I have learned that it’s true
What I heard once when I was young
That old age abounds
In what we crave for lacking in youth
It’s true in the obvious way
That in surviving past midlife
One gains powers and skills
Unknown to the inexperienced
Though it’s a canard to claim
That method compensates Wordsworthlike
For declining inspiration
I see no reason for inspiration to decline
Though it’s intensely clear
That the accretion of method
If combined with the sustaining of insight
Brings about an abundance of creative power
As these pages show
And so one gets better at cooking
And enjoys many good meals
And one gets better at writing
And the rate of discard declines
Or better the rate of keeping increases

Much time in youth is wasted
Establishing our identity
Discovering our personality
Finding one’s voice
Only to discover upon achieving
Some measure of maturity
That one’s own identity or personality or voice
Is not terribly rich or interesting
And that everything of note
Comes from a collective or composite
Voice or personality
Indeed personality is nothing
But the static emplacement of a persona
And maturity brings about the welcoming
Of an ethos of the artificial mask
For the mask was always artificial to begin with
And real achievement follows
The repertoire the reservoir the repository
Of many masks and masks of varying size

And so I will speak of myself
And I trust that my reader will understand
That I make no attempt
That indeed I shun the attempt
To treat my self
As a unity a totality or even an accomplishment
And I will speak of the life of a poet
For in my youth I castigated myself
Nay I contempted myself
If I may indulge in neologism
If ever I exercised the temerity
Of referring to myself as poet
For in my youth I convinced myself
Erringly
That only a great poet
Only a Keats or a Milton or a Dickinson
Could take on the mantle of poet
For so foolish is youth
To suppose that only the finest exemplar of a thing
Qualifies as that thing
And now I know
I may be a good poet or a bad
And I don’t really suppose myself
A particularly good poet
But poet I am for good or ill
And I write this essay
For I have achieved a certain age
And am therefore qualified
To make the attempt
Of certain statements
As to the meaning of attaining
A greater age than many of my acquaintance

The young poet yearns to express herself
A yearning like most yearnings
Founded upon an idealization
That my self is bursting to escape
The confines of myself
To press outward into the world
Of delighted and horrified spectators
For I so strongly wish
That my self might be as delightful and horrifying
To the world as it is to me
Except that I don’t know my self one whit
Or even whether it exists at all
It does not
At least not as a coherent thing
And so this yearning is bound
To fall upon disappointment
And thus the passage into maturity
Is marked by ennui
And the person straddling youth and adulthood
Is the most cynical of dogs
And this ennui never lets up
So far as I can tell
But unless it is opposed
And supplemented by idealism
Then inspiration is sure to fail
The youth idealizes the self
As an unconscious figment
But the grownup idealizes
The conscious virtual self
And hence the necessity of the mask

My friend the philosopher has claimed
Each one must become a philosopher
For each one should want
To think rightly about the world
And agreeing with this I add
That each one must become a poet
For each one should want
To construct the conscious mask
And forswear the unconscious figment
For in dreams each person is a great poet
And imagination is nature’s artifice
And I was instructed in childhood
That one ought to develop talents
And all possess the natural gift of dreaming

When I had entered the cynical transitional phase
I thought to suppress subjectivity in art
For worthwhile art I thought to be
Hard and objective
But now I thoroughly doubt
That suppression is ever the wisest course
For I adopted the cynical suppressive stance
No doubt out of shame
For the inferior self
That I had after all never discovered
In its pure suppositiousness
But whose expression I feared
Would expose me as truly
Neither delightful nor horrifying
And to be fair the artificial mask
Of which I boast
Is constructed of such shards of subjectivity
As I might have become aware
And its expression
Not to say its exposure
Remains a matter of terrible anxiety
Since it is now no longer
A question of an admirable or despicable self
But only of accomplishment admirable or despicable
Although since one’s powers of composition
Have increased with experience
The joy of expectancy
Ironic perhaps in a greybeard
Outweighs the anxiety of success or failure
Or more simply
And old poet is less concerned
Than a neophyte
With being well received

