Age Identity

Now and then I read academic books that are so dense in theory and research that I can only read about 5 pages at a time. One that I'm reading now is Aged by Culture, by age researcher Margaret Morganroth Gullette. This is an important book but not an easy one. She defines her field and she defines much else, it's a heavy meal. I am not coming across pithy things to underline because that is definitely not the style. But the following longish bit seemed something I wanted to share. It's from a section called "Age Identity as an Achievement."
Age identity is a special subset of autobiography -- I understand broadly, as a narrative that anyone can tell about one's self, to self and others, whether informally in conversation or written for archival purposes. No particular level of education is required. Age identity is special because its focus is on the meaning of long time, although it can highlight one-time events or short periods of epiphanies. It's what I report when I stand back to survey where my "historic" trail has led me. From observation and self-report, I think that identity over time can be seen as a sense of an achieved portmanteau "me" -- made up, for each subject, of all its changeable and continuing selves together -- connected in different ways, or intermittently, but sometimes barely at all, to a sensuously material body.

The partially conscious, partially unselfconscious, agglomeration includes private, self-defined traits, relationships, heartbreaks, and desires; the secret my father told me when I was eleven, the secret I told my son when he was twenty-one, stuff I'll never tell about early sex, ambitions relinquished, dreams maintained against the odds. Memories of this kind feel authentic, and if they are not, nothing is.

I think of this above quote especially in relation to the writing class I am in at the local community college where most people are writing memoir pieces. A couple that were read yesterday were particularly memorable. It was interesting that one writer let the work speak for itself which it did powerfully. The other writer had no confidence in his writing -- which was quite vivid and needed not explication. But he talked and talked about the subject before and after reading his work. The former was willing to project identity and trust what he wrote, the latter neither trusted his writing nor was he self-assured enough to feel he had project himself adequately.

[the portrait above is, of course, Georgia O'Keefe]

Disturbances of the Passing -- I hope -- Kind

It is 3:18 in the a.m. and I am drinking chamomile tea and reading blog -- ones I often read and a few I've found through links. In the last hour I've been in Mongolia celebrating the new year with a monk and the master horse-head fiddle player of the country, I've been to Japan with a man growing winter potatoes [who knew, he didn't either], and I've been in the quilting circles that spiral from Down The Well [see link in my other blog -- at 3:21, I'm incapable of adding links, apologies. She's in the UK an some of her links took me to Australia and New Zealand as well as, imagine that!, the USofA.

Sleep has been fitful for quite some time. That's how it is. Pema Chodrun, a Canadian Buddhist nun I read for peace of mind and balance, advises one live with it, ever moment of life is yours to live. So I'm awake and reading hasn't worked to make me sleepy and I don't think surfing the blogs has either. What I seem to need is to feel in touch with other people who need to write about what they are doing. For me it's always been the way to know what I'm thinking. Writing is also a way to live in different depths. Sometime very superficial, sometimes really thinking hard. I'm somewhere in between tonight.

Yesterday morning I sat here with the Mac on my lap and wrote a memory of an evening at a beach party. I had promised write something about "sky, ocean, food" I wasn't sure what I would write about, let alone how I would write it, until I started. I think after so many, many years I have a spot in the gray matter that activates on demand -- tho' not without the priming of some previous mulling in a cud-chewing, almost mechanistic way. At the necessary point the stody part of the brain sits down to rest and the creative part is out the gate and pounding down the track. So I began writing and I liked the pictures I found myself painting, the details I recalled, the similes and metaphors that came to my mind. I won't claim it was fine prose but it's a nice piece to add to the little "memoir" folder -- digital and hard copy. I hope I'll do more occasional writing like this. This is a long trek away from Buddhist meditation but I think it may be a kind of meditation I need to do.

Meanwhile writing this blog is in that same category. Yes, as the picture shows, I walked holding a lion by the tail; that's a metaphor that gives me satisfaction this middle of the middle of the night, wakeful time. So the lion was tame? In truth my life is pretty tame in the continuum of what could be. Change is exciting and to be embraced but it's not easy, it's scary. It's part of nearly everyone's life. And it comes with the Big 7-0.