''I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
...and walk upon the beach?
I have seen the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.''
T.S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
One of the defining traits of middle age is an acute and inescapable awareness of loss that seems to be wired into experience. Its autumnal tone is unexcitable and calm: it has lost the violent optimism of youth and is at peace with its fatalistic acceptance that life would not give another chance.Every evening is a dire reminder of another petal fallen off the dazzling, but wilting, flower of youth. Every morning, a tortured search in front of the mirror for another new grey, another line added to the deepening crow's feet. Every sudden phone call, the news of another ageing, ailing relative passing away, someone we should have visited long ago but couldn't quite manage.
The beauty of youth is in its wasteful abundance: we make mistakes, lose jobs, break off with lovers, neglect friendships, forget birthdays when we are young. We know we are never far away from a second chance,life bursts with such a pressing immediacy, such an overwhelming vehemence that everything else must wait till we sort out life. Middle age is the dawning awareness that we have exhausted our reserve of second chances. Life, from this point on, is a series of finalities.
Mid-life crisis is consciousness' meltdown in the face of such a traumatic, inexorable given: youth, with all its abundance and intoxication seems like a betrayal from this lonely apex. Depression and suicide are at one end of the spectrum of reaction to this unmitigated eventuality,while chronic cynicism, overspending, and one night stands lie at the other, less extreme end. They are the soul's insane, and essentially futile, attempts to reassert control over something that is outside the ambit of human power.
And yet, there is another, more meaningful, more beneficial way of doing the same thing.Most triumphant art is born in this place of infernal darkness: they are aesthetically organised responses to the writer/ artist's terrified recognition of this truth. Rabindranath Tagore's frenzied translation of the 'Gitanjali' poems (resulting in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, 1913) was a middle-aged man's answer to the gaping, numbing futility at the core of life, often driving him suicidal by his own admission, in one of his letters to his oldest son. Having lost his five children and wife to death, in a quick succession, this is how the mystic from the East reacts:
'' I must launch out my boat--I must. The languid hours pass by on the shore.... .
Dost thou not feel the thrills passing through the air with the notes of the faraway song... from the other shore?'' Gitanjali, 42.
Mellowed by this profound knowledge of letting go, middle-aged love is less arrogant,more abject and more philosophical. Unlike in the first flush of youth when love is at the very first sight and its demise is at the very first slight, love, if it at all happens at this age, is rather with a philosophical construct, than with a person. That's why it is so difficult to let go of someone at this age, especially when you know that it is this one person who stands between you and the barren shore of dotage and death. The one writer in English language who celebrates this brand of love with enduring success is William Shakespeare.
In 1596, Shakespeare was 32 (the quite appropriate age to experience the onset of midlife crisis in the sixteenth century) when he lost his 11 year old son, a memento mori that was to exert a powerful influence on his creative life. His sonnets, written over the span of the next 8 years, is a theatre of love, loss, youth and its passing in the face of the ominous antagonist, Death. The stage is the bereaved soul of the poet, where he obsessively keeps re-enacting these themes, these anxieties with the help of his two other dramatis personae--his boy -muse,the Young Man(YM) and his Dark Lady (DL). The essence of this abject, slavish, cringing and often most self-abasing love is quite heartbreakingly contained in his critically celebrated Sonnet 64:
''Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate/ That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as death which can not choose/ But weep to have that which it fears to lose.''
This sad and terrifying picture of mutability is inspired in a man in his thirties by a seventeen year old kid.In keeping with his youthful good looks, this boy-lover is most notoriously disloyal, the poems are permeated by a profoundly mature awareness of his profligacy. And yet what exactly is it that keeps the celebrity playwright of the Elizabethan popular theatre latched on to the callous and ruthless boy so poignantly, with such inextinguishable affection and forgiveness?
The break-up sonnets (ie when the boy has absolutely had it and is breaking off) 87-90, almost viscerally ooze with tears and blood. One can not but think, what is it, really, that inspires such fierce, suicidal loyalty, especially when one knows one's lover is false?
''When thou shalt be disposed to set me light/ And place me in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side, against myself, I'll fight/ And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn'' (88)
One of the provocative theories, suggested by Michael Wood, is that Shakespeare's most severe separation anxiety, in response to the possibility of his parting with the Young Man has its roots in his parental grief: the boy-lover is a transmutation of the dead son, adolescent and now, lost.''For his love is absolute, intense, overwhelming in the way that a parent feels for a child'' (Michael Wood). That makes Shakespeare's romantic intensity and sexual jealousy infinitely more challenging to read, taking us almost, to the edge of political incorrectness but read in this light of fatherly grief, his romantic loss assumes a devastatingly tragic tone, so unspeakable that is defies the limits of ordinary articulation:
''Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: / In sleep a king; but waking no such matter.'' (87).
A more modern and readily relateable example would be Eric Clapton's 'Tears in Heaven':
''Would you hold my hand
If I saw you in heaven?
Would you help me stand
If I saw you in heaven?
...Beyond the door there's peace I'm sure
And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven.''