And so the most comfortable mask
Is that of the guru
The aged preceptor
For I have been gainfully employed for many years
As a humble schoolmaster
And I have endeavoured to develop my talents
As I was instructed one should
And I add texture to the persona
By recognizing that I am a neophyte among gurus
As suggested by the poem of Ali Akbar Khan

If you practice for ten years
You may begin to please yourself

After 20 years you may become a performer
And please the audience

After 30 years
You may please even your guru

But you must practice for many more years
Before you finally become a true artist
Then you may please even God

So the guru has certainly practiced
For more than thirty or forty years
And since both Yoda and Pai Mei
Are more advanced than I
And each has reached an age over 800
I figure I must be about 612 in guru years
@ 10/10/2015
And by no means do I claim
The title of true artist
I do however claim the almost equally charming title
If oxymoronic
Of neophyte guru

But here the picture darkens
For I wish to serve as guru to aspiring youth
And two factors one internal and the other external
Thwart my desire
The first is that no guru
Has given me the boon
Of decades or years of instruction
And I must instantly confess in shame
That this puling complaint
Originates in youthful idealization of self
That some other wiser ideal self
Should devote herself to my tutelage
Attention baby
And yet I have learned
From both literature and experience
That the relationship of guru and pupil
Compares in intimacy
Only to that of lover and beloved
And my own beloved has made me wealthy
In the riches of love’s sweet mysteries
Lore invaluable
For understanding the world
For the beauty of the beloved
Is the most immediate figure of beauty as such
But the path of eros is also the path of the sublime
And who knows not the sublime
Knows not the world
But eros cannot be the whole truth
Or will be at best a synecdoche for the truth
And certainly parenthood has taught me much
Just as my own dear parents taught me
But the parent cannot be a guru
For the parent’s child can never be a pupil
So burdened is the child
By parental idealization

And well into my adulthood
And even unto this very day
I have yearned to serve as ephebe
To some eminent teaching artist
For great teachers instruct in all the arts
Except that of teaching
And so though in my age I enjoy an abundance of students
I have no pupil
And I am no guru’s pupil

Which brings me to the external factor
For my geriatric dissatisfaction
For in this decadent age of history
We have given up so much of our selves
Ideal or multifariously practical
Old and young late and soon
To abstract and impersonal System
As the devout submit to the will of God Almighty
That commits the unspeakable tyranny
Of relegating persons to the status of things
As Dr King accused racial segregation of doing
Transcripts curricula rosters schedules and worst of all
Grades grades grades grades grades
Howl howl howl howl howl
And we surrender our autonomy
God damn it
If you want to get better at reading and writing
I’m your boy

And yet I have a friend
A younger man than I
And thus prima facie not a fit candidate
To act as guru to aged me
But in a few short years
And in old age days grow long and years short
I have learned more from this young teacher
Than I have learned from any other
In my long life
And he asserts
Motivated perhaps more
By a desire to evince respectful reciprocity
Than by the truth of the claim
Though I know of no other
His equal in hungering and thirsting for truth
He claims to have learned something from me
And so I envision the cheering prospect
Of the symmetrical gurus
No longer the master and the apprentice
But shipmates on the voyage of understanding

As a youth I cultivated
An exorbitant love of chat
Preceding even the dormitory bull sessions
Ending only with birdsongs and rosy dawn
And in old age I have transmuted that enthusiasm
Into the recording of these poor pages
And their transmission
Outward toward fit audience though few
Although my audience need not
Demonstrate in any wise its fitness
And most assuredly the readers are few
Even if technology gives the promise
Of infinite reproduction
And let me attack another canard against the aged
That they are technologically incapable
When anybody with any sense knows
That a person makes technology serve
Instead of the other way around

