Elder Myth

Most of us understand our lives as a narrative story. Elders tend to form that into a mythology. Like any good literature, the best exaggerate the highs and lows and often have a structure with a moral. Grandparents especially enjoy inflicting this on their young grandchildren. Or at anyone else when there is a holiday gathering. It’s a way of making a mark on the universe, claiming an importance almost as meaningful as in tales of heroes of old .

Nor is it wrong to do so. There is more to existence than daily meals and bedtime. Formulating one’s place in eternal mystery is important to all of us. And once in a while it is nice to share – even proclaim – that adventure .

Unlike many others, I do not think such tales actually help the young in their own lives. Life and circumstance were always unique, and the days change at a dizzying speed. At best this is just another form of entertainment with the added benefit of being (mostly) true .

Oh, perhaps there is some moral value. But really it helps everyone share and join internal narratives to feel far less lonely in the ineffable cosmos.

Sanibel Sad

“You can’t go home again” -, well you can’t really go anywhere as it once was. Older folks are often wrapped in nostalgia. As one of them, I remember many places I was privileged to visit before great change. Often merely modernity, sometimes catastrophe. Sanibel Island was one of them .

When my wife and I visited years ago it was – like many places we went – caught between old and new. The new was glitchy, shiny, and inaccessably privatized. The old had a patina of history along with the comfort of the commonplace.

Hurricane Ian exchanged all that, of course. New things are being rebuilt, but all is shiny, private, glitz. I find myself never wanting to revisit anywhere that once charmed me .

This culture is, I think, testing the proposition that private wealth is always better than public for anything but the most utilitarian needs. Mostly gaudy and ugly, but above all else tightly secreted away. With rare exceptions, America has no grand public spaces, and even fewer that are not merely an attempt at preserved wilderness .

It’s a forward-looking time. Ignoring real history in favor of myth, and ignoring the present in the race to the next great thing .

Sometimes an old man believes all the great things are gone with the wind .

Beauty

Like ” wrong”, beauty is one of those concepts that can never be simply defined. It depends not only on environmental and cultural factors but also on the mood of the observer. We can often agree, but almost as often argue with others and even with ourselves .

It’s fairly safe to say that even considering beauty requires a sense of security within the observer _ you can hardly appreciate the loveliness of a forest while being chased by a bear. . Whether something is beautiful or not occurs way down on the scale of evolutionary fight or flight. A great deal of the time, most of us hardly notice it at all .

We assume that – like other odd traits – there must be SOME biological reason we can respond to beauty. Perhaps it helps social solidarity. Perhaps it is a shortcut to relaxation. Certainly nothing obvious .

I have noticed that in my own life the idea of beautiful has evolved as I age. When young, it was primarily biological. When older, mostly cultural. And now, in an elder, much more simply appreciation of all that is and how it fits together. A miraculous and – yes – extremely beautiful universe .

At least when I am happy, secure, and not doing too much .

Light Lessons

My wife usually gets her hair “done” in a salon,. When she gets home, there are inevitable complaints that it “looks different”. Of course – the lighting is changed .

There have always been different light effects – sunset, noon, overcast. And artificial from candles, gas jet, incandescent. In the era of LED, any “temperature” of red or blue or green or yellow mixture can be served up, bright or dim .

We deal with all this amazingly well. Red usually looks red. A landscape picture resembles itself in almost all conditions. But that should indicate to us just how amazing our vision is – both raw data gathering and interpretation .

Painters always knew this. Patrons who bought things done under “Northern light exposure” in studios rarely hung their purchases under similar conditions. Poor artists’ dimly lit barns had different lighting then when the work is hung in a brightly illuminated museum. And forget trying to recreate the conditions of “plein aire” .

My lesson is that much of our life is like this. We may think things are exactly the same, but only because our brains automatically adjust to what are objectively quite different events. It’s part of our amazing ability to compose and generalize, the core of our knowledge.

Not quite obvious, and easy to ignore. Until the hair looks entirely different …

Next Time

We are conditioned by evolution and experience to expect there to be a “next time” for most events. Next time the sun comes up, the next time it rains, an endless procession of recurrences .

We use that knowledge to plan and learn. “Next time will be different” we may say. We hope to do better in things at which we have failed, repeat exactly things we have enjoyed. And for most of our lives, for much of our daily existence, that belief works very well indeed .

Oh, we know there are unusual one-offs. Never again a fifth birthday party. Hopefully not another car accident. We stash those away and hope or fear as “once in a lifetime” .

As I grow older, “next time” becomes more problematic. Almost all the things I used to know have changed. Places are no longer as they were. Some people have vanished. Institutions I took for granted have mutated as in horror films. Some of it is good, I acknowledge, but even that means there is no true next time for a lot of my memories .

And it begins to get a little frightening. Any given day, for any given event, any given encounter, there may never be a next time. Such absences cascade until I feel trapped in a few quotidian routines that I can (for the moment) count on .

And yet – I DO still expect a next time most of the time.

