Turning 60 (in 2006)

 This is the first of my birthday posts, back in 2006, just a few years after I started blogging (since blogs didn't exist before.)  It begins a series of  birthday re-posts in chronological order, up to last year's at age 78.  They were originally posted on different blogs, but I wanted to have them all in one place.  And I wanted to see the chronology.  That aspect may also be of interest to others, so I offer this possibility.

  I also assume people about to become 60 and the ages that follow may wish to check their feelings and expectations by reading mine, and they may want to see how those feelings and expectations held up and changed over the years. 

My favorite Magritte, which as a poster has been on a wall of my various residences since the
1970s.  Like many Magrittes, the time depicted could be just before dawn, or just after dusk.
Therefore, it is both.

As I begin writing this, I am 59. When I finish it, I will be 60.

How do I think about turning 60 years old? Some look at how vital we are at this age in comparison to our parents’ generation, and say we’re still young. Or at least in middle-age. You might make a case that these days our youth lasts until 40, and middle age extends to what used to be the retirement age of 65. But as Michael Ventura points out, we’re not living to 120. Sixty isn’t the middle. We aren’t young, in Act I of our lives. We mostly aren’t in Act II anymore.

This is the start of something different. It is early old age---maybe even “young old age” if that feels better. In the theatre of our lives, it’s the curtain coming up on Act III.

This is going to be happening to a lot of people starting about now. When the battleship Missouri was steaming into Tokyo Bay to accept the surrender of Japan, my parents were marching up the aisle of Holy Cross Church in Youngwood, PA. I was born the following June, making me one of the first of the postwar Baby Boomers, and so one of the first Boomers to turn 60. There will be millions more over the next decade.

Turning 60 is a hard thing to admit, even to ourselves. There is a shame attached to it in today’s world. Younger people and even our contemporaries look at us in a different way, and treat us differently. Of course, this happens anyway, whether we admit it or not, and whether or not we announce our identity in this way. Do we say we are 60? Claim the senior discount? It’s scary, maybe even depressing and demeaning.

Part of the scariness is obviously that getting older inevitably places us closer to death. More people we know or know of, people we grew up knowing or knowing about, are suddenly dead. We shudder when this includes our contemporaries, or even those slightly younger. It is hard to accept that we have fewer days ahead than behind. Maybe it’s even harmful to accept it?

Like anything important, both sides of the contradiction are true in some way, and must be embraced, reconciled. There is pain in coming to terms with Act III. But there is also freedom, and purpose.

Michael Ventura

Emphasis is a way of considering one side, before considering the other. Two texts have been important to me in the past few years in this intermittent but intense effort to figure out how to proceed. The first is an essay published in a fairly obscure journal by Michael Ventura, a columnist, essayist and novelist who was approaching 60 when he wrote it in late 2004. The second is James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character, first published in 1999. It so happens that Hillman and Ventura collaborated on an earlier book (We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and the World is Still a Mess.) So though they differ on some points, it seems to me they agree on most basic ideas. It’s mostly a difference of emphasis.

In his essay, Ventura emphasizes loss. This is natural for one approaching 60, and a necessary initiation. When I stumbled onto this essay (in a magazine I’d never seen before, called Psychotherapy Networker) I was jolted. It took me awhile to accept its premises. But in my own 59th year, I came to embrace it, guided by my own life to the truth of Ventura’s words.

The article is called “Across the Great Divide: Middle Age in the Rear-View Mirror.” It begins when Ventura realizes he must make a major change in his life. He can no longer afford to live as he had been in Los Angeles. He must find a new place to live. At the same time, he’s thinking about turning 60, and arranges to meet an old friend in Las Vegas. He drives there, taking a long and thoughtful route.

The statement that rocked me was simple: “When you’re pushing 60, the rest of your life is about saying goodbye.

“Your greatest work may yet be demanded of you (though odds are against that). You may find more true love, meet new good friends, and there’s always beauty (if you have an eye for it) and fun (if you haven the spirit)---still, no matter what, slowly, you must say goodbye, a little bit every day, to everything.”

Ventura’s examples are painfully familiar: you’re saying goodbye to your own face as it was in your youth; to how you drove a car (he mentions reflexes; I’ve noticed night-vision—my eyes don’t readjust from glare as fast as they did), to life without aches and pains, perhaps to certain strengths, and to access to your memory. “Alzheimer’s? ‘A senior moment’? You get used to it and hope for the best. Ain’t nobody can do a thing about it anyway. Goodbye.”

