Calypso down, p.1
The Time of Our Lives, page 1
PART I
‘The last enemy …’
(I Corinthians 15)
Forever Young
Itchi gitchi ya ya da da … (now we’re pumping) … getcha getcha ya ya here … You betcha! Across the lawn from me in the sun, a bunch of hotel guests with their wellness instructor were prancing, swivelling to the music, brown limbs gleaming, boom box thumping by the lotus pond … Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
‘Sure, sashay right over, why don’t you?’ I thought to myself as I eyed this perky performance from the divan in the hotel’s garden pavilion. I felt all jazzed up just watching. At that moment I’d have coucher’d with practically anyone. Every morning that week, soon after sunrise, the young Balinese guy, Budi, had been strutting his stuff here in time to the music, bare-legged, sweaty singlet sticking to his chest, with a few middle-aged guests gyrating along beside him, punching the air. Against the fall of ruby-red flowers on the coral vine, it was a mesmerising sight. I wasn’t tempted to join in, though—well, a little, perhaps, synchronised dancing is always seductive, but I know my limits. Apparently there’s nothing like energetic dance movements to boost the cognitive functions—or so a nice Englishman in glasses claimed on television recently. Something about synaptic firing, as I remember.
Some days, though, cognitive functions just aren’t the priority. It was all very mind-body, Budi’s class, which can be quite cheering when you’re twenty-five and still looking good in shorts, as Budi was, especially now the soul is out of fashion. It may lose its appeal when Alzheimer’s and peripheral neuropathy kick in, but right there at that moment it was very much the plat du jour. There was something about it that reminded me of the Greeks: the smooth, slender, Greek ideal of strong-shouldered beauty, male and female, has more or less taken over the world now—not the actual world, obviously, but minds from Montreal to Melbourne. Even in Mumbai I noticed that the billboards all over the city featured gods and goddesses in the Greek mould, not the Indians you see in the streets or hanging out of buses.
All the same, I was aware as I sat there in that hotel garden outside Yogyakarta that this display of jerking, jiving, jumping bodies, while entertaining and exhilarating, was also at some deeper level unsettling. Yet what on Earth could have been unsettling about such innocent calisthenics? Everyone was clearly right into it, after all. It looked sexy, it looked enlivening, it looked fun. They were publicly thumbing their noses at conventional ideas about what sort of behaviour was seemly at a certain age, and particularly about how an ageing body should display its pale, wrinkled self in public. And who doesn’t get a kick out of doing that? Needless to say, like mindfulness and Tibetan singing-bowl sessions, these kinds of classes are a clear class-signifier for us—this whole hotel is a class-signifier, for that matter, as are my shoes and the Brazilian maca-root shaving cream I favour—but that’s not what unsettles me.
Renate, for instance, who was well into her sixties, was electrified, she was reborn, it was never like this in Utrecht before breakfast on a Thursday; Malcolm from Melbourne was hovering between euphoria and panic, as dancers often do, amazed to find he had it in him to caper like this in public, yet at the same time unnerved, like a hang-glider coming in to land; while the couple from Kuala Lumpur were literally in an altered state, they were not just spry any more, they really were kids at play again, a little bewildered, but youthfully loose-limbed, bursting with energy—for now, at least.
I was bothered, however slightly, for the same reason I’m bothered by gyms, I suspect, not to mention joggers. Neither gyms nor joggers disturb me deeply—I’d like that to be unequivocally clear from the start—I don’t think they should be banned. Even with reasonably good health and a mind in working order, it’s hard to grow old well. Round and round we go, in ever-tightening circles, like water down a plug-hole, and then we’re gone. So how you deal with your body’s gradual collapse is your business, not mine. All the same, something about these regimens does cause unease. Years ago, I recall, when I was a regular at a gym near my house, something would put me on edge as soon as I pushed open the door. There was always a kind of tense self-consciousness in the air, even when there was almost nobody there. Everyone without exception—the women with blonde ponytails pounding away on the treadmill, going nowhere, the swimmers doing lap after lap in the pool, the young men lifting weights, biceps straining, the fit, the unfit, the taut, the sagging, the aged, the youthful, everybody performing these rituals—looked anxious. Each and every one of them gave the impression of fighting a losing battle while pretending to have the upper hand. Against what, though? What were they fighting against? Flabbiness? Obesity? Heart disease? Stress? What?