Entranced

I think throughout history most humans at one time or another have entered a trance state. Often from concentration on something, sometimes from unusual circumstances like pain or fatigue, occasionally from use of drugs or alcohol. Always when dreaming .

In a trance we tend not to be fully aware of our surroundings. The universe has narrowed down to a particular selection of mind and senses. We are hyper aware of a few things and ignore the environment. This condition may last a few minutes, a few hours, rarely longer .

I’ve always been easily entranced. When reading a good book, for example. In my working days, entering a fugue in cyberspace as I worked out problems. Now when I engage with a sketch or drawing .

There’s not much to say about being in a trance. To be honest, I most appreciate it when I return to “real life”. I suddenly realize I’ve been away. I am refreshed, relaxed, and surprised. Wonderful things!

Of course, nobody can or should inhabit dreamland forever. There is truly a big universe to appreciate out there. But as a short vacation from the mundane it is magnificent .

Selecting Limits

A primary goal in any art form is to select the limits of the work and communicate them to an imagined audience. A pencil sketch is different from an oil canvas. A tonal study has criteria which do not much resemble hard outlines . How well the final work succeeds is based on the selection of limits, the communication of these limits, and the impact of the finished product within its declared and accepted boundaries .

I think this is why we find children’s or “primitive” or amateur work so charming. We accept the basic proposition and enjoy the creation. No need to compare your child’s work to the Sistine chapel. “Grandma Moses” even finds a place in fine art museums .

We live, however, in an age of imagined limitlessness. Artists often refuse to accept any limits, and the result is a mess, whether a dinner or a sculpture or a book. Other artists rebel and set artificially narrow bounds which, even if successfully executed, are quite boring once the initial shock wears off .

So I happily say to myself “this and not that”, or “that’s enough”. My art is more satisfying for so doing. And I pretty much feel the same way about life in general .

Making Criminals

We are each guilty. As the Bible says “let him that is without sin cast the first stone”. Going through a red light as it changes from yellow. A few miles over the 15 mph speed limit. Fudging an application slightly from need or vanity .

Life isn’t fair. Being nice when accosted by the police sometimes gets you off with a warning (unless they’re too far behind on quota.) Sometimes they don’t like your looks. A fine or court appearance – it’s a free country except for time, hassle, and in some cases expenses for a lawyer. We won’t even mention bribes.

But the point is, if somebody doesn’t like you – the police, the actual officer, the people controlling the police – you are going to be harassed as a criminal for something or other. Even if “proven innocent” later, the loss of reputation, not to mention loss of time and energy – can be significant. Often that’s the point of the whole thing .

Juries were supposed to be the backstop. And maybe they were in the slow old rural days. Now they can be as intimidated as anyone else, and the massive loss and time of a trial makes an awful lot of folks accept a plea deal just to get back to normal .

When the judicial system rots from above or within, well, we’ve seen the results in Stalinist Russia and a bunch of other places. Maybe coming soon to a courtroom near you .

Goals

Goals are one of our most fragile, useful, illusions. Although they may help focus our activities, they are subject to constant change and apt to be overruled any instant by some contradictory pursuit. Not to mention modified or severely disrupted by changes in environmental reality .

But, as noted, they are useful anyway. I like to work at making my art better – although exactly what that means is tenuous. Draw more accurately? Accent a personal style? Create something beautiful? Yes, well, okay …

There is usually a question of trade-offs – enjoy that donut or continue the diet? More seriously, how willing should we be to direct all our energies towards a relatively exclusive vision. Trying to be the “best” at something, if done to exclusion, may “work” but leave us damaged or unable to do much else .

I’ve learned to accept reevaluation of goals as a normal part of consciousness. No doubt aided by being older, when it is only prudent to find time scale shrinking and capabilities more limited. I no longer try to run fast, nor to walk 15 or so miles. I do adjust to walking “briskly” on hills, and I’m satisfied if I do a few miles or so .

Thus also with my artwork. And, honestly, an awful lot of my daily moments. Sad, I suppose, from the goal orientation of youth. Which has faded, as all illusions do .

Binocular

Old Dutch Master still lifes make you think you can lift flowers or bugs off the painted surface. Modern photographs have the same effect. Yet in a very real way, they do not match the reality we inhabit .

Two eyes let us see – especially nearby – in parallax to be able to judge depth. For distant objects, of course, we have other references like size and haze and perspective, but they can be quite deceptive. In the real world it has been important to us primates to be able to focus in this weird binocular manner to better use our hands for handling fruit and tools .

That is a long prologue to today’s rant about cults – religious, secular, or political. Cults have beliefs that are strictly monocular. They have little depth and allow by definition for no other viewpoint. The strictest cult outlooks don’t even let one move one’s head to get a better or different view – that’s the definition of “heresy” .

Current culture has unfortunately devolved into a set of cults. Perhaps a saving grace is that complex humans can believe in more than one cult – often contradictory – at the same time .

Binocular vision and its philosophic implications is a gift from the universe we should always acknowledge gratefully .