Being Old

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Life after life

[This is reposted from Hilarie Cutler’s Just Hilarie]

Amongst my parent’s generation, there were a few men who, though they had reached the age when they could retire, they didn’t. Their wives had retired already, if they had worked, but not these few men. Their workplace was still willing to have them even though they might have passed their best before date. I assume they must have liked their jobs enough to keep working even when they didn’t need to. My parents retired as soon as they were old enough to do so, leaving behind them jobs that were just jobs and looked forward to doing something that they really wanted to do. But my parent’s friend continued working and kept on traveling to his job every day. If you asked him why he continued to take the hour and a half bus ride in to the city from the retirement community he had recently moved to, leaving behind wife and new friends, he would stare at you with a look on his face of incomprehension. Finally, he said, in a very quiet tone of voice, “If I retire, I am afraid that I will die.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He was serious. He was sure that if he should stop working, the next day or week or month after his retirement party, he would die…of something. He eventually did retire. He and his wife got to spend more time with their kids and grandchildren. They traveled a bit together. They spent time at the clubhouse of their retirement community. And eventually in the fullness of time, his wife died and soon after so did he.

I have worked since I was about 17 – nothing serious until I was about 25, when I got my first job in the field that I had studied in college. Since then I have managed to support myself as an Art Director, Illustrator, Production manager, Board artist, Speaker support slide maker, Website designer, Powerpoint designer, magazine designer and in general, whatever one can do in the commercial art field. I have never needed the typing skills my mother insisted I acquire to help put food on my table – which is a good thing since my typing skills are really not all that much to write home about.

But all that professional working life is now 7 years behind me…and I am definitely retired. Am I dead yet?

I am not completely without things to do. I have 2 pro bono clients for whom I volunteer my skills and knowledge. I basically work for free now. But I get a pension, so I’m OK.

One of these groups, a Writers Festival, thinks I’m great. They love what I do for them. They are fun to work with. The project is something I am also interested in. I feel like I am doing a good job for them. But that little nagging voice that always lives in the back of my head says, “Of course they like you. You are free.” But the important thing is mostly they listen to my suggestions and often do what I suggest. That satisfies my control freak tendencies. So I’m OK.

The other group is a Jewish group working to bring Reform Judaism to Stockholm. It is a group that I have been involved with since before I retired – almost 2 decades, actually – a long time. I feel I know most of those people well. We have been on on the same board of directors together for so long that many of them have become friends. There are a lot of tasks on that board that I can not do. No one in their right mind would ask me to take the meeting minutes – the mishmash of swenglish would be illegible. Neither would I be useful to do anything in regards to religious tasks for my knowledge of such things is extremely superficial, a la carte and personal. To be the contact with the greater Jewish community is also something I would not be well suited to due to my poor comprehension of how Swedish society works and my latent phone fear. My only real usefulness lies in my years of work experience as a graphic designer. So that is what I have been on the board – a graphic designer. I designed their logo, I designed the now very out of date website and made a new one in WordPress. I make whatever graphics they need for promoting the group. And I try to maintain the look of the brand. These are things I know how to do. These are things I have experience in doing. With this group I feel like I am doing something important. So I’m OK.

Unlike my parent’s friend, my concern about my post-working life – and my fear – is metaphorical. I am still walking around. I am still breathing. I am not worried – at least not too much, that I will imminently drop dead any minute now. But…am I still alive? Do I still have worth? Does what I know have any value? And why aren’t people doing what I tell them?

Hilarie’s Strawberries

In the summers, I have been spending most of my time at our country house with my husband. We have filled our planters with topsoil and I have bought plants to grow there. There are 3 requirements I insist on for any plants I might bring home: The plant has to be an almost indestructible perennial and need very little care from me, the plant has to have flowers, and finally if it has a wonderful scent that’s great. I have planted two small lilac bushes, 3 mock orange bushes, a flowering bush called Ölandstok in Swedish and two strawberry plants.  I also planted 3 clematis plants to climb up the wall behind the planters. So far none of my plants have died yet and this year one of the lilac bushes had wonderful, scented flowers and my strawberry plant had strawberries. I spend a lot of time looking at these plants. This seems to be my new thing-to-do. It seems to pacify my anxiety about what I am doing with my post-work life. For the moment at least.

I guess with my two pro bono “jobs” and my green, planted friends, I have found my life after my life. I hope, as I work to keep all of these things alive, they will also keep me alive.

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“The Advantage of getting old…

… is having no future.”

Carl-Göran Ekerwald

This quotation, translated from the Swedish, is from an article in Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily newspaper. Journalist Christian Dyresjö interviewed writer Carl-Göran Ekerwald upon his having published The Advantage of Getting Old, the most recent of many volumes of writing in the 100 years of Ekerwald’s life.