Yes, I know there’s advice out there on strengthening mental agility, and we can all be heartened by the research showing that brain cells continue to be born as well as die all our lives. But the basic point is sound.

Ventura is also saying goodbye to where he’d lived in the prime of his life. Though he isn’t saying goodbye to his career exactly—he writes a column these days for the Austin Chronicle--there is a sense that in some ways he’s doing that, too. Many of us at 60 are facing such a change. For those of us in a position to “retire” (leave our jobs and collect retirement benefits) it is also a time of taking stock of accomplishments, and saying goodbye to having any more, at least in that job. Financial retrenchment has its own set of goodbyes. In many ways, these all imply saying goodbye to possibilities, and perhaps to dreams unfulfilled.

To accept this element of turning 60, I had to come to terms with my 50s. In some ways, my 50th birthday was the best of my life. I’d been living in Pittsburgh but was preparing to leave for California with my partner, Margaret. After years of cobbling together part-time teaching and writing jobs, she’d landed a good full-time position teaching dramatic writing at Humboldt State University. I was attracted to what I learned about the place—an academic environment, in the redwoods, near the ocean, with a temperate climate year round (the increasingly hot Pittsburgh summers were making me edgy), close to indigenous Native American tribal areas, and not far from real wilderness. Yet not terribly far from San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, three of my favorite cities in North America.

I would be giving up my Pittsburgh life—the infrastructure that worked for me, the city and neighborhood I was fond of, and especially my apartment, the best place I had ever lived. It was a commitment to our relationship, but of course I had to think about my own life and livelihood. My local career in Pittsburgh had stalled, and I felt I could grow into a new one in California, but mostly I felt poised to come into my own on a larger stage. I felt strong and at the top of my writing game, yet with knowledge and experience I hadn’t had when my first book was published in my 30s---especially the hard-won experience of my 40s. My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption. It seemed worth the risk.

For my family birthday, my sisters surprised me with a more personal and elaborate celebration than I expected. They assembled photographs from my childhood. And their gift was unique: an assemblage of objects under a glass dome that represented my life, in the form of a room. There was a desk and bookshelves, a computer, a guitar case on the floor, running shoes and a baseball glove, etc. But the detail was amazing and personal: for example, the tiny books included facsimiles of my book and a few others I treasured.

There was a sense of elegy to this, and of honoring, which was moving. Yet I was looking towards the future. I didn’t see anything ending, really. If I were successful, I could come back anytime.

The move to California was much more wrenching than I had ever imagined. Though I reveled in the soft air, cool until heated by sunlight, I mourned the loss of my apartment and what I had to leave behind. I also quickly discovered that while Margaret had a place in this world because of her job, I had none. The downside of the isolation became apparent. Nobody was much interested in me, as a writer or as anything else.

In some ways I was lucky in early encounters. I worked on writing a video concerning local forest issues, and worked for awhile with a Native American organization. I learned a lot from both, but neither led to anything lasting. And that became one of the characteristics of my 50s: a lot of beginnings that led nowhere.

By some measures, I was enormously productive. I researched, wrote proposals and wrote drafts of chapters on several nonfiction projects, often returning to some aspect of the one I’d been working on when I left Pittsburgh. I wrote fiction. I wrote plays, including a musical for junior high students about smoking, which included the songs: music and lyrics. I wrote and rewrote a screenplay, I wrote and rewrote a young adult novel. I used a new electronic keyboard, a 4-track tape recorder and a computer program to arrange and record songs I’d written.

I sent things out to agents, publishers, theatres, etc. I had conversations and correspondences with several agents and editors on various projects. Nothing came of any of it. The projects closest to my heart got the least response.

I got into grantwriting and picked up freelance jobs writing and editing reports, to generate income. I was already saying goodbye to writing on certain subjects (like popular music) and for some publications (I was no longer in, or in touch with, their younger demographic). But I continued to be published—in one year, my work appeared in five separate sections of the San Francisco Chronicle: the book review, Insight section, the daily and Sunday arts section and the Sunday magazine. Several of these pieces could well have led to books. None of them did. None of them led anywhere.

Thanks to digital technology, I did finally get my one book into paperback—when I did it myself. As that book’s author, I was filmed for three separate television documentaries, any one of which might have led to enough interest that I could get a contract for a new book (or so I thought.) But I never found out. Though I’d been interviewed in films before, and was very successful as a public speaker, none of my footage was used in any of these new projects.