But age is the time of abundance
In less obvious ways also
For abundance is more abundant
When you desire less
Take sex for example
In youth three or four times in a day
Could leave me dissatisfied
And while fewer instances
Can bring me now closer to satisfaction
But Platonists are right to observe
That sex can never satisfy ultimately
For two can never become simply one
Except perhaps in some Tantric paradise
But there no doubt two hope to become zero
And attain nirvana

But age is most abundant
In that one gets better
At recognizing the good
And evading the mediocre or worse
For example as Tolstoy observed
It’s so much easier for an oldster
To be truthful
Than for a youth
Certainly I did a lot of deceptive
Sneaking around my parents
Especially in the days of early love
And as a young parent
I spent half my time
Sneaking around my kids
But I intend here the good
More in aesthetic than in ethical terms
Unquestionably tastes are formed in youth
And I was lucky enough to come of age
During the glorious cultural flowering
Of the late 1960s
And perhaps for the last time
The culture industry gave one access
To the classics that made popular culture possible
And the Stones and Jimi led me to the blues
And Cream led me toward jazz
And the Beatles led me to the classical music
Of India and the west
Though I must disclaim that that taste
Already resided in me
But most of all Dylan
In collaboration with Mr Smyth
At Bishop Kenny High School
Showed me that poetry
Backed by electric guitars
Differed not a particle
From the art of Dickinson or Melville
And Ezra Pound and TS Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
And so I became a musician and a poet
Though as I always disclaim
An eminent practitioner of neither art
And in old age I have come to recognize
Ever more distinctly the excellence
Of the Beatles and the Stones
Of Hendrix Dylan and Cream
And indeed of Beethoven Schubert and Miles Davis
But I have learned to renounce my toleration
For Steppenwolf Steve Miller and the Amboy Dukes
And for every Björk or Aphex Twin or Radiohead
There are a thousand Skrillexes and Miley Cyruses
And other pasteurized processed commercial cheeses
But the essential truth
Is that there is more than enough noble art
To sustain one for a lifetime

And it’s manifestly true
That one does not reach old age
Without many reminders of debility and death
Though these are never far from the view
Even of inattentive youth
And our epoch isolates the young
From the solemn spectacle of death
Except in sentimentally violent representations
And our epoch wallows in a slough of denial
Of the frightening and the inconvenient
While any reasonable person adopts a way of life
That aims to forestall debility and death
Moreover addiction the plague of the age
Proves more powerful than reason
Certainly in my own case
For I am addicted to animal fat for example
But I lack the will even to seek rehabilitation
And so much of the suffering we link to old age
Is preventable
The rest is mere contingency
And not a matter for fear or resentment

The relentless question arises
At any stage of life
Whether to suffer the slings and arrows
Of outrageous fortune
Or take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them
But first it must be observed
That this formulation
Comes from a cynical transitional figure
Who should be king
That is
An adult
But is thwarted in that natural progression
By the corruption and complacency of others
Especially the selfish old
But Hamlet is right to assert that troubles are a sea
Deep because so many troubles
Result from mere contingency
But wide because so many troubles
Result from the wickedness of others
And you won’t end troubles by opposing them
Any more than you will defeat the sea by arms
But I know of no middle path
Between patience and opposition
And so I try
And fail
To mount patient opposition
Or perhaps the fulness of time
Will prove me a success
And this modicum of wisdom I will share
That there are things in life more important
Than success

The decadent scientism of our epoch
Loves to remember Aristotle as the guy
Who was wrong about physics
And it is probably true
That Aristotle committed the sin
Discovered by Socrates
Of claiming to know
That which he did not know
Though he certainly knew more
About more topics than any other
And dependent as he was
Upon the state of arts in pathetically embryonic stages
He erred
Nevertheless Aristotle was right about this
That all persons want eudaemonia
Though many of the human race
Languish in ignorance of this fact about themselves
And try to enrich themselves one way or another
Shortsightedly neglecting the purpose
For which they seek material things
And in my old age the good life
Seems singularly lacking in mystery
But is as clear as sparkling water
Nobody desires to be in agony
Though history especially in the West
Is nauseatingly replete
With apologists for suffering
And avoiding the agony of privation
Requires skills such as are handed down
From generation to generation
But no degree of competence
Can guarantee the prevention of suffering
Since so much suffering originates
In mere contingency
But the worst of all suffering
Originates in the human animal’s instinct
For promoting exalting and enriching
At the expense of others
The individual or the tribe

