Time’s Fool #1

W. S. Graham, declining to write an “auto-elegy” about turning sixty-five, asks, “Where am I going now? / And where are you going.” Fair questions. And, not just where, but how? And when?

Artificial intelligence & life. Mobile apps can modify photographs to create versions of your not-yet-older face. But before such transformations, artist Phillip Toledano, photographing his demented father, anxious about his own possible “sad fates,” decided to enact them. A make-up artist and prostheses created versions of Toledano as a drunk; as obese; as homeless. Also slumped over in wheelchair, caretaker checking her phone. And, inevitably, as bathtub suicide.

Sic Toledano. But how have I imagined it will end? “Mortality salience,” they call it in the flourishing field of terror management theory: awareness that death—your death—is inevitable. And, even, that most of what we do is impelled by fear of death. By The Denial of Death, title of Ernest Becker’s book. (Becker himself died at forty-nine.) A bit reductionist, terror management theory, but surely containing more than a grain of truth.

Recently, the bathroom in my cottage was second-childhood childproofed: grab-bars to prevent falls; raised toilet seat for aching knees; two-sided shaving mirror, one side with unforgiving magnification. The beholder’s predictable shock at sight of Hamlet’s “thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.”

Call me Mr. Natural: jaws shrink; gums recede. Veins bulge. Skin slackens, sags. Lines, wrinkles, age spots. Furrows, folds. Creases. Striations (from Latin for groove, channel). And that bump or whatever it is. A when? Oh, no h? Okay: say wen.

Overall, I’m dusted with old age, the way we were in grammar school theatricals to play George Washington and his ilk. Surely this is part of the make-up.

Long-gone poet Francois Villon’s belle has a question. “This is all that human beauty comes to?” She for whom “once there wasn’t a man alive / who wouldn’t give me everything.” Now “dried up, paltry, thin and scrawny, / I’m nearly driven mad with rage.”

Superannuated. Outmoded. Obsolete. Over the hill. Out of it.

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” members of my cohort said when I was in my early twenties.

In Robert Frost’s vision, the “withered hag” who came to clean “with pail and rag” was once a Hollywood star. “Die early and avoid the fate,” Frost counsels; do what you can to keep “the end from being hard.”

Frost-the-baleful. Mischievous, cruel. Frank. But, just how do you adequately “provide, provide”?

William Butler Yeats admired actors playing tragic parts who didn’t weep. For me, weeping’s no problem. Re the idiomatic “Not a dry eye in the house,” I’m dry eyed. Lubricate with Visine Tears® or Thera Tears®.

Youth versus older age. From anything goes to everything goes. As on the radio in the 1950s when a baseball player hit a homer: “Going, going, gone!” Or, as the official U.S. Air Force song has it, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.”

Think of Samuel Johnson’s “Unnumber’d Maladies” as “Decay pursues Decay.” Or his “life protracted is protracted woe.”

Amazing recovery from illness or surgery? Fresh start, “new lease on life.”

But, terms of the lease?

Durations. Disintegrations. The extent of things.

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For the time being. For the time being we timed beings be...

Time spans. Our “days are numbered.” Job 14:5–7. Duly noted. But what’s the (magic) number?

“I’ve got nothing but time,” we’d say when I was a kid, in no hurry at all. “All the time in the world.”

“Time’s wasting,” my mother would admonish: “Hurry up,” though I liked “dragging my feet.” Or, bored, had more time “on my hands” than I knew what to do with. Or, impatient with others, might say, “I don’t have time for this.”

Now that it’s getting late for me, I can barely believe I was once always the youngest. Yeats’s time, “that has transfigured me.”

Time passing, I make a point of being on time. On time? More like...