'There Ain't No Sanity Clause'

"The brains of older humans are cluttered with irrelevant information." 
                                               - Harper’s Magazine (“Findings,” November 2011).

Scientific research is a trove of surprising propositions, none more so than truffles such as this heady speculation unearthed by social scientists like hogs rooting a Picardine oak forest. Irrelevancy is a relational attribute, however, determined only in relation to something else it is found irrelevant to. Information may be irrelevant in one aspect, but entirely pertinent in another - if the 12:15 is arriving in the station on time it won't be irrelevant information if it's you who happens to be tied to the track. Nonetheless, the sort of information lodged unshakeably in older brains is, so far as social science is concerned, irrelevant simpliciter - of no possible use in any relation whatsoever. 

I find upon reflection that this must be true. I can remember, to cite a trivial example, the name of my first grade teacher from the palmy boyhood days of six decades past - Mrs. Rigby, like in the Beatles song about "Eleanor Rigby," who picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been/Lives in a dream/Waits at the window/Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door, and so on although I don't recall her name being Eleanor, come to that though why on earth should I remember the name of a woman already old and unmemorable by 1950? But I do. Irrelevant information indeed. No movie star, our Mrs. Rigby (Mrs., not Miss), though it occurs to me she must have been born in that same golden era as were some of the old screen idols like Clark Gable (betrayed by some of his leading ladies as suffering from halitosis, as did they each in their turn); or Garbo, or the tragically short-lived and eternal ingenue, Jean Harlow, although on further reflection I can't recall any of them being named Eleanor either, although there was Esther (Williams).

 Jean Harlow

Speaking of which calls to mind a funny story about Jean Harlow who, when still a fresh young face in Hollywood was in attendance at a cocktail evening at which Tallulah Bankhead was also a guest. Evidently J.H. had just learned the phrase "bon mot," which she shoehorned into the conversation at every opportunity, persisting in pronouncing it as spelled, "bonn mott." Finally, with an elaborate patience born of petulance, Tallulah pounced. "It's pronounced 'bawm moe,' dear," she purred languidly, Frenching the phrase perfectly. "The 't' is silent - as in Harlow." 

Plenty of stories as well about Tallulah herself, whether true or not I've no idea, like the one Sabbath she attended a Greek Orthodox mass, the priest entering the sanctuary from the rear and making his way forward toward the altar, richly caparisoned (as the phrase goes) in alb, surplice, chasuble and all the priestly whatnots, swinging a censer (which is a different animal from a 'censor') of  smoking incense down the aisle, whereupon Tallulah when the saintly cleric reached her pew in his venerable progress leaned out and in her best stage whisper said, "I love your gown, dahling. But your purse is on fire."

Tallulah Bankhead 

Although for my money, when it came to the bon mot no one could outdo Winston Churchill. By now the tale of his inebriated exchange with Lady Mary Astor at the dinner table is legend ("You're drunk, Sir!" "Yes, madam, and you're ugly. But in the morning I'll be sober.") Irrepressible even in youth, he once sent a corsage to a young lady with the injunction to "pin it to your white meat." Asked as an elder statesman to account for the martial glory of the Royal Navy he growled in his characteristic growl, "Rum, sodomy, and the lash!"   As Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) reminds us, Aristotle held that "melancholy men of all others are most witty," and Churchill seems a melancholic sort, though in our more modern age melancholia is a minor crime, a treasonous subversion of the doctrine that happiness shall be universal, a certain sign of moral turpitude akin in gravity to the Catiline conspiracy against which Cicero (who was Tully) fulminated so eloquently in centuries past ("How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?").

Cicero upbraids Catiline in the Senate

Melancholia as you know is the predominance of the black bile - the hotter and drier humors prevailing, an imbalance in the animal spirits which are as you will recall the medium of conveyance for such subtle events as our thoughts, passions and imaginings, a highly refined and rarefied liquor whose subtle influence occasions the motions of the humors in all the assorted ventricles, chasms, receptacles, creeks, channels, conduits, rivulets, ravines, puddles and reservoirs of the brain, transmitting commands and volitions to the limbs and likewise transforming the perturbations and oscillations of the nerves into images, impulses, sensations, smells, sounds, appetites and what have you. Or, as Burton's afore-referenced Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) has it, "The brain . . . hath many concavities distinguished by certain ventricles, which are the receptacles of the spirits brought hither by the arteries from the heart and there refined to a more heavenly nature, to perform the actions of the soul. . . etc. etc." 

From all of which it follows that wit is a bilious excrescence which causes hot and dry spirits, as Heraclitus also implies when he observes that the wisest souls are the dryest (from whence I suppose we get the term "dry wit"), while foolish souls are moist, as in the souls of inebriates such as the uncles of Sancho Panza, famed for their palates but objects of ridicule when, asked to sample