One of the fullest satisfactions of old age is that your children can have become, in spite of you and almost imperceptibly, your peers. Fully grown, easily your equal with regard to most of the nuances of maturity and experience, and your superior on any number of subjects, not least technology, they populate your circle with a sensibility different from your own, and at the same time, trust-worthily. Furthermore, they have become among your longest and most intimate friends—if you’re lucky—which I am. They can even be traveled with.

Visiting family in Tempe, Arizona last month, my daughter and I ran across some images of old men in the Phoenix Art Museum and the ASU Ceramics Research Center and Archives. Nudes, naked old men. Unlike paintings from the Old Masters, Eric Fischl, an old but contemporary master, exhibited some rather unflattering depictions that raised the perennial question: Are Truth and Beauty equivalents? (I say “No,” but hear Keats out.) 

“In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou [the urn, remember] shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

In Tempe, AZ, here is a half-naked Fischl, Study for Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Now, my daughter can credit the  subject matter of “old dudes” as “totally fine,” the poses “interesting,” and “the painting style engaging.” Fair enough, but not Beautiful, not even merely beautiful. An interesting palette, perhaps, and brushwork, but images of naked old men, honest images, are not beautiful. Which is not to say that there is not some truth, even much truth—along with humor and irreverence and, alas, pathos. But the aged bodies of undraped old men are not beautiful and cannot, I fear, be made so. No kouros, here, no Doryphorous, no charioteer, no Dying Gaul.

An old face, on the other hand, can be supremely, sublimely beautiful: i.e. the portrait busts of ancestral Romans. The beauty of dignitas and mortality. Old men, keep your pants and shirts on, buttoned! 

78 Whistles

There are downtimes in the resistance, at least for retired amateurs like myself. One can tolerate only so much virtue in a day, even virtue in defiance of the non-stop malevolence effluent out of Washington, D.C. these months now. As if the virtue itself were tainted, ever so slightly, by the malignancy that spawned it. Non-violence provoked by violence, alas, seems to carry a seed of violence within it, which can be checked behaviorally, but not imaginatively. (How many government officials have I terminated in my daydreams? With extreme prejudice.)

Last week’s downtime, though, produced this poem, in praise of de-escalation. Violence free. 

78 Whistles

A Gordian knot of whistle cords lies

on the table before the old man, the

nickel-plated whistles nesting therein.

He pulls on one whistle, the knot tightens.

He pulls on a cord end, the knot tightens.

“What the . . . How the fuck? . . Who the fuck?” he thinks.

It is what cord does if left to itself.

A retired Ph.D., he’ll figure it out.

It just takes time. Patience. To untangle.

In time, seventy-eight whistles are free.

 

Winter is here. The ICEmen cometh

in brown shirts—faceless, bulky, and armed.

They prowl the streets for our brown neighbors

in SUVs with out-of-state plates.

Pepper-spray ever at the ready.

Tear-gas, side-arms, and assault-rifles

                              vs.

 Whistles, cell-phones, yellow vests—us.

 With losses, yes, yet we hold our own.

68th Winter

 

The Furor’s brown shirts have descended in force upon our city. Last week an ICE trooper killed one of our citizens in a neighborhood not far away. Shot her in the face, point blank. I attended her vigil/protest. The administration’s Big Lies to follow.

While we are not Nazi Germany yet, the government’s aspirations seem to be clearly in that direction and credibly well on the way. For someone who has known sixty-seven years of relative freedom—i.e. white, male, middle-class freedom—I find the change to dangerously not-so-free and the new demands of civic resistance considerable. Even the relatively simple protest marches and the ICE watches require dressing for the frigid weather now and the treacherously icy footing. Much more to learn and do. It would appear to be a long haul in a dark winter.

Old and retired, I have the time, and if less energy than I once had, I’ve read my history and retain much memory. And if we aged late-Boomers needed a sense of purpose—I didn’t, but you know, shit happens and it’s sometimes big—the GOP’s embrace of fascism, racism, and Christian nationalism makes for a wide field of opportunity to discover it: that is, opposing, well, EVIL.

So, they say, freedom isn’t free. No, it isn’t. It requires time, energy, treasure, and, apparently, the blood of young moms trying to get out of the way.

67

“67” is a meme apparently, a digital fart of no fixed meaning, a trendy bit of forgettable social media nonsense awash in the general nonsense of social media. It is also, as of today, my age for the next year. One of those ages of no particular promise, not a 0-birthday, or a 5-birthday—decadal or semi-decadal—not a schnappszahl (divisible by 11), and not one of those more broadly culturally recognized birthdays, threshold birthdays: Sweet 16, 18, 21, 30, 50, 65, 70, 100. My second Henry—Adams—tallied his birthdays with some attention. “At sixty-seven,” he observed, “one knows one’s nervous system at least.” Perhaps not completely. We should always be a little open to surprise, I think, but I probably knew my nervous system much earlier, starting at 13. We’ll have to see if my 67 has any numerological significance to speak of.

