The Butte-y of Aging

In a recent Frazz, the eponymous college-educated janitor of an elementary school, turns to one of more precocious students, Caulfield, and says: "Henry David Thoreau said to beware of all enterprises that require new clothing." To which Caulfied gives this reply: "Like aging."

Yes, like aging...

Like many of us I suppose my aging has meant a constant adjustment, not only in my wardrobe, but in my sense of myself. I remember I few years back going into a department store where I'd usually bought pants, going through the stacks, finding my size, and going to the cash register to pay for them. The sales person took one look at them, and another at me, and said, as tactfully as could be, "Don't you wish to try these on before you buy them, sir?" No, I said, I knew MY size. Well, sure enough, when I got home I found out that the size of me was not "MY size" anymore! One would think that there's only so much of that sort of adjustment a person could take, but the fact is, I've had to adjust "my size" several times since!

I like to think that I do pretty well with this "aging" thing, but the truth is, I'm still a sucker for the compliment that goes along the lines of: "you look (or sound) much younger" than my chronological age. And to think that, when I was a child, and even a youth, I took it to be a compliment when someone would say that I seemed "older" than my age! Somewhere in the course of middle age/adulthood, the compliment gauge was switched.

I have come to believe that our culture gives us no good, useful, confirming and guiding models for getting older, and telling us what aging might truly mean for us. We have no good names for people of a certain age. "Seniors" doesn't sound too good-- unless it leads to discounts on movie tickets and the like. "Elders" might be more accurate, but in our culture people have to be enjoined to respect their elders (because it doesn't seem to come naturally) and having lived so long does not seem to me to be in itself an achievement worthy of respect. And sometimes, one can simply seem to be way too "old!" John McCain, I think, suffers from this. The appeal of Obama is to the "young" supposedly-- and that means not just those of only a couple or three decades of life, but also maybe those who think "young." And "inexperience," which used to mean something negative, McCain is finding out, is not such a detraction. We have this shared sense in our society right now that we are moving into a time that none of us have experienced, a time when all of the paradigms seem to be shifting, and so,what would "experience," in itself, teach us? This, of course, is how the "young" think anyway!

I've begun to believe that we are requiring for ourselves a New Paradigm for aging. I was impressed to have been listening again recently to a cassette tape (you see, even saying that dates me!) of Robert Johnson, the eminent Jungian, talking about the strengths and limitations of the Parcifal and the Holy Grail myth for modeling male identity. Basically, what it boiled down to was that young men, coming of age, would benefit from understanding their lives in the light of the Parcifal tale. Fathers would certainly do well to teach it to their sons. But it scarcely applies to older men. The story "runs out," as it were, of meaning. It fails to be instructive, let alone enlightening.

In its place, Johnson subsitutes Shakespeare's King Lear-- which I found even less instructive and not at all enlightening.

And this is my point: if aging into and beyond seven decades of life is to be accomplished in some meaningful and meaning fulfilling way, then a good mythic structure for it certainly would help. Maybe not enough visionaries and myth-speakers have lived long enough (yet) for our culture to have generated such narrative underpinnings. All we have now is "retirement," as a constant vacation ended mercifully by death, hopefully before too much suffering or lingering or otherwise eviscerating one's material and spiritual resources. Rather dismally vague, wouldn't you say?

OK, so if not from our culture, perhaps from another? I would like to recommend the following from the Arapaho, as recounted in Joseph Bruchac's Our Stories Remember:

As we travel, we shall come to four buttes. We must be ready when we come to each of them in turn, for their sides are steep and rocky. If our steps are not careful, we may slip and fall and go no farther. When we reach the top, which is flat and wide, we may stand there and look far in all directions, both behind us and ahead. But, sooner or later, if we would continue, we must climb down the other side. As we pass through the valley between that butte and the next, we are met by White Owl Man. He tests us to see if we remember what we learned from our climb, from what we saw while we were there on the top, from our experience of leaving that former high place. If we remember all that our past experience has taught us, then we are allowed to continue on until we come to the side of the second steep slope. Then we begin the hard climb again.

So it goes for each of the four buttes in turn. We must make the difficult climb, stand for a time on top seeing far vistas, but then, at last, descend and prepare for yet another ascent.

Each of these four hills has a name. The first is Childhood. The second is Youth. The third is Middle Age. The last is Old Age. That journey which leads us up and down is called the Road of Life.

With this narrative map, I can come to know where I am in life: climbing that last butte of Old Age. It tells me that the butte is worth climbing-- and that it is work to do so! So as I struggle with myself and with where I am in life, I am really answering the questions of White Owl Man, who is evaluating whether I am worthy to go on. This makes sense to me. This frame of reference grounds me and gives my present life meaning.

Perhaps the best mythic structures are the oldest-- older even than the Arturian Legends!