Decrepitude

My publicity limited to the students in the college where I taught, my body now creaks much more than it used to do when I was “A sixty-year-old smiling public man.” I was born in January of 1952, and as I write this in 2026 I am 74 years old. Add whatever number of years is appropriate for the date you’re reading this and understand that I am deep in this absurdity, as Yeats calls it, “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail.” Alas, I’ve long passed the “Excited, passionate, fantastical” phase of old age Yeats claims for himself as he circles the tower.

 

I’ll call it my lumbago, although I’m not quite sure what that ailment really is. I’ll add the rheumatics in my hand and the gout in my right great toe that suppress the pleasure of touch, and the dimming eyesight, and the failing hearing, and the tongue tasting only what’s over-spiced, and the nose growing daily larger while the attar of a rose fades into memory—take all of the aches and the fadings of Blake’s chief inlets of Soul, and they draw a veil across excitement and passion and fantasy.

 

What’s left? Memory, what there is of it. Old folks sit on the park bench trading stories of the past, the bookends of lives once led, the pair securing the volumes between them so the memories do not simply sublimate. It’s not because they have nothing new to say but because it’s only in the past that life seemed to have excitement and passion and fantasy—a purpose, perhaps, best suggested in Howard Cosell’s habitual pleonasm, “The future is ahead of him.” Or her.

 

And there are passages in the past that truly bless the soul. That moment of rapture when first you saw her naked, that hour of bliss when first you made love to her, that passion of the soul when first you fell in love. Everything so exciting, so passionate, so fantastical. So much still to be known.

 

I was an unfortunate child in many ways. I lost my country, and with it the web of relations from those early years, then my father, then my siblings. I was in no one school for longer than three years, and in one case for only a month, followed by the remainder of that year in another and then yet another for two years. Friends with whom to sit on a bench? Impossible to maintain friendships when transplantation loomed as an ineluctable fate. Memories, what there are of them, remained solitary, and I a lone bookend, all sense of memory dribbling through the unstoppered other side.

 

And then there came college. Even in that first year, indeed that first term, came my first real experience of friendship, in the dormitory house of the fifth and sixth floors of a tower of rooms for students suddenly free from the constraints of anything but their own relations. Now fifty-six years on, some of those kids, now women and men old like me and even older, like the guy who had returned from his stint in the Air Force and was a whole quarter century old back then—some of those kids sit on the park bench with me, trading memories and holding fast to a past that we hope will not trickle out and disappear.

 

But trickle out those memories do. Physical distance intervenes, another veil. Those old friends spread so far away so we cannot sit together on the park bench and instead substitute “social” media. A Face Book post. An Instagram photo. Poor substitutes for the flesh and blood that was the ground for friendship in the first place and fueled the excitement and the passion and the fantasy of old. In the gaps between posts and photos nostalgia takes root and turns the past tawdry with false feeling. Real memories hide behind the veil.

 

Did you really see her naked? Did you really make love to her? Did you really fall in love?

 

We meet from time to time, infrequently. Such meetings cannot sustain the reality of that mutually lived past. Yet another veil now, temporal distance. Fifty-two years of disengagement as the boys and girls became women and men, became spouses, parents, grandparents. How can the past focus into sharp relief when the shade of those years darkens it?

 

What intervenes between then and now? More excitement of naked bodies, more passion of making love, more fantasy of falling in love—but this time true and permanent, real love that even in the decrepitude of old age brings abiding joys. And the joys of the present veil the joys of the past, irrecoverable it turns out.

 

The brain too throws its veil over it all. The synapses don’t fire, and with those squibs excitement fades entirely. The acetylcholine doesn’t flow, and with that loss passion disappears completely. Beta-amyloid coats the hippocampus, and all fantasy withdraws behind a curtain. The faces of friends become blank canvases. What is a park bench?

 

Then no memories left at all.

 

What persists? The pain of mere movement, the world bound to the bonds of a decrepit body. The final veil, death, would bring relief.

Fart Freely

I will not subscribe to baby-blue-eyed Ben’s adjuration to fart proudly. But I do think there is a magical point in the life of any wedded, or at any rate inveterately connected couple when it becomes a thing of course to fart freely in each other’s company. The moment steals upon the couple as the fog does, on little cat feet, unexpected and unforseen. I have no doubt that it occurs by accident. It would be a quite arrogant person who thinks their farts so redolent of self-assurance that they can issue forth without concern for whatsoever malodorous consequences the farts might have. By accident, then, the fart comes, and the other of the pair giggles aloud or perhaps expresses their own airy agreement that unexpressed wind will give “great present Pain” and may also occasion “future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c., often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.” Such wisdom does baby-blue-eyed Ben himself deliver freely to the unfastidious reader! And then the symphony of farts can proceed until, firm in the knowledge that the other person accepts the reciprocity of exchange, farting freely becomes the final effect of wedded bliss.