Now hedonism is a fairly respectable
If incomplete philosophy
For obviously the opposite of pain is pleasure
And one might reasonably surmise
That humans seek pleasure and avoid pain
And I myself have often claimed
Though I should probably retire the claim
That having a good time is nature’s way
Of telling you that you are doing something right
And what I meant was
Given that our time in life is limited
A fact that age regards distinctly
One should endeavor to make that time good
But good is a highly ambiguous term alas
And goodness in the sense
Of doing something right
Has little to do with nature
And much to do with the cultivation of reason
Which cultivation is most conveniently accomplished
In the dialectical exchange
Of guru and ephebe
And the ignorant equate a good time
With fun which means little more than diversion
A turning away from trouble or care or duty
And hence in many cases culpable neglect
And more subtly many equate a good time
With pleasure
And the more respectable hedonists
Know that drunkenness results in a hangover
And thus reason defers present pleasure
If it results in later pain
But in this they credit humanity far too much
For the drunkard might well calculate
The hangover as a small price to pay
And indeed decadent scientism
Promises a pharmacological remedy
For this and all ills
Including perhaps the moral ones
For all ills are now bodily ills
And any dysphoria a neurochemical deficiency
Never a metaphysical ennui
For subjectivity is hallucination
And metaphysics a quintessence of vapor
And all the universe a compound
Of matter massive or lightweight as the case may be
Convertible to the energy of forces strong or weak
And physicists will no doubt flame
My Aristotelian errors in nomenclature
And in the pharmacologically materialist epoch
Pleasure seekers know
That for a few drachmas
They can purchase preparations that go
Right from the stomach or the vein or the nose
Into the brain’s pleasure precincts
And that pleasure is no longer
A state for which one will take action
But merely the effect of a chemical substance
But worst of all is the pleasure
Of which I will speak as little as I can
For some derive pleasure from causing pain
Or imagine relief of pain of their own
Or imagine the triumph of their belief
From the slaughter of innocents

Hence
Since competence cannot exert sufficient control
To obviate contingency
Or the wickedness of others
And there is no absolute security
Or probably not even minimal security
In these wicked days
What must I do to achieve a good life
And let me reiterate most emphatically
That the world is a shithole
Because humans are assholes
And if that makes me sound like a bitter old man
You’re hearing me right
And yet and yet
I ask most seriously the most serious question
What must I do to achieve a good life
And I ask not for myself alone
But for any youth or indeed any fellow greybeard
Who wishes to hear any answer I might discover

I cannot control the world of things
I cannot control abstract impersonal system
I cannot control the world of other people
I can only control myself
But I know my multifarious self but poorly
And by fleeting glimpses
I know that I don’t know
The extent to which any of my selves
Result from intention
And which from contingency
And yet even so
I know that I am a being of incalculable value
I know that like any organism
I will struggle to sustain my existence
And I know since I can communicate
And that any two persons can reach understanding
That all other persons
Similarly know themselves to be incalculably valuable
Unless they are so woefully ignorant
Or criminally devoted to unreason
That they stand in direst need
Of my tutelage

And now I know what it means
To do the right thing
And it’s so simple
To treat each person as a person
And not as an instrument of use
Or an obstacle to be kicked out of the way
So to begin with
To live in a world full of assholes
Don’t be an asshole
And perhaps now I’m feeding the canard
That old people are squares
But I nevertheless assert
That the best chance for having a good life
Is to cultivate the habit
Which cultivation no doubt requires dialectical exchange
To cultivate the habit of doing the right thing
The path to a good life
Is the path of virtue