense all the time through old eyes.
We’ve collapsed beauty into promise, into potential, the flower… because it’s about to open. So anything past its opening reads as loss. But there are aesthetic traditions built on the opposite premise. The wabi-sabi finds the deepest beauty in the weathered, the bowl mended with gold so the break becomes the loveliest part. Because of damage. Your curious 80-year-olds are living proof, the fresh lens through old eyes is beauty that stopped needing to be young. A big kiss back, and thank you for watching your parents so tenderly, Karin!
Life wounds.
Wounds are not beautiful as a rule. So, yes aging beautifully is a questionable project at best.
But Hugo Simberg catches much of the story in his “Wounded Angel.” The average viewer will see three responses to the wounds, to aging. The boy ecclesiast, marching forward somewhat fatalistically. The angry youth cynically carrying the burden of his future like it’s a big waste of his time; he could be elsewhere enjoying his present. The wounded angel herself as the old man blinded to stroller-like walks by litter conveyance.
All three are missing the alternative path signalled in the natural setting surrounding them. Yes, aging carries one to the mouth of the river. Yes, the larger whole, the body of water that terminates the river, is waiting to receive the part you played, the waters you carried through your life story. But, look at the rivers. With the correct perspective, one cannot know whether one is 10 feet from the end or 10 miles. The meadows, the swamps, the tree-lined banks all continue unabated until the end.
Aging is living with fewer rapids perhaps, a gentler flow through softer fields sometimes. But if you focus more on the living and less on the aging, who’s to say your river might not run white water right up to the fall at the end. Exhilaration! Thunderous roaring fluid violence right up to the very edge.
To age beautifully is to live fully until living stops. Carry the ‘Waste’, endure the ‘Chill,’ stand flat-footed and face the ‘Absence.’
I am so pleased you found the one figure in the painting ignored by almost everyone. The second stretcher-bearer, the one glancing back over his shoulder at the viewer, faintly hostile, as if he’s caught you watching. Simberg painted him looking at us on purpose. That backward glare makes me shiver: He carries the wound and he knows you’re the next one to be carried. He resents that you get to stand there upright and comfortable. This painting accuses, and I’m glad I’ve got to use it to illustrate one of my essays. It is a phenomenal piece of art, and I had the privilege of seeing it in Helsinki in June.
I am impressed that you also caught what I underplayed. I wrote the river as if it slows. But some rivers do the opposite, gathering right before the drop, the last stretch being the loudest water. There’s no rule that the flow has to gentle out. Some of it accelerates into the fall. A natural course we could conclude.
Marilynne Robinson gets near this in “Gilead”, the old minister writing to a son who will read it after he’s gone:
“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? … I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovely, and I hope against hope.”
That’s your white water.
And please, you have to understand that I can’t sign off on ignoring the Waste. Endure the Chill, sure! Ignoring the Waste is what lets it grow while we look the other way. I’d rather stare it down than pretend it isn’ there.
Thank you, Andrew, for making me look at my own river again and notice it was moving faster than I’d let it!
I agree and have made edits. The imperatives now come directly from the figures. I appreciate the red marks.
You’ve made me want to look at the river rather than the ending! The idea that we have no clue whether we’re ten feet or ten miles from the fall and that the water can still turn white right up to the edge, yes! I’m taking that with me!
What a beautiful counterpoint to an essay that asks such difficult and uncomfortable questions…it opens the conversation rather than closing it. I’m very glad you added this, Andrew!
Tamara makes her art selections with the same deliberate concision she writes her essays. And although they do not resolve the tensions for the reader either, they very often offer a side entrance into the piece which opens the conversation further, as you say. In this case, the subjects of the Simberg piece reflected the discomfort of the text so precisely, I was compelled to turn my gaze to the setting. There I found my own side exit, the two rivers and the large reservoir they were feeding.
Whether it is her background in ballet I cannot say, but Tamara’s text and art selections do perform a kind of dance. The art elevates her essays’ themes through visuals that keep the reader grounded. Philip Golabuk is the only other serious philosopher I know with a 'danseur' history. And he too writes without resolving from a posture of humility aligned with reality. Perhaps there’s something in the water ballet dancers drink. There is a conviction and precision and depth in these voices, and yet the hubris one often encounters in brilliant essayists is entirely missing.
Thank you so much, Sirens on the Rocks, for being here and contributing your own voice to this dance of fire that Museguided keeps burning.
Nothing to add! Just pure perfection. And I’m so so so grateful to read this. I’m blushing, Andrew!