Dyresö elicited many observations about life and death from Ekerwald, some of which I show here (the full article, in Swedish, can be read under this link: https://www.dn.se/kultur/carl-goran-ekerwald-fordelen-med-att-bli-gammal-ar-att-inte-ha-nagon-framtid/ ).

“I am prepared to quit at any time. Now that we’re here talking would be perfectly fine. When the thunder passes, I sit out here and hold my chest up to the sky and say ‘Here, come lightning’…”

Ekerwald lives in a village near Knivsta, between Stockholm, and Uppsala to the north. His home “is a red one-story cottage with white knots and a balcony. In the house next door, one of the grandchildren has moved in with his family. Two of the great-grandchildren often play in the shared garden, which Ekerwald overlooks from the balcony. On the other side of the road lives his daughter.”

Some excerpts, quotations, from the article:

  • The advantage of getting old is that every day is a treasure. Without obligations, without coercion. A life in complete freedom.
  • (I have a writer friend who) believes that all Swedes who died would be reborn in India, “to learn how to know”. When the day comes, we can meet him in the non-being. I don’t know, I’m not worried, I’ll allow myself to be amazed and see what happens.
  • Some die when they sit and shit so it’s dangerous if you exert yourself too violently. But it will come as it will. I accept it. It will be a liberation.

Since the publication of his first work in 1959, Elden och Fågelungen, Ekerwald has published one book per year, on average: novels about small-town life, poems about love and relationships, biographies of Goethe, Nietzsche and Shakespeare, as well as a number of articles and translations. He counts as one of his greatest achievements his introductions in the “Persian Anthology”, a collection of Eric Hermelin’s translations of Persian poetry (1976).

Ekerwald says that God does not exist. “If God existed, we would have killed him long ago–man is like that” Yet, he says that the Bible is one his favorite books, along with the Koran (Quran). He quotes Augustinus, thus: “He who does not know God knows him best,” and names the medieval Persian poet Rumi as his “spiritual food.”

His advice to aspiring writers: “Don’t try too hard or plan too much. If you set goals, there is a big risk you will not be satisfied when you reach them. Avoid vain pursuit.

Ekerwald was married to Anna Westerberg for 69 years. In her last ten years Anna was affected by ‘Alzheimer’s.’ Ekerwald thinks is inappropriate to call dementia a ‘disease’. “It’s a completely natural human condition, like a flower that withers. The withered state is also a state. We should have a greater understanding that we have different forms of life. Being ‘normal’ is a way of life; getting old is another way of life, not a disease. You can be healthy even if demented.”

“Life itself is a contradiction… all that is going on is remarkable, instructive, difficult to understand. You can’t see any intention or meaning… we must consider ourselves as plants, as animals, and that’s all.”

In his latest book, mentioned at the top, Ekerwald tells us what the life of a future 100-year-old looks like. “I’m ready to quit at any time. When we sit here and talk would be perfectly fine.”

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Permissions were obtained from the Culture Editor of Dagens Nyheter and from journalist Christian Dyresjö, the interviewer. Photo by Thomas Karlson (edited)

 

 

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My Latest Letter to Fred (may he RIP)

Fred Pape died seven years ago. He and I exchanged around 300 letters with each other over our later lives. After his death I couldn’t stop writing to him for around 18 months. I still write the occasional letter, which is a way to maintain a diary or memoir.

I herewith share an edited version of my latest letter

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Saturday, 17 September 2022

Eh, Fred,

Last missive was Monday, January 25, 2021.

I re-read what I had then written and find that the needle hasn’t moved very much, except that the Wuhan Flu is effectively behind us, and we are free to move at will. I will get shot #5(!) within the month ahead, just before I leave for a trip to the US&A to visit Andrea and Greg, (my daughter in Phoenix, Arizona and my son in Medford, Oregon).

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The ‘Big Blank‘ is still ahead of me at, now, age 85. What does the future hold, and so what?

I am evermore inclined to regard my universe (that which I perceive and imagine) as do the folks imbued with certain Eastern Ways: an illusion. Maya is one name for this:

maya, (Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion”) a fundamental concept in Hindu philosophy, notably in the Advaita (Nondualist) school of Vedanta. Maya originally denoted the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion. By extension, it later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real. For the Nondualists, maya is thus that cosmic force that presents the infinite brahman (the supreme being) as the finite phenomenal world. Maya is reflected on the individual level by human ignorance (ajnana) of the real nature of the self, which is mistaken for the empirical ego but which is in reality identical with brahman. (Wikipedia)

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Zen Buddhism, as you know, shows us that emptiness is form/form is emptiness.

