September 20, 2024

My cousin Wanda is 99, still lives on her own, and her mind is clear and sharp.  When I talked about school starting up again, her response was, “I wonder if I can still learn something.”  The easy answer, and it’s a true one, is, “Of course she can,” but we don’t learn much by stopping with the easy answers.  What is it to learn?  The easy answer is, to acquire information, analyze it, and draw conclusions from it.  Wanda does all that.  She has mastered Facebook, which is more than I can say, and she deals directly with medical and insurance people about various problems.  But that kind of learning, though important, is superficial.  On a deeper level, to learn is to be born again, to become someone new.  Our identity, our sense of what we are, is the eggshell that we must burst out of in order to be born.  We become a self only by exploding the limits of a previous self.  

Nietzsche got this right in his definition of the self-transcending Superman (or Overman). But Nietzsche’s development of his own idea was unbalanced enough to give us pause.  What about hubris?  Are there no limits to this self-transcending?  The idea of learning as rebirth sounds hopeful, like a kind of eternal youth, but the body gives the lie to the mind’s easy metaphors.  Especially when you are Wanda’s age—or even mine, 26 years younger.  I have been extremely lucky so far not to have suffered any real decline, but I am shocked at how many of my friends are starting suddenly to become old and debilitated.  A few are dead.  That stuff a few years ago about how 80 is the new 50 now looks absurdly naïve.  Maybe for some.  In the last volume of Marcel Proust’s semi-autobiographical novel, protagonist Marcel, walking into a party given by the Prince of Guermantes, is shocked by a sea of grey hair that has transformed people he has not seen in years, the characters the reader has been following through seven huge volumes.  It is then that he decides to write the book that will become In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, even though he may be close to death himself.  The idea that there potentially are no limits to the human condition is merely a form of immaturity.  When Goethe’s Faust unites with Helen of Troy, their offspring, Euphorion, immediately after his birth begins living up to his name, bounding around on precipices like a mountain goat.  He actually seems to think he has wings, and only finds out that he is mistaken the hard way.  There is such a thing as gravity, the force that holds us down and limits us, and it has to be taken into account. 

Yet to take into account is not necessarily to become resigned.  One of the learning tasks of old age is to decide what are the genuine limits of the human condition and what are merely the conventional expectations of society.  There are those who assume that old people are physically and mentally incapable, and who become uncomfortable and even irritated when their elders refuse to live up to the expectation of their decline.  Alice Munro has a quietly devastating story about this called “Pictures of the Ice.”  In it, a minister pretends to retire and pretends to be making plans to move to Hawaii and live with a woman named Sheila.  But the point of view character, a young woman, discovers that this is all a cover story—literally, since the first scene is of the minister trying on loud and tacky old-people clothes, looking at himself in a mirror.  In reality, the minister has accepted a position in the fierce cold of Thunder Bay, in a poor community that cannot pay him much but which genuinely needs a minister, unlike the smug, snobbish, self-involved people of his community, which includes his own children.  He has had to conduct an elaborate ruse because he knows these people are likely enough not only to stop him but to have him “evaluated,” since anyone who would choose Thunder Bay over Hawaii with a woman named Sheila clearly has mental health issues.  Not only can they not comprehend such a choice, but it makes them uncomfortable, because it calls their own choices into question.  It makes us uncomfortable too, because we know from the first lines of the story that the minister will die in a boating accident only a short time after his arrival up north. 

The conventional view, flavored with pop psychoanalysis, is that the minister clearly had had some sort of deathwish.  But it is equally possible that the minister was not trying to hold on to his present identity as a slightly ridiculous oldster, possible that he was not trying to die but was also not clinging to the identity that Paul called the “natural man.”  In a poem of old age, Yeats spoke of himself as being “fastened to a dying animal.”  In the pictures of the ice of the title, the ice along a frozen lake, the young woman cannot see the minister, but seems to sense his invisible presence.  It is possible that the minister has been born of water and the spirit into a new identity that the natural self cannot perceive. 

