Going Gentle

It is right that things should fade
That oxygen should draw its electronic debt
In every cell and line of age

It is left to me to say
That I have always loved my different cats
Despite outliving all of them

Memo to the interior designer:
Let the parquet stain grow pale
Grow old along with me
My falling hair will then be less visible

Memo to the exterior designer:
I've come to appreciate
This maturing pain
The sense of loss balanced by forgetfulness

If the guitar were less hollow
The sound would be less sweet
If the sound were less hollow
I would listen harder to my beat

And so my trousers they are rolled
By rhyme to remind me I am old

Yesterday's Men

Historians are the vanguard of the past. They serve as the shockwave front as the future tries to understand its past; they have auxiliaries such as chroniclers and journalists, but their task is the great strategic one.

Historians are Yesterday's Men, those who serve the ever increasing and diminishing vision and tapestry of the past. And slowly, slowly, I am becoming one of them, one with the past, one with a past.

I am halfway to the enormous silence, at the very least. Even if I enter it tomorrow, yesterday I would have thought it a longer way away. And so I sit, contemplating the accumulation of history faster than any grass can grow.

Where I Live (Part II)

I live in that awkward zone for men, the time of life during which you feel young enough for the sports of your youth, while knowing that this is quite likely untrue. I console myself with thoughts of Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, only to realise that I am older than either, and earn a minuscule fraction of their wages (and that's my annual wage against their monthly, it seems).

I live in the region just after spring, somewhere into summer, with a view of autumn and a dread of winter. Winter's faintest whispers are in my hair, my eyes, my sinews. I still feel young, but that is more a sign of how resilient my mental landscaping is, than a sign of how physically fit I am.

I live in that odd time when the old have passed away, but so have some of the young. Some of those I grew up with are dead, from heart failure, from misadventure, from a malaise of the soul. Just yesterday I received the news that a young man two-thirds of my age had died after a wasting disease. I knew him; he was a good man, a man of integrity — and he has gone away.

I have returned to the poetry of my youth. My mother, always one for the metaphysical poets, brought me up on John Donne. I found myself at Meditation XVII. And there, these words leapt out at me in violent ambush:

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

And those great words are not even the most well-remembered of that meditation. Sometimes it seems that the talent of the world has died as well, that the world is like me; that old Dylan's 'green fuse' that drives my green age also drives the world, and both are less and less green by the day.

Over The Hill

I'm still charging over the top, in many ways. I'm over the point that people call 40, and into the ages beyond. I remember that I once described my life in terms of decades: my first, second, third and fourth decades are all here.

The funny thing about my post on the fourth decade is that I actually thought, almost exactly two years ago, that my last place of regular work would be a more permanent abode than most; barely seven months later, I left it. I was made to charge over the hill, in a manner of speaking.

This present age is a strange one, symbolically. If one becomes an adult at 21, what then can one say about 42? Is it an answer to a question? An answer to a question that is unknown? A symbol of life, the universe and everything? A cross-product of sixes and sevens? I don't know. But I'm strangely warmed by the hundred or so people who this day spent some time to make a link between their busy lives and the life of a person who for some of them was almost a stranger, and who for some of them (hopefully) played a useful or cheerful part in those lives.

Well, stranger things have happened. And I'm still a happy person. Very.

Of Gambles and Gambits

This afternoon I was at Gambler's Town. This two-building edifice in the old administrative centre of Atlantis once boasted the tallest hotel in the region, and is a stone's throw away from the infamous Gambler Inn, Silver Saint Art Museum, New Library, and other such structures of human and social capital.

We were having lunch there, on my side a curious package of tenderly done minced meat, egg and caramelised onions; on the other side a wrapped up but tasty mess of butter prawns in aromatic leaves. Then we saw the couple, and knew them at once. They were old friends.

The slightly corpulent man had been my senior in my younger days as a wyvern. He was now the Old Man's Oldness Man; some people have Wellness Men, some people have Richness Men, the Old Man has an Oldness Man. His wife was (and still is) Nobility personified, with a cheeky smile which goes back almost to the beginning of my life.

We chatted, with their two children B & K hanging off their parents' various limbs. The boy has that smile, and the dimples too.

I noticed the white hair, which somehow bears little relation to the idea of oldness. I think they're a great couple and those children are charming. Sometimes things look like gambles, sometimes they look like gambits. The difference in them is this: with the former you often think you'll win, which is why you lose; with the latter, you deliberately lose in order to win.

Life is full of that sort of choice. That's why when I see happy people, I feel happy for them too.

Seasonal Change

My father is getting old. And he is no longer skinny the way we used to take for granted. Mother hasn't aged at all very much, except that if you look carefully, my maternal grandfather's hair genes have tolled/told the final story there. And I, I have about ten times the amount of white hair I had last year. I put it down to December stress.

I think the safest course of action for anyone in December is to cut and run. Pretend you have minimal family, no in-laws or outlaws or relations of dubious genetic provenance. I am all for spending family time with the two, three, four, five, six or (stretching things a bit, are we, much?) seven people who really mean something to you in the warm and intimate family sense; the rest ought to be silence and contemplation of the old year's passing and the new year's uncertain squalls.

Then again, it is impossible to separate your availability to those you love from your availability to those who you don't feel so charitably inclined towards. Especially when you may be seeing both in the same place and at the same time.

The biggest change in me, I suppose, is oddly bipolar. On one hand, I have a much larger tolerance for things I used to hate; on the other, I have a greater ability for doing without the things I like. It all makes for a less unnerving season, a less dramatic one.

The Inconsistency of Growing Old

Recently, a raven told me that there would be an age requirement for principalities and powers. "Ark! If thou hast excess of two score years and but a little more, thou wilt not be granted ascension, and thou shalt perish as a small power unsated and beneath contempt."

Haha, it is one of those rare and silly things. If you are too old, you cannot ascend to the seat of the wise. It would be ludicrous to think of this except in an exceptionally foolish society. Especially when in the highest realms of the City, it is said that you must be at least of two score years and a little more in order to reach the seats of the great. In fact, it is said that the highest of the wise and great should be of four-score years, proven strength and indispensable wisdom all in one.

It beggars belief that the raven's croakings might be true, but sadly, it is not beyond my creative and imaginative powers to imagine how it might be true. I am quite sure that a society which thinks it is ossifying in the middle has got two main views: 1) that the oldest and wisest are legendary and hence beyond ossification; 2) that the youngest and most efficient have not ossified yet. Hence you must have young powers of their third decade and a bit, and old powers after their fifth decade. The rest need not apply.

Truly, I say, a case of scorer, ossifer, general-men.

I used to believe that a society that valued education should have values respecting the wisdom and effectiveness of the old, rather than the energetic efficiency of the young alone. Then I realised that seniority could also fall into the trap of selective banding. The really old are in power, ergo, that is a natural state to be continued. The middle-aged are not energetic enough; neither are they in power, ergo, anyone at that level who is not in power should never be. The young are a different generation and manipulatable, let us put them in power beneath the ones who are in power.

Two phrases come to mind. Firstly, that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; secondly, that things should be done on a case-by-case basis. The two mean the same thing: that power and wisdom trump the rule of law and order. This would be perfectly acceptable, if you could ensure that power and wisdom together are indeed right. The problem in this world is that this is seldom true; instead, the flight from consistency towards individualism and flexibility can overshoot the mark and lead to chaos, favoritism, nepotism, and other corruptive ills of society.

Ah well, I always leave it to the wise and powerful who claim they know what they are doing. That is because, eventually, the All-Wise and All-Powerful will have His say in the End.