Out of Time (6 page)

Similar reflections on the lively, unpredictable resources of memory, summoning up lifetimes of commitments and evasions, joys and losses, hopes and humiliations, have been increasingly evident of late in the memoirs of a small but growing number of older authors, accompanying the burgeoning interest in autobiography, and related literary criticism. In her best-selling text,
Somewhere towards the End
, Diana Athill, at eighty-one, reported that for a variety of reasons, especially the success of her writing in old age, she had managed to enjoy the return of some of ‘the comfortable warmth of early youth’, when she
could sometimes feel pleased with herself: ‘If this is smugness it is a far more comfortable state to be in than its opposite.’
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Old age and pleasure – this is not a combination that we often see, although their coupling will appear and disappear in a variety of ways in the pages ahead.

The idea of us all having multiple and internally divided selves is neither new, nor restricted to ageing. However, the psychic resources it can offer seem to me particularly important for refiguring our ageing selves. Even when we may want to be, we are never entirely removed from who or what we have been, when that demanding, self-centred, long-forgotten infant might reappear at any moment, whether in intimate relations, in our dreams or, more embarrassingly, in public life, where her manifestation is usually most unwelcome. At other times, the distant playfulness and pleasures of childhood can sneak out arousing far less suspicion, indeed at the very best of times producing mutual delight. As many have noticed, infantile pleasures can resurface, for instance, in the special affinity grandparents often exhibit playing with their grandchildren, perhaps in ways they never managed with their own children, when responsible adulthood was a status they were still struggling hard to achieve. At seventy-three, Doris Lessing summed up this feeling in an article for the
Sunday Times
: ‘The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.’
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This too is a simplification, but it suggests how much creative work there is to be done in thinking about the paradoxes of ageing.

Seeing Differently

Paying more attention to the radical ambiguities of old age, trying to glimpse the appearance and disappearances of the many buried, or half-buried selves, perhaps better seen simply as continuities and discontinuities over a lifetime, can help to subvert the most familiar typecasting of ageing. This is usually dismal, whatever the official talk of ‘ageing well’. Though attitudes to old age vary considerably across time and place, they are rarely free from dread, disgust and other discriminatory perceptions. Classically, from the days of ancient Greece or Rome to the present, those who did write more positively of old age spoke of it as a time of potential serenity, all passion spent, acclaiming the greater tolerance, personal acceptance, surviving dignity of ageing men and women, although it was men, in the past, who were the main focus of such thoughts. Yet, especially recently, contrasting accounts of old age are more widely and vividly aired. These might echo Dylan Thomas’ now classic poetic rage at the ‘dying of the light’, or, more intriguingly, engage with the posthumously published reflections on ‘late style’ penned by the eminent literary critic Edward Said in his final years, when he was already battling against the leukaemia from which he died, aged sixty-seven.

Said’s writing explores not the quiet tolerance and self-acceptance of old age, but rather the intransigence, difficulties and contradictions evident in the aesthetic productions of certain ageing artists, writers and composers.
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Aesthetically talented or not, from where I look out on the world I hear many angry ageing voices displaying little resignation, but instead persistently determined to keep right on challenging a world still determinedly built around the preservation of injustice and
inequalities, near and far. I return to this theme often, but here I will just mention what I notice in relation to one of the sites of struggle I have been engaged with lately – opposition to Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. In May 2010 it was a few women in their seventies and eighties who were most active in commissioning the first six-ship flotilla which, with many veteran activists on board, and against all odds, vainly attempted to break through the continuing barricades cutting Gaza off from the rest of the world.
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Despite the violent encounter with Israeli soldiers that ensued, which resulted in nine deaths on one of the boats in the first flotilla, five months later another small boat headed up by Jewish people from the UK set sail with the same goal. On board, the average age of the passengers and crew was over sixty. Older people, in particular, have often engaged themselves in a broad range of politics, at the forefront of community activist movements, as the writer and scholar Temma Kaplan recorded in her account of diverse grass-roots struggles around the world.
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I know that in old age the pathways back to experiencing the emotions and engagements of youth can be blocked, or treacherous: the playfulness, comforts and recognition hopefully at least sometimes provided in intimacies and friendships may elude us; the political passions that perhaps once animated much of our waking hours may be less easy to express, or even retain. Hard times, hard feelings, extreme physical or mental deterioration can imprison people. However, when we are lucky, there are many ways in which our ageing minds are as busy as ever weaving together our memories, still dreaming, scheming, connecting, resisting and, in the process, sometimes regaining once more earlier ludic selves, even if, occasionally, only through tears of rage.

Something of this sentiment is evident as Anne Sexton imagines the thoughts of an old woman awakened in her nursing home, in a poem written shortly before her own suicide at forty-six: ‘What are you doing? Leave me alone! Can’t you see I’m dreaming? In a dream you are never eighty.’
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Throughout life, and not only in our dreams, the impact and messiness of psychic life, floating free from chronological time, enables a host of seemingly inappropriate aspirations and emotions to surface. More people today are commenting upon and trying to find ways of confronting our culture’s demoralizing lack of imagination in relation to ageing. One of them, the French scholar Anca Cristofovici has been engaged in commenting upon a host of art works that both reveal and also work to undermine the rigid masks of ageing that are clamped upon us, for instance by counterpoising one facial image upon another from differing ages. This leads her to conclude that there is no true older self, but only ‘permanently fluctuating relationships between younger and older selves’.
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This feels right to me. I know that I fluctuate all the time, and not only in the company of much younger friends, who at times enable me to experience once more much of the energy of youth; at other times, usually quite accidentally, they make me all too aware of the generational gaps between us.