I just read an article about the attempts of some of the super-rich to live, through various forms of quackery, to 120 or 130, and of course without Wanda’s walker, portable oxygen, and hearing aids.  The rich, being narcissists, want also to be frozen until the time when someone figures out how to bestow not just longevity but immortality.  ‘Twas always thus, from the time of the Pharaohs who had themselves mummified out of the same motives.  Believe me, at my age I am not knocking longevity, but longevity is “more of the same.”  Just to prolong life, to avoid dying, is not a solution, because by itself it would only lead to monotony and boredom.   Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein revolved around this theme throughout a long life and a long career.  A novel called Methuselah’s Children in 1941 introduced a character named Lazarus Long, member of a group of human beings who, through a genetic mutation, are extremely long-lived.  Three decades later, Heinlein wrote another novel about Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love (1973).  In it, when we first meet Lazarus he is quasi-suicidal because he has done it all, seen it all, and finds no reason to go on.  In itself, longevity can be a form of hell, an eternally unchanging torment, as in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt (2002), which shows retirement as a fate worse than death.  What we need is not more of the same, but metamorphosis. 

The way to a new self may be a new land.  The original colonists of the United States were not just looking for new real estate.  The New World was a place to begin again, not just reproducing their old life in a new location, but to create a new form of life that would also be a new identity.  Science fiction’s fascination with colonizing alien planets may at times be a relapse into the bad old imperialist dreams, but more positively there is the allure of making a home in a place that is exotic and different, so that, adapting, we become different ourselves.  Living in a new land, a new environment, we become new people in subtle ways. The theme of much early American literature is the quest become Americans, not transplanted Europeans.  It is not true that we remain constant no matter what environment we live in.  That is an illusion whose premise is the ideology that underlies colonialism, that the duty of the powerful independent will is to dominate its surroundings.  The protagonist of an early long poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” begins by believing this: 

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost.  As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. 

But eventually he comes to reverse himself:

Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence.
That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find. 

Thus, we are refashioned into a being that befits its world:  

The responsive man,
Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,
But on the banjo’s categorical gut…

This idea that our identity and our world mutually remake each other is an insistent theme in Stevens’ poetry.  The assertion of an early poem, “Theory,” that “I am what is around me” is repeated in various other poems:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
                              “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

Our identity is shaped by time as well as space, by our historical context or “horizon,” as it has been called.  We are a product of our time: made and remade by various historical forces.  We have freedom, but only within the horizon of what frames us.  There are better and worse ways of understanding these things.  Critical theory in the late 20^th century, trying to counterbalance the tendency of the ego to assert dominance of everything around it, lay too much stress, I think, on how we are constructed by external forces, sometimes seeming to conclude that we are merely puppets.  It is true, nevertheless, that the “American way of life” has become a demand for repeated changes of identity, as the social system conditions younger generations to expect having to re-invent themselves a number of times in the course of a lifetime.  Abraham Maslow saw this coming 60 years ago, advocating a kind of education that he called Heraclitean, in other words, starting from the Greek philosopher’s idea that no one steps twice in the same river. Americans change jobs, and therefore often move, several times in their lives—the younger generation is more or less told to expect this.  The problem with it is that it is all too often mandated by necessity rather than by deep emotional impulse for a change.  Change is in fact built into the American lifestyle.  We change jobs, we change relationships.  The flux of contemporary life is so different from the “traditional values” good old days, in which people stayed on the same land for generations, and people stayed in the same jobs and the same marriages for a lifetime.   A good part of this is simply an enormously increased lifespan merely within the last 75 years or so.  Over the course of a long lifetime, people change, and may drift apart.  They are not the same people they were 20 years before.   It makes for pain, but perhaps it is good for us, at least sometimes, forces us to keep growing. 