This is exactly what drew me to Tamara in the first place. The way she brings art into the conversation, not as an illustration of the text but as another way of thinking alongside it. I love the precision of that relationship: the image doesn’t explain the essay, it opens another door into it.
And perhaps that is why your reading of the Simberg piece spoke to me so much. Looking at the setting, finding the rivers and the reservoir, following the thought somewhere the writer didn’t explicitly take us that is such a beautiful way of reading.
It is also very close to the way I see the world. Art has always been my way of making sense of things, long before I started writing. Sirens on the Rocks actually began on Instagram through that instinct: putting art, interiors, people and ideas next to each other and seeing what happens in the space between them. For me, art is a kind of emotional intelligence, another language for things we sometimes cannot quite articulate.
And I love that you see that dance in Tamara’s work. Your reading of her has made me look at it again from a slightly different angle, and I think that’s the beauty of a good conversation: it makes you see something you thought you knew a little differently.
Nothing makes me happier than my readers in dialogue with each other and my essays. I’m in awe in front for yours with Andrew. Brava! What a privilege I have to read you both!
I think the level of your writing is a magnet for thoughtful people and wonderful conversations.
It’s honestly one of my favourite things about reading your essays, getting to engage with fellow readers and seeing where the conversation takes us.
I always come away having learned something, or seeing something from a slightly different angle. It’s such a gift.💝
The comments section as the actual essay, with mine just the prompt that starts it. I think that's true more often than not here. My readers out-write me in the margins regularly. Grateful to host it, and to be corrected by it.
Ferocious writing!
Gerontologists distinguish between chronological age and what they call "subjective age dissonance", the persistent gap most people report between how old they are and how old they “feel”, which widens with time. It means the mirror stages an argument between two ages that never agree to meet. That gap is usually sold to us as delusion, something to be corrected. I read this as the last honest evidence that the self never actually finishes arriving, right up until the Absence stops asking it to.
Niceeee! The gerontologists frame that gap as error, a lag to be corrected, telling you they’ve mistaken a symptom for a fault. Nobody ever feels their true age because there isn’t one. Briliant! The self runs late by design, always half a step behind the body carrying it. What they diagnose as dissonance is the sound of something still under construction refusing to hear the closing bell. You’ve turned their pathology into evidence of life, Clara! Magistral! That’s a better reading. Thank you for arriving with a magnifying glass and the scalpel at the same time!
The soul is impervious to age…clueless, actually…or perhaps curious to witness how humanity interprets time passing. The gap informs humanity of the promise of a leap ahead, a bridge to somewhere…wherever dreams go…
The soul as the part of you that never got the memo about time, a promise or a cruel design flaw? I lean toward flaw more than you do, I think. That gap between the ageless-feeling thing inside and the body filing its complaints can be a bridge, but it can also just be the ache of a passenger who never agreed to the journey’s terms. Still, curious is better! A soul that watches humanity fumble with time has found the one seat in the house with a view. Grateful you pointed to where the dreams might go.
I love the “seat in the house with a view” point you make - it speaks to my perspective, so vividly visual. I have found my life has been a journey in motion…so much more to learn…stay curious!
Curiosity is my middle name and the engine that makes me write.
From the title, I was expecting an article on wellness; what I got was something closer to the book of Revelation, complete with your own horseman of the apocalypse, except here the end comes in three, not four.
The “chill” for me is both your main and final insight; that the end is coming for us all, and to fail to discern throughout your life is the delusion of thinking that filling the space around you will stopgap the march of time; that most talk of aging “beautifully”, as is the case for most talk of empowerment and abundance, is the denial of death.
We recoil when the horsemen come circling because we’re terrified of catching their gaze, as if the Waste, Chill and Absence are contagious. The way we conduct our lives and specifically the choices we make, are directly affected, consciously or not, by whether we see age and eventually death as natural or apocalyptic; the main flaw with the latter being that the apocalypse comes for us one at a time. So the beautiful way to go, if such a thing exists, is to prepare years and decades prior; not with serums and steroids and seminars, but by leaving as little Waste as possible.
Phenomenal, Tamara. I’m only sorry that I let the title fool me.
Will you believe me if I confessed that the title was meant to fool you on purpose? ohhh God, wellness…. a topic that I despise today, and I even wrote an essay on this last year. Yes, this time the wellness in the title was the bait, in an ironic fashion, and the switch is the argument. Anyone who arrives expecting serums and leaves thinking about Revelation has just lived my essay’s thesis in miniature. You came for the denial and got handed what it denies. Am I smart or what? (and you know I’m joking, but I have to write it here for new readers who might get outraged at my little narcissism number.)