Suddenly my fifties were three-fourths gone. I was applying for full time positions here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere for which I thought I was well-qualified. I got a few interviews, nothing more, and usually a lot less. Still, I kept trying and some cause for hope would turn up. In 2004 I got an assignment from the New York Times to write on a subject I wanted very much to write on, that was central to the book project I’d been vainly trying to put together since before I left Pittsburgh. It was a dream, and worked out very well. Everyone loved the resulting article—my editors and the people I wrote about.

But it led pretty much nowhere, not even to another assignment. I was told that the Times wasn’t taking freelance work for the arts section for awhile, and neither was the San Francisco Chronicle. My financial situation was getting desperate. There were no resources for reasonably frequent travel home, or to the wilderness, or anywhere.

For all this time I had gambled on the next step---the book contract, the book or movie sale, even a play production. Then on the good job that would set things right. Redemption.

But then, as I approached 60, I began to say goodbye to all that. In part it was now simply a matter of looking at time. I sacrificed a great deal to remain true to my dreams, even if that sacrifice wasn’t always intentional. I had already said goodbye to the possibility of having a family. That time had passed me by. Now I was saying goodbye to aspects of my dreams that would never come true, not in the time left to me. I’m not going to have a career as a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, an author with a flow of books. It could happen that I’ll have again what I’ve tasted before, like the speaking engagements I had as a book author, or the buzz of seeing my play performed even on an obscure stage. But it won’t be a career.

A career is about movement; movement with its oscillations but generally up and outward. It is about an identity and a livelihood created and recreated in the process. Over time. But much of that time is over.

This is sad of course, because it’s a kind of failure. But at this point, like a lot of failures or changes that come with age, it is also a relief. It is also liberating. I no longer have to look at anything I do as leading to anything else. Everything is what it is.

I don’t discount the possibility of more accomplishment, even of some kind of redemption in the eyes of others. But I’m saying goodbye to the need for it. Success and failure, what do they mean at this point? In comparison to other aspects of growing old, or to the vagaries of existence that take more control, not very much. They may cause me pain, but pain is now a regular part of life. There are famous people with great financial resources who wind up with incurable diseases. There are people with great health insurance who die as a result of bad medical practice. Having money increases your odds of having a comfortable and productive life, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

Like a lot of young writers, I used to sweat over the passing time, mapping out the years against the number of books I could write and publish, the necessary steps to the destiny I craved. Now those calculations show there isn’t enough time left. That anxiety is over. Nothing leads to anything else. But that also means that I can devote my full attention to whatever it is I manage to do in the present. That becomes its own reward. Nothing leads to nothing.

I know that few people get hired for good jobs at my age until they are already established in the higher ranks of that occupation. You either get a job as a CEO, a college president, or something much less. Maybe not only a greeter at Wal-Mart, but not a job that somebody considers part of a career. And there are occupations in fields of my interest where nobody over 50 is even seriously considered. So nothing I do is going to necessarily lead to anything like that.

Right now I have three small jobs that don’t add up to either the income or the demands of a full-time job. They require some diligence, creativity and applications of skills, but their challenges are modest, as are their results. Yet they all have their modest pleasures. So here I am. Say goodbye to redemption. Say goodbye to great expectations. Say goodbye to all that. The intense humiliation of my 50s has led to modesty. It has led back to the moment.

Windsurfer at nearby Clam Beach.  BK photo

I think I did some good work in the past decade, including published work I can be proud of. I may remain puzzled and sad about the work that didn’t go anywhere, that was ignored or scorned, and I have to deal with the work that was never completed, that may never have a completed form, let alone a life outside the rooms of their making. But as long as I have memory, I’ll remember the excitement and experience of making them, or the struggle and yearning and the promise of their potential, however bittersweet those memories may be.

But this modesty, cooling in the release from the crucible of humiliation, is not the whole story. The dearth of time ahead, and the ashes and annihilation at the end of it, are only part of what Act III is about.

Ventura writes about more goodbyes: as older family members die, we say goodbye to family history we don’t know and now will never know, and neither will anyone else. We say goodbye to the last people who knew us as young children.

The common denominator of many goodbyes is death. He even says that the changes in our faces as we age marks the approach of death. “Call it whatever you like, but that’s what it is, that’s what we politely call “aging.” As we lose capabilities forever, we are moving towards the final loss of everything, which is death.