Writing a Memoir

About five years ago I started to write something that I’ll call a memoir because there’s no other genre that comes close to what I’m doing. I went great guns and finished what I took to be a first chapter. I was happy with it, more or less. It skipped from point to point and didn’t really have a time-wise progression. But that was ok. I bunched together things and events that seemed to me bunchable and didn’t worry about anything like a plot. Despite all that mess, I thought there was coherence and direction.

 

And then I got bored. To vary Hamlet’s wisdom, when boredom comes it comes not a single spy. I put the thing aside.

 

Then a few weeks ago I thought I’d take it up again. I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote. I whizzed through five more chapters, almost without pause. Not making a judgment as to the quality of what I wrote, I felt great about it all. It reminded me of the writing of my dissertation, when after years, literally years of collecting sources and weighing them and thinking about my primary objective and reading some more source material and weighing some more, I sat down and wrote the damned thing in a rush. Writing this sequence of chapters was as exhilarating.

 

I especially enjoyed coming up with titles, for the memoir as well as for each chapter. The whole I’ve called Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For: A Life. And then the chapters, in sequence: Paradise Mislaid; North of Eden; North by Northeast; Journey to the Centre of the State; Errand into the Hub; Midwestward Ho!; Albert Redux.

 

I think that I’ll make that final title the last chapter. But writing it is giving me conniptions. For one thing, the number of years that it represents is much larger than any of the previous chapters. The first chapter takes up all of eight years. The chapters other than “Errand into the Hub,” which occupies eleven years, take up no more than four years each. That final chapter goes on for thirty-seven years and counting. How to deal with all that time and all the events and changes and surprises and losses and gains . . . it’s imponderable.

 

I’m thinking of stopping right now, with the final chapter just barely begun, and letting the project lie fallow, maybe for another five years. To be sure, five years may see me dead, so I don’t know that it’s the smartest of strategies. On the other hand, what I want to get out of the memoir is not so much completion as the satisfaction of remembering. I don’t have a madeleine to help me recover the lost past. Indeed I have some huge, major lacunae in what I do remember that not even a madeleine would help fill in. What took ages of reading to tease out in writing my dissertation has become the teasing out of memories as best I can. That teasing takes time and effort and it is exhausting in its own way.

 

If I die before I finish the task, so be it.

Full Constant Light

In “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” John Donne affirms that “Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night.” I think that’s true. In the main. There are moments when a quarrel shades the light, and moments when the quarrel, turned to outright battle, quenches it entirely. For a minute or an hour, perhaps. Quarrels aren’t the same thing as jealousy, however. When jealousy has substance to invigorate it, then love has entered its post meridian phase and gone to full night.

 

That’s what happens to Othello. As he says to Iago,

 

Think'st thou I'ld make a lie of jealousy,

To follow still the changes of the moon

With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt

Is once to be resolved: exchange me for a goat,

When I shall turn the business of my soul

To such exsufflicate and blown surmises. . . .

 

Othello mistakes doubt for certainty and immediately implements the shift to resolution, full midnight. People who encounter Othello’s rage blame him for not taking what should be the intermediate step, verification of the doubt. Donne may explain one aspect of Othello’s change—that one minute after noon destroys him.

 

Still, I do want to give Othello a break. He does verify, in some sense, via the “witness” of Iago himself. Recall that Othello comes to the habits and mores of Venetian social interaction from the “tented field,” the field of battle, where he has lived ever since he was seven years old. He has lived in Venice for only “nine moons,” a phrase that suggests that in the intricacies of Venice, Othello is a new-born baby. He knows very little, almost nothing about how Venice comports itself. And what he does know about women he has learned on that same “tented field,” where camp followers were no doubt legion. Those are the women, primarily women, that the Union army during the US Civil War called hookers after General Joseph Hooker.

 

When Iago tells Othello that “In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown,” Othello responds, “Dost say so?” He concedes even before Iago pours the full dose of poison into his ear. Sure, Othello then demands “ocular proof” of what Iago has told him, but the substance that invigorates his jealousy is the auditory “proof” that Iago, an old hand at Venetian mores after all, has given him.