The fourth horseman in John is Death, riding last, with the others as his outriders. War, Famine, Pestilence, then Death bringing up the rear. I dropped him on purpose. Waste, Chill, Absence are the end, already here. No fourth horseman coming over the hill, because there’s no arrival to wait for. The three are the arrival. It’s the slowest apocalypse ever staged, and it’s already underway in the room you’re sitting in. Can you feel it?!
That line about contagion is stunningly good, representing the whole social machinery of how the old get is left out. We look away from dread, pretending to be indifferent, because the face on them is the face for us; averting our eyes feels like cancelling the appointment. It doesn’t.
Thank you for reading in order to notice what I subtracted, Andrew! As always, remarkable!
You write about aging without consoling while most writing in this genre tries to soften the blow with boring wisdom or contrived gratitude.
Aging for me is a form of loss of editing time. Any long-term practice like for instance restoration, archiving, whatever preserves things against decay, teaches you the same lesson, that the fewer revisions you have left, the more each one costs, and the more it costs, the more you’re tempted to skip the hard cut and leave the flawed version standing because redoing it feels unbearable. Pure economics you would say. Your “waste” is what happens when you keep the flawed version because you’ve run out of drafts. Concision then is what’s left when the editing budget runs out and you’re finally forced to only keep the essential .
I love that you wrote about decline without once flattering the reader that they’ll transcend it. Nearly every essay on aging smuggles in an escape hatch, we all know the drill, legacy, memory, some spiritual upgrade. But you would never do something so boring and predictable. You let your reader look at their own future face and find no exit. How many writers are capable of such magic?!
“The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognised for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” (John Berger, from Ways of Seeing)
Your model is better than my Waste, I have to agree. Cleaner mechanism. But the cruelty Berger points at, the flawed version you’re too tired to cut starts rewriting the earlier drafts behind you.
Thank you for reading the way you do, Alexander, in such an artistic fashion!
Without knowing what the inspiration of this post is, I can't help but conclude that it describes our political class and their ways perfectly.
The cruel thing is that they are the one crowd exempt from the mirror. Office keeps handing them fresh reasons to stay vague, so the concision I’m after never has to arrive. Everyone else ages into fewer options. They age into more, and get photographed doing it. Grateful you read it sideways like that, I wasn’t thinking of them at all. Thank you so much, Gerry!
I don't know how close you and I are in age (I'm 65), but interestingly enough, the more I age the more freedom I feel that I have. Don't get me wrong; I don't look forward to dying, but I actually feel more and more free. I feel less and less a need to prove anything to anyone else. It hasn't gone away completely, but it gets smaller all the time. And I find myself thinking less and less that the end is actually the end. I know that this incarnation will change, but I also know that that's the way it goes. My main desire is moving deeper into who I've been and who I am. I won't say I'm not frightened sometimes. But I will say that aging is just a threshold, and I won't be gone; I'll just be something else.
The shrinking need to prove anything is real. Though I read it differently. That freedom is the residue of everything you’ve already refused over 65 years, finally outweighing what still pulls at you. You built it.
You feel the something-else on the far side but I can’t follow you across. I don’t know that anything waits. But the person who lives believing it’s a threshold ages differently from the one braced against a wall. You’ve stopped needing the options I described. That answers what my essay left open.
Thank you, Miguel!
Miguel, I agree with you in theory 100%. I love the freedom you describe, especially the bit about no longer needing to prove yourself. In practice, I’m a work in progress…still curious how easy it is to feel that free when the physical reality of ageing starts to kick in. That’s the part I’m still figuring out…
Full disclosure, I'm not always so cavalier about the eventual end of my present existence. Not infrequently, I feel like a failure in various areas--or at least that I could (should?) have done. But the Buddhists increasingly convince me that I need to make peace with the aspects I can't control. To pretend that I can direct outcomes that I can't really change is above my pay grade. Part of the reality of living involves letting go. Emotionally, I want to resist that truth, but deep down I believe there's nothing to gain by pretending..
The failure feeling and the letting-go practice aren’t opponents, though it feels like they must be. Maybe the regret is just the part of you still auditing outcomes it once thought it controlled, and the Buddhist move isn’t to silence that auditor but to demote it. You don’t stop feeling the shortfall. But you stop granting it jurisdiction over what’s already sealed. Peace doesn’t agree you didn’t fail. It declines to keep prosecuting a case that has no defendant left. Grateful for the honesty under the disclosure.
This is a propitious essay. I was thinking about age earlier today, and how it relates to honesty, at least socially. The inward zone journey and introspection are separate matters.
