I believed them, the local authority, when they said the lights in their building next door to my house, wouldn't be turned on before eight a.m. It was wonderful. For one night. One night. One. So wonderful, a sense of security, of being listened to and heard, being able to sleep peacefully. And the next day, the signs of aging began to slip away: my legs didn't ache, I could walk properly and so on. Almost a miracle.
And the next morning, the lights were on again - snap - well before dawn and I was snapped awake. And I my legs ached and I was shuffling again, all confidence stripped from me, again. snap. And now, again, I can't sleep at night, again; I am sensitised and expect to be snapped awake.
Interesting, isn't it, what sleep deprivation can do to a person; and being stripped of free will by bullies. I do resent it. In England, I believe, one is entitled, by law, to the right of peaceful enjoyment of one's home.
I know I'm naive, but I do expect the Local Government to adhere to the law of the land.
(I wrote the above for the local authority and emailed it to them. They seem now to have fixed the problem.)
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When George was old and not long before he died, he began to fall down; suddenly he'd drop, crash, just fall down. He wasn't firm on his feet, anyway, and then this added problem. (Apparently, it's common in old people.) He didn't understand it. Let's see.
He was old, dependent on others. He was being lied to and misled by someone whom he trusted implicitly, undermining his work and his judgement. He didn't know. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he didn't know consciously that she was lying to him.
He had been physically very strong but was becoming weak and frail; for some time he had difficulty swallowing food, something wrong with his throat, until for months or maybe a year, he was fed by a tube into his stomach; he had digestive difficulties.
I identity with George. Now that I am old and share some of the same physical difficulties - though I do eat, quite a lot, and don't know how he survived, really - I have some idea of what may have been in his mind.
It seems to me that in falling down, which is common in old people and toddlers, he showed that he wanted to give up; he'd had enough; and the same in not eating, which is why I suggest that he did know unconsciously that he was being lied to, and even perhaps who was lying to him, but he couldn't accept it consciously.
And it seems to me, that while George Frankl struggled with all this, his spirit, the unnamed essense of him, his psyche, or the universal in him, was crying out, 'Enough! Let me go. Let me be free.' And if that sounds over-passionate, that's how it seems to me. It's how I feel.
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We seem to think in terms of life or death. I always have: alive one day, dead the next. But isn't it different?
Isn't it more balanced than that? Isn't it all life? But we are so confused, so frightened - for causes we've looked at here - that we cling to what we know, can see, and shy away from what we can't see, and increasingly refuse to see. (This isn't quite what I thought at 4 o'clock this morning, but couldn't write down as eyesight demands I now must write in daylight.)
Toddlers re-live the phylogenic experiences of our ancient ancestors, and from the age of about four years grow into the ways of homo sapiens, and there is a division between ourselves as infants and as adults. Then, in old age, we have 'second childhood' and there is a division between the old and the younger adults, ie any adult who is not yet old. Where Shakespeare has 7 ages, let's say for our purposes here, 3 ages, children, adults, olds.
Babies live within nature; adult homo sapiens are rather more than somewhat divorced from nature; we may begin to recognise that olds in second childhood are slipping into nature. Let us investigate.
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As far as I remember I haven't read any first hand accounts of being old. I think Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie writes about two very old women in his village, who strongly dislike each other and who eventually dry up and blow away, like autumn leaves. It's a memorable passage, beautifully written, but we don't know what the old women think about things.
The old and old age are interpreted by the young, who cannot know what it's like to be old. I'll try and give an idea of what it's like to be old from the perspective of being old.
First, the brain. There is a vast hinterland to the brain. We have the forebrain, the new brain, pre-frontal cortex; years ago, I read something about the fore brain being empty, and wonder if that is possible; perhaps I misunderstood, which is very likely. But perhaps the fore brain (located in the forehead) may be thought of as a blackboard on which we write our equations and questions, and do our working out, and find our answers, make our intellectual discoveries and are satisfied until the next question arises, and so we progress.
With George Frankl as my teacher, I have, of course taken the forebrain on trust, particularly as necessary for conscious understanding and recognition. But now that I am old, in my second childhood, I'm finding that there is a hinterland to the brain, obviously; the forehead is only a small area, and there is the crown and back of the head in which are the areas of the brain which work with the eyes, guts, memory and everything, (the motor areas, perhaps?). But I am also becoming aware that the hinterland of the brain is teeming with life and vast, a universe of innate knowledge, instinctual understanding.
Babies, naturally happy, live inside the natural world of instinct, and we may begin to recognise that they are within and surrounded by the universe of the hinterland of the brain. And we may begin to understand that the old are naturally going to that instinctual state. We may speculate that dementia in many cases is not a disease, but is part of a natural process; and furthermore we may recognise that if the aged demented were simply allowed to fade away and die naturally, it would be better for them and for society.
Personally, I begin to see that I am far less afraid of dying than I am of being kept alive unnaturally.
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It's terrifying, whatever 'it' is, and that's the point: what is it that is so frightening? I could cry, but that wouldn't do any good; nor would anger; can't run from it; and the quacks with their drugs wouldn't help. I'm powerless against it.
I reckon I became old when I was 72 (nearly 73) and finally realised that the bastard builders who put a hole in my roof, weren't going to mend it as they had promised; and I was powerless. Powerlessness seems to me to be a feature - a defining feature? - of being old.
But I can face this fear, and must try to understand it.
As an old person, I usually wake 2 or 3 times a night to pee. Recently, I've been waking at around 3.30 am and can't get back to sleep. And that's when the fear grips me. My brain seems somewhat scrambled, not because I'm half asleep - I am wide awake. Or maybe I am half awake - trying to get back to sleep.
Perhaps the fear is ever-present and is kept under control by sleep? And when the sleep pattern is often disturbed, the fear rises nearer consciousness. Perhaps the fear is reaching out from the deep unconscious?
But what is it, this fear? It's in the brain, that's for sure.
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A healthy baby is born with the brain in good balance. But life goes on; the baby encounters phylogenic difficulties; and whatever the adults (and/or older siblings) might inflict; and what life might inflict, until by old age, the brain might not be in such good balance. This is not universal, there are individuals who may live well into old age, healthy in mind and body, body includes the brain, of course.
It seems likely that we are afraid because we are homo sapiens; that whatever first prompted us to split from nature - the Great Catastrophe? - was so terrifying that as a species we have carried the terror within us; and that being so separated from nature as we are, exacerbates, makes the fear worse and prolongs it over the millennia.
'It' isn't the devil, or hell, or ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggety beasties. And 'it' isn't caused by our inborn sinfulness, Frankl's Proof scotches that. The fear is what is in our memory as a species, trauma unresolved, and we have pursued the ancestral remedy relentlessly ever since; while all the time our species has been and is still haunted unconsciously by that disaster, which we repeat over and over and over again, in different-seeming ways, which are in fact and in effect the same.
And it seems to me that senile dementia might be seen is an almost rational response to a lifetime spent in the unreality imposed on us because we are homo sapiens.