Our identities are initially constructed for us by family and society as we grow up.  Adolescent coming of age confronts us with a choice.  We may accept the identity that has been prefabricated for us, keeping the values, customs, and occupations deemed “normal” and suitable for our social situation.  Traditional societies have “initiation rites” by which young men and women are inserted into their adult roles.  Or we may rebel, sometimes only mildly, in order to establish our autonomy as adults, but sometimes boldly, breaking with family and social class expectations, looking to construct a new identity with new values—usually ones that stress individuality and freedom and difference, whether sexual, religious, political, or artistic.  But no one is an island.  The rebel seeks out kindred spirits to form an alternative society, or, as we said in the 60’s, a counterculture.  But we don’t just acquire identity once and for all at the end of our coming-of-age story.  We continue to grow an identity as a tree accumulates rings.  All obvious enough, no doubt.  But there are aspects of the growth process that are less obvious. 

It may be useful to make a distinction between two kinds of identity-formation.  It is not an either-or, and the two tendencies may interplay in people’s lives.  But there does seem to be a kind of rough temperamental difference.  In his cosmology, Plato makes a distinction between two types of cycles, the cycle of the same and the cycle of the different.  These terms could be repurposed to refer to two ways of acquiring a new identity.  In the “cycle of the same,” as we are defining it for our own ends, when people are reborn into a new identity there is nonetheless a continuity between the old identity and the new.  People become more of what they potentially were.  The acorn does not resemble the oak, but is the oak in potentia.  May Sarton sees her own growth this way in “Now I Become Myself”:

Now I become myself.  It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…

She uses the same metaphor of the organic growth of a plant:

My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.

Cosmically, the sun goes through its cycles of rising and setting, disappearing and reappearing, but it eternally becomes the same self.  The stars eternally sweep across the heavens, sometimes disappearing for the winter, but eternally return. 

Thus, some people keep and enhance a kind of stable identity despite the inevitability of change.  Rather amusingly, the same is said to be true of acoustic guitars, which is why some collectors hunt for vintage models, preferring a guitar from the 1930’s, a refreshing counterbalance to the American mania for having the newest model of everything.  The reason is that wood improves as it ages, develops a resonance and subtle overtones over time.  It is nice to think that your guitar is going to sound better the longer you play it, aging into its best self like a fine wine. 

But another identity process is more radical.  For our purposes, the “cycle of the different” means that there is a revolutionary break, and when someone is reborn to a new identity, that identity is truly other. Some of nature’s more radical metamorphoses seem to express this.  The caterpillar does not remotely resemble the butterfly, nor the tadpole the frog.  Yes, there is a continuity—yet we are struck by the otherness of the change.  Some people, with less serene and balanced and more volatile personalities, grow in this dramatic way, becoming a new self that is truly different from the old, perhaps even antithetical to it.  The traditional paradigm for this is religious conversion, such as when Paul describes how, since his conversion, it is “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.”  No transformation was more total than Paul’s, as he changed from being a Jew who persecuted Christians to a Christian saint.  A secular counterpart is Rimbaud’s famous statement, Je est un autre, “I is another.” 

Rimbaud’s example takes us to the arts, in which the cycles of the same and the different are even more evident than they are in ordinary life.  Northrop Frye uses the example of Yeats, who fashioned a new identity for himself beginning in mid-life that was quite deliberately antithetical to what he had been as a young man, and whose poetic style simultaneous changed from the languid, passive lyricism of his early volumes to the sharp, powerful rhythms and startling assertiveness of his late verse: 

Yeats is one of the growing poets: his technique, his ideas, his attitude to life, are in a constant state of revolution and metamorphosis.  He belongs with Goethe and Beethoven, not with the artists who simply unfold, like Blake and Mozart.  This phenomenon of metamorphic growth, which must surely have reached its limit in Picasso, seems to be comparatively new in the arts… (222)

Thomas Mann was an unfolding writer.  There is in a way a great difference between the realism of his first novel, Buddenbrooks, published when he was 25 and the mythical method of the tetralogy Joseph in Egypt, but the calmly meditative style remains the same.  Mann is often compared with James Joyce, but Joyce is one of the metamorphs, moving from the delicate, spun-glass lyrics of Chamber Music to the drab realism of Dubliners to the heavily embroidered and ornate style of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (where he is perhaps closest to Mann), to the tour de force of Ulysses, which re-invents itself stylistically in each of its 18 chapters, to Finnegans Wake, which invents its own language in the attempt to become sui generis, completely other. 