I was looking at how my favourite musicians are performing when scrolling through short videos on social media: Robert Smith of The Cure; Diamanda Galás; Tori Amos; Tomas Haugen of the band Emperor; David Gilmour, still releasing and writing great music in his eighties - and how they all “let” their gray hairs and their wrinkles show in their performances, and yet still perform (as they are able) to the best of their abilities as though time *is* breaking them at the same time that it is *not*.
This is one of the many facets of my affinity with music lain bare: it is an honest extension of humanity, and not just an impetuous, pediocentric, market-driven set of commodities that implore people to try to foolishly maintain the illusion that they are somehow not letting time break them. In some cases, it actually does transpire that way - Madonna and Joan Rivers are examples - but I would contend they are more commodity than music.
I remember, and I know I may be haphazardly confessorial here, being in my twenties and wishing to be deceased before my forties. I was gonna go out like a rock star. I was heeding to the notion that what I was then was going to break down before I made it to where I am now, in my forties. I clearly don’t feel that way now, and I now have no shortfall of examples to draw upon should I ever need to. The prospect of “growing out” of music used to horrify me, until I discovered that it is not a necessary rite of passage into the successive breakpoints and rollbacks of the tides of life.
Perhaps aging beautifully is a conceit, or an ideal. Maybe it’s best to just - age. Know that it will happen, resolve it, accept it, and function within the vicissitudes of an aging life. We, wonderful, flawed creatures, first crawling, then toddling, then running, then skipping, then walking, then ambling, and finally creeping into inevitability, our humanity defined by the messages that emit from us along the way, be they strong or weak.
The twenties death-wish is the sneakiest commodity of all. The young corpse sells better than any living artist. Dean, the 27 club, frozen at peak value, never made to find out if they could mean the song at sixty. You outlived the most sellable script going. The shaking live version carries what the record can’t. But you don’t get to just age. Acceptance is passive, and passivity hands the Absence its chair. Keep refusing. Fewer things, chosen harder!
Thank you for the confession, Ian, and for making me go to old music and listen to it!
“The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche (of course it is!)
Actually, contrary to popular belief, I think some of these artists are making some of the best music in their *older* years. David Gilmour was sixty-two when he released On An Island, and I heard it when I was twenty-three, and it made a great impact on me. Of course, there are a great number of those who won’t give it a listen because it’s “not Pink Floyd”. I’m inclined to think they’re listening improperly.
Same with David Bowie. His final two albums - The Next Day and Blackstar, respectively - are among my favourite in his oeuvre. It’s because you could hear him singing about things he never would have known about when he and Iggy Pop were stoned in the Alps and Berlin.
So maybe “just aging” is an infelicitous way to frame it. Maybe it’s best to frame it as *becoming* first, and then letting what has become subject to the ravages of aging, like a safe that one has emptied of valuables before eventually succumbing to the temptations of burglars.
Nietzsche is cheating a bit, though. The safe emptied of treasure, the thief robbing an empty box. Consoling, but only if you believe the work carries you out whole, and I don’t. The safe is never quite empty, there’s always the piece you never managed to get onto the page, and that’s the one time steals clean.
Blackstar is fuller. He knew the thing he was writing about was arriving, and the record shakes with knowledge the young man never had access to. Not a safe being robbed. A last deposit, made in the dark, on the way out.
The final song fits nicely into your assessment of the safe: there is always something left. “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. Literally about all the things he can’t give away. It can choke you up to think of it.
Maybe that’s a fitting coda that testifies to never being able to transplant any more than a silhouette of your humanity. After all: it does stand to reason that the gestalt of a life is more than the sum of what is absorbed and interpreted by others.
But all those moments are eventually lost, in time,
Like tears in rain.
Time…to die.
🌹
Closing on Roy Batty… can it be more stunning that that? His tears-in-rain speech is itself the thing it mourns. The words survive, the moments they name don’t, and the gap between the two is Bowie’s silhouette. The shape of the loss transplants, never the loss itself. Choke-worthy, yes!
Dal segno al fine.
🖤
Philip Roth put it amazingly: "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre." Nine words, and they undo the whole fantasy of "aging beautifully". No strategy that wins a massacre, only how you carry yourself while it happens.
Concision and refusal aren't victories. They're just how some people choose to fall, deliberately, awake, still choosing something, right up to the moment choosing stops to matter. Not dignity earned. Dignity as the only decision left when every other one has been taken from you.
This is a piece of art, Tamara.