Some of these goodbyes aren’t too difficult to deal with gracefully, once they finally come. The anxiety over the years about losing my hair (which given my maternal grandfather, was all but inevitable) was far more intense and difficult than the acceptance of its reality (at least so far.)

But Ventura points out that the bigger losses are harder to deal with, and require a quality he calls fierceness. “It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word goodbye—learning how to say it in many ways—fiercely, yes, but also gently; with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.”

This is a kind of tonic to the anxiety we’re bred with in this society to keep up, stay young, and fight off any sign or recognition of death, to the point that people never say their goodbyes at all. The denial of death—the rage against the dying of the light-- may be in some sense noble and courageous, but it can also be just plain denial.

I was present for the last months of my mother’s final illness; I was there at the moment of her death. I helped take care of my father during his last weeks. But I learned most about dying from Tess, our cat, two summers ago. There were no layers of social complication, of her dealing with the emotions of others, with nurses etc. There was just her instinctual confrontation with growing weakness and onrushing death. Some of her behavior was not according to the book. She didn’t hide herself away as cats do, she stayed near us, perhaps responding to our involvement. In the end our companionship was strong.

But some of what the cat books describe was there: the helpless insistent purring, the hovering over the water dish without drinking, and the faraway look in her eyes. Without hesitation, she did what she could of what she used to do. She went outside and surveyed her garden, taking rests. She was in the world as fully as she could be, and yet she was looking far beyond it.

Being aware of the relative nearness of death as well as new aches and pains, failing vision and so on, does focus the goodbyes. Goodbyes are present experiences, though. They include being as fully as possible in the world of now. This moment that will never come again.

Yet in early old age, at the beginning of Act III, and perhaps through it all until the final scene, there is living, and contributing from one’s unique perspective, experiences, talents and character. When we were trying to be successes, we had to emphasize one or two differences, and otherwise be (or pretend to be) the same as everyone else. Now we have no choice. All our differences are on display. They are our character.

Character is the shape of soul. Without the inflation of early ages, we are forced to accept ourselves, good and bad, with consequences pleasant and painful. We are no one’s ideal. “I walk through life oddly,” Hillman writes. “No one else walks as I do, and this is my courage, my dignity, my integrity, my morality, and my ruin.”

There are characteristics that come with becoming an elder. We must take responsibility for the past and we feel the responsibility of the future. In the role of grandparents (actual or metaphorical), we set our sights on the future we will not see.

“Before we leave,” Hillman writes, “we need to uphold our side of the compact of mutual support between human being and the being of the planet, giving back what we have taken, securing its lasting beyond our own.”

James Hillman

In living past the age of procreation, when physical growth is long past and physical pain is a closer companion, we feel differently about our relationship to the world. We no longer feel only one purpose in life—our own preservation, and that of our offspring. And we want to know what it’s all been about. “In later years feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers plays a larger role,” Hillman writes. “Values come under more scrutiny, and qualities such as decency and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency.”

What we say goodbye to as we age reveals some hellos: hello perhaps to some sharper memories from the distant past. Hello to insights as well as embarrassments. Hello to other worlds. "Discovery and promise do not belong solely to youth;" Hillman insists, "age is not excluded from revelation." Indeed, if the theatre is any guide, Act III is when it's more likely to happen.

Hillman was one of the first since Jung to introduce concepts of soul in psychology. (For Jung, “psyche” and “soul” were virtually identical.) I find the relationship of character, aging and soul most comprehensible, at least intuitively, when I think of soul as not something in the body (as we were taught in Catholic school) but the body as being enclosed in soul.

We do things to do them, we live in the moment and work for the future of what we will leave behind. Character and contribution to the future are the final adventures. "A certain kind of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of morality adds its blessings," writes Carl Jung. "But to have soul is the whole venture of life..."

Part of what this has meant for me is represented by this site and its companion, the Boomer Hall of Fame, as well as my other ongoing projects (Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, Soul of Star Trek, Blue Voice etc.) Here at 60’s Now I hope to explore issues pertinent to my generation, our present, past and the future we won’t see.

