THE NEGATIVE SIDE
One of the amazing recognitions of Celtic spirituality and wisdom is the sisterhood of nature and the soul. The body is made out of clay. It has the memory of the earth in it, and not just the memory of the earth, but also in some strange, subtle, almost silent way, it has the rhythms of the seasons in it too. G. B. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young, so springtime is always a season that somehow resembles the energy of youth. Autumntime seems to mirror the gathering and the harvest of old age. One of the amazing lines in the Bible that I really like is a line from the prophet Haggai, who says, “You have sown so much and harvested so little.” I feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience. Contemporary society worships youth: it worships strength; it worships image. It has a whole ideology of externality and it has no refined sense of the subtlety of the soul, the secrecy of the heart. Especially, it has no sensitivity of these interim regions where the great gatherings happen in human life.
Admittedly old age is a very difficult time—and I can’t talk about it from within because I still have a bit of youth left in me!—but it is a time when the body becomes more infirm, when you could be ill, when you could be alone, and it is also a time maybe when you become dependent. When I think of my own future and getting old, one of the things that would really disturb me would be my lack of autonomy and freedom, that I could be dependent on other people to go places, to take me out, to mind me, to get things for me, bring things in to me. I think that we need in our society to be very sensitive to that diminishing of the body’s vigor and passion and possibility and the lack of freedom that goes with that, especially when illness comes in old age. It must be very frightening for a person if you’re trying to forget that death is ahead and you’re trying to live every day as it comes, yet illness comes. Illness is the precursor of death when you’re old, and it frightens you, and small illness knocks a lot more out of you than it would have when you were a young person. So there is that whole tide of negativity that the old have to deal with. When you walk down the street and see an old person walking slowly, you just overtake them and go on. But you wouldn’t notice the achievement of that person looking for what they need, shopping or whatever, and being able to come back home. When an old person goes for a day out and comes back home and recovers from it, it’s almost a celebration.
It reminds me of the great Polish director Kieślowski, who made The Ten Commandments and Three Colors. Always in his films there is a crucial moment in the evolution of the plot when an old man or an old woman, anonymous figures, just pass by and the camera lingers on them. It is like an oracle or an omen of the future of time for these characters, who are in the midst of great passion and trying to work things out.
HARVEST TIME
So there is a negative side to old age, but that has to do with the externality. It has to do with the body, and my understanding of old age and aging is that as the body diminishes, the soul gets richer. In old age, one of the things you have, whatever way you want to construct it, is time. When you have time, your soul begins to decipher things more and more. Camus said that after one day in the world, we could live the rest of our life in solitary confinement, because so much happens to us in one day. If you look at that from the perspective of all of one’s life, there are thousands of years of experience packed into sixty or seventy years of human life, because the amazing thing about the human mind is it is never neutral. The amazing thing about the human soul and the human spirit is it is never in a state of non-experience. There is something going on all the time. Even when you are sleeping. There are rivers of dream-thought flowing through the earth of your body, bringing up all types of mythic, archetypal stuff, some of which belongs to you, a lot of which belongs to the clay and a lot of which belongs to the race. A human being is an endless, epic theater of activity. So in old age, time slows a bit, the outer draw to activity recedes, and you have time for the more contemplative side of things. One enters the contemplative side of one’s own life, and you have a chance then to decipher what has happened to you, to see the hidden depths of experiences that have occurred in your life. You really have a chance to weave a new shelter for yourself. I love the image of the Carthusian monks, the contemplatives, who wear this habit with a cowl on it, and that then is sewn up when they die and becomes the shroud in which they are laid out. I would look at old age in a positive way, as a time of weaving the eternal shroud, the things that you take with you into the eternal world.
I remember one time in Moycullen giving a sermon about how we shouldn’t get waylaid; our journeys shouldn’t get falsified, trying to carry the world on our shoulders, because we can take nothing with us when we die. I was up in the local shop afterwards, and one of the neighbors said to me that he liked the sermon and he said, “Do you know the way we say that around here? You’d never see a trailer after a hearse!” You can take nothing with you but the interior things, which have reached a level of refinement that there is no barrier that they have to pass through. In that sense, aging is the ultimate refinement and ultimate harvest.
Our culture has gone so much into falsity that we don’t acknowledge that at all. It is very interesting, if you look at the anthropology of tribal cultures, that the elders were always the people of wisdom. Nowadays, we put them away in old people’s homes. Sometimes people have to be put into old people’s homes when they can’t be managed, but some of the loneliest places I’ve ever been are old people’s homes. I remember one particular place I used to visit. When you went in, twenty little worn, winnowed faces with hungry eyes would look up at you as if you might be the visitor that they’ve expected maybe for months, or maybe in some cases for years. It used to take me a couple of days to recover from it, because it is so lonesome. It’s lovely to have a friendship with an old person, because you learn so much from them. The Bible says that you should always ask for advice from a wise person. Old age and wisdom usually go together, because when you’ve been through the treadmill of experience you know what counts. You know the chaff from the real grain that brings nourishment. Old people have great wisdom and great light, and when they are not governed by fear there is incredible permission in them. You often get more encouragement in relation to your own wildness and sense of danger and carelessness from an old person than from anyone who is stuck in the middle of a system or a role or the kind of atrophied complacency that often passes for achievement and respectability.
THE GIFT OF MEMORY
Since I was a child, one of the things that always haunted me was the way everything passes away. In relation to death, that is the ultimate transience, when someone you love goes away, falls away out of visibility into the invisibility of death. I often think there is a place where our vanished days gather, and that place is memory. One of the fascinating things about old people is the way that they stay around the well of memory. If you are willing to sit with them, you won’t get analytical sentences from them about was it this or was it that, or could the meaning have been one, two, three. What you will always get is narrative about events from their childhood, which are never straight replications of what happened, but are the bones of the event, enfleshed with image and with anecdote and with narrative. In a strange way, nothing is ever lost or forgotten; everything that befalls us remains within us. There is within you the presence in a refined sense of everything that has ever happened to you, and if you go looking for it you will find it. I always think that in our time, memory has been hijacked by the computer industry, and the more correct term is “recall” rather than “memory.” Memory is a particularly intimate and sacramental human phenomenon and there is a great depth and density to everyone. The image in nature that is really profound in relation to that is the tree; all the rings of memory enfold all the years of growing, blossoming, dying, budding, blossoming, growing, dying, and enfold all the elements of experience. In a similar way, within the clay part of each soul, the rings of memory are there and you can find them.