Roth is unanswerable on this, so I won’t even try :))) But notice he wrote it in “The Dying Animal”, through Kepesh, a man whose entire creed was appetite and conquest. The massacre line works because it comes from someone who spent his whole life believing pleasure was a form of winning, and only at the end admits there was never a war he could win, only a rout he was always inside. The concision is what’s left when you finally stop pretending there was a battle to lose. Grateful for Roth, and for you, Céline!
Two rules about ageism by Carl Honore
1. Don’t pretend death isn’t coming. Embrace it – just not yet. “It’s useful to know our lives are bookended,” says Honoré. “When time is running out, it becomes more precious. It gives life shape and, in some ways, meaning.” Don’t dwell morbidly on it, but don’t shy away from it either. The closer you get to it, the less you are likely to fear it and the greater your focus will be on the things that really matter.
2. Try to stay healthy. Eat well and take lots of exercise – it’s good for brain and body. Exercise doesn’t have to mean playing competitive ice hockey; the odd brisk walk will keep you in shape.
Ps: … and subscribe Museguide Tamara (words are tools and Tamara essay can help to slow the process of getting older;)
I’ll take Honoré’s first. The bookend does concentrate things. I distrust the second one a little. Walking is fine but the promise smuggled underneath it, that if you eat well and keep moving, feels like you bought a discount on the ending. You haven’t. The healthiest body in the room is still on the same errand as the rest. The walk buys is a better present, not a delayed exit, and that’s worth doing for its own sake without the bargain attached.
Thank you for this, Juan Carlos!
I was just about to write you, Tamara ... as I went today to the Calder expo ... and as I walked along the halls, looking at the wonderful world of Calder, I had this thought that everyone here looked beautiful ... strange, no ? Grace and charm seemed to envelop everyone, and it made me think of you ... I must confess, I did not read your essay here ... enough to see it had to do with beauty and its tribulations throughout the years ... I believe that beauty appears to those who look outside of themselves ... as you do ... as the crowd that was there did ... They looked out to beauty and to playful inventions, and this reflected in them and made them beautiful. 🦋
Funny, I was there on Wednesday. Whole afternoon, and I left lighter than I came. Art has this effect on me. Calder makes it impossible to look inward, that’s the trick of him. You can’t stand in front of a mobile and brood. The thing keeps moving and you have to keep watching. Attention pointed away from the self is maybe the only cosmetic that works. The room agreed with you. So did I, apparently, without knowing you’d been thinking it too. Thank you for this, André!
I wish I could have seen that exhibition.
Maybe I’ll write about that.
Calder reminded me of an expression you said a few weeks ago "la ligne juste" except in his case it would be "la légèreté juste" ... L'art de la légèreté ...
Ohhh que c’est beau!
I was a little horrified by some of the statements on first read - especially losing the desire to remain awake and present. But I was looking through a spiritual lens and to me "awake" and "present" are spiritual capacities that often increase with age - albeit only for those of us who have "taken the journey."
Ageing beautifully has a completely different meaning when used by those who have an over attachment to the identity and appearance of youth, fear preventing the embrace and curiosity of each life stage. Unrecognised fear manifesting as denial of mortality is problematic.
As a person prepared to accept mortality and attempting to age consciously, I still have fear. My strategy is to create a type of partnership with that fear, get to know it, so it doesn't stop me fearing life or finding the gifts and beauty in each life stage. (Current challenge is fear associated with an impending hip replacement.)
To be present is to acknowledge that fear and grief/loss are an inherent part of ageing.
You always write such thought provoking essays, delivered with such an eye for the detail found in the underbelly of life, balanced always by appreciation of beauty. Thank you Tamara. With love.
I can understand the clash you felt on the first read. I won’t deny it, I think it’s real, and I don’t want to dissolve it quickly. I never do that when my readers are startled. I also think we mean two different things by “awake”, both true. I meant it almost physiologically, the body’s dimming, the literal pull toward sleep and vagueness that comes with the years. I believe you mean it spiritually, the awareness that can sharpen as the body softens. Those two curves cross. The animal alertness fades as the contemplative kind can deepen, and old age is the strange place where you’re going dim and lucid at the same time, in different registers. Neither of us is wrong, we describe the two ends of one person.
Your partnership with fear is the wisest strategy. Fear you try to eliminate goes underground and runs the show from there, the unrecognised denial you mention in the youth-clingers.
The hip is not abstract, and I won’t pretend the philosophy touches it where it actually hurts. A joint being replaced is the body admitting it’s a thing that wears. Frightening because it’s so literal. I hope the surgery is clean and the recovery kind. Walk out the far side of that one and you’ll have rehearsed something no essay could teach you. And that is so valuable. Experience is priceless, what’s why I love the elders… they feed my imagination with their real life.
