It's a farce. No, it's a pantomime. Being old is a pantomime, with stock characters, like rheumatism and arthritis, so your body hurts and you can't do things, hold things; or your legs hurt and are heavy, so you shuffle along, and maybe you don't pick your feet up enough at the kerb and you might stumble, or trip or fall, and there's the everlasting chorus of ahhh, poor old thing ahhh bless ah bless. And if you're a nice poor old thing (bless) you'll smile nicely and wait to be picked up and set on your dodgy old pins. And if you're me, you don't go out to be blessed and risk being taken into the Bureaucracy of Care.
And I'm being played by the pantomime. It must be the phylogeny. But what caused it, what event? It might be something really rather simple (I might even have said it before) it may be that very many older people become so fed up with the unreality of being human that we just stop seeing and hearing, and our teeth fall out, and the rest. We give up, go on strike, in a way. I recognise that it is infantile, which tells us that this comes from the cultural infancy of our species, or perhaps from the time at Olorgesaille, so this old age pantomime may be the breakthrough of the repressed memory of a time when many of our ancestors were and knew they were surplus, really not needed or wanted by their society.
Some older people now go on quite happily until they die. It would be interesting to know how many, what percentage of people avoid the pantomime of being old; we might then have a clue as to how many humans should naturally be born. Possibly,
Affection
It's very difficult to say it, but I must: I don't get any affection.
It's no one's fault; unless I really am a nasty bastard, which I don't think I am, nor very weird. People do gossip and make up stories, trying to justify their own bad behaviour, bear false witness, as I daresay the cowboys (who put a hole in my roof and refused to fix it which they promised to do) have. And in a place like this; and the resentment against foreigners from London.
But it's everywhere the same; you do have to conform and I do try, but, you know, I'm me, and what can I do about that?
It seems to be spreading. Disobliging young men from Sainsbury's delivering food, just three, so far, who've refused to come into my house, one said he was allergic to cigarette smoke, (though I've learnt not to smoke anywhere near people long ago) one who said he was allergic to cats, well feel sorry for them, although I did suggest to smoke allergic bloke that he maybe should wear a mask while driving as he was in danger from toxic fumes in his cab; the third chap was simply rude. They're not obliged to enter a house, but it's getting difficult for me to carry stuff in myself.
And the bank. There's a special phone line if you're old, and you don't want to speak to AI, so I rang about my debit card, and the young man was so disobliging, and subsequently various young women were, too. The girls were being mischievous, impishly unhelpful; the young man seemed almost unhinged. And they all lied. Very distressing.
The behaviour of these young men, and at the bank, young women, may be the opening shots in a new action against old women particularly, or the old generally, or whatever.
(I enjoy phoning call centres, I have a good phone voice, sound young, and have pleasant mini relationships; though a Scotsman at the referendum was horrid.)
And no hugs. No close friend to embrace. And, of course, no intellectual communication. The pain of loneliness is full upon me. I'm just reporting, facing the difficulty, as I must.
Three thoughts or lines of enquiry occurred to me when I woke this morning:
1 I'm doing it myself. I am making myself ill, or old, old and ill, in protest at the ways we live, are required, or forced to live. It's an ancient mechanism, if that's the right word, from the cultural infancy of humanity. The terrible diseases (which might afflict us at any age) through to the more specific health difficulties of second childhood are self-inflicted in protest, but they are ancient ways of protest, have become a habit, and are unconscious; we make ourselves ill without knowing we're doing so. Actually, that's not quite true: one does know but not clearly. This is, I believe, well known in psychoanalysis; George Frankl certainly knew it.
But it is more than the human me; it is the noumenon in me or of me, or so it seems. So if I do fall down the stairs, which I dread, and break my neck, it would not be suicide, but perhaps exhaustion, or perhaps obedience to some outside me, or something more than I am, or higher than I am but in which I am included, in which all life is included, of which all life is part.
And, while we're on this subject: it cannot be wrong to want to die, to stop being human, although personally I think suicide is best avoided, unless one's human life is, has become unbearable.
Three things - 2 and 3
2 I'm still waiting for the wonderful thing to happen, you know, the dream. Fame, fortune, big happy family, roses round the door, whatever, it's very strong, the dream and somewhere in the back of my mind, it's still there. But it is a dream, a fantasy and cannot be fulfilled: - it isn't real.
The strength and persistence of the dream tell us a lot about us. The transition from ape to homo sapiens was extremely difficult; to give up the glories of reality for empty dreams, to choose shoddy fantasy and cling to make-believe for so long, our ancestors were terrified out of their wits by trauma. We're still afraid, haunted by ancestral fear; still playing make believe, and games of let's pretend.
3 What did George mean when he said 'we've got everything the wrong way around' ?
But, of course, we human beings do see the world the wrong way round, literally, our eyes see the world upside down, our brains make the necessary adjustments, and we are the only creatures whose eyes are like this
- or so I thought, and have written here. I found the information on the net, and double checked it and it seemed so right; but now, maybe 10 years on, checking again, I find that human beings do not see the world upside down; I tried different wording and was told that all other animals see the world the same way as we do and their brains make adjustments too… (all answers supplied by AI) and now I'm confused.
On consideration - and with AI giving answers in which it seems to contradict itself - whether or not we see the world upside, down or back to front or sideways, human beings do have a perverse moral view of life, and George Frankl's statement was, of course, a moral one.
So what did he mean? Have we got everything the wrong way around? Yes.
It's obvious. We live in shadows, dominated by terrifying shadows of the past, and the shadows of fantasy. We're prisoners, just like those in Plato's Cave, prisoners interpreting shadows, using shadows as our yardstick.
We huddle in the shadows, afraid to venture into reality, the clear, bright pulsating reality of life. We are such fools!