Without knowing the backstory of Clapton's son's death inspiring such a beautiful lyric of loss, one would underestimate the depth of grief packed into the poetry. As romantic lyric-- which it is entirely possible to be interpreted-- it is quite ordinary, indeed, bordering on the sentimental, but as a grieving father's vision of a dead child it is exquisitely, and most achingly sublime. And this is also a grown man's psychological response to loss that is irreparable.
An ordinary, lesser person would retreat into psychotic disintegration under similar circumstances, pretty much like the Mother in Laars Von Trier's Antichrist, whose infant falls to death from an upstairs window while she is engaged in sex in the shower. Chances are, that the parents' sanity would get eroded by survivor's guilt, as it surely must have been in Clapton's case as well, but the gifted artist that he is, he turns this moment of severe emotional rupture around, into an occasion of aesthetic inspiration with the help of the oldest psychological defense, deployed by creative individuals everywhere: sublimation.
After a certain age, every act of artistic creation is essentially an act of exorcism: a solitary, anguished effort to drive away the demons of loss, mortality and irreconcilable separations that torment every thinking individual who knows that he is growing old; every line written on the page, every stroke of the brush on the canvas, every note composed on the instrument is the howl of the ageing soul being slowly dragged away to the dreadful destination.
Art, in this situation, becomes a means as well as an end in itself; the repeated assaults of death, loss and separation have taught us that there is no eternal, permanent core that guarantees stability against the systemic unpredictability and mutability of adult life. Michael,the classical violinist who is Vikram Seth's protagonist from his excruciatingly cathartic novel, An Equal Music, contemplates the nature of his coping with the loss of the woman he lost and found and lost again in his middle age, in clearly aesthetic terms. This is what he concludes during the final concert in which his beloved performs with the divine perfection of a deaf Beethoven:
''Music, such music is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough , it is to be blessed enough to live from day to day and to hear such music...''. Art, then, gives the order and symmetry, the beauty and permanence that the chaos of living denies. Art stays, while life slips through the clenched fingers desperately trying to hold on to old certainties.
Writers, artists, musicians descend into the darkest well of loss, the inferno of distance and death, and find reprieve, if not redemption, to make our own loss of youth and beauty, our own progress to extinction a little less alone, a little more bearable--so that, their art offers a purpose, a meaning to the senseless entropy at the heart of creation, and therein, art writes a divine comedy on the pages of the grim tragedy that existence is. They encourage us to celebrate the brief hour of love, of life,through their art and experience, that wrests immortality out of our all too human transience.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
...and walk upon the beach?
I have seen the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.''
T.S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
One of the defining traits of middle age is an acute and inescapable awareness of loss that seems to be wired into experience. Its autumnal tone is unexcitable and calm: it has lost the violent optimism of youth and is at peace with its fatalistic acceptance that life would not give another chance.Every evening is a dire reminder of another petal fallen off the dazzling, but wilting, flower of youth. Every morning, a tortured search in front of the mirror for another new grey, another line added to the deepening crow's feet. Every sudden phone call, the news of another ageing, ailing relative passing away, someone we should have visited long ago but couldn't quite manage.
The beauty of youth is in its wasteful abundance: we make mistakes, lose jobs, break off with lovers, neglect friendships, forget birthdays when we are young. We know we are never far away from a second chance,life bursts with such a pressing immediacy, such an overwhelming vehemence that everything else must wait till we sort out life. Middle age is the dawning awareness that we have exhausted our reserve of second chances. Life, from this point on, is a series of finalities.
Mid-life crisis is consciousness' meltdown in the face of such a traumatic, inexorable given: youth, with all its abundance and intoxication seems like a betrayal from this lonely apex. Depression and suicide are at one end of the spectrum of reaction to this unmitigated eventuality,while chronic cynicism, overspending, and one night stands lie at the other, less extreme end. They are the soul's insane, and essentially futile, attempts to reassert control over something that is outside the ambit of human power.
And yet, there is another, more meaningful, more beneficial way of doing the same thing.Most triumphant art is born in this place of infernal darkness: they are aesthetically organised responses to the writer/ artist's terrified recognition of this truth. Rabindranath Tagore's frenzied translation of the 'Gitanjali' poems (resulting in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, 1913) was a middle-aged man's answer to the gaping, numbing futility at the core of life, often driving him suicidal by his own admission, in one of his letters to his oldest son. Having lost his five children and wife to death, in a quick succession, this is how the mystic from the East reacts:
'' I must launch out my boat--I must. The languid hours pass by on the shore.... .
Dost thou not feel the thrills passing through the air with the notes of the faraway song... from the other shore?'' Gitanjali, 42.