Seven Old Men In Prague

Whenever we travel, as retirees are wont to do, we’ll often include a museum or two on the itinerary, an art museum. I find a visitation to past imagery of our civilization instructive on many levels, with particular attention paid to the depiction of old men, like myself. At the Sternberg Palace gallery in Prague, I happened upon these aged gents. 

                    Johan Michael Rottmayr, 1692

Seneca, at 68, is having his veins cut on order of the Emperor Nero for alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate him, Seneca’s former student and imperial advisee. While premature to consider seriously as a form of self-administered euthanasia, bleeding out represents an exit strategy of some appeal to me in certain dire circumstances—inoperable, painful cancers; dementia; boredom and disgust with this world—though Seneca’s execution required poison and a warm bath as well. I’ve given blood enough to know that my flow rate would probably do the trick.

   

St. Jerome is not looking long for this world as he handles a crucifix and a skull. (Both Jerome and the skull have my hairline.) He is thought to have lived into his mid- to late 70s and looks it, or worse here. 

Jusepe de Ribera, 1646

 

 

 

 

Actually, he appears more than once in the Sternberg, with the Ribera capturing “all the details of the old man’s body.” Some of which, I recognize all too well.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, ca.1755

 

 

 

On a lighter note we have Tiepolo’s “luminous” Bust of an Old Man. 

“Tiepolo’s character heads of old men—often depicted with Oriental stylisation—were originally created as study materials but soon became so popular with collectors that the painter even bought them back to meet demand.” Imagine that. A world in which bald and bearded old goats in exotic headwear were a thing.

 

Jan Miensze Molenaer, mid-1600s

 

Or there’s the tippling peasant senior modeling and encouraging all sorts of questionable behaviors in the dark of a bar. Under the title of an old Dutch proverb, As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, we corrupted elders entail our corruption unto the following generations.

 

 

 

And as winter approaches, the last detail of Allegory of Four Seasons and Human Ages, a dapper old fellow shares a meal and a brazier with his beloved, probably an art history major.

Simon De Vos, 1635

All of which is to say that even amidst the the tyranny and the mortality or our own times, we can seek and find a little truth, a little beauty, the warmth of companionship, and good humor. We must.

 

 

 

Grown Children

My son turns 40 today. At one point in his pre-natal months, a rather complicated pregnancy, there was some doubt about his reaching any birthdays at all, even his ur-birthday, that is to say, his birth, but here he is, my first-born, a man in full. When your own birthdays have less and less significance as they multiply, the birthdays of others can mark the passage of time with greater salience. Give one pause. My father, at 93, couldn’t believe that he had sons in their 60s: An old, old man with old men for progeny. He was not long for this world.

For these 40 years, my son—and his sister a few years later—have been the unmitigated wonder and pleasure of my life, a buoyant tag-team of now early middle-agists composing an acerbic fam-dramedy forty years running. I cannot imagine more delightful long-term company. But as I watch them in their majority living the fullest of lives, I cannot remember having such energy and so little seeming time. How do they do it? How did I, if I did? Even as I trundle toward the great abyss, yet I do not wish to return to their heady days, that comparative youth.

Forty was not a good year for me. Things falling apart. And work. But for him, they continue to come together, which is as it should be. Thus, I will enjoy his 40^th with a special savor: the wisdom of an old man.

Last Respects

Photo credit: KSylvie

Two weeks ago, I attended the “No Kings” march at the capitol in St. Paul. Earlier that morning, and mostly unbeknownst to me, a Trump-voter with a gun had murdered the Minnesota State House Speaker emerita, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, killing her dog for good measure, among previous attempted murders. This Friday last, I attended, with my civic-minded spouse and ten thousand others, Rep. Hortman’s lying-in-state, filing by their photos, coffins and an urn to pay our last respects. When I contrast the cautious, sometimes raucous optimism of the march with the ensuing solemnity, and consider these past two weeks’ news from Washington—Iran bombing, deeper debt- and deficit-enabling legislation, and Supreme Court spinelessness—I must sadly conclude that the Republic is a republic in name only, made so largely by a Republican Party that is republican in name only and has been for a long time. We are at the bottom, the Constitution a dead original letter, our politics a tawdry and empty theater, a dumb-show.

Insofar as I have had an academic, an intellectual career, it has been in the study of republicanism in the United States. The concept of virtue—personal and individual, constitutional, and political institutional—the very soul of our political system over two hundred and fifty years strikes me now as quite antique and enfeebled. A few fragments and figments of classical virtue remain to disguise the almost perfectly complete corruption, but, and I’ve hesitated to say it for eight months or so at the risk of sounding like an old man, which I am, we have become not merely a long-standing if imperfect example, but now a complete and utter embarrassment of that ancient ideal.

I have never lived in a dead country before. Perhaps it is the living death of a zombie republic.