I’m currently reading K. by Roberto Calasso. Here is a précis of the book:

What are Kafka’s fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka’s work to discover why K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–are so radically different from any other character in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, is K. The culmination of Calasso’s lifelong fascination with Kafka’s work, K. is also an unprecedented consideration of the mystery of Kafka himself.

My inexpert summary of one element presented in the book: no thing is what it seems simply to be, connected as any thing (any seeming-‘thing’) is on higher and lower planes with concentric circles of existence which ultimately cancel each other out or combine into a mythic whole.

What do I get from all this reading and pondering? A vague feeling of non-ordinariness. A feeling/sensation of the consciousness that there is a curtain between me and what may or may not be reality that I could easily push aside with a bit more effort than I have heretofore exerted. I seem not to be in a hurry to push the curtain aside, but the curtain seems ever more transparent so the pushing aside may not be necessary.

An inhibiting force, mild but present, is my feeling that should the curtain disappear, I may find that my relationships with other people may change in ways that I would currently find uncomfortable, undesirable.

I have been reading, also, the writings and biographies of the “Beat” poets and writers who emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many of them pursued ‘enlightenment’ in India and Japan, and through psychoactive drugs. Perhaps some succeeded (I’m thinking primarily of Gary Snyder).

I have thought about this notion quite a bit and have the opinion that one doesn’t search for it, but one grows into the world where it may find you. There is too much ego in such a search. I remind myself of the Zen proverb: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Well, Fred, this letter has transformed into a blog article.

Thanks for listening.

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What to do with the rest of my life?

My father lived until a few days past his eighty-seventh birthday.

I am now 84, but actuarial tables suggest that, barring accident and reversion to past bad behavior, I could possibly achieve age 97.

I feel perfectly well. I am quite fit and healthy.
But I am a serious fellow, always have been,
And it seems time to set a general course for my remaining years.

There is a growing dissatisfaction with the way things are going.
I am too much aware of all the ills and distresses of the world.
These have always been with us, but now we have countless sources,
Filling unlimited, unavoidable spaces and pages
With all the terrors and injustices in the world,
And perorations on how things should otherwise be,
And what you and I should do about them.

Among his many admirable and a few frightening ways,
My father was someone who drank in all the injustices of the world,
Spewing vitriol around his home about the evil perpetrators.
But he tried to do something to ease his Weltschmerz,
A word his family often heard.

He did some creditable, palpable things in pursuit of Justice,
Something the gods of the Ancient Greeks reckoned was of paramount importance.
And Dad was, in essence, an Ancient Greek.
It was his mother’s desire and plan for him.

Conrad Pavellas Cleaning up the front yard Nepo Drive, San Jose Around 1995

Conrad Pavellas
Cleaning up the front yard
Nepo Drive, San Jose, 1995

But, in his final years, he turned to his garden, and to music, which was always with him for as long as his failing hearing would allow. Ludvig van Beethoven was his lifelong hero. There was always a picture of Beethoven’s scowling visage in his home.

I, too, now find the garden a place where a great Nothing happens. But, musically, I am more in tune with Johannes Brahms.

I am, in many ways, my father’s heir,
As Brahms was Beethoven’s heir.
But Johannes didn’t try to change the world;
He described it, poignantly.

Brahms was serious, and he was melancholy.
It was not a hopeless melancholy, for there is much joy
And power throughout his works.

Beethoven fought the Fates;
Brahms accepted them.

I spent much of my working life trying to make things right,
Sometimes succeeding.
But as time progressed, these efforts became exercises
In personal survival.

I have survived well into the years designated for Senior Citizens.
Some years before this attainment
I began writing about the world that I saw,
In poems and essays, and writings such as this.

I began reading all the books my father wished I had read, and more.
I began collecting and listening to all the music my father and I listened to,
And more.

I joined a book circle and remain with it, our meetings now ‘online’.
I started weblogs in which I discussed fiction and non-fiction books.
I was accepted into a writing group and retain many friends from this association.
I started to write memoirs, and stories, and novels, as well as poems and essays,
Many of which I published in my weblogs.
I self-published small volumes of short writings, mostly poems.

Now I am here.

One paragraph in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has stayed with me since 1975, an edited version of which is:

If we are going to make the world a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do.  Programs of a political nature can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right.  The social values are right only if individual values are right.  The place to improve the world is first within one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.  Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind.  I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.  This has more lasting value.

Here is what I will do:

  • I will avoid “The News” as much as is possible.
  • I will let poetry and other short creative writings happen.
  • I now release myself from expectations regarding my two-and-a-half novels which are “in the drawer.”
  • I will continue, during the seasons which allow it, to work in the garden with Eva, a place where everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, is good.
  • I will continue to be with family and friends, as much as the current pandemic will allow, for without them, well…
  • Finally, I will continue to obey, as I have since reaching real adulthood, the universal imperative: “Clean up your own mess!”