The Brooklyn Rail

“Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is.”— Lyric by Jerry Ragovoy, sung by Mick Jagger (1964)

“Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner, you know? Really, time is your soul mate.”— Bob Dylan (2015)

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”— Søren Kierkegaard (1843)

Time … friend or nemesis? It depends on who you ask. When we’re young, time propels us ever forward. As we age, time begins to feel different, more finite, less predictable, sometimes like a rainbow muted by shadow. Time reveals who we are and what we’ve become. Its pace, once we reach a certain age, can feel relentless.

The difference in how young people externalize time versus how elders internalize it can be as vast as a desert. When Mick Jagger carped about lost love, time was indeed on his side. Hubris thrives on cocky confidence, libidinal drive. Would the octogenarian singer feel the same way now? At the age of eighty-two Bob Dylan knows implicitly that, as life unfolds, time holds the upper hand. To accept this truth is to carry on, humbled, wiser. Most artists relish the present as a liminal space of possibility, doing whatever it takes to transpose experience into art. Kierkegaard speaks for any artist who soft-pedals the past, while eyeing the future, to seize the present.

But existential questions arise: How does creativity accommodate age? What are the benefits of aging when your body and mind begin to occupy alternate spaces? How does one adapt to these changes? What’s lost? What’s gained? How does creativity persist?

To be old in the United States (anyone over the age of, say, sixty-five) is to be (in many people’s minds) less effective, less engaged, less productive. In a word, marginal: a cultural bias exacerbated by economics and politics. (The contentious debate raging around Social Security and Medicare is a flagrant case in point.) It may well be that artistic creativity (visual, literary, musical, theatrical, filmic, choreographic) is one of the last bastions where any individual, regardless of age, can still impact the cultural realm.

An article by Lewis H. Lapham in the October 26, 2014 “health” issue of the New York Times Magazine piqued my curiosity. Eight individuals—documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, jazz drummer Roy Haynes, crooner Tony Bennett, painters Ellsworth Kelly and Carmen Herrera, actor Christopher Plummer, and naturalist E. O. Wilson—were featured, all “old masters” over the age of eighty, still present, still striking. A garden gate opened in my mind. Such a perennially relevant topic. I could be like Aesop’s slow-and-steady tortoise pacing life’s race, grabbing the baton from predecessors who embraced aging as a boon.

Some of the most revelatory insights come from individuals who reach the threshold with their intellect intact, their empathy heightened. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Coming of Age, her magisterial study of growing older, when she was sixty-two. Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, his own swan song, appeared three years after his death. Baba Ram Dass’s Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying stands out as an act of fierce grace. The debilitating stroke he suffered while writing the book enabled him to finish it.

Well before Connie Goldman, a Minnesota public radio journalist and arts reporter for NPR, crossed her own threshold, she became interested in how creative people approach aging. Her conversation with the poet Stanley Kunitz, one of many she transcribed, edited, and published in The Ageless Spirit, is a model for how one enters the arena of aging and brings back the gold. With any oral archive project, particularly one involving older subjects, time is of the essence. Ars longa vita brevis. Goldman knew this, just as she knew that her project couldn’t be sustained indefinitely.

My collaborators—Michael Brenson, Phong Bui, Bill T. Jones, Nancy Princenthal, Anna Raverat, Richard Shiff, Jeanne Silverthorne, Bob Stewart, Robert Storr, David Levi Strauss, Paul Hayes Tucker—are kindred spirits, fellow time travelers. There were many preliminary conversations, one-on-one, in person and via Zoom. The more candid, the more insightful. A philosophical perspective offers a long view.

A roundtable conversation five years ago at John Giorno’s loft (The Bunker) on Bowery remains memorable. John hosted our group—Bob Stewart, Mary Heilmann, Randy Kennedy, and me—to talk about an upcoming session on creativity and aging at the College Art Association conference. At one point the poet lamented not being able to perform publicly with the same level of intensity. He felt frustrated, resigned. Bob, who’s been playing jazz tuba (a demanding instrument at any age) for more than half a century, chimed in, encouraging John to accept his body’s limitations and reimagine the results. During the presentation a few days later, after a little cajoling, John rose to recite “Everyone Gets Lighter,” one of his iconic poems, and totally killed it!

This project will continue so long as I’m able to enlist willing participants. Artistic lateness means different things to different people depending on who they are, what they do, and how they’ve always done it. An older dancer’s attitude toward space, one shared aesthetic disposition, differs significantly from, say, a musician or a painter’s. How artists navigate the aging process depends as much on methods as it does on expectations. With no definitive answers, there are only empirical observations.

Time … an enabling gift.