‘Death, of course,’ said my friend Sarah next morning without a moment’s hesitation when I asked her what she thought all the joggers and gymnasts were trying to hold at bay. ‘What else? It’s death they’re afraid of—or at least dying.’ She gave me a slightly lop-sided smile, not being in her prime any more, and cast a wry Hungarian eye over that morning’s group performing its synchronised moves by the pond. ‘This lot is still just young enough to imagine it can win.’ She laughed in that throaty way only smokers can. She was looking more and more like Maggie Smith that winter, as a host of women of a certain class eventually do.
‘Perhaps they just want to stay limber.’
‘Limber?’ Sarah sometimes likes to savour a word as if hearing it for the first time. In reality, like so many Hungarians, she speaks English better than the rest of us. ‘Limber is always good, of course. Covers a host of sins.’
‘And lithe,’ I said. I’m a fan of lithe. Freddie Mercury was lithe. (And Zoroastrian, too, from Zanzibar … but my mind was wandering.)
‘Still, at root,’ she said, eyes fixed on the group gyrating in the sun, ‘I think they simply want to avoid getting old. And facing what comes next. I can’t say I blame them—at their age.’
‘But you can’t win at that game, can you.’
‘No, it’s quite futile.’
‘None of it works,’ I mumbled, half under my breath. ‘Time passes and things fall apart.’ I studied the merrily cavorting crew, all gleaming in the sun. ‘In the end their brains will liquefy and dribble out of their mouths and ears just like everyone else’s.’
‘I suppose they will.’ At our advanced age this thought does not unduly alarm us. It doesn’t alarm the young much, either, because it’s all so notional, but it frightens the hell out of the middle-aged.
‘Not everyone thinks it will end badly, though, do they.’
‘Who, for example?’
‘Americans, for a start,’ I said. ‘Americans seem to have an inborn predilection for happy endings. They confuse life with Singin’ in the Rain. Everything’s going to be just fine.’
The beat was from ‘Stayin’ Alive’ that morning, and Budi, a mere stone’s throw away across the grass in his knee-length blue shorts, was our dancin’ man—breakin’ and shakin’ and stayin’ fetchingly alive. He was drilling his squad of foreigners to fantasise about being as loose-limbed and fit as he was. Ah ha ha ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. (Saturday Night Fever, I admit, ends fairly bleakly: moving to Manhattan is not my idea of a happy ending. All the same, I have a point about Americans.)
‘It’s like taking the waters, really, don’t you think?’ I said after a few moments. ‘Remember that fad?’
‘I’m from Budapest, darling. We had the best bathing establishments in Europe. It wasn’t just a fad.’
‘People aren’t still doing it, surely, are they?’
‘By the thousand! But they call it something else these days. You don’t “take the waters” now, you pamper yourself at … what do they call it? Ah, yes—a wellness spa.’
‘Well, I doubt anyone ever lived a second longer for lolling in a wellness spa.’
‘Maybe not, but in trying to, people …’ She waved one hand in the air. A tiny gem on her ring flashed blue in the sun.
‘What?’
‘Oh, I don’t know—people enjoy their bodies in these places, openly, publicly, extravagantly. They feel beautiful, they feel chic … a touch decadent, perhaps, in a faintly Roman sort of way, if you know what I mean.’
I’ve never felt comfortable with that sort of thing, to be frank—luxuriating in your body in public—try as I might to loosen up a bit about it. I just never have. Much too sincerely carnal. That said, I have no objection to it in the theatre.