That’s something else important about Act III-- the character has lived through Acts I and II. We carry our history and the history we’ve experienced, not only in the weight and reference of our words, but in ourselves. I am all that I am, including the heroes of my youth, and those that gave me the imagery of my middle years, and those that inform me now. So that is also why I hope to build a kind of database of those influences from the past in the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I expect all this to happen slowly, fitfully, cumulatively. These aren’t the text-messaging kind of blogs, lots of short items off the cuff and often. Sometimes they will be. And while they won’t often be as long as this, I will take some care with them. I hope you’ll come back. Don’t be too disappointed if there’s nothing new. Your expectations should be modest, too. But our intentions don’t have to be. My name is Captain Future. I’m here to save the world.

Hillman on the Author's Battlefield

I was never in any military, and although I played at war endlessly for a few years as a boy, I never developed a lot of interest in the military vocabulary.  But James Hillman was in the U.S. Navy during World War II, tending to amputees and other severely injured in hospitals.  His last book (so far) was A Terrible Love of War, which according to the paperback back cover, somebody in the San Francisco Chronicle called "A skillfully constructed tour de force."  Oh yeah, that was me.  And yes, it was a pun, kind of.

Anyway, that's a long way to get to this slyly revealing passage in that book in which Hillman talks about writing using military terms and concepts--not something I've ever thought about, or how I approached writing, but worth considering. 

"Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign.  I  confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors.  There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way.  When stuck, don't dig in; keep moving forward.  Don't obsess trying to reduce a strongpoint by sheer force or laying seige.  Isolate it and in time it will fall by itself.  No pitched battles with the interior voices of saboteurs, critics, adversaries.  A light skirmish, a show of arrows, and disappear into the next paragraph.  Camouflage your own vulnerability, your lack of reserves with showy parades and bugles---remember everyone else is equally vulnerable.  Pillage the storehouses of thought, refurbish old material and use it to reinforce your lines.  Abandon ground you can't exploit, but when you've got an issue on the run, take all the territory you can."

Elders

People keep dying. Older than me, some younger, well known names. Known to me if not to you, for example, was John Henry Redwood. Known as an actor, some on screen, mostly on stage, he's been a developing playwright for the past decade or so, and a good one. Also a great person. A big man with a big heart and a big smile. I met him in Pittsburgh when the Pittsburgh Public Theatre put on one of his first plays. He was very interested in the craft of it. Actually we may have met when he was in an August Wilson play there. It's been awhile: I remember a patio party at someone's house where he and I sneaked off for a minute to check the Lakers playoff score---and Magic Johnson was playing then.

Anyway, he died recently. Not as heralded as John Ritter or Edward Teller or Warren Zevon or even Sheb Wooley (of Flying Purple People Eater fame), but a man whose presence and talent in this world will be missed. We will be lesser for his absence.

Which got me to thinking, not very originally, that we ought to honor people when they're still alive to hear it. I've picked some Elders I wish to honor. Some aren't in fact very much elder to me in years, but certainly in achievement.

Norman Mailer. He seemed to have retired during the Clinton years but Bush has brought Norman stormin back. Sure he's flawed in big ways, but he's a huge talent, and someone who has given me key thoughts and prompts over many years. I wasn't all that crazy about his book on the Pentagon march, though in 1968 that a writer with his credentials (and military novel) could write about anti-Vietnam and anti-draft youth with such conviction was important. His novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam?" was riveting. I loved his defense of Henry Miller when he was a notorious target of Womens Lib in the early 70s. For good or ill he's carried the torch for the heroism of writing and especially the aspirations of the novel during my lifetime.
Yet besides the example of his engagement and standards he tried to uphold, I'll remember specific things he said or wrote almost as asides. "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood." I heard him say that on a talk show (talk shows used to have actual writers on them) and it blew me away. Later I found it in one of his books, Advertisements For Myself I think. It's still a very profound personal and political formula for me.
And an offhand comment in his prose-as I recall he was narrating that someone had apologized for not having read one of his books and he said he understood entirely-that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other. That too is a guiding light to me. It says so much about books and life, and about how we continue to have new and illuminating experiences, how books speak to us in the course of our lives, they are there as resources for us, and how even the books are treasures at the end of the hard roads of life, a kind of payoff in wisdom and light and depth for all that we've seen and felt and been subjected to.
I wonder if his more recent work has spoken to young people at the time. I haven't read him in recent years. Maybe I'm just not ready yet.