 

Doubt about the fidelity of one’s partner in life is to me an imponderable phenomenon. I have never doubted my wife. I can’t conceive of any betrayal that would warrant any such doubt. It’s not that it would be impossible for a partner to find someone else so attractive that she or he would transgress that minute before noon and convert all love to night. But it would be impossible for my wife, I think, as it would for me. In our case the appropriate passage is not from Othello but from Hamlet, in the letter from Hamlet to Ophelia that begins with that “vile phrase; ‘beautified’”:

 

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

 

I should not and so shall not speak for my wife, although I know that she is more trustable than the “fire” of the stars, which Arthur Eddington would later prove not fire, or the movement of the sun, which Copernicus had already proven wrong. But I will speak for myself. I could never betray the forty-six years of marriage that have entangled her in me so profoundly that were I to sever the tangle I’d cease to exist.

For me there can be no minute after noon. 

Bare and Bare-ish

Contemporary attitudes to bare and bare-ish bodies puzzle me. On the one hand showing off body parts when they’re almost uncovered but do display bulk and size and girth and cup-size albeit not das ding an sich, is as common as chicken feathers in a poultry yard. On the other hand, nakedness of any sort comes under the judgement of a prurient puritanism the strictness of which would challenge the goodies and gaffers of 17^th century New England.

 

A vignette from the distant past. As part of my first term in college all kids were obliged to take a swimming test. Boys and girls were put in separate groups, each group showing up at the indoor pool at different hours, even different days. The reason for the separation became apparent when we discovered that the school would not provide swim suits, so that if a kid didn’t come wearing one, he or she was obliged to take the test naked.

 

Back in the olden days of yore, no one thought much about it. It just happened. Big whoop. Think about it happening in 2026. And then follow the trail of law suits that would ensue from the non-suit swimming.

 

On the other hand, in 2026 it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing barely clothed bodies all over the place, whether on the red carpet or on the poster advertising the latest modification of some underwear brand. Think about that happening in the olden days of  yore when barely baring the little kid’s butt in the suntan lotion billboard was a scandal.

 

Which is it? Do we like bodies or not? Is it the shadow of a smile that titillates or the smile full-on?

Grok

I’ve known since it first became a thing that Twitter’s “Grok” AI bot is named after the word invented by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, “grok” means understanding something so thoroughly that it and the thinker become as one. Presumably the Musk-rat wants us to think that his Grok functions much the same way as the bot comprehends the user’s perspective so deeply that its response is exactly what the user’s little heart would desire.

 

What I just grokked, however, is just how much Musk-rat’s use of the term reveals about his own demigod mentality. To get at the danger that connection represents, I need to think through a little bit more about Heinlein’s book.

 

“Grok” is a word that the main character of the book, Valentine Michael Smith, usually called Mike, imports to Earth from the language of the Martians. Mike had been born on Mars, the only child begotten by the first human colony of Mars, which had then disappeared, leaving Mike to be raised by the Martians. But that’s not the only thing that Mike imports from Mars.

 

Martians are very sophisticated people, but their outstanding characteristic is that, in the meditative states that they enter as they work towards grokking things in the universe, they access a degree of power and control over the thing that they grok that, simply by willing it, they can convert that thing into something else entirely. For instance, the Martians had spent some time grokking that the planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter represented a profound danger to the solar system, and so they willed the planet to destroy itself. The asteroid belt represents the leftovers of that planet.

 

Mike is a plain old human being—hence the last name that Heinlein gives him, Smith—not a Martian. But one doesn’t have to be Martian to achieve the power that the Martians have by dint of inheriting their culture. Once he acclimates to Earth, then, Mike goes around grokking things so thoroughly that he does to them the same kind of things that the Martians did to that destroyed planet. When the federal authorities send a bunch of armed officers to confront Jubal Harshaw, the lawyer-philosopher-savant who has become Mike’s mentor, almost in loco parentis for him, Mike groks that they mean nothing good for Jubal and so he . . . he makes the officers disappear.

 

It’s not the only destruction of others that Mike accomplishes during his life on earth, but grokking does not necessarily entail destruction. Two of his many female companions, recognizing what it is that Mike likes in a woman, grok together to reshape themselves into a closer likeness to what he likes, for instance. Those women are key members, priestesses in fact, of a new church that Mike creates, deliberately intended to teach Martian ways to human beings. Ultimately all of the members of the church, at least the ones who are part of the highly selective inner sanctum, develop their grokking skills to the point that they are as adept as Mike himself.