Thank you, Catherine, for reading with both lenses and telling me where they collided! It’s then that I learn about myself and about my writing at the same time. My readers represent mirrors and when we don’t agree, I generally grow and evolve. With love returned.
How about Age Entelechially? The oak dosen't bemoan its aging, why, it keeps growing till its limit is reached, that is if the acorn gets that far and doesn't get eaten by a squirrel first!
Jung's notion "It is the priviledge of a lifetime to become who you truly are." Somewhere else he mentions re: the Waste, not to sweat it because the real journey is just what his quote alludes to, and whether one is middle aged or older, the second half of life is all about finding the meaning for the first half, completing the circle of one's life as a spiral beginning again from where we started at a higher octave of coherence.
Or Shakespeare's As You Like It, presents the Seven stages of Man in Jaques All the world's a stage monologue ending in the famous lines, "That last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childhood and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, san taste, sans everything."
And finally, Hillman: "We must learn the art of dying (Ars Moriendi) by building our own "ship of death"...Dying "in character" facing death directly and with our own unique style, rather trying to rise above it or deny it." And along the way, "accepting the gravity of aging and the twisted branches of our personal history...allowing the soul to find its roots, accepting that necessity and fate shape our lives, including our deaths."
Thank you for this age appropriate essay, Tamara!
Another ride around Michael’s intellectual-adventure-land. Ohhh I love this because you took me to my realm with your references. Entelechy has one flaw the oak hides, and it’s the flaw your own squirrel already hints at. The oak has a form to complete, encoded in the acorn and it grows toward it without the option of getting it wrong. We don’t have that. There’s no telos stamped in us that aging simply unfolds. And that’s why the squirrel matters more than a throwaway. The acorn eaten halfway is closer to the human case than the full oak. So interruption is the medium we grow in. By the way, one of my dearest friends compares me to a squirrel, so it’s fitting and it makes me smile.
I see Jung’s spiral but I need to make one little adjustment. The second half completing the first sounds too much like the circle actually closes. I think you keep going back to the start because it never resolves. And the higher octave is just the same unanswered question sung louder. Coherence is an excellent quality of not-knowing.
Dying in character is the refusal I was clumsily trying to emphasise. Not rising above death, not denying it but building the specific ship that only you could build, out of the twisted branches, roots and all. Jaques gives you the 7 ages as a stage everyone shuffles through identically, sans everything. Hillman answers him… the sans-everything is universal, but the ship is yours alone. How you go is the last authored thing.
Thank you for 4 thinkers in one comment and not a wasted line among them, Michael!
This is an interesting thematic, if nature all around us is "in gear", entelechy-wise, and Gaia is geodynamically aligned for the long haul, till the sun blinks out in some future astronomical eternity, then it is us hominid-humans homo-faber/cybernaut dwellers parsed out on the land, with the 10k civilisational modu operandi evolving to where we find ourselves presently tiered on its shoulders, who are the wild card genetically speaking, without a place to rest our itinerant, aging, individual, and species-beings heads?
I am slow, a 71 year old back at the start as a 17 year old, not-knowing like you said so well, at a higher octave maybe but more curiously at a time when the human species globally is in a similar point of not-knowing as well?
I was given the first copy of a local guide for the island waters where I've lived for 25+years to peruse and comment on, by the highly proficient water expert Dr. Lovelace and his co-author another Ph.D fellow Dr. Haskill, the former who's also the elder of our men's circle and a leader at the Unity Church where I've been going for the last three months since my wife's passing.
Here on Whidbey, it is all about this moment we are at now, when our island waters, from a sole source aquifer, is at a crossroads, from a past where individuals were on their own, or in HOA's and small municipalities, for accessing the waters in wells, to today when it is critical that there is a unified approach to assure there is a sustainable future for drinking water, with the challenge from years of population growth and aging infrastructures, pollutant run-offs, combining with rising sea levels and dryer years from climate change.
So it seems we humans have to come spiraling around, me first, to where we started, as if for the first time, with fresh eyes and an open mind and sense "que la diferencia", with gratitude yes for all of what went before, for the most part, but now with what we've learned from the first go round, or is it the thousandth, to step with fortitude and begin to make the moves necessary to go forward with a thoroughly hatched out and vetted protocol for our participatory convening on what really matters here locally with our water, and soon as well for our planetary habitat for life with all our relations to be able to make it through an existentially challenging passage into the future, that has us in it, me as well.