Robert Bly. Another writer with flaws, perhaps more lovable ones, but not entirely. But I doubt there's been anyone more important to poetry in America in the past sixty years. He's been at the forefront from the sixties on, with his personality and enthusiasms and in recent decades his transparency, his honesty and courage. He still gets dogmatic once in awhile but that's the kind of flaw that integral and forgivable and lovable. His powers of promotion have brought many wonderful poets to wider attention. He's kept that up, from Neruda in the early 70s to Machado and Rumi and more. He's been close friends at different times with two of the best poets of the age, James Wright and William Stafford.
He's taken a lot of heat about the men's movement from people who have entirely distorted what's he said and what he's done. I respect him as an elder and I will always listen to what he has to say. He's written some fine poems, and he has done more than anyone to revive the performance of poetry, except perhaps Allen Ginsberg (who took up the squeezebox at about the time Bly took up his stringed instrument.) He's one of the connecting points between so many important places in our culture and consciousness.

Bill Moyers. Bly was but one of the voices of our age that Bill Moyers introduced to millions of people. The range and quality of his work over the years is nothing short of astounding. I have transcripts of his programs and books from his various programs and series' going back to the sixties. Political, imaginative, artistic, thoughtful life in these decades would be so much poorer without him. Even today, his PBS series "Now" is virtually alone on television as a quality news program of relentless probity, leavened by intelligent enthusiasms in art and thought. Bill Moyers is really the hero of the television age.

Leslie Marmon Silko. She's not much older than me, but she's an elder in many ways in what she knows and writes. She's the most profound and political of the many excellent Native American novelists, poets and nonfiction writers. Her generation that came of age in the 60s with an explosion of writing turns out not to have been an anomaly. American Indian writers remains vital, and beats new paths. But the continuing energy of this generation's writers, especially Silko and Linda Hogan, still inspires me.

Doris Lessing. A writer who would never let anyone else define her. "The Golden Notebook" made her a feminist heroine, but she refused to be limited or defined by any political agenda. Her science fiction novels are amazing in their conception, though she got little credit for them-puzzling both mainstream fiction adherents and s/f fans. I don't find her much of a stylist, but her energy and intelligence propel you forward. She must be a model for other strong women writers like Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin. Atwood has a takes no prisoners intelligence, yet she's witty and civilized, and she sure can write (some of her short stories in particular are outstanding.) LeGuin is heroic as well, although she's offended me with some of her sexist talk, but like Lessing she's her own person, and quite forthright-and often right.

Maxine Hong Kingston. Again, an elder in example and inspiration, but not elderly. Her new book is courageous, not for what she's endured or even done, but in her honesty with herself, and honest attempt to tell us the truth. But not only that: it is the textures of her telling that ultimately are the most inspiring. I'll bet she's a great teacher, and I'm glad that her books are so popular on campuses. She believes in literature, in story, imagination; her new book unites the world of literature with the attempt to unite inner and outer peace-for example, by using meditation in her workshops with war veterans.

I need to add two or three more---there are many more, of course, but I can't neglect these: James Hillman , the most important of the post-Jungians, who lately has turned his attention to the subject of elders and aging. I just listened to the audiobook version of his print book (which I read when it came out), The Force of Character. It is a great listen as well as the usual rivetting and admirable read. He quotes another elder who has valuable and inspiring things to say about aging, Theodore Roszak. I've written about both these men and their work in this and other blogs.

Then there is Paul Newman , who acted in important movies as a young man, in middle age and in his later years. Then he parlayed his fame into a business that simultaneously offers good, healthy and tasty products and helps support good causes and artists. He's been a model in so many ways for so long, that his few lapses---that oil company commercial, and the promo suggesting that "Washington Week in Review" is something more than the march of cliches by timid journalists mouthing conventional wisdom very occasionally enlivened by new information or analysis---are easily forgiven. Now he's helping to bring Thorton Wilder to TV. He's been admirable in many ways, in his personal trials as well as modest in his triumphs, and so it's fitting to end this tribute to all elders with him.

Finally there's someone who exemplifies the elder perhaps best of any I can think of, and that's Gary Snyder. A poet of mythic power, whose life and work have forged crucial links important to the future, in his pioneering synthesis of Buddhism, Native American worldview, practical ecology and much more. His prose works such as The Practice of the Wild, The Old Ways, "Four Changes" and the interviews and essays in The Real Work and A Place in Space are essential as any body of work created in my lifetime. He is the elder teacher of our time, who introduces, connects and interprets knowledge as a guide on our individual, collective and planetary journeys.

I hope all of these people are around for a long time. But in my life they've been inspirations and so I testify to this, while others can still take advantage of their live presence.