Many of the themes I will be addressing in the pages that follow focus upon these fluctuating ties between younger and older selves, and the pleasures and miseries this can create. First of all I survey the way in which age groups are so routinely lined up against each other, with damaging consequences for everyone, but particularly the old. I then venture into the hazards of desire in old age, and the apparently contrasting situation of ageing men compared with ageing women. By and
large men see themselves faced with the challenge of how to keep desire visibly alive, many seeking assistance for maintaining the sexual potency of youth. Quite differently, women often appear to find it more convenient to eschew sexual passion altogether in old age, especially if and when they are living alone, though what exactly lies behind this gender contrast is in need of further elucidation. In looking out for ways of affirming old age I will be paying heed to the many ways in which older people generally, up to and including very old age, sometimes find ways of surviving the hurdles of humiliation and disregard they are likely to stumble upon. Here, women are more visible in the lead, their flags of resistance evident, when confronting the legendary aversion the ‘old woman’ has hitherto faced largely on her own.

The one thing that both young and old people, men and women alike, seem most to hate about the notion of old age is that it symbolizes forms of ‘dependency’. What is rarely culturally acknowledged, least of all in any imprints of masculinity, is that differing modes of dependence are essential to the human condition. From our very first breath, we only come into existence, and then acquire any kind of subjectivity at all, through our dependence on others. We are never truly the self-made, independent creatures our culture likes to celebrate, as in the karaoke and funeral favourite, ‘
My Way …
I did it my way’ (even though this self-absorbed song apparently remains the top favourite for funerals in the UK and is, disappointingly, seen as the most suitable epitaph for a life well lived).
⁷¹

Thus it is precisely our founding, and then life-long, dependence on others that many have argued makes its acknowledgement most unbearable, and therefore so routinely disavowed. For it threatens not just the vanities but also the
very substance of selfhood, often seen as requiring the enduring disavowal and hatred of dependency.
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I also suspect that the hidden stigma around ‘dependency’ was one of the main reasons the people interviewed by Paul Thompson so often insisted that they ‘do not feel old’.
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As we shall see, it is also why ‘old age’ is still largely seen – ironically, even amongst those people most eager to eliminate ageism – as something to be ‘transcended’ rather than in any way affirmed, if at all possible. A large survey of elderly Americans conducted in 2009 found not just a gap between actual age and the age people said they felt, but found that this disjuncture increased with age: most adults over fifty claimed to feel at least ten years younger than their chronological age, while a significant minority of those over sixty-five reported that they felt up to twenty years younger.
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It is surely our aversion to the cultural diminishment we believe ageing entails that lies behind that sense of distance from it.

Thus another theme in this book will involve looking again at issues of care and dependency, seeing the notion of ‘dependence’ as an intricate, interactive phenomenon, one in which carers in different ways may be both invested in and dependent upon the presence and the needs of those they care for, whatever their age or condition. However, the cultural framework of individualism has little time for notions such as this. Meanwhile, it is those who are already thinking differently about issues of care and dependency who are also most likely to describe ageing, and even very old age, as a time when we may well still be learning new things, deepening existing relationships and, if spared harsh material deprivation (which many, shamefully, will not be), continuing to savour life – though probably a little more slowly and often facing several new pitfalls.

Pursuing such thoughts, in this book I will not be singing the joys of ‘agelessness’, but rather listening out for alternative stories of ageing, confronting some of my own fears, as well as tackling the routine ‘jovial’ dismissal of ‘dementing oldies’.
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Acknowledging the habitually disavowed mutual dependence necessary for sustaining the human condition, while querying our cultural obsession with notions of ‘independence’, just might help us to see that those most disparaged in the circuit of human interdependence, or largely abandoned within it, call into question the humanity of all of us.

‘How old am I?’ is not a question we usually dare to ask aloud, except in jest. Soon after we learn to talk we come to know exactly how old we are. Today, however, I can easily find myself genuinely wondering exactly how old I am, lurching around between the decades, writing the wrong date on cheques. Ageing is still a topic that many hope to dismiss. Both my own fears as well as the defensiveness I hear all around me (‘you don’t look old’) confirm its unpopularity. Nevertheless, addressing old age is not as forbidden as it once was. In my experience, by the time we start reading that certain topics are unmentionable, we can be fairly certain that old taboos are already collapsing, often indeed that the floodgates are opening.

Simone de Beauvoir, whose voice travels along with this text, said that when in the 1960s she searched for books on the condition of the old she could find hardly any at all, a situation that encouraged her to write her own book on old age. This state of affairs is shifting. Starting up my computer today, I see an interview with the impressive, politically engaged actress Juliet Stevenson, now fifty-six. She is asked whether there are fewer parts for older actresses compared with older actors. We know the answer. But she is quite precise: ‘Yes, way fewer.
And it becomes increasingly difficult. As you go through life it gets more and more interesting and complicated, but the parts offered get more and more simple, and less complicated. That’s a battle we still have to fight.’
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It is a battle I want to join. Old age is no longer the condition that dare not speak its name, but we have a long way to go before we can joke that it is the identity that refuses to be silent.

2
Generational Warfare

‘What’s the matter with him?’ whispered Lenina. Her eyes were wide with horror and amazement. ‘He’s old, that’s all,’ Bernard answered as carelessly as he could. He too was startled; but he made an effort to seem unmoved.