By Genie Zeiger
Hillman: When we compare our deep personal experiences with those of Eastern Europeans, or Russians, or South Americans, or Africans, ours seem so irrelevant, so tiny and shameful — just people talking about what sort of relationship they had with their father. Our novels, compared to those coming out of other parts of the world, are insular and parochial.
Zeiger: But what can we do about the fact that we have these insular lives, that we’re surrounded by so much comfort? We can’t manufacture hardship in order to write deeper, more meaningful novels.
Hillman: Good question, what do we do? After all, the people in Kosovo, or wherever we look, have personal experiences, too: their spouses walk out, or they get cancer. But their experiences are part of something else. They resonate with the world, with society, with tragedy and fate, with political and social repercussions. Are ours just part of our comfortable life, as you say? Or is it that we’ve cut ourselves off from the larger figures of the cosmos?
Zeiger: I often stay away from the news and then feel guilty for not participating in the larger theater of the world. But if I see those images, I’ll feel a responsibility to do something about them, and I can’t, except perhaps to send money. I’m left feeling powerless.
Hillman: Yes, powerless, but there are answers. Gary Snyder says, when something strikes you — whether it’s a hungry child, or the death of a fish, or the cutting of a forest, or the warming of the air — take that particular thing and enter into it. Learn about the salmon, about the Indian myths surrounding it, about the whole life cycle of the fish. Through your learning, you develop sympathy, and you become an expert. You pick one place where your heart can connect to the world’s problems. We can’t just say, “This is too much. I can’t bear it.”
Zeiger: I do volunteer work at a senior center leading writing workshops, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It’s too easy. I enjoy it. Perhaps there needs to be some element of sacrifice.
Hillman: That’s a good point. Your example also raises the question: Why does our society believe old people need help? They are the ones who would be, in some other society, passing on help to others: teaching skills, telling stories, leading rituals, caring for children. They have a contribution to make, and instead they are segregated as sick people who need to be nursed. This is ridiculous.
Zeiger: Your work seems to be an attempt to bring our culture, which is so afraid of aging, into better balance.
Hillman: Yes, we’re supposedly a young nation; we’ve always worshiped get-up-and-go, doing things on your own, winner take all. But we’re also a practical nation, and we don’t realize the practical value of older people: they know a lot; they’ve acquired many skills; they have a knowledge of tools. Think of old carpenters, old gardeners. An old cloth merchant in New York City can touch a material and know what it’s all about, and that’s practical. We need to restore their value.
Zeiger: I think fear of aging is related to a fear of dying, and also to a fear of being really alive.
Hillman: We’ve become security-obsessed. We’re an air-bag culture. We buy cars because of their safety features. Everything has to be safety-proofed so that there can be no accident. To avoid wounding of any kind has become our prime objective. It’s as if, psychically, we live in gated communities in order to keep out the unforeseen.
Zeiger: That fear of the unforeseen seems related to our Puritan beginnings: fear of vitality, sexuality.
Hillman: Yes, keeping things under control. We’re obsessed with sickness. That’s what I mean by an air-bag culture. We are so rich and our egos so strong in our gated communities, in our gated selves, that we’re afraid of everything: disease, old age, different-colored people, poor people, change of any sort. We’re terribly afraid.
Zeiger: Those reactions are so much in opposition to the American spirit of exploration.
Hillman: Where has the risk gone? Aging is a time of risk, and older people have incredible courage.
Zeiger: Could you say something about faces, their importance?
Hillman: To show one’s face is part of having the courage to show who one is. And coming to terms with your own face takes a lifetime. Just think how, when you were twelve or sixteen, you wished you looked different. And that’s true for everyone; even the most perfect, beautiful boy or girl is dissatisfied. So why is that? It can’t just be that I don’t look like the model on the magazine cover. It’s something else. You haven’t yet accepted your fate, who you are. As you get older, that relationship between your face and who you are matures. They blend together. Your true self shows more.
Zeiger: Like the spirit that shines out in a really old person and makes him or her beautiful. I have a friend who is eighty-six and she seems young to me.
Hillman: Do you really mean “young,” or do you mean vital, alive, lovely, handsome, striking? See how we give it all away to youth? And even if the eyes have yellowed, if they’re cataracted, there’s a beauty that’s transcendent. The real person is there.
I emphasize the ethical claim of the face on another person. The idea comes from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. “The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me,” he says. The other person’s face requires a response. Levinas says that’s where civilization begins, where ethical responsibility begins: face to face. He hits upon something very profound.
Zeiger: With fewer and fewer face-to-face encounters, as with e-mail, we inevitably grow more and more estranged from each other.