Wonderful

Things are still pretty unsettled in my little world. But I've got two moments that I'd have to classify as wonderful, and both happened on the same day.

The first was a small and so far solitary personal victory. For something like five or six years now, I've had this little musical play that I wrote---a play for (I figure) junior high age kids, about smoking. It's a musical, and I wrote songs for it. I really liked it, but I've had to pick my battles-those things I tried to steel myself to send out into the world of rejection, misunderstanding, envy and heartbreak. Some of those items perhaps deserved not to be published or produced or whatever, but when you start out and believe in what you've done or at least the potential of it, you have to go forward and see what happens. But I have to be selective, not really just in terms of what I think is the quality of what I've done, but in the kind, the quality and the quantity of shit I'm inviting. For example, I can expect a nonfiction book proposal to get at least a little respect from somebody, since I've published a nonfiction book, and I'm an Author and a Freelance Writer. But if I try springing a musical play for kids-look out! Blank stares, or just total blankness. Cause you see I'm not a career playwright, I don't have my PhD in Advanced Dramatury nor have I workshopped and networked nothing but plays plays plays for ninety years---let alone musical playwright OR kids writer. In this world you write childrens books about stamps, and that's your identity for life.

And not only is the rejection more likely, it's harder to take, because I'm also insecure, for the same reason---I've got no track record. Maybe it really is shit. But I never believed this play or the music was shit. However, I could never get a recording that represented the music to my satisfaction. Because I couldn't afford the time or the money to do it, and there wasn't anyone else interested and able to help make that happen.

Then technology sort of caught up. Several years ago I got an inexpensive four track recorder. I had an electronic keyboard-not a great one, but not a real cheapo either. I composed the songs on that keyboard, with all that instrumentation, using presets in my own way. Over the course of a couple of years, when I could stand to spend all that time and belief, I recorded the songs. Actually I recorded the three songs people who heard them liked best, and they did seem like the obvious "hits"to me, too. And I recorded short versions of the other songs, just to indicate how they would go in the script. This wasn't easy.

Then I had to listen to all the takes, choose the best ones, redo several vocals, sometimes whole songs. And then, I didn't have the equipment to mix these recordings to my satisfaction. By then the programs to mix on the home computer were coming along, and so were the computers. Finally I found a program cheap and easy enough to use just to make a decent CD. It took hours more, and two computers, but just when it looked like---or rather it sounded like---it was never going to happen, it did happen. I now have a CD that sounds pretty good. Not perfect but (as we used to say) good enough for this band. It's musically okay and gets the idea of the song across. So finally, after all this time, this much exists, and that's about as wonderful as it's been in such things.

The second wonderful thing also has to do with music and technology and specifically, this laptop. On it I watched and listened to the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night" I borrowed from the library. You know how many times I've seen this movie in theatres? I stopped counting at 20. Then came the video restoration (which I have) and now the DVD. And it's the best yet. Moments as terrific as some moments in the theatre. But as an overall viewing and listening experience, better.

You can now see all the flaws that the big screen hid, but you can also see all the little subtle things. And mostly it's the presence. The immediacy. A combination of the visual image and the music through the earphones. (A lot of Beatles stuff at a certain point was in true stereo, which makes earphones worse than useless for me, since I can hear only in one ear, and therefore only half of the song---the drums and the backup vocals, or switch to the lead vocals while the rhythm cuts out-very frustrating, torture really.) But this is mixed so I get stereo through both earphones. (Something I picked up from the recording program was what added echo/reverb sounds like, and so I could identify that reverb was added to the songs the Beatles play in the concert in the end, so the music sounds like it's being played live in a hall---though of course in that hall the music wasn't heard at all, just the screaming.)

It's a nice DVD package, with interviews with everybody they could find, including the woman who did makeup, but those Brits talk so well that even all these bits were interesting and fun. I can't figure out why they didn't include the "I'll Cry Instead" footage they added in the video version, but other than that, it's a fine two DVD set. But the movie-that the thing. That's the wonderful thing.

I remember long ago---1969 to be exact---I was walking with a college friend in Berkeley, and I happened to mention Wallace Stevens' statement that the purpose of art was to make people happy. My friend, a philosophy major on a heavy political and psychological trip, laughed at me. I doubt if that's why many artists do it, he said.

Kurt Vonnegut said something like that in his novel Timequake. "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'the Beatles did.'"

