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The poet William Butler Yeats was authoritative about aging. In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” he wrote, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. . . .”
The image inspires pity and conjures the trivial nature of being old. The soul and substance of the poet can’t be seen. And we’re inevitably reminded of liver spots and loneliness, of death and oblivion. Yet Yeats has something much different to say at the close of the poem:
“Consume my heart away/sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal/it knows not what it is/and gather me into the artifice of eternity.”
In other words, the poet, though wracked by age, ultimately embraces death and seeks out what lies ahead, in the realm of the ancestors, joining eternity.
That’s the vision I hold of growing old. But when I turn 60 this spring, instead of being an older, I aspire to be an elder. There’s a world of difference. An older is someone who just grows old, perhaps even loses his memory in this age of raging dementias. An older is a rich capitalist who watches his/her portfolio fatten even as young people suffer and the masses starve. Another image: An older is someone obsessed with his own health, leaving no room for seeing tragedy on a grander scale.
An elder, by contrast, sees the spirit and soul of young people and is not threatened by them. An elder has access to “blood memory,” which in Native American thinking is connected to tribal memory, language, song and spirituality. An elder sees ahead and back to the beginning, noting politics and history, but seeing beyond them to what is really at life’s core: love, suffering, joy, community, old age and death. A true elder is a mentor by temperament, something of an outsider and even flat-out weird. (In fantasy literature, Gandalf was a weird, wise elder, a wizard who hung out with Hobbits.) And a genuine elder commands respect because he’s been initiated. He’s been through fear and weathered the fires of life.
I set this out because I see a lot of old people who have cut themselves off from what’s happening in the world. They’ve self segregated in age-appropriate communities so as not to be reminded of the struggles of youth. Some are cynical and some are scared. The wealthy ones manage their 401(k)s without a thought as to leaving some for those who are in need. They’re olders, without a prayer of becoming elders unless they radically reappraise their lives and make different choices.
An elder may have white hair or none, but he has the fire of youth still burning. Temperamentally, I’m still 30, alive to creative urges, bursting with those same ideas and visions that rattled my psyche so many years ago. True, my left knee swells up unaccountably. I may yet be soon leaning on a staff. And the other day I woke up nearly deaf in one ear, though I managed to get my hearing back by late afternoon.
Was that a premonition of what’s to come? Likely not.
I know becoming an elder won’t be easy. The “weird” part I have down. And I stand outside the social order, answerable to my own instincts. But do I have enough wisdom? What’s more, the thing that’s lacking is a container. So far in Columbus, I haven’t found a visionary community that supports the notions of elders and mentors outside of formal churches and synagogues.
I noticed that Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela are part of a group called the Elders, which seeks positive social change. That sounds like a good thing, though the celebrity vibe makes me wary. For here’s the deal: True elders come from within the community and don’t have any fame.
An elder knows that the idea of life is not to be anesthetized or consumed with desires, material or otherwise. An older, by contrast, is still grasping for things. An elder lives authentically in life and has a death with purpose. An older stumbles alone to the grave, devoid of meaning.
Who would you rather be?
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