Hillman: Now you’re touching on a big question, because the Internet is faceless. Even if eventually we can see the person we’re talking to, it won’t be quite the same. But people who deliver the news on TV become like our intimates, because their faces are there every day. Isolated older people may tune in, not for the news or the weather, but for those faces they get to view. The face captures you, and the people who produce these shows know that.
Zeiger: You write about becoming, in old age, our essential character, a character that is not “centered,” but more eccentric, a bit off course. My dad, for example, became more of a cynic. You recommend honoring that essential character. But what about things like civility, kindness? While some of us become more gracious with age, others can become pretty obnoxious. Isn’t there a danger in abdicating some standard of behavior?
Hillman: You are stating a collective fear. So what if you are obnoxious? People are used to dealing with curmudgeons. And there’s a social cohesion that works to modify such behavior.
Zeiger: Speaking of parents, when my mom was dying, I felt as if she was both here and somewhere else. She was a very practical woman who never talked about dreams or the spirit world, but near the end of her life, in the nursing home, she turned to my husband and said, “Bill, I just heard that your death has dreams.”
Hillman: “Your death has dreams”? What a poetic statement of great mystery.
Zeiger: I truly had a sense of her being in both this world and the next simultaneously. Do I dare ask you about that?
Hillman: We can speculate about what’s on the other side. Many people need to believe in something, whether it’s heaven, or reincarnation, or channeling. But I don’t take that subject up, because no one knows. No one has ever come back. There is the sense, however, that there is an—other side, and that’s interesting — that this life doesn’t feel complete in itself. We intuit something else, and we get that feeling most of all with older people. They seem to be carrying messages, or to have one foot over there. In tribal societies, they expect that from shamans and old curanderas — healers. They are supposed to have access to spirits.
Zeiger: And, unless you’re a child, there’s this yearning — I don’t know what to call it. . . . “Something to go to,” perhaps.
Hillman: “Something to go to,” yes. It’s more than wishing, because it comes from the heart and soul. The German Romantics said, “Tell me what you long for, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Not what you do. You go to a party, and people ask you what you do, and you say, “I sell cars,” or, “I’m a gardener.” But for the Romantics, it was “Tell me what you long for,” what your yearning is, which suggests something huge.
Zeiger: What about sex and old age?
Hillman: Yeats talked a lot about the need to face the erotic, at every age. People were embarrassed by it then, and they are still embarrassed by it.
Zeiger: The Puritans are still around.
Hillman: They really are. They don’t realize that the erotic imagination is so crucial for an inspired old age. It doesn’t mean that you have to be chasing girls. It’s just important to have that erotic feeling. One of the crippling restrictions about old age in this culture is the shame about eroticism. If old people are to recover their vitality, or their value, they have to open themselves up to erotic fantasy. Old people guard against the erotic as something belonging to youth. But eroticism is a life force lasting as long as life. Imagination, that’s all that’s necessary. There’s a French joke: A little old lady goes to the priest to confess, and she tells the priest this long, detailed story of sex with a boy at the farm. And the priest says, “My goodness, when did this happen?” And she says, “Seventy years ago.” And he says, “Seventy years ago, and you’re confessing it now?” And she says, “I like to think about it from time to time.” [Laughter.]
“I like to think about it from time to time.” That’s the point. She’s alive partly because her imagination is alive, and I think that needs to be said again and again. In the Puritan point of view, you’re supposed to put all that behind you.
What ever happened to the pleasure of aging? I guess that’s it: we don’t see it as pleasure. I don’t know what you experience, but I certainly experience pleasure in many ways, and different kinds of pleasure than earlier in life: Sitting back and letting things happen. Speaking out, and damn what others think. Watching birds, or people. My appreciation of music has become much more acute, even if my hearing is a little less.
Zeiger: There’s a book by nature writer Farley Mowat called The Snow Walker. It’s about Eskimos, and there’s a story in it about how, when there’s a very bad winter and there isn’t enough food, the old just leave the igloos and go off to die so the children will live. There’s something satisfying and good in that idea of sacrifice, that one leaves to make room for the next generation.
Hillman: I think that’s very important, the feeling of stepping back. You don’t need certain things anymore.
Zeiger: For me, I was far more politically active when I was young. I don’t know if this falling off has to do with living in the country, or a shift in energy.
Hillman: I think we need more old people becoming activists. In the sixties, in the civil-rights movement in the South, there were many coalitions of old and young. The same is true with the environment. Old people have a lot of courage. They can enter the political arena in a different style — can be there without being quite as caught up in it.
Young people have a great sense of justice. One of the common complaints of children is “It’s not fair, it’s not fair!” And old people feel that again. I have no idea where that sense of justice comes from. It’s almost as if it’s born in you. It’s a remarkable thing. We should all pay more attention to it.
Reprinted from an interview in The Sun Magazine
Genie Zeiger will be participating in the Sun Magazine workshop May 15-17. Click for details.
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