Antiquity is the unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

December 10, 2019 11:56 AM

Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again. "However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. " Donald Hall, the late poet laureate's meditation on aging.

Also consider Roger Angell on the same subject: This Old Man.

"We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation."

posted by storybored (2 comments total)

Well, that was lovely. I have a friend who gardens, she is far away. She let me share the abundance of it, and the abundance of beauty. Even now, often our conversations center around the birds at her feeders, how the squirrels are doing, the sharp shinned hawk who hunts the place. I have some hens and chickens here, that come from there. I send pictures of rainbows, citrus, parrots, flowers, food. We have long, ongoing conversations in these areas. I remember her shouting from the back of a large arena, when I walked to pick up my Masters, came her voice, "My friend! Oyéah!" My best friends still remain, though far away, I will never lose them, in my memory, anyway.
posted by Oyéah at 2:27 PM on December 10, 2019 [4 favorites]

A beautiful meditation on rural life, and his life as an older man. An extremely fortunate man, an extraordinary education, and real talent, he lived in a beautiful place all of his life, until his death. Talk about having a sense of Home,Capital H Home.

That barn sounds great. I do love barns. There was a post here a few years ago about old barns, I wrote of my love of them, how they smell, the strips of wood nailed up as a ladder to the hay mow, the cob-webs. If it's an abandoned barn, as Hall's seems to have been, it's really fun to root around, find old tools and try to figure out what their purpose was, find a pair of leather gloves stuck on a nail, just inside the door, put them on and slide back in time -- who wore these gloves? What was the last thing he (or she) did before that last time of hanging them in that nook near the door. Jesus, look at this wrench -- it's huge!

The dust of years, maybe centuries, laying in this building.

In one farm that the farmer died in, my brother and I were nosing around in an out-building, on a couple of nails in the wall hung a perfectly beautiful -- if just a bit dusty, and just a bit rusty -- a perfectly beautiful Marlin 30:30. Imagine that -- a sweet rifle on nails in the wall in an outbuilding. It's clear that to the farmer it was just a tool.

In Illinois, and in Wisconsin, all of those gorgeous old barns are getting torn down. They are examples of remarkable craft -- I'd say Art, myself -- remarkable craft but due to horses-ass laws in Illinois and Wisconsin they have turned into tax liabilities. Rural people are tearing them down and putting up ugly squat metal buildings. It's a crying shame.

~~~~~

I'm from Illinois, I know long dark winters. I know the beauty of cardinals at a feeder outside the window, sharp red, beautiful golden beaks against the while of snow weighting the pine tree the feeder was in, that red beauty sharp also against the green pine. I love the wall of ice coming down off of houses or barns or garages or whatever, and I love when it comes crashing down, in the spring melt.

I left Illinois because of those long dark winters. It was too much. I'd lived in Florida for two or three years, moved back to Illinois -- knowing that there were people in shorts and t-shirts surf-fishing in the Gulf of Mexico as I banged my hands together sharply to get enough feeling into my fingers to put jumper cables from one vehicle to the other, the 18 hour long nights -- no. Just no. Texas called. I love to visit there, now, I love more to leave, headed south and west, back to Texas.

Texas is filled with people who got here running from, more I think than those who got here running to.

~~~~~

While his writing was beautiful I disagree with his willingness to be marginalized. As in:
put me in a box where she can rub my head and hear me purr. Or maybe she would prefer me to wag my tail, lick her hand, and make ingratiating dog noises.
You get put in a box if you let yourself get put in a box.

the same man, who asks Linda if she enjoyed her lunch. Then he bends over to address me, wags his finger, smiles a grotesque smile, and raises his voice to ask, “Did we have a nice din-din?”
Just because you're older, perhaps especially because you're older, saying "Fuck you." with authority and sharp eyes is as needed as in a bar at 26.

~~~~~

My mother turned down many opportunities because she hated to be in a wheelchair. I never could understand this, and don't understand it yet. Maybe it's something that I'll have to experience, walk (roll, in this case) a mile in her shoes. I've a friend confined to a wheelchair and he does everything that he can, and with that attitude it seems like there is a lot that he can do. I am very proud, I love to be physical, I do love to move this old crate of mine around, riding that bicycle, doing my other exercises also, carousing about -- maybe if that were taken away from me I'd understand better. I hope not to find out.
posted by dancestoblue at 3:09 PM on December 10, 2019 [9 favorites]