– James Hillman’s The Force of Character and the Lasting Life
This is a book about men aging. I am compulsive about James Hillman’s books. I buy them and devour them though I will admit with some difficulty. Sometimes, I do not know which I enjoy more, the book’s content or finding that I am able to understand and finish it. Nevertheless, I love that he is erudite and quotes Plato and Aristotle like they were his friends. In this book, Hillman makes a valiant attempt to ennoble the aging process, to put a lofty spin to the deterioration that I personally witness when I am with my beloved aging male friends who have taught me so much about life and, well, martinis, shaken, we finally agree.
According to Hillman, according to Aristotle, old age is the period of life when "lust becomes extravagant." See why I like him? He goes on, "As physical powers wane, imagination cuts loose and runs wild. On the one hand, impotence, misogyny (hatred of women or maybe only of wife) and depressive isolation; on the other, the lewd fantasies of the dirty old man, that old goat." Definitely, this explains why my friend M. sends me four dirty text jokes a day. He tells another of my friends as if I’m not there, "Four keeps her happy." I have no idea what he’s talking about because I never respond unless I am in an extraordinarily expansive mood, which is rarely, but this makes him happy and that’s good. I decide to keep score: Four, indeed, every day. He even works on Sundays.
Hillman, who is a Jungian analyst and scholar, opines that this awakening of the imagination comes from the melancholia that seems to visit and linger more frequently in the later years. Also, "while performance subsides, the range of erotic fantasy extends and enlivens." He quotes the poet William Butler Yeats:
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?
He quotes Walt Whitman and Dr. Samuel Atkin, another psychoanalyst who had Parkinson’s Disease but nevertheless kept a detailed honest diary that included his erotic feelings at age 88. He cites Picasso’s creative burst at 87 and attributes it to erotic imagination. Hillman says, "In old age, erotic fantasy is more than a symptom, more than a compensation. It becomes a private necessity and, consequently, a societal benefit." Yeah, right, how dull my life would be without my ration of four dirty jokes a day, most of which I disdain! How dull M’s life would be without his list of aging single women to send four dirty jokes a day to! If you think I may be the only one on M’s list, you must be young. Older people know that having just one person on any list is boring. Life requires fallbacks, backups, alternatives. That much we probably have learned.
Hillman continues, "Male fantasy is said to be more concrete and organ-focused, female more imprecise and encompassing – witness romantic novels; nonetheless, the intensity (Hillman’s italics) of fantasy is shared equally." I might agree with him if I hadn’t met the other book on my sick bed: Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman, My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance.
My daughter Panjee gave me this book, maybe her way of saying, "Look, Mom, all is not lost." Jane Juska is a retired English teacher (who should explain why the words after the hyphens in her title are capitalized, far as I know, they should not be) who decides at 67 that she has had too much English and not enough sex. This, by the way, is not uncommon among women, whether or not they are more or less than 67. What is uncommon is that Jane did something about it. She put an ad in The New York Review of Books. It read: "Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope (an English novelist) works for me." Her choice of publication showed she was looking for someone well-read or he wouldn’t have The New York Review of Books. When I told this to a septuagenarian, he was totally bemused and chortled, "Who responded?" As if no one would respond to a 67-year-old woman. Well, 63 people responded, enough of them younger, and she sorted their letters into Yes, No, Maybe. Then she checked out the Yeses and Maybes and wrote the book.
It’s in our psyche, I think. Women have always been mired in the gritty parts of life. We clean the fish, dress the chicken, wash the diapers, mop up the barf. We do the cooking, the cleaning, the washing daily. We have no time to be adventurous and reckless. What did I do with my single exciting life? Mostly, I worked! Here’s a well-educated, perfectly respectable and perfectly literate and literary lady finally getting around to doing what she wants to do before she dies.
She also tells us honestly and candidly about the risks she took, how foolish she felt sometimes and how she hurt nevertheless. Women are never so casual about sex. We always hope that it will be a romance novel so we are always somehow in love with whoever happens to be with us, real or imagined. Jane first was in love with her therapist and, incidentally, every halfway decent man she met, just a single woman’s imagination or effort to infuse some motivation into her life. Apparently, for older people of both genders, imagination is the happening place, the perfect bar, the sweetest romance. Reality is different. She can’t stand the first man she meets for lunch. He does obnoxious magic tricks. The first one she sleeps with steals from her. The men are old and eccentric, more real than romantic. Jane Juska writes honestly. I am struck by one of her paragraphs: "Life just keeps coming at you. Make no mistake, it’s out to get you, and in the end it will. But every so often, you can catch a piece of it and make it do what you want it to, at least for a little while. You’ve got to stay alert, though. Heads up so you don’t get caught off base, though if you do, what the hell, it’s not the ninth inning until it is."
I cough productively. This is how my doctor describes my main affliction: a productive cough. It comes with fever on the side and a bacterial infection of major proportions presently being zapped by mega-antibiotics. So my books and I are stranded in a storm. Voicelessly, I do the proper thing. Mr. Hillman in your 80s, meet Ms. Juska, late 60s. Hope you guys are happy in my bed where nothing’s doing not even in the imagination. Would you care for some paracetamol?