Mellowed by this profound knowledge of letting go, middle-aged love is less arrogant,more abject and more philosophical. Unlike in the first flush of youth when love is at the very first sight and its demise is at the very first slight, love, if it at all happens at this age, is rather with a philosophical construct, than with a person. That's why it is so difficult to let go of someone at this age, especially when you know that it is this one person who stands between you and the barren shore of dotage and death. The one writer in English language who celebrates this brand of love with enduring success is William Shakespeare.
 |
| Shakespeare's sonnets are a fraught monologue of the modern soul confronting death without the consolation of Medieval Christianity, trying to find immortality in romantic love instead. |
In 1596, Shakespeare was 32 (the quite appropriate age to experience the onset of midlife crisis in the sixteenth century) when he lost his 11 year old son, a memento mori that was to exert a powerful influence on his creative life. His sonnets, written over the span of the next 8 years, is a theatre of love, loss, youth and its passing in the face of the ominous antagonist, Death. The stage is the bereaved soul of the poet, where he obsessively keeps re-enacting these themes, these anxieties with the help of his two other dramatis personae--his boy -muse,the Young Man(YM) and his Dark Lady (DL). The essence of this abject, slavish, cringing and often most self-abasing love is quite heartbreakingly contained in his critically celebrated Sonnet 64:
''Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate/ That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as death which can not choose/ But weep to have that which it fears to lose.''
This sad and terrifying picture of mutability is inspired in a man in his thirties by a seventeen year old kid.In keeping with his youthful good looks, this boy-lover is most notoriously disloyal, the poems are permeated by a profoundly mature awareness of his profligacy. And yet what exactly is it that keeps the celebrity playwright of the Elizabethan popular theatre latched on to the callous and ruthless boy so poignantly, with such inextinguishable affection and forgiveness?
The break-up sonnets (ie when the boy has absolutely had it and is breaking off) 87-90, almost viscerally ooze with tears and blood. One can not but think, what is it, really, that inspires such fierce, suicidal loyalty, especially when one knows one's lover is false?
''When thou shalt be disposed to set me light/ And place me in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side, against myself, I'll fight/ And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn'' (88)
One of the provocative theories, suggested by Michael Wood, is that Shakespeare's most severe separation anxiety, in response to the possibility of his parting with the Young Man has its roots in his parental grief: the boy-lover is a transmutation of the dead son, adolescent and now, lost.''For his love is absolute, intense, overwhelming in the way that a parent feels for a child'' (Michael Wood). That makes Shakespeare's romantic intensity and sexual jealousy infinitely more challenging to read, taking us almost, to the edge of political incorrectness but read in this light of fatherly grief, his romantic loss assumes a devastatingly tragic tone, so unspeakable that is defies the limits of ordinary articulation:
''Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: / In sleep a king; but waking no such matter.'' (87).
A more modern and readily relateable example would be Eric Clapton's 'Tears in Heaven':
''Would you hold my hand
If I saw you in heaven?
Would you help me stand
If I saw you in heaven?
...Beyond the door there's peace I'm sure
And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven.''
Without knowing the backstory of Clapton's son's death inspiring such a beautiful lyric of loss, one would underestimate the depth of grief packed into the poetry. As romantic lyric-- which it is entirely possible to be interpreted-- it is quite ordinary, indeed, bordering on the sentimental, but as a grieving father's vision of a dead child it is exquisitely, and most achingly sublime. And this is also a grown man's psychological response to loss that is irreparable.
An ordinary, lesser person would retreat into psychotic disintegration under similar circumstances, pretty much like the Mother in Laars Von Trier's Antichrist, whose infant falls to death from an upstairs window while she is engaged in sex in the shower. Chances are, that the parents' sanity would get eroded by survivor's guilt, as it surely must have been in Clapton's case as well, but the gifted artist that he is, he turns this moment of severe emotional rupture around, into an occasion of aesthetic inspiration with the help of the oldest psychological defense, deployed by creative individuals everywhere: sublimation.
After a certain age, every act of artistic creation is essentially an act of exorcism: a solitary, anguished effort to drive away the demons of loss, mortality and irreconcilable separations that torment every thinking individual who knows that he is growing old; every line written on the page, every stroke of the brush on the canvas, every note composed on the instrument is the howl of the ageing soul being slowly dragged away to the dreadful destination.
Art, in this situation, becomes a means as well as an end in itself; the repeated assaults of death, loss and separation have taught us that there is no eternal, permanent core that guarantees stability against the systemic unpredictability and mutability of adult life. Michael,the classical violinist who is Vikram Seth's protagonist from his excruciatingly cathartic novel, An Equal Music, contemplates the nature of his coping with the loss of the woman he lost and found and lost again in his middle age, in clearly aesthetic terms. This is what he concludes during the final concert in which his beloved performs with the divine perfection of a deaf Beethoven:
''Music, such music is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough , it is to be blessed enough to live from day to day and to hear such music...''. Art, then, gives the order and symmetry, the beauty and permanence that the chaos of living denies. Art stays, while life slips through the clenched fingers desperately trying to hold on to old certainties.
Writers, artists, musicians descend into the darkest well of loss, the inferno of distance and death, and find reprieve, if not redemption, to make our own loss of youth and beauty, our own progress to extinction a little less alone, a little more bearable--so that, their art offers a purpose, a meaning to the senseless entropy at the heart of creation, and therein, art writes a divine comedy on the pages of the grim tragedy that existence is. They encourage us to celebrate the brief hour of love, of life,through their art and experience, that wrests immortality out of our all too human transience.