However, once again, like all theories, this one will be insightful to the extent that it avoids a reductionistic either-or.  When he published his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther and became famous while still in his 20’s, Goethe was the most influential practitioner of the emotionally-extreme expressionism of the early phase of German Romanticism known as Sturm und Drang, storm and stress.  But he became so dissatisfied with the limitations of that style that he recanted—the opposite of conversion—and identified himself with what he called the Classical style, characterized by Olympian detachment and formal control.  This too turned out to have its limitations: it produced several plays imitating the hieratic formalism of Greek drama, but nothing beyond the realm of pastiche.  But then there is Faust.  Is Faust Romantic or Classical?  Act 3 of Part 2 culminates in the marriage of Faust to Helen of Troy, and explicitly expounds the ideal of a marriage between northern Romantic and southern Classical.  I would say that, whatever Goethe thought, Faust is Romantic, but Romantic in a deeper way than his early angst-ridden poetry.  Faust is probably the most restlessly metamorphic work before Ulysses.  Both Parts 1 and 2 are divided into fairly short scenes, and there is a relentlessly changing mood running a full gamut from sublime idealism to savage and often obscene satire and employing the full encyclopedic range of possible poetic meters and stanzas.  In a way, it could be considered an unfolding, as Goethe worked on it over a span of 60 years, and it represents the many-sidedness of his Renaissance-man personality.  But it is also different, other, sui generis, unlike any other work in literature. 

The issue is complicated because writers may want to be the same and different, traditional and innovative, at the same time.  Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound expressly to contradict Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, outraged that Aeschylus sold out and accepted a compromise between the tyrant Zeus and the rebel champion of humankind, Prometheus.  Yet stylistically, Shelley’s work imitates Greek dramatic style in general, Aeschylus’s sublime, sonorous rhetoric in particular.  Whereas, although Frye describes Blake as an unfolder, in other ways he was uniquely radical.  He was not content to borrow either Classical mythology, like Shelley and Keats, or Christian mythology like Milton, but invented his own strange pantheon with even stranger names like Oothoon and Golgonooza.  He also invented his own verse form, a 7-stress line that he hoped was freer than traditional lockstep meter and rhyme.  The whole Modernist movement of the early 20^th century tried to be traditional and iconoclastic at the same time.  T.S. Eliot wrote approvingly of “tradition,” yet his early verse, with its irregular rhythms, grotesque metaphors, and startling conjunction of pathos and the sardonic, was revolutionary.  In later life he went the other direction:  Four Quartets is much more conservative in its style and versification.  Writers may adopt the radical style of the “cycle of the different” for ideological reasons, especially in modern revolutionary times.  When she was still a “good girl,” Adrienne Rich wrote astonishingly perfect formal, metrical verse.  When she turned radical feminist lesbian, she wrote in a jagged, disjunctive free verse.  During the 60’s and 70’s, in fact, American poetry rejected formalism altogether, because it was identified with the oppressiveness of the patriarchal, imperialist, racist, sexist, capitalist order, said to be represented by the traditional literary canon.  The demand to “Make It New,” in Ezra Pound’s famous phrase, has led in all genres of art to a demand for continuous re-invention that is, it seems to me, unbalanced. 

We return to our earlier question of what is supposed to happen in the second half of life, a question Jung confronts in an essay of his that I refer to often, “The Stages of Life.”  What happens when we reach retirement and the end of parenting, like the minister in Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice”?  Old age so often seems like an exercise in contraction.  Our circumference slowly shrinks as friends die and children go off.  The body begins to abandon us, a piece at a time, and we can do less and less.  A visit to a nursing home may make the idea of a continuously reborn self, “aging gracefully,” seem a cruel hoax. 

