Out of Time (24 page)

Grief, mourning, loss, even exhaustion or boredom, let alone weakness, passivity or dependence, make no appearance in this book: amortals deal with mortality by ignoring it. When this is no longer possible, they are likely to seek to control death as well, by checking out assisted suicide: ‘In our assumptions of agelessness and blindness towards age, we criss-cross a fine line between resilience and denial, optimism and absurdity’ (261).

Mayer is aware of the commercial side of this quest for agelessness, and understands the association between the pervasive emphasis on self-determination and the contemporary rejection of calls upon the public purse to provide a better existence for elderly dependent people in line with the continuing attenuation of welfare provision in the ‘developed’ world. However, the aggressiveness of market capitalism, and all those exploited and ignored by the pursuit of profit – the majority of the world’s population – is completely outside her frame of reference. She is vaguely knowing about, if largely uncritical of, the
reigning ideology of neo-liberalism: ‘Amortality is a product of a world that has normalized certain narcissistic traits, favours individualism over collectivism, has lost faith in God and public life’ (262). Actually, even religion itself is all too easily made to service corporate capital in much of the USA, where it is the worship of God, rather than any support for or from the state, which draws together forms of collectivity beyond family and workplace. Religious faith substitutes itself for belief in public life, as evident in the paradoxically public orchestration of the populist Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement, with its extreme hostility towards any forms of state provision or redistribution.

It’s easy enough to see the dangers of that oscillation between optimism and absurdity, resilience and denial, in the desire for agelessness. Flaunting only confidence, strength and autonomy, when life is inevitably full of losses and sorrows, leaves those who are furthest from the comforts, cosmetic manipulations and elixirs that money can buy all the more subject to humiliation and abuse for failing to conceal the signs of ageing. In its repudiation of actual ageing, striving for agelessness is thus in one sense a rejection of life and collectivity. It is not just that such relentless buoyancy allows no space for neediness and dependence; it is also quintessentially shallow, self-centred and elitist in its refusal to engage with the suffering and helplessness of others. ‘Experience consists of experiencing that which one does not wish to experience’ is an aphorism that Freud quoted playfully in his book on jokes.
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It is a form of imaginative impoverishment to refuse to accept the tragic. Freud was surely right to point out that forms of denial operate in most of us, much of the time, in our daily pursuit of personal happiness. Nevertheless, as I will explore later in this chapter and the next, unless we choose unremittingly to close our eyes to the world
around us, we need to acknowledge that loss, mourning and grief are inevitable aspects of a full and creative life.

Being in Time

What does it mean to feel in time with time? I can remember occasionally feeling this, usually when I was caught up in something much bigger than myself. What was so exciting about becoming a part of women’s liberation as the 1970s kicked off was this sense of immersion in something outside of oneself, a collective identity that felt like it might leave its mark on history. However, the problem with such moments of high collectivity, whether in politics or any other domain, is that they will soon enough be outflanked or disregarded, as new political or aesthetic avant-gardes jostle them for space. A more fashionable location is always waiting, eager to insist upon its own moment of articulation. Moving from the public to the personal domain, instances of true pleasure and passion are usually those in which we manage to escape our gloomy or restless selves, to become completely immersed in something else: whether in absorbing work, imagined or actual fulfilment of sexual desire, in thrall to the beauty of a landscape or other visual delights, captivated by music, or merely caught up in the enjoyment of friends, family, dinner-table conversation – whatever takes us out of the everyday into something else. Even in solitude, those most lyrical about the joys of chosen silence are usually in search of transcendental or sublime states of meditation and arousal, which may be experienced as the necessary precondition for creativity: ‘one can never be alone enough when one writes … there can never be enough silence around
one when one writes … even night is not night enough’, Kafka declared.
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What I am suggesting is that the time we feel most at one with the world is often when we are in a sense
least
our ordinary selves. Paradoxically, being in time with time in these ways means stepping outside of normal temporal patterns, stepping outside ourselves. When the feminist writer, Sara Maitland, for instance, went in search of solitude in her fifties, adopting a reclusive life in Galloway – the landscape of her childhood in south-west Scotland – she recorded the pleasures and joys of the complete silence she found in the depth of its moors or on the peaks of its mountains, surveying the landscapes and skies she had always loved. Combining her treks with prayer, meditation and other rituals, she felt she was breaking down her old self-narratives, creating a new porousness or openness to the world beyond the bounded life she had earlier struggled to maintain. This was not in her view an escape from her former love of noisy sociability, family and friends; these old desires remained with her, alongside her need for silence. It was simply that she was able to add a new dimension in her embrace of the various enjoyments of solitude. She tries to capture all this in
A Book of Silence
, a text she closes with the thought: ‘Terror and risk walk hand in hand with beauty. There is terror, there is beauty and there is nothing else … The rest, I hope, is silence.’
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Clearly, there is an alternative sense of time, perhaps better seen as a type of timelessness, which people describe when they feel most at one with the world. This is certainly a feeling not confined to or perhaps even particularly prevalent in the young, eager to display forms of individuality in social contexts that they hope will convey their independence, autonomy and agency. We are more at the mercy of dates and deadlines
in projects of personal growth and achievement, whatever our age. Accordingly, some of those more attentive to the experience of ageing, such as Ruth Ray in
Endnotes
, have suggested that the rhetoric of life-long self-building is lacking in imagination, especially so when Ray found it guiding the policies operating in nursing homes in the USA, which set out to keep old people as ‘busy’ as possible. Adding to the observations of another American feminist, Margaret Cruikshank, Ray described this ‘busy ethic’ as contrary to the desires many older people expressed. Instead, they spoke of a need for solitude and meditation, although within spaces where they could feel secure, respected and loved.
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The wish to escape the self and its unremitting intellectual goals was also what Eve Sedgwick mentioned when she wrote of the joys she found in poetry, textile art and Buddhism, as she faced up to the mortal fears and debilities of cancer in her middle age.
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There are philosophical routes as well as spiritual ones that suggest more complicated understandings of our relationship to time. In his densely abstract compendium on modern time-consciousness, British philosopher Peter Osborne argued that everyday life is constructed through repetitive cultural practices that valorize only the new. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin, Osborne concludes that in the accelerating pace of modernity the ‘new’ that is always sought after is actually better seen, like fashion or other forms of commodification, as an endless recycling of ‘the ever-always-the-same’.
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Such a conception of time as the fleeting moment that is always impatiently urging us into the future also exists in stark contrast with the temporal patterns evident in Freud’s psychoanalytic metapsychology of unconscious desire and fantasy. For Freud, unconscious processes remain in themselves ‘timeless’, displaying a life-long
indifference to the forms of temporality emblematic of capitalist modernity.
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As we saw in the opening chapter, it is this timelessness of the unconscious, the persistence of the psychic past within the present, which ensures that there will always be some sense of temporal vertigo within our experiences of ageing. For if we are never simply our chronological age, we will all nevertheless, one way and another, be kept aware that we are growing old – though for some the effects will be far harsher than for others. Meanwhile, the practices that allow us most easily to acknowledge ageing and old age are those most at odds with exhortations to seize each passing moment and the opportunities it offers for making fresh plans for the future. They are thus at odds with the temporal tunes of our time, usually disdainful of tradition and the wisdom of elders, and thereby fostering disavowal of the experiences of ageing, even when promoting notions of ‘ageing well’. In contrast, the ruminations most attentive to ageing include much pondering over all the ways the past has impacted upon the present, or alternatively perhaps reflecting upon how fast things change, often seeming to leave little enduring trace.