‘What you obviously can do, though, is stave off looking old,’ Sarah went on, her eyes still fixed on the exercise class. She hadn’t much bothered to stave off anything herself—a thin couche each morning of some special anti-rides unguent, because one wants to give the impression one looks after oneself, but nothing more than that. Her face looked like what it was: the face of a woman who had lived a long, rich life—a difficult one in recent years—and lived it intensely, eyes wide open. In other words, a ‘finely seasoned face’, to quote Daniel Klein’s lively musings on ageing in his Travels with Epicurus. ‘The face is me,’ he says, ‘it’s my life.’ So why would you stretch and paint over it? ‘Speaking of which,’ Sarah said, ‘Jane Fonda’s picture was in the paper the other day—did you see it? She’s older than we are but looks thirty-two.’
‘But what’s the point of that sort of thing, really? All that maintenance—for what? You’re still rotting away inside.’
‘I think w e know perfectly well what the point is.’ Did we? ‘To stay attractive. You can’t cheat death, but you can stay attractive.’
‘Do you mean sexually?’
‘Obviously I mean sexually. Why else would you get a facelift?’
‘You mean looking twenty-five when you’re seventy-five might spice up your sex life a bit?’
‘Well, it won’t hurt, will it.’
‘What are the figures on this, I wonder? Does anyone know?’
‘At their age,’ Sarah said, nodding at our younger fellow guests, ‘you still think it’s worth giving it a shot. That’s one good thing about being actually old, in my opinion: it finally dawns on you that there’s no longer any point at all in faking youth. You look like shit and will soon be dead. You can relax.’ Another throaty laugh. I’d known Sarah since the age of ten and she’d never been a romantic. We sat for a moment, engrossed in the show across the lawn. ‘Were you ever in love with John Travolta, by the way?’
‘I don’t remember,’ I said, recalling very clearly the dark-haired figure in the white suit, stabbing at the air. ‘It was so long ago.’
‘I don’t believe you. I was.’
‘Really? But you …’
‘I was always willing to make an exception for John Travolta.’ She paused to take a last sip of tea. ‘Are you afraid of death, do you think?’
I had to chuckle: very few friends will put a question like this to you over breakfast. ‘Hardly at all these days, no—well, not of being dead, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Nor am I. Not of being dead.’
Strange to relate, in later life there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in spending time on that. Flicking through a Melbourne newspaper on the plane the other day I lit upon a piece by a young journalist I like (with a cheeky Polish name and spectacles) in which he wrote he thought that, as free-thinking ‘baby-boomers’ approached death, the churches might fill up again. How off-putting, whether it’s true or false, but I think it’s a young man’s take on things. As death’s door creaks open, something unexpected happens.
For the first time in years a vivid picture of a friend called David Fosse flashed into my mind: emaciated and blind, he lay dying in a Sydney hospice with just a few weeks left. It was the mid-eighties and he was the first close friend of mine to die of AIDS. His family, being devoutly Christian, had disowned him, so he lay there for the most part totally alone for those days he knew were his last. Was he afraid? Not at all. ‘What of?’ was all he said when I asked him. Distressed and regretful, but not afraid. And how did he spend his time? Listening to talking books—tapes of novels by Dickens and Thackeray. Beauty. What he wanted was beauty, that’s all. And wit, of course. And language—that goes without saying. And the sense of a gentle heart beholding him. (You can’t really say that in English, I know, but that’s what he wanted.)
‘Yes, you can try to look young forever,’ Sarah went on, ‘like Jane Fonda and whatshername from … you know …’
‘Joanna Lumley.’
‘It’s the names that go first, isn’t it. Nouns come next, apparently. Yes, her. You can try to die young as late as possible, in other words…’
‘Did you just make that up?’
‘No. Or you can do what you’ve done.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Fail to grow up in the first place.’
‘I see,’ I said, but didn’t—not at that moment.
I’d have pursued the question, but, once Budi, Renate, Malcolm and the rest had dispersed sweatily, wandering off to shower and breakfast, Sarah asked me to walk with her to her room. She has a cane to help her negotiate the slippery stone floors, but all I really had to do was to take her elbow as we went up steps, and there weren’t many of those because it was just a scattering of renovated houses and pavilions, this hotel, spanning the village street amongst the bamboo, the coconut palms and the lush, dangling ferns. Such a wonderful place to do nothing in—a pretend Javanese village, sunk in a paradise of ponds and tumbling greenery, with white stone buddhas in nooks left over from the days when Buddhists lived here. Tomorrow would be a big day—Borobudur (speaking of both buddhas and steps)—and Sarah had to rest up for it. Borobudur is a stupa the size of hill. It’s vital to climb to the top.
