I don’t worry about it, but as with my questions about the
perception of time, I wonder how other people perceive their own aging. There
are many signs, both real and illusory, of aging, and they appear at different
times in different people’s lives. I have been listening to the Jefferson
Airplane recently, and I enjoy their lyrics and sounds more now than I did when
they were fresh and new. To a significant degree they reflected an illusory
view toward age and aging, that I suspect they are still happy with, and there
would be little need to change the lyrics to reflect changing attitudes, even
though their opinions were fluid; the fluidity is what I like most about the
Airplane.
Consider the lyrics of “Lather” by Grace Slick. The lyric poem is
about Lather having reached the fine, early middle-age mark of thirty years,
but, for the poetess, it marked the end of being young (sort of), “Is it true
that I’m no longer young?” The song goes
through Lather giving up youthful things, etc., but it ends with the
unforgettable lines: “And I should have told him, 'No, you're not old.' / And I
should have let him go on... smiling... babywide.” (from Lather” by Grace
Slick).
Some may
consider that was a little out of character for an era and philosophical
movement that was said to worship youth, and in “We Can Be Together” (written
by Paul Kantner) there is the beautiful line “We are obscene, lawless, hideous,
dangerous, dirty, violent, and young. Here the reference to “young” was a mark
of distinction, something to set us apart from the rest of humanity; it makes a
great song, but I see it as a matter of attitude, rather than chronology. I
love hearing that line now, and it still refers to me. That song is chock full
of ironic contradictions, and it comes down on my side in each case; it’s no
wonder that I like that song still. The youth culture of that time was not
about chronology; it was about an attitude that included tolerance and
intellectual openness, real old-fashioned 18th century liberalism.
It was diametrically opposed to the totalitarian ideas that were (and still
are) pushed by Socialists and other movements that think that people can be
“politically incorrect”. The incorrectness is in thinking that any individual
has all of the answers for anyone else.
My own
attitude is reflected more clearly in Bob Dylan’s lines: “Ah, but I was so much
older then, I'm younger than that now” (from My Back Pages), because in most
ways I feel younger now than I did when those lines were written.
Which brings
me to the point: is one’s attitude toward age and aging determined by one’s age
as a percent of one’s total lifespan? When the Airplane was created I was
serous-minded and diligent. Alas, I had no significant opportunities for much
else, but I didn’t let that bother me. I enjoyed the attitudes and sounds of
the Airplane more than any other bands, and when people with whom I associated
switched to other noises, it made little difference to me, and I noticed that I
didn’t especially like music at all; although I love great lyric poetry.
Through the weeks since then, I have become younger and more appreciative of
the attitudes of the Woodstock Nation. That doesn’t mean that I think that
socialism is a good idea. No, that nation favored no government, rather than
government that controlled everything. And yes, I am still an anarchist.
There are a
few subsidiary questions that are more personal in nature, and you, oh reader,
may want to consider those for yourself. For one example, I was born on the
twenty-seventh day of the sixth month of the 1370th year; how old
does that make me now?
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