They didn't do it alone in this movie, and finding the right people at the right time and inspiring them was part of their genius, their success when it worked, and their bad times when it didn't. They rescued Richard Lester from making commercials for the rest of his life, and he turned out to be a very fine director, with several of the best films of the 60s and early 70s. They inspired the camera people, the editors, the other actors, etc. In some ways, this movie is like Shakespeare for the 60s-full of clichés, because the lines became part of the culture. I could recite the times even in recent years that people have quoted from this movie. Yet I had forgotten some of the funny bits.

I've got to take the DVD back to the library tomorrow, so as soon as I post them, I'm going to watch it again.

It's All a Mistake


I awoke from another set of bad dreams. Yesterday had been filled, possessed by an idea, which I worked out in some detail but did not speak of. It is a very delicate process. I was aware of my own instinct---supported by James Hillman and others who wrote on this subject---that these creative seeds are fragile and must be protected. We tend to dismiss the idea of anything being fragile, or being allowed to be, in our lives and work today. Get over it, is the refrain. The idea of harboring secrets is judged as criminal.

But closely holding the idea, it may then die for lack of outside air. Today it seems delusional. So who knows what the right decision is. If you speak it aloud and it gets shot down, a lot of the fledgling life in it dies, or is injured and perhaps warped in its development in some way. If you don’t speak of it, it is in danger of being overrun by other things, dismissed without a hearing as whim, a stupid idea, a delusion.

Especially an idea that has so many risks attached to it. An idea for a play---a play!---in this day and age, written by me, the very idea would make people blink three times, swallow hard and try a brave smile. Cause I'm not a playwright. That's not my slot.

On the other hand, what is my slot? Anyway, the time to do it, the risk that it will come to nothing, that it will fail on its own terms and then in the world, is what dominates my mood today. Yesterday I lived in its aura, it seemed so perfect, and of course the dream extended to transformative success. There's some sense in that, of course. Most creative careers are based on one successful idea. Other ideas or variations on that idea aside, there is usually one, that at some point makes the difference and defines everything else. There's no law, fortunately or not, that says when this idea may come. And then the carrying out of the idea must be successful. That's the rub for many, the people with ideas and longings, but not the wherewithal to carry them through successfully, in their own terms as well as convincingly to others.

But the investment of time and concentration and writing energy, it all seems so foolhardy. And then, in some crucial way, it doesn't quite work. Which you don't discover until it's done.
There is a kind of goal outside the play itself, and a deadline, of little more than a month. A full-length play in a month? Well, why not? (Lots of reasons why not. Many more than why.)

What I thought of, however, as I got up was something I'd read yesterday, an account of Jung's last informal talk to friends and supporters at the end of his last visit to America. He told them it was important for each to live his or her life as fully as possible, even if it is based on a mistake. Life is full of errors, no one has found the whole truth, but the point is to live with integrity and devotion.


This idea of mine is a dramatic one, but it is in keeping with a lot of the work I've attempted to do in the past several years in non-fictional ways. I keep inventing variations, re-combinations of this work. This week I came up with two new approaches to it that might work quite well as books.

This too is another nerve-wracking part of the process, which at times seems absolutely crazy. Again, it is so counter to today's received wisdom, which is: move on. If it isn't working, move on. Of course, there is always a time to move on. But there is also a process of finding the best way into it, the best way to express it and communicate it, which is also another way of understanding it, or in fact of defining it.

This thought reminded me of one of the first passages from James Hillman's work I copied out. In fact I remember that I printed the long quotation and tacked it on the wall next to my computer in the room where I wrote in my late lamented apartment in Pittsburgh. I searched it out again today in my computer files, though without a citation. Hillman is writing about psychological analysis, using creativity in the arts as a metaphor. But it was the description of the artistic activity that I was interested in: that is, the literal meaning of the metaphor. I hadn't thought of this "amplification" process in that way before. I knew that more and more I was beginning to orbit my ideas, revisit them and work on them, rather than trying the idea out once and moving on. There's no support for this from the business side of things, to say the least. Work it took years to shape gets dismissed in a nanosecond. Anyway, here it is:


"The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes. It has a ritualistic aspect as well, because the dignity of the problem which is being amplified is never wholly claimed by knowledge. One starts off knowing that one cannot know it; one can only hover over it, thrust at it, and pay respects through devoted attention. This permits the levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul itself presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on.

Analysis is better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. It tends even to build symbols. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical unconscious aspect, than does definition with its exclusively conscious rationality."
James Hillman