52 & Counting - Crystallizing
Preface C (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)
A number of things stuck to me in growing old. One is to write in such a way that there’s no space for an additional ‘m’ in any line I write. That does not leave a lot of space for fluency in writing1. Another is to stop talking by counting whether the letters in any a sentence to be uttered are divisible by 3. This never stopped me from talking too much. It can be proven - not that I proved it - that this criterion is very forgiving taking into account interpunction and the likes. I inhabit a weird world whose windows seem slowly to shut me in behind blinds. I wonder whether being bitter is what will inevitably befall me. Which is why I let my thoughts wander, hoping that whether behind a walking rack, or, ultimately, in a wheelchair they can still roam free enough to make this, my, older life worth - at least - another one’s while.
Whence I wonder “What is growing old?”. It is - I think - a phenomenon a lot like hoarding where, gradually, one’s mind is filled up to the rim with memories. The seemingly ageless aspect of ageing might well be that we are all hoarders. After a while we can’t be bothered to clean up after us because it is too much bother. And this not just on account of laziness; (we don’t completely regress to childhood). No, it just costs too much to remove old habits to make place for the new. Certainly when physical ageing kicks in (more on this below - I, alas, shan’t forget). Then we become ‘that old couple’ living in the midst of dated furniture in a house smelling of the living dead. A picture imperfect, unless (and as long as) they can still blow away the smell with some fresh laughter: it takes a hoarder to navigate within the borders of what is hoarded and still see the pun in bumping their legs into a pointy piece of hoard.
The general idea is that in growing old one grows wise: wisdom is like whiskey, something that develops with age (and on top of that only if well caged). But clearly there’s something amiss with such simple linearity. We start as very young children endearing to the very old precisely because they appreciate what’s being lost at their age: playful plasticity. I saw my father playing with my children and saw in him the sparkle he had lost in paying his dues. ‘Close the gates’, he went, they were chuckling like ducklings to try to get to the pie via the other door. ‘Open the gates’, he said, and they flooded back to the path of least resistance. And on and on. Playing without point is the least pointless thing to do2. When the kids had their pie my father’s face frowned admonishingly upon me for having 3-is-too-many kids to keep up. Life is a brutal game, he said, and it was difficult to keep it up. He had put all his heart into it, but didn’t become quite heartless enough to survive the competition sane and sound. This is to his credit as sane and sound means to be set in ways of wisdom willfully without regard for what is really new (I do not mean computers, automobiles or consorts; I mean finding the best way to a nice piece of pie).
Still, to rear a child is taming that very plasticity. Canalizing it away from, say, incontinence. As endearing children can be, they are also exhausting. I was never so happy as when my 2 eldest were potty trained; never so desperate to realize the third was not magically born with the innate capacity for self-control. And here you have it, as Jablonka stresses in her work on epigenetics: the complementary pair of plasticity and canalization. Because such is the grammar of life: a recursive plying of culture canalizing the raw pluriform plasticity of our society’s stem cells which are the young who, in turn, break open culture to keep such eternal recursion going. As biologists know, all of life is recursive, returning on itself in self-reflection like a toddler pausing its play as if to think, until finally! really thinking: ‘Should I not go to the bathroom first?’. Or, as the child pausing it’s quick fire questioning as if to say, until finally! really saying: ‘Should I not contain such verbal incontinence to finally find stuff out for myself?’ Because, as linguists know, all of language is recursive, so languaging is to start asking questions to yourself, thereby making memories that, by making them, make it increasingly difficult to discover questions you feel you have not already answered3.
So there you have it, a bell-shaped curve starting helplessly with a high plasticity ending in being of no help to anyone because too highly canalized4. Somewhere in the middle you’re in the prime of life: able to simultaneously stand your ground and to discover new ground. Simondon says that we start with a potential for becoming without yet being very much one’s self. As we crystallize our potential, our individual being solidifies, but this necessarily is at the expense of what we can, still, become. The grammar of ageing is that we are conduits who transfer possibility into reality, but finally become so real that any possibility exhausts us. This is literally true for physical ageing: when old we simply cannot move our pieces of dated furniture anymore. It is only figuratively true for mental ageing. We may, still, wander around in our memories, making the young wonder about new possibilities their, younger, bodies might discover. By connecting to the young we may laugh at our own unbecoming, or sparkle at how we will, after death, live on in them. Shorter this: mentally we do live on, but only through others.
Much more needs to be said of course, but not in a preface where the mind may wander in blissful forgetfulness of critical commentaries. As if playing at the opening and the closing of gates without the stern admonishments of not being overly ambitious. Jablonka, by the way, says it explicitly: forgetting is crucial for evolution. Simondon might have added that in a truly open society we need to allow ourselves to be forgotten. ‘To remain forever young’, is, as Wilde pictured it, the ultimate perversion. Being born is to be undetermined, living is becoming more and more determined. If one does not give way, one gets in the way of the young and not just your life but all life is at risk. I will have succeeded in this book if despite the thickening of our heads with age, I helped to get across the message Gaia is trying to get through to our thick old heads: make way! Shorter that: both our bodies and minds are at their best when we can see them as fertile compost. Otherwise we are just being toxic.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
Besides, it is pointless given fully justifying your lines of writing cannot survive - like now - those lines being transferred to another word processor (worse, not even to another screen on which they are displayed). Luckily, as is the point of the sentence to which the following footnote belongs, playing pointlessly is the least pointless game there is
Play is a theme that ties some of my favorite philosophers together: Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Lugones and, even, Davidson. Whilst Lugones blasts Gadamer as an example of colonialist-competitive concepts of ‘playing to get the upper hand’, playing without point does need to include playing for points. My point being that playing with words needn’t follow hard and strict rules neatly deranged to only allow conventional ‘set’ meanings. Still, the upper hand, in our linguistic wonderland, soon slides down the rabbit hole where strict criteria for truth defeat themselves, turning into the fossilized bones of a dead language. With which I return the reader to the main text as being seriously competitive is a clear sign of losing plasticity - to wit: to enter the land of nitwits (literally lacking wit) who are (also literally) unbecoming.
For the reader of footnotes, this is where a serious linguist might go: but the recursion of language isn’t the reflexive ‘asking yourself questions’ and I believe this is a piece of hoard Davidson finally was able to laugh away as deranged: the epitaph of serious linguists being “We only dealt with languages as dead as we are now.”
When Aristotle talks about the golden mean of courage as lying between excess of rashness and excess of cowardice, we find these bell-shaped curves having a maximum appeal where the underlying - complementary - concepts reach an optimum (given circumstances, as no one would be so rash to claim that in states of war it wouldn’t be prudent to err somewhat more on the side of cowardice).
Credits image: Deviant Art via https://www.deviantart.com under Creative Commons license