Out of Time (36 page)

I had feared that old age might set in too late (because speaking physiologically it had only set in at sixty) and that in this way I might be cheated of what old age specifically has to offer. Fortunately, I was able to capture something of it. And certainly, it did bring happiness – indeed, if I had to choose between the two phases of life, I am truly not sure on which my choice would fall. For when one leaves erotic experience in the narrower sense, one is at the same time leaving a cul-de-sac, however marvelous it may be, where there is only room for two abreast; and one now enters upon a vast expanse – the expanse of which childhood too was a part and which for only a while we were bound to forget.
⁸⁸

That letter was a response to an earlier letter from Freud mentioned before, in which, although only five years her senior, and responding to ‘his dear indomitable’ friend’s birthday congratulations on his reaching seventy-one, Freud drew upon his love of Shakespeare to announce: ‘with me crabbed old age has arrived – a state of total disillusionment, whose sterility is comparable to a lunar landscape, an inner ice age’.
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In stark contrast, Salomé’s description of the joys of old age, ‘after leaving erotic experience in the narrower sense’, and returning to some of the joys of childhood, but with greater independence, is certainly appealing. Salomé’s own case, however, was surely unusual. In old age she grew closer to the husband she had married four decades earlier, in a relationship that was never apparently sexually consummated. Only after her mid-thirties did Salomé abandon her chaste but passionate intellectual friendships with men for a series of younger male lovers, first and most famously her two-and-a-half-year affair with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
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These relationships, which were always begun and ended on her own terms, made Salomé an exceptionally confident and independent woman for her time, or perhaps for any time, as she dismissed the physical depredations of ageing for the delights that could arrive in ways that were ‘new and unexpected’: ‘It is true that in all this the body, which in youth helped to build the bridges of love, grows constantly more troublesome, and remains so to the end, as an alien part of ourselves – confound it!’
⁹¹

Such sentiments are very much in keeping with the
zeitgeist
for ‘ageing well’, evident, for instance, in the mood portrayed by one of Britain’s iconic figures for acceptable old age, Joan Bakewell. Yet the contradictions remain. Launching her weekly column, ‘Just 70’, which ran for a few years in the
Guardian
as the twenty-first century kicked off, Bakewell asserted that, whatever your age, you are no older than you feel: ‘which’, she quickly announced, ‘is young’.
⁹²
Somehow, calmly accepting one’s age mutates again into barely ageing at all. The same light, ironic, self-mocking tone pervades the very successful magazine
The Oldie
, in which, for instance, one typical cartoon portrays a young woman introducing her boyfriend to an old man flaunting Mickey Mouse ears and absurd teenage clothing: ‘This is grandpa, he’s having a late mid-life crisis.’
⁹³

As I have said often enough, any source of optimism in old age requires a platform of economic security and wellbeing, one that in the foreseeable future will never be the preserve of all in old age, even less so as cut-backs in care facilities and threats to pension rights continue to undermine its possibility. Meanwhile, and more chillingly, the main way in which longevity is increasingly culturally registered, when it is not being airbrushed away as some enduring spirit of youthfulness, is coupled with disability. In a survey of the representation of old age in cinema in the twenty-first century, but especially that of old women, Sally Chivers argues that older people must be presented as disabled to be legible at all as ‘old’: ‘in the public imagination, disability exists separately from old age, but old age does not ever escape the stigma and restraints imposed upon disability’.
⁹⁴
Looking at a number of recent films, including
Iris
(2001),
A Song for Martin
(2001), and
Away from Her
(2006), Chivers suggests that in all of them the cognitively disabled body comes to represent ‘normative aging’.
⁹⁵
We can now add
The Iron Lady
(2011) to this list, in which Meryl Streep represented the old age of Margaret Thatcher.

There is thus clearly a very fine line to tread, and one I find hard to tread even at the close of this book, in trying to
acknowledge the actual vicissitudes of old age while also affirming its dignity and, at times, grace or even joyfulness. As I have mentioned, Beauvoir’s extensive research on the topic led her to conclude that the only way to age thoughtfully was to try to hold on to those things that have given life its meaning – friendships, group affinities, as well as former political, intellectual and creative endeavours or interests. This is a challenging task, at times impossible. Friends may die; political contexts change; creative challenges overwhelm us. However, Beauvoir is on firmer ground when she continues: ‘One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.’
⁹⁶

Here, at least, I feel I can gain some foothold. Another of my old mentors, Stuart Hall, addressing a rapt audience at the celebration of his eightieth birthday, closed with some of his thoughts on ageing. Since they summed up many of my own meditations on the subject, I later interviewed him. He began by saying that ‘everyone expects us to become wiser as we age, but that’s not the case’. However, he continued with the thought that he did often wonder what it might be that he could pass on to anyone, knowing that the overall lesson of ageing is that, contrary to everything we are taught, ‘life isn’t primarily a self-project’:

The first thing is, as I’ve got older I believe less and less in the language of the independent self, personal achievement, the autonomy of the individual … [In every sense] we are never self-sustaining but constituted by others who are different from us … Another aspect of this is that I’ve lived between ‘home’, but where I don’t feel at home, where I can’t be home, and that place I ‘feel at home’ but which will never be quite home. So I’ve learned not to mourn but to embrace displacement as a strategy of survival … Secondly, I’m less and less impressed by the singularity of my own contribution but value more the many collective occasions when I’ve worked together with others, whether in intellectual or political activities. I could hardly list all the ways these communal enterprises have mattered, and how much I’ve appreciated the opportunity to work in this way with other people. So, thirdly, I’ve come to see how completely we are ‘dependent’ on others … My favourite example is Robinson Crusoe, a very early example of the capacity of the individual to survive on his own … In fact, Crusoe could not have survived for a moment without all the things made by others he scavenged from the boat. He barricaded himself against The Other, especially after he saw that footprint in the sand. But when finally he encountered The Other he felt obliged to make some relationship with him, though of course, good colonialist that he was, he also had to subjugate him. Human life is dialogic – something that happens between people.

Human life is about other people, both the contexts and the ways in which they leave their mark on us. Hall’s fourth and final thought about ageing, though, concerns the continuities that sustain us through time. For him, these have been and remain those political aspirations that have guided him through life, which, even in politically bleak times such as these, suggest that change is always possible:

Finally, for someone who is committed to political and social change, I am astonished, looking back, to find how consistent I remain. I still believe that the poor should inherit the earth, that capitalism is a barbarous way of organizing social life, that despite all its political complexities that social, sexual and racial justice is possible and worth fighting for. I think that while sometimes the situation looks extremely bleak – as it does at the moment – there are always what Raymond Williams calls ‘emergent forces and ideas’, which cannot be contained within the existing structure of settlements and compromises which constitute the dominant social order. Other wishes, desires, ideas and interests cannot be indefinitely contained. They will always break through in ways you cannot anticipate or predict.

Hall’s words reprise my own conclusions about ageing, and I can see that I sometimes involuntarily echo him. Whatever our losses or regrets, whatever our continuing sources of satisfaction, pleasure or occasional delight, we can always try to retain and express compassion for the lives of others. In so doing, we will be reaffirming, as best we can, the political and ethical outlooks that have most often helped us make sense of the world, and that keep us close to those remaining friends and companions who share our concerns, in whatever form they appear and change across the decades. So long as our ethical imagination survives, we remain attached to the world, although where, how, and with what consequence we communicate our views will surely shift with the passing years. These are my thoughts as I end this book, still looking out for others, of whatever age, who wonder whether some of their transformative visions of the past, looked at critically anew, just might be put to use to help them imagine different futures from the ominous one that seems most likely at present.

For both personal and political reasons, in old age we are unlikely to retain the confidence of those youthful dreams we
might have had of leaving our collective mark on the future. Apart from all the obstacles we have encountered, with age we usually become more aware of, and prepared to admit, just how much we fail to understand the complexities of power bearing down on any who challenge its manifest operations, not to mention its largely hidden ones. We will no longer be significant catalysts for envisioning the future, if indeed we ever were. Yet we can still feel our lives have meaning in so far as we are collecting up, contemplating and perhaps even communicating something about the past, and the aspirations we once shared. One way or another, ageing should encourage us to live more in the moment, salvaging what we can from where we have been. The quality of affirming the moment is perhaps what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben alludes to when he writes of ‘the time of the now’ in his book
The Time That Remains
.
⁹⁷
For Agamben, attending to the time of the now means seeing that which is itself outside of chronological time, a form of politics that means attending to the possibilities of life itself, ‘a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself’.
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Agamben’s messianic reflections on the possibilities of ‘life itself’, however, hardly tell us what it is about living we might most want to savour, politically or otherwise.

Here I can only speak personally. Part of my life’s ambition, or at least the better part of it, has been dedicated to trying to work for greater equality overall and increased democratic accountability, seeing feminism as a key player in the process. Today, I can see the significant changes that feminism helped to introduce in making the world a less harsh, less confusing, and more fulfilling place for many women, raising people’s awareness of sexual oppression, domestic violence and the exclusion of women as significant players in cultural, political
and economic life. I see also what has worsened. At the vulnerable end of old class, ethnic and geographical hierarchies, both women and men have crashed to the bottom of that deepening chasm between rich and poor, while unfettered market forces have been allowed, even encouraged or forced, to erode workers’ rights, and been given greater leverage in the public sector. I can register as well the connection between what we have won, and what we have lost.

Failing to see any rainbow on the horizon, and knowing the brutal forces protecting every pot of gold, how do we nurture any hope for better times? In another of his recent books,
Bento’s Sketchbook
, John Berger contemplates the futility of words, or even actions, now that ‘democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit’. In this situation, he suggests, the first thing to do is to accept that our actions may indeed be ‘inconsequential’ in altering the shape of the future, certainly in producing a future that is truly close to our heart’s desire.

Nevertheless, Berger also sums up my own thoughts nicely when he writes: ‘One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests … in order to
save the present moment
, whatever the future holds.’
⁹⁹
This is why living in the present is best seen as also living within or staying in some sense connected to our pasts, remaining true to their trampled hopes, whatever the current terrain. It returns me again to the thought that there can be beauty in the tragic, at least when loss arrives without malice, brutality or personal fallibility, whatever the suffering. I see this in the poetry of Denise Riley, mourning the sudden and unexpected death of her son Jacob, at thirty-seven. With his death, she says, time stopped
in its flow: ‘For I don’t experience him as in the least dead, but simply as away … Perhaps only through forgetting the dead could one allow them to become dead. To finally be dead.’ ‘Meanwhile’, she writes, ‘I’ll try to incorporate J’s best qualities of easy friendliness.…’ Nevertheless, she does wonder, ‘By what means are we ever to become reattached to the world?’
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