Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts

Sunday 31 October 2021

Briefly; on the Growing Sense of Insignificance that Comes with Aging

by Simbarashe Nyatsanza
 

Lord Chesterfield: "I look upon all that is past as one of those 
romantic dreams, which opium commonly occasions."

I will be, hopefully, turning 28 on the 10th of April this coming year, and I recently, reluctantly, came to the end of my university studies in December 2020. I was 26 years old at the time; late, somehow feeling outgrown and out of place, too aware of my fading sense of wonder and merriment with everything around me to continue on with the farce of mock-ignorance often needed for one to successfully allow themselves to be ‘educated’. 

I had to complete my studies and end the nonsense. I was also feeling quite stagnant and of stunted progress, with nothing to show for my life (if those ever-fleeting moments of glee and glum that characterized my existence back then could safely be called life). But, good god, I miss those old wicked times! Things were hard and confusing and drunken and exciting and draining and enraging and saddening and thrilling and depressing and carefree and sexy and sexual and niggerish and nightmarish and orgasmic and purifying and, sometimes, there was nothing but the rousing possibility, the potential, for more innocuous but meaningful meaninglessness. I was alive for, and because of, that. 

Memories of the debauched moments of belligerence, the often psychotic, sporadically violent and extremely intoxicating sense of selflessness that came with the demonstration of inebriated impulses during those days, now assume a faint kind of beauty that is no longer reachable, simply impossible to replicate, way out of par and incompatible with the forced sense of self-responsibility that often finds itself creeping in and enlarging in the crevices of the mind as the years add on. Yet these memories are somehow reassuring, as if they were a faint picture of a monument - the strange and saddening beauty of a wilting flower - a remembrancer of a series of moments fully exhausted, while they were exhausting - and yet the closest thing to liberation - to the very soul of the young, misguided misfit I so proudly was. 

 It often feels that it won't be long till I start describing myself as a 'once-was', or as an 'i-used-to'. Like those busy-sounding, busy losers who speak of a past laden with potential and yet say nothing of their rotten and dried out, washed up presences. Or those forcefully eccentric Africans who still speak with a misplaced ‘White’ accent ever since they went to Europe for a time as brief as a fortnight when they were as young as ten years old, who desperately hang on to a fading sense of sophistication, of a ‘difference’, who greatly overestimated their own sense of importance. Like them, it feels like it won't be long until my mind finally accepts its role as a repository for failed tests, failed relationships, failed prayers, failed exams, failed apologies, failed attempts at reconciliation, failed learning, failed loving - failed everythings, and the mouth resigns drunkenly into an amplifier of the uselessness of wisdom that comes with hindsight, always blasting even in the forced silence of one's mind. 

 It is The Irishman telling Jimmy Hover that 'It is what it is'. It is Red, in Shawshank Redemption, marking his name beneath a dead one, and then moving on. It's the red at the center of the flame that burns your fingertips as you light another cigarette that gently pushes you, drag by drag, towards permanent oblivion. It's the most gentlemanly Robert Mugabe finally dying in an Adidas tracksuit, while he always wore suits all his life. It is like shaving your hair every two days because of the gray strands that always eagerly sprout in it, reminding you of the old man whose face is starting to come out of yours, when you hadn't thought of yourself as that old. In fact, you would never have thought of yourself as old at all. It's that ageless voice inside of you, the one that keeps coming up with the reassurances, the reminders of how everyone is God's favorite child, of how there's still a chance to turn things around, to be something, like the others, finally gently screaming, “Get over yourself!” from the center of your brain. 

It's that desperate yearning for longevity, which almost comes across as a series of threatening promises of mediocrity. It's really a well crafted and articulate declaration of complacency; aging.

Monday 25 January 2016

Poem: Friendship

Posted by Theo Olivet *

Original painting by T.A. Marrison
A central question of life is that of where may I find firm ground as I search for my own position? Subsidiary ones are: Does friendship help? Is it possible to obtain support through common suffering? Or to define one's future position? And to what extent may one find strength through the weaknesses of others? 

Friendship
Translated from the original German by Pi Editors

Come, let the two of us bow down
at this, our so familiar place,
so many stubs you stubbed out here,
the white smoke rising from your face.

And then, in that deep silence
to which we often yielded,
A raw cough I coughed
and my eyes from yours I shielded.

At times a gentle word fell,
'I run from me, tomorrow.'
And you in turn, said frankly:
'My man has not been found, though,
I guess I am my own first foe ...'
I asked:  'You mean, above, below?'
Then we wept aloud.

Those were the days! I tell myself.
So awesome! they won't come again,
yet we stood there, all four feet
in a sea of tar then …

Come, give me one of yours
since mine are dull in taste,
I am changing, it would seem to me,
this house has all but gone to waste,
my doors are much a'rattling,
oh, were my sails by new wind chased.

The cigarette, yeah …  I say thank you,
the way it tastes, the smoke reminds me
how oft you fingered stubs and drew.
You … yes you … I wish once more to be
with you



* Theo Olivet is an author, artist, and retired judge in Schleswig-Holstein
The original German language poem appears at Gedicht: Freundschaft