Fractal Aging

One characteristic of reaching advanced age is that the patterns have become all too familiar. Not that we know much. Nobody really does. But any effort to dig deeply into the details of something will in old age predictably reveal patterns already encountered numerous times before. That sentiment is echoed in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” So how old was Solomon—assuming he dictated his wisdom in advancing age? Wikipedia grants him 80 years but without presenting any evidence for that; the Jewish Virtual Library scatters some dates from which I derive maximally 69. In any case, old enough—especially if you had circa 1,000 wives…

Thinking about this feeling—that “same old” feeling—brings to mind tracing, say, a Mandelbrot or Julia fractal image to ever greater levels of magnification, and while the vistas keep changing and can be beautiful, interesting, even mesmerizing, the patterns remain the same.

For this reason alone—ignoring the fact that with advancing age the body gradual weakens, stiffens, hardens—at my age the notion of extending life beyond the standard three-score and ten or, these days, fourscore, is not all that attractive. And supposing science could deliver augmentations, let me call them, so that we could live to be two hundred, three hundred while yet retaining bodies that function as they do in their late forties, early fifties, why, the prospects would not be all that attractive. That would mean working for many more decades with all that that implies for the ordinary human: layoffs, new managements, reorgs, off-sites, airports, committee-meetings, deadlines, budgets, on and blessed on. That same old would soon take on a quite toxic flavor; life would become quite burdensome. And a feature of that future society would be, it seems to me, that the majority of deaths in that evil future would be by suicide. A sci-fi story lurks here, come to think of it, but, come to thinks of it, I’ve already been there and done that.

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The Julia set image courtesy of Wikipedia, by someone called Eequor. Link.

Blank Simian Rote

A reviewer in the London Review of Books, Glen Newey, wrote in the March 2012 issue words I found refreshingly on point—although somewhat removed from the book he was reviewing, one dealing with human failures in the realm of statistical inference. Here is the passage that caught my eye:

Human existence is an acquired taste, and many of us get through it with the aid of what Vladimir in Waiting for Godot calls the “great deadener”. Blank simian rote—the round of feeding, grooming, ablution, slack-jawed vacancy—serves to block out tracts of time that might otherwise get colonized by anxious thought.

The first sentence is a bull’s eye, in a way. I don’t know Mr. Newey’s own stance on cosmology, but in mine that sentence is descriptive—because I don’t think that we belong here. And “blank simian rote” will bounce around in my own slack-jawed vacancy for a bit yet, bringing a little smile—as it has now for a few days since reading the phrase. I have this maddening habit of sometimes becoming aware of people’s ears when I watch TV; the situation is always one of intellectual exchange, interviews, or speakers behind a podium, usually on C-Span. The content is abstract, in other words, but I’m suddenly fixated on the ears. And yes, I am. I’m seeing a simian holding forth learnedly on some global subject of complexity. We find ourselves in bodies, sort of wake up in them. And when I watch little babies, it’s quite apparent that they’re surprised, baffled, and exploring what this thing is, meaning their little hands and little legs and toes. And the acquisition of the habit happens quite naturally.

Then it goes on for a while—make that decades—before a kind of reversal of that process begins. At minimum you notice that people have ears—and in the ultra-sophisticated world of abstraction and high technology, with ritual garments and blow-dried hair or sculpted coiffeurs more or less sublimating the underlying ape, only the ears remain as drastic reminders of what we are beneath the highfaluting reasoning that vibrates the air that the ears manage to detect and then to signal inward by incredibly sophisticated bio-technology until neuron servers make it audible to the mind—a mind that acquired a taste, as it were, for human existence—and then with age, is beginning to lose the habit. Because “seeing ears” is just the beginning.

Another of my symptoms, anyway, showing that the process is reversible, is when I hear of 70 or 80 or 90 year-olds praised to the heavens for their heroic fight, usually against cancer. And I wonder why it is so heroic to keep holding on, to the bitter end, when the ape just wants to lie down and die. My reviewer tells me why; they resisted being colonized by anxious thought. In them, evidently, the blank simian rote is still all right. The heroes are still hanging on; evidently they didn’t spend much time in thought and wonder, wonder about who they really are and what they’re really doing here. If they had they wouldn’t fight so hard when the end comes knocking on the door. They would’ve been waiting for Godot, not fearing the encounter.

A lifetime of thought, however, and not always anxious thought, either, produces insights that really help as the trip to the Garden of Simia begins to draw to its close. One can have a fair amount of fun, too—not least studying people’s ears. And, by the way, you can’t get away from them. Your own are there in the mirror to tell you that you too have a pair. Then, if you’re a man, you envy women who can hide them so well. Just checking on the spelling of the word “coiffeur” just now, I am looking on my screen, to the right, at a page featuring what is called Coiffeur D’Elegance. It shows five lovely ladies’ hairdos—and not an ear in sight.

The Old Lady and the Lab

There is a sense in which human beings resemble plants and molting insects. Moths, butterflies come to mind: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. If all goes according to design, in advancing age a transformation comes, in some cases almost visible.

I knew an old lady just blocks north of here; I got to know her on my walks. I’d pass her house about the same time every other day about the time when she took an old, old dog, a lab as ancient as she was, on its very short, very slow walk. At one time I’d stopped to talk, and after that we exchanged a few words every time, and over the period of a year or so I saw the strange process of her “detachment” from this life. She was exceedingly thin, frail, almost translucent—translucent enough so that I could almost see her spirit shining through—and it seemed like a light to me, especially brilliant in her eyes—and each time we parted and I marched on, I thought to myself: “She’s almost done. Almost done.” She was an ordinary, simple woman. Our exchanges turned on weather, seasons, plants, the grass. But I sensed a quality in her that transcended all of that.

We can learn many things by intellect, reflection, observation. But to have the inner, visceral, experience of it takes its own time. Odd word, that, visceral. There’s nothing more physical, material than our viscera—yet what I means is something quite different. The feel of this process of gradual detachment has the character of sensation, but it isn’t physical, quite the contrary. By “visceral” I mean something direct, experienced—not the abstract emptiness of concepts.

Long before books, culture, ideologies, philosophies, arts, sciences, religions—long before empires of rhyme and indies of calculus (Nabokov)—humanity already passed through this strange process of growth in which the body itself contained the winged creature and caused it mysteriously to develop into a being that could take to the skies. The old lady I knew—and yes, she did pass on—had little actual knowledge or contact with these highfalutin realms, but the process of life itself had worked on her—and she on herself—just living and being and participating in the ordinary chores of ordinary life. Yet at the end she was translucent and illuminated.