You don't have to read or reply to this Tamara, I just needed to write it out after our wonderfully, small is beautiful, Sunday church meeting at Unity of Whidbey today, (with left over chocolate birthday cake with lemon curd filling) whose female elder, Joanne gave a talk just about this spiralling around to a see anew from a higher octave of not-knowing, where we/I started, and now, what might be a recursive path that fits us for the future, with all our Gaian relations, and with borders which bring us together rather than separate us from one another. (Great cake, I must be writing this from the thick chocolate frosting rush? Time for a Sunday, 2 mile stroll around the lake.) Merci!
The wild-card intuition inverts my essay. Every other creature ages inside a form it can’t fall out of, while we author the passage with no template, alone and collectively at once. No telos to unfold. Just improvisation. Your water gives it a floor. The aquifer doesn’t care about octaves. It needs the shift from every-well-for-itself to shared protocol, the same move a person makes ageing well. Concision at civilisational scale.
The chocolate frosting under the cosmology is the most human line in the thread. Go, take the stroll. You’ve earned the lake, Michael!
Without an indelible acorn entelechy uniformly given species-wide maybe, but ours is a daimon-contoured architecture of one's calling, vis-a-vis our soul's imprimatur, vested in the very conditions of one's life, and the path one is on belongs to the soul in it's mythic personifications enfolding into a lived story bespeaking of the drama of our becoming, from the inscrutible design of an "acornation" that has found the soil, daimon-protected for a squirrel-free moment, to put down roots, in the world that is the anima mundi? (Hillman)
Careful, though, or Hillman hands the acorn back through the side door I just walked it out of! The daimon, the soul’s code, the calling vested before you arrive, is entelechy again disguised as myth, a telos smuggled back as imprimatur. I love it as story and distrust it as claim. If the pattern’s already written in the soul, the not-knowing I prized becomes mere ignorance of a fixed script, not genuine authorship. I’d keep the anima mundi and lose the imprimatur. Root in the soil, yes! But no design waiting to be obeyed.
Yes, thank you! He actually posits that "the soul is not a pre-existing unity to be discovered, but something built shard by broken shard, through the very experience of fragmentation." (Which was just "used" in my comment on your inner light note.) He goes on to say of the soul, its work cannot be commodified because "it is an end in itself (autotelic), not a means of accumulation", so is useless to the money machine of global capital/social media, and out of governmental control. :)
Somebody woke up on the morbid side of the bed…
I can think of three practices that must be started early to age beautifully: two tips and one insight.
One, you can’t retroactively take care of your skin.
Two, you have to keep training your fast-twitch muscle fibers so you don’t fall down easily.
Three, you must die while you’re alive.
Memento mori is the only rehearsal we get. Everything we gain, we lose. We are born blind and die blind, at least symbolically if not in fact. We all have the same origin and destination. Now we’re just quibbling about the dramatic shape of the curve.
My father, looking up to his hale and hardworking Uncle “Whip,” once asked him, “Have you found there are things you can’t do as you’ve gotten older?”
His uncle replied that he could still do everything, just a bit slower.
My dad found that comforting, and if he hadn’t already told me, I would have found that comforting too.
The problem is that our perception operates on thresholds. Losing 1% of your eyesight each year is probably manageable. It’s when you don’t notice for a decade that you suddenly freak out as though your eyesight became 10% worse overnight.
Or you “suddenly” lost your looks.
Or your friends.
And this is where I think your word “concision” and its strategy are most important. Look in the mirror and see what is. Deal with that. Let the rest go as best you can.
You’re here now. How you arrived is anecdotal compared to the solidity of this moment.
Uncle Whip is unknowingly the best evidence for your threshold theory… “everything, just a bit slower”, a man says when the decline is finally happening below his own detection limit. The slowness is the whole plot, arriving in a register too gradual for him to register. Your dad found it comforting, and so did you, and that transmitted comfort is how the threshold does its work across generations. Nobody lies. Everybody just reads a curve too slow to feel. The mirror won’t alarm you in time. You have to check the instruments on purpose. Grateful for this, Guy!
"Check the instruments" — you implicitly bring up a good point: while most people don't check the instruments on purpose often enough, some waste life by checking them too much. I know people of my parents' generation that consult obituaries more than they call the living. Their concision boiled it down to the wrong thing.
Right, and that's the failure mode I under-warned about. The obituary-readers have mistaken monitoring for living, as if surveillance of the end were a way of preparing for it. You known instruments tell you how to fly, they aren't the flight. Check them to correct course, then look back out the window. Concision aimed at death instead of at life just builds a tidier waiting room. Grateful for the correction.
Your uncle Whip may have thought the same I do (I wonder how old he was when he said that to your father): I can do most of the things I used to do, but the recovery is much longer.
There are fewer sudden losses than gradual, though as you note sudden realization of a gradual decline manifests in the mind as sudden loss. Your words are rich and complex. My thanks.
I appreciate that! I've been trying to figure out those age differences, but it's going to be a forensic endeavor. I know my Great Uncle Whip built his own modest house not as a young man, and my dad was on the roof clearing out leaves and also replacing kitchen flooring in his early seventies, so that seems to bode well for me. I still lift heavy weights but I'm not shy about taking a nap afterward.
I really loved this, Tamara. Such an unsettling subject, but you’ve written about it with such clarity and imagination! “The Absence” is such a powerful way of describing what happens, when parts of ourselves slowly disappear…
I really like the idea that we have to practise ageing long before we actually get there, but I wonder: can we really prepare for something we can only understand once we’re living it?
I hope I can put some of what you say here into practice and perhaps even surprise it back.😊
Your question is the right objection. I don’t have a clean answer, only a hunch. You can’t rehearse the content of old age, no! The specific losses arrive unrehearsed and unrecognisable. But you can rehearse the posture toward loss, that’s transferable. Someone who practised refusing, choosing, letting things go while it was still cheap, meets the unfamiliar thing with a trained reflex rather than a panic, not preparation for the event, but for the flinch. That’s the most I’d claim. Surprise it back, yes, exactly, that’s the spirit I couldn’t fit into my essay.! Thank you for this!
And this is exactly why I enjoy reading you! The essay opens the door, and then the conversation gives me a glimpse into the thinking behind it. Your world is fascinating, and I love getting these little peeks into it. “Practising the posture toward loss” is such a beautiful way of putting it!
Really grateful to have readers like you.
Hmmm. Many of the older men I know are still measuring themselves against other men. When they walk into a room, they try to figure out where they are in the wolf pack. Do women also do this? Yes. Of course. But I am privileged to know several women who have said to the world: "This is who I am. Accept it or not...I don't give a damn." They are...in every way...beautiful.
The pack instinct in old men has a cruelty built in that they rarely see. The ranking never stops, but the prize disappears. You keep measuring for a contest that ended, jostling for position in a hierarchy nobody’s scoring anymore. The women didn’t win that game, they only walked off the field entirely, the only move that was ever available and the one almost nobody makes. Refusing to be ranked is a harder discipline than climbing. Grateful you brought them into the room, John! They belong in my essay more than most of what I put in it.
A few years ago, I went to an event in New York City to see a friend's child get an acting award. I left early once the award was given and ran into Isabella Rossellini. Her car hadn't arrived and it took me five minutes to find her a cab. She radiated confidence and beauty. In contrast, there is nothing more depressing than running into a man who used to have power because of his role, but now that's over...you encounter a ghost mulling over past victories. Tiresome.
Beauty in her case was always a way of looking outward, at a person, a room, a lens, so age just redirected the gaze without emptying it. The powerful man ran on position, and position is borrowed, always on loan from an institution that eventually asks for it back. When it’s recalled he’s got nothing of his own left to stand on, so he stands on the memory instead. She carried her source with her. He rented his. That’s the difference between the radiance and the ghost. Thank you for this, John!
For me the first question is this "what is beautiful? Thus what means aging beautifully?". Isnt it, that we get served a certain idea what beauty is- which is in our societies: the young, flourishing,striving, the blossoming flower, the sharp mind with massive accumulated knowledge at best, the peachlike face and so on. There is no space for ambuigity, for confusion, for forgettfulness, for wrinkles, for scars, lines, edges and absence (we could call that space too). With this limitation we loose curiosity I feel. As I see my parents age, I see- and do talk about with them- what I call "split between hadbeen and is". Between spirit (not necessarily mind) and body. I am regularly amazed by the resilience within a faster and faster progressing frailty. Maybe it is generally that we do not have a very natural relationship to natural decay? And no curiosity about it, because what we see is us too. And that is threatening. We- too- are about to decay and end.
And what I could see too, in 70, 80 years old people who cultivated their curiosity over a lifetime- they are different. It's like a fresh lense all the time through old eyes.
A big kiss to you Tamara, love your essays!
We’ve collapsed beauty into promise, into potential, the flower… because it’s about to open. So anything past its opening reads as loss. But there are aesthetic traditions built on the opposite premise. The wabi-sabi finds the deepest beauty in the weathered, the bowl mended with gold so the break becomes the loveliest part. Because of damage. Your curious 80-year-olds are living proof, the fresh lens through old eyes is beauty that stopped needing to be young. A big kiss back, and thank you for watching your parents so tenderly, Karin!