Why we're on earth . . . ultimately

“Ultimately, you know why we’re here on earth . . . to get rich.” – Kevin O’Leary.

O’Leary’s a wealthy investor, one of the pair—with Amanda Lang—featured on the Lang and O’Leary Exchange on CBC. For half-an-hour, they alternately yell at each other, talk over one another and generally (it’s likely staged to be like this) disagree about emerging economic issues-of-the-day. O’Leary is full of the unfettered, unregulated marketplace theory, minimum taxation . . . and himself. Lang is the good cop arguing at every turn for some humanity to temper the bellicose pronouncements of O’Leary, the one who’s ultimately on earth to get rich.

                It’s too phony by half and one can’t be blamed for assuming that CBC has O’Leary on for the same reason they’ve long given Don Cherry airtime in the first intermission on Hockey Night in Canada; there’s an audience out there for loud-mouthed, right-wing cockiness!

                But wait! Maybe O’Leary's comment sticks in my craw like a sharp chicken bone because he’s inadvertently pointing out a bit of hypocrisy in the non-wealthy world of which I’m a card-carrying member. If someone had observed me day after day since I left grade school, I’m sure they would have arrived at the conclusion that my primary pursuit was to gather means, i.e. money and the things money can pay for. How I have longed to be wealthy, to have all my days secured by absolute, independent wealth. My pursuit of it was hindered only by a lack of the skills, the luck and the energy possessed by people like O’Leary.

                I have daydreamt of living in a mansion with servants while espousing egalitarian, left-wing platitudes. To put it bluntly, my ultimate drive in life has been to become rich, or at least comfortably well-off. One of my greatest personal fears (next to sickening and dying, that is) is that what wealth I have accumulated—modest as it is—may prove not to be enough to sustain me with dignity in my old age.

                Whatever O’Leary’s sins are, I ought to leave to him to discover. For most of the world, I think, the greatest folly is to be dishonest with oneself, about oneself. Seems to me that replacing the word “sin” with the word “hypocrisy” wherever it occurs in scripture might come closer to what’s meant by the original nature of human folly. It’s so universal. People trumpeting resurrection and eternal life as if they were irrefutable facts . . . and living their lives as if they were agnostic on the subject. People judging others for particular sins as if their own sins were nothing more than endearing foibles. In the words of Christian scriptures, people who strain gnats out of their drink, but swallow whole camels without blinking.

                This is the club of which I am a bona fide member.

                If O’Leary is wrong, then what are we ultimately on earth for? If not to get rich, then what? Or are we—like the dandelion that sprouts on our lawn without apparent purpose—just . . . here?

Maybe pondering purpose is wrong-headed altogether; maybe, like the dandelion in the lawn, the proper answer to “here’s why I’m on earth” is found in blooming as large and as yellow as possible before the obsessive suburban homeowner sprays you down.

Maybe T.S. Eliot said it best:

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

And sprayed down we will all be, O’Leary and me included.

Meanwhile, tomorrow Lotto 6/49 will draw for an estimated $18,000,000.00! Have you got your ticket yet?

I Will Wear my Trousers Rolled

 Endings

Beginnings

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--

(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")

I’ve had occasion recently to revisit T.S. Eliot’s masterful stream-of-consciousness poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and since several of the lines are currently impressed like skipping tracks of a vinyl disc in my head, I decided to ease the repetition by writing a bit about that whole subject—aging and the reflection on the meaning of what we have been.

In my case, the “with a bald spot in the middle of my hair” would be understatement—by quite a bit—and “how his arms and legs are thin” could be replaced with “how his midriff is preceding him,” but I recall how my father’s clothes were all too big on him when he reached three score and ten, and I can empathize with Prufrock.  Besides his hypersensitivity about his changing appearance, Prufrock is plagued by world-weariness, the “why bother” syndrome; why keep up the rituals of coffee times and repetitive, mundane, silly conversations:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

Being “elderly” grants permission to be honest, frank, impolite if necessary when faced with the same-old, same-old of conversation for conversations sake, but will one have the courage?

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

But knowing finally that we have settled for “shallow” in a universe that cries for “depth” may not be of much use when the truth of the matter finally comes home to roost:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worthwhile,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question . . .?

There must be a word for that; I think it’s part regret, part too late and part would it have made any difference. Perhaps the right word is ennui.

            Whereas old age used to be an arm’s-length, somewhat mythical phenomenon belonging to a culture that was not mine, I now live in its midst. I have come to appreciate what has been called the wisdom of age in, for instance, my 98-year old neighbour who recently bought herself a new house and asked me a few days ago to help her locate the biography of Mahatma Gandhi’s wife because she’s interested in the life of that forgotten woman. And I’ve seen its opposite, the interminable assembly of jigsaw puzzles in seniors’ centre foyers, the tedious search for tiny pieces of the universe that will fit, and the exultation when a picture that was scattered has been made whole. What a metaphor!

            And yet, it’s hard to assign blame to whatever sadness accompanies old age for many people. My mother-in-law lamented as she approached 90 that all her bosom friends were dead. That recognition alone must be daunting to even the strongest among us. I’ve seen the powerful need to grasp whatever intimacy is left in the world in people in nursing homes and seniors’ centres. I’ve seen how their eyes light up with the hope that my entrance will mean someone to talk to, someone to attend to their existence.

Our institutions for the elderly are wrong, somehow. Like our prisons and hospitals, they group people with similar needs together and isolate them from the population. The reason for this might be obvious; we are so afraid of being old, sick and/or terrified of deviance that we can’t stand to be reminded of our fragility by seeing aging, by seeing illness, by seeing the variety of hurts and angers that combined to make criminals. (I’m exaggerating for effect, here.) Or else we just couldn’t possibly find the manpower to service their needs except we house them close together.

Resignation is the ubiquitous option, isn’t it? I find the penultimate lines in Prufrock as compelling as any in modern poetry:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Perhaps that’s the inevitable finale: I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .. Resignation? Acceptance? Feeble excuse?

Take your pick.

Eat a peach.