‘I’ll climb as far as I feel like climbing,’ Sarah replied when I told her, ‘and not an inch more. See you at lunch.’
What Are We Afraid Of, Really?
Could it be true that we try to stay young in the way we look in the hope of putting off being dead or, at the very least, dying? Is that really why we do it (if we do)? Are all those youth-enhancing hormone treatments, facelifts and injections, all those yoga and tai chi regimens, all that jogging, all those punishing diets, the implants and anti-ageing serums, all that time-consuming upkeep—is it all in reality, at least subconsciously, just a self-deluding stratagem to postpone what we fear above all things: death? There must be more to it than that, surely. You don’t spend half your life on maintenance of one kind or another just to hoodwink death. Or do you?
After seeing Sarah to her room to rest on her terrace with a book, I set off on a slow stroll through the kampung—the village the hotel is nestled in—gathering my thoughts. It’s not one of those Javanese villages lost in some remote valley, looking much as it did when the Dutch arrived, but a busy outer-urban kampung with its network of small houses and gardens and chickens, its cemeteries and mosques (just two), its schools, its tea shops and corner stalls, squeezed between the main road south from the city proper and the rice-fields. It’s not postcard pretty, the houses being mostly too run-down for that, and some American visitors have even complained to Reception about the poverty on their doorstep, apparently, but for me it’s a pleasure to wander alone around its quiet laneways, especially in the morning cool or at dusk. Everyone whose eye I catch nods, many smile, and there are few vehicles, for the most part just push-bikes and motor-scooters. Many bodies here are bent with age, many faces weathered, even ancient. Of course, in an Indonesian village the immensely elderly for the most part do not venture out. (Indeed, in some parts of Indonesia, such as Bali, if they are not just decrepit but also demented, they are caged or kept in stocks in the backyard. Respect does not imply a commitment to aged care.)
Quite a few well-known thinkers seem to agree with Sarah that pretty well everything we do is indeed a ploy to deny death. Epicurus, for instance, over two millennia ago in Athens, thought the denial of death responsible for most of our neuroses and our obsession with our own wellbeing. What was there to fear? Death as the end? Concentrate instead, he said, on close friendships, self-sufficiency and thoughtful tranquillity. I’ve never seen the point of tranquillity, I must say—give me animation any day—but I don’t live in ancient Athens. In any case, the whole world dreams of it constantly. To be busy all day and then expensively tranquil for an hour or two is our ideal these days. The fantasy smells of Los Angeles. I see men and women walking fast, talking fast, arguing loudly, as Americans do, and then chilling out in a watery spa with floating candles. For the modern psychiatrist Ernest Becker, for instance, from the moment we first realise it’s not Disneyland out there beyond the front gate, as we’d naïvely thought (until Mother told us where sausages come from or the cat got run over), but a terrifying slaughterhouse—every square inch of the planet, every drop of water a killing field, never mind about Cambodia—our human experience becomes one long ‘immortality project’, doomed from the start. After all, entropy can’t be argued with—you’re falling apart physically and there you go. So, to stare down death and reach for immortality, humans typically don’t just resort to keeping the body in shape, as we might have expected, but also, according to Becker in The Denial of Death, to various ingenious symbolic systems.
There’s nothing humans like more than a system. To this day they even think of themselves as systems (rather than as two-legged biological battlefields). Typically, most humans yearn for systems that are much bigger and longer-lasting than they are themselves, such as the Communist Party, say, the House of Islam, America or even Gaia, striving to merge with one or more of them. Some, more modestly, consider themselves to be members of a ‘community’, one that looks good for the long-term, if not eternity (the Aboriginal, Esperanto, LGBTQIA+ or rugby community—the list is long). Failing those sorts of systems, almost everyone at least has the family. Loners everywhere arouse suspicion.