Contemplating ageing might include mourning the roads not taken. Or more contentedly, it might involve finding pleasure in the reveries of the moment, as if we might linger there forever, indifferent to the passage of time. For sure, the border between the approach of old age and old age itself is fluid, in general more dependent on our social and economic situation than on genetic inheritance or personal attention to health and fitness. Yet wherever we situate ourselves on the continuum of old age, it is a time when each day brings us more to look back on than to look forward to. By late middle age, we know far
more about the past than we will ever know of the future. This may give us a certain freedom from projects of self-making, though hardly total escape from pondering how one should live. We know that time seems to speed up as we age. The most convincing explanation of this sense of temporal acceleration is that in childhood and youth each new day brings the excitement of genuine novelty, making the days seem longer (especially in retrospect), while as we age routine and repetition collapse the weeks and months into each other, year on year. This is also why our memories of youth appear more vivid and enduring.
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Acknowledging old age means knowing that we are unlikely to remain the autonomous, independent and future-oriented individuals most of us once liked to imagine we were, and in Western cultures are encouraged to think we should remain. It also includes, when we can manage it, finding ways of facing up to loss, and mortality, ideally in a manner we can share with others.

Ruptures and Reckonings

I have heard it said that those who most mourn their youth are more likely to be people who felt confident, loved and attractive when younger. Whatever the pitfalls and losses of ageing they face, those recalling more unhappy feelings about their younger years may therefore have little cause to grieve the passing of youth. One friend who suggested this insists she herself has little regret, despite suffering from the most serious of incapacitating diseases for the last twenty years, since reaching early middle age. The relevant statistics on ‘wellbeing’ partially confirm the view that people can become happier once
safely past middle age. Unsurprisingly, however, these empirical studies offer a welter of inconsistencies depending on the wording and particular methodology of the information being solicited. For instance, overall, women are said to be slightly happier than men, and yet women are generally more prone to depression than men.
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Nevertheless, over the last few years the ‘happiness’ studies I have already mentioned report a U-turn relating to happiness and ageing. They present evidence for a serious global dip in wellbeing in mid-life, when people are in their forties and fifties, and then an upward surge in feelings of acceptance and wellbeing from the late fifties.
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The researchers explain their accounts of increasing happiness coming after middle-aged misery in terms of people becoming less ambitious and angry about disappointments in life, more tolerant and accepting of any misfortune. Whether a person’s verbal report of increasing tolerance of life and its limits can be equated with the sense of leading a fulfilled life, however, takes us down philosophical pathways that cannot be further explored by these studies themselves. Yet it is surely at least pertinent to say that individual lives, even at the best of times, are likely to be a messy mix of satisfactions and frustrations, pleasures and pains, that cannot but be flattened out if we are forced to sum them up on ‘happiness’ scales telling us that on average people entering old age complain less about their lot in life. It seems old people do come to expect less, but it is surely a moot point if that should be our definition of ‘happiness’, or indeed of any notion of the ‘good life’.

From whatever perspective we look at ageing, however, it is generally agreed that at least for many people mid-life brings with it differing levels of mourning for the loss of what is recalled at this time as the greater physical attractiveness,
energy or exuberance of their youth. Yet this mourning for our youth, in particular when it is for lost beauty, is a regret for something most of us did not experience ourselves as owning at the time we supposedly possessed it. This is what the feminist scholar and poet Denise Riley intriguingly calls a form of ‘retrospective identification’: ‘ “Yes, I suppose in the past I must have been beautiful, as people used to say, although at the time I never saw it.” ’
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