However, the purpose of the second half of life, and especially old age, is to learn how to detach from the ego as the locus of identity.  What can this mean that is not merely simplistic?  The ego stares into oncoming death, sees nothing, and is terrified.  In an attempt to preserve itself, it may embark on various immortality projects, as Ernest Becker explained in The Denial of Death (1973), efforts at some kind of survival in this world.  The bigger the ego, the bigger the project.  Goethe’s Faust, at the age of 100, attempts to reclaim land from the sea in a parody of the Creation in Genesis, in which the dry land rose from the waters.  But such works still succumb to mutability.  Even stone crumbles, as in Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias,” whose tyrant declares, “I am Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”  But all that is left of Ozymandias is a bodiless stone head lying in the sand.  Shakespeare’s Prospero expresses his author’s melancholy at growing old, born of the looming insight that “We are such things as dreams are made on,” that the whole theatrical spectacle of life will fade away, and “Leave not a wrack behind.”  Instead of trying to hold on, the task of the second half of life is to learn how to progressively let go, how to say, with Yeats’s Great Lord of Chou” in “Vacillation,” “Let all things pass away.”  In Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot asked to hear “not of the wisdom of old men but of their folly.”

Elders are supposed to be dignified, but instead may throw off timidity and self-consciousness and become ornery and outspoken, bluntly honest.  They may throw off the fears and the need for security.  For after all, what’s the point?  They begin to travel light. 

And where they are traveling is into the darkness, a journey of decreation that reverses the arrival out of the darkness of the original Creation.  The mythological motif known as the night sea journey represents the passage out of being into nothing, yet that may not be the same as a journey into annihilation.  In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats leaves the land that is “no country for old men.  His destination is a golden city, Byzantium—but not the historical city: rather, one built out of the “living gold” of alchemy, in which he will find a new identity as a golden bird upon a golden bough.  D. H. Lawrence exhorts us to build our ship that symbolizes an identity that is not that by which we are known in life.  In “The Ship of Death,” he tells us we must “bid farewell / to one’s own self and find an exit / from the fallen self,” in order to “die the death, the long and painful death / that lies between the old self and the new.” 

Jung, like Paul, postulated an identity that is not the ego.  In Christian terms, we die to the natural self and resurrect as the spiritual self, which is not bound by time and space but is rather their circumference. But would we know the resurrection if we saw it?  Maybe we do see it and do not recognize it, because we see only with the natural eye.  If we had been there, witnessed Jesus on the Cross, would we have lost all faith?  Jesus broke down, cried out in despair, and died in the most ignominious way possible.  It is not a matter of saying that physical death is “unreal,” which is just the “denial of death” again, but of recognizing death as the dark stage of a way. 

“I learn by going where I have to go,” says Theodore Roethke in “The Waking.” Then he says, “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” But it may be that there is something to know after all.  We began with the assertion that to learn something is to be changed, and thus to become a new self.  In this process of learning and development, we slowly gain self-awareness as we mature.  Children act spontaneously, on impulse, having little awareness of who they are, like the animals.  Growth to adulthood entails a certain kind of learning: the development of a process of self-reflection, insight into why we are what we are.  Increasingly we analyze ourselves, judge ourselves, learning to guide our innate or instinctive self.  We sit back and look at ourselves and evaluate.  Some of us become writers in order to do so.  Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” finds a similar process of growth and development in the arts.  Artforms develop from “naïve” to “sentimental,” that is, from early works springing spontaneously from largely unconscious inspiration to the later, more sophisticated works in which the creative impulse has introjected a critical faculty that makes later works in a genre more self-aware, controlled by conscious design and calculation.  Such works are often revisionist of the earlier works that are their models.  Virgil’s Aeneid constantly calls to mind the patterns and themes of Homer’s Iliad, partly to repeat them but partly to improve them, at least from Virgil’s point of view. 

All modern art is “sentimental,” meaning self-conscious, and sentimental art is “belated.”  There is a price for such learning: modern art knows what it is doing, and its self-knowledge is abetted by the recent genre of literary criticism.  The modern age has seen the appearance of the poet-critic, such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, or Eliot.  Wallace Stevens, especially in a series of long, discursive poems that are about poetry itself, subsumed criticism into poetry, re-inventing the form of the verse treatise such as Horace’s The Art of Poetry and Pope’s Essay on Criticism.  But what Roethke meant is that too much self-awareness can paralyze by cutting writers off from their deeper impulses.  Hamlet has become a paradigm of such paralyzed self-consciousness, and a common feature of modern literature is the endless monologue of an alienated consciousness whose ruminations are essentially circular, endless variations of “I think, therefore I am.”  From the poetic monologues of characters in Browning and Eliot to the self-involved musings in fiction of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and various characters in Faulkner and Beckett, the modern reader is put through a reading experience that can be rather numbing.  Sometimes it is the narrator’s voice that subsumes plot and characters into an endless meditation: this is characteristic of Thomas Mann, and has perhaps been picked up from him by Thomas Pynchon and Samuel R. Delany.

A growth in self-consciousness is evident in popular art over time as well.  Bob Dylan began by performing traditional folk songs in a traditional manner, but began writing his own songs, which at first were new songs in a traditional manner but which became increasingly complex and “poetic,” finally leaving the realm of folk music altogether.  Although I am no expert, Taylor Swift’s early music, which in the beginning stuck close to pop formulas, has expanded to become less regular and more reflective, even a bit experimental, at least on albums like Folklore and Evermore. 

But by itself, reflective self-knowledge reaches a limit.  The kind of learning that takes place beyond that may have to come about by forgetting what we know.  The Renaissance scholar Erasmus wrote an essay “On Learned Ignorance,” which is not the same as simple ignorance.  Musicians need to become unconscious of the notes they are playing—not by forgetting them but by internalizing them, which means “knowing” them in a way that repeats the unconscious spontaneity of early life.  Perhaps the most famous of all Greek sayings is “Know thyself.”  However, that is the advice of the Delphic oracle:  in other words, the counsel of a voice that came out of a hole in the ground via the mouthpiece of a drugged-out priestess.    Shall we pay heed to that?  In our later years especially, “knowledge” may come in the form of dreams, impulses, intuitions from some internal oracle.  We can call it the unconscious, though that explains fairly little.  And what that voice most typically does is surprise us. 

Ah, we think we know—until something awakens out of an unknown depth and changes our lives in an instant.  Last week I spoke of Mircea Eliade’s idea of hierophanies, sudden epiphanies of the sacred:  the bush that suddenly burns and talks, the angel who announces that the child in your womb is the God who fashioned the galaxies, shaped them like glowing snowballs.  It happens in love as well, as the medieval Courtly Love tradition well knew.  Dante speaks of the moment he met and fell in love with Beatrice—the same moment—as a vita nuova, a new life, a phrase usually referring to religious conversion.  Some poets, perhaps Rilke most spectacularly, operate by being enraptured, seized by a power that causes verse to pour out of them after years of dry silence.  But even we lesser writers know the experience of works that simply come, arrive full blown out of nowhere.  Sometimes a single line simply occurs, drops into a stubborn blank where a line needs to be, and turns into the best line in the poem.  The mysterious power may demand changes, not just additions.  You had planned that the work was going here, but, no, you are firmly informed that it needs to go here.  Both comedy and tragedy exemplify Aristotle’s idea of anagnorisis, or recognition.  The plot takes a twist, as if something were manipulating from behind the scenes, and a terrible mess turns into a happy ending, or a cloudless sky darkens with the destructive storm of a tragedy.  These twists produce the lightning flash of recognition, whether in the characters, the audience, or both.  People learn—but they are caught by surprise by something that enters the picture from outside the framework of their ordinary reality.

This is the only kind of evidence there is for the existence of something towards which we move as we travel towards death.  It is, of course, not “evidence” at all.  The wise attitude towards such intimations is “learned ignorance,” an openness based on the humility that concedes there is something it does not know but which has the capacity to smash our carefully constructed sense of identity and pull us, like a midwife, into another world. 

Reference

Frye, Northrop.  “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism.” In Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology.  Harcourt Brace.  218-27.  Also in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature.  Edited by Glen Robert Gill.  Volume 29 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press.  54-73.