 

The theology of Mike’s church collaborates with the power that grokking engenders. At its base is the notion that all creatures are divine, a fact unfortunately hidden away from humans by the mere fact that they are human—Martians are born into a culture that understands, fosters, and develops the divine potential of every individual. It is also part of the theology that living beings are simply a temporary expression of the infinite divinity that every individual can become. In practice that means that to die is not to end existence. The idea is a bit like the notion of reincarnation that makes a subsequent embodiment of a particular soul an expression of just how “pure” that soul has been.

 

What Mike wants to accomplish, then, is to make all humans as capable of such divinity as Martians are. Of course, Martians are also not only capable but more than willing to snuff out the life of any young Martian that does not take the divinity as a serious responsibility. On the theory that killing the young Martian does not put an end to that particular soul, the practice is thought to produce an increasingly more divine population of living Martians. So too on Earth, Mike sifts out all the non-responsible people who want to join his church. Only the most select of the most select achieve the potential of divinity. The adepts do not always kill the impure souls that want to join the church, but in the long run those who do reach the highest level of the church will be able to control every aspect of existence, and so the impure will simply die off on their own until in the future at some point all living humans will be like the Martians.

 

I know that the summary of the novel is too long to tolerate. But it’s essential to understand that what Heinlein imagines is a race of human beings who have divine power, who can control every aspect of existence, who have the power of life and death and are entirely immune to any law or practice that inhibits or proscribes that power. When the state tries to intervene against Jubal, then, the state is deemed impure and so destroyed. Jubal himself is something like what has come to be called a sovereign citizen. He uses his mastery of the law, human law, to assert for himself such a grand prerogative of authority that he might as well not be subject to any law at all. So where Mike handles the “theological” side of absolute personal power, Jubal does the same for the social and cultural side of such power.

 

The combination of theology, law, sociology, and culture is irresistible. It is also what undergirds Musk-rat’s and, it seems, a great many of the tech bros’ attitude and approach to existence on this planet. They are above the law because they control the law. They want to be immortal, and so fund research into how to extend human life, their life, maybe into infinity. They are semi-divine because they control almost every aspect of human existence in this AI-benighted world we live in. They are a threat, a dire threat, to anyone who is not “pure” enough—which is to say too poor, too technologically unsavvy, too much underlings. It’s not that Musk-rat has the power to grok people into non-existence. Instead he uses his power to create a “department” of the government, DOGE, that sets out to erase people indirectly. How many have died because DOGE eliminated foreign aid, for instance? And Musk-rat doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the damage.

 

What I grokked, in short, is that the use of “grok” as the name for Musk-rat’s AI bot is not an accident. It is quite intentional. It should be taken as a warning. 

Health Care As It Should Be

When I went to vote in the PA primary yesterday, I was wearing my Harvard t-shirt. I have one or more t-shirt for every institution that I’ve been associated with, and this one came up in the rotation. Anyway, the nice lady behind the desk asked if I’d been there, and I said yes, and she said her granddaughter had just been admitted to the dental school. So I congratulated her and said that I had fond memories of the dental school.

 

I didn’t go into the reason why I had such memories. There was the serious business of being # 44 to vote that day—it was around 2 p.m., so pathetic turnout is the name of the game. But the memories of the dental school are interwoven with memories of the health services offered to students and faculty at Harvard, at least back in the last millennium: I don’t know what they’re like nowadays.

 

Three experiences there.

 

One day I was sitting at my desk intent on taking notes to prepare to write a paper, and I carelessly inserted the back end of a Bic pen into my ear. Being a lucky kind of guy, I immediately felt the little rubber cap that seals the end come out and nestle itself lovingly into my ear canal. I went to the health services. The receptionist did not mock me. The nurse who carefully removed the cap did not mock me. I walked out chagrined but un-mocked.

 

A while later a physical exam suggested I had a heart murmur. The health services sent me to a specialist facility where the good doctors and technicians spent some two or three hours trying one test and then another and another trying to figure out what was going on with the ol’ ticker. It turned out that nothing was going on, and happily I trotted back home.

 

And then came the dental experience. I went to have my teeth checked and cleaned. The dentist looked at the results of both procedures and said, “Your teeth are fine, but your gums have got to go.” What a joker! And so the health services provided me with a periodontist who considered my mouth and decided that the dentist had been right. He, the periodontist, was affiliated with the dental school, and it happened that he had a student who was about to finish her training—a nice Iranian woman, as it turned out. The student would do the surgery, which took place over the course of a month or so, one segment of the mouth at a time while the periodontist supervised. I was the student’s final project. Everything worked out fine.

 

So from blush-causing idiocy to oral surgery, the health services were there to help.

 

And you know how much I paid for all of that? Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

 

That’s the way health services should function across the country, for everyone.