The cult of youth

It will come as no surprise to the long-time sufferers on this blog to discover that I really am an old man. I have been old for ages, in fact. And that remains true despite my naivete, stunning impracticality and inability to consider what grown ups take seriously to be anything but comical. In other people the refusal to cower before authority would probably be taken to be a reflection of anarchist tendencies or a religious leaning; whereas for me it is, I suspect, a form of childishness. So, old as in: old-world, out of date, a relic from the past, etc., etc.

In this line of work you always stand still while everyone else gets younger. So, in effect you age at double the speed. 

Makes you wonder what "value" (to use that horrible word) old people actually have. In previous times, culture was essentially conservative and backward-looking. The past was never truly past and everything was about the origin, not the periphery. 

Also, because time passed more slowly and nothing really happened we were closer to the natural cycles of the earth. In fact, it would be fair to say that all of our thinking was circular. Birth-growth-death, the great cycles within which we would weave our story. At another level: poverty-labour-luxury-poverty. Perhaps there's something truly frightening about the inevitability of those closed worlds-except they weren't completely closed as long as they had a transcendental dimension (broken circles). 

But if we live in linear time then time always escapes us or we always flee it. There's only a chance encounter with what is lost and there's no "redemption" of time. If the past is remembered then it as the "past," something that is staged for consumption and not something that stands as a model or that offers exemplars (I told you I was old!).

What counts is what can be counted. The experience of age, the accumulation of experiences, doesn't matter any more. But why is that? It's not just that there's a cult of youth and beauty; it's not just that the economy increasingly values productive skills and knowledge rather than craft or wisdom (the latter being reduced to some kind of woolly leftover from a bygone age). It's also that given the way technology develops, cities and places develop or are transformed, nothing stands still..nothing is allowed to stand still. 

In that sense, even the idea of a linear narrative is broken since we only live in, are encouraged to only live in, the moment. There is no continuity and therefore no experience to speak of. We do not grow old but are stuck in a perpetual adolescence, clutching onto our toys in the belief that they will offer some semblance of order (memory?) against the momentariness and fragmentary nature of the modern world (religion, to state the obvious, is one such toy).

So, given this wild desire for the shock of the new, for novelty, we end up thoroughly bored, needing an ever more exotic and erotic 'fix' to keep us going. And we must keep going. The only thing that can be conjured up is a fake stability produced by fake images infinitely repeated. Repetition and ritual do not disappear from the modern world (Calasso).

{Poussin, at The Wallace Collection, one of London's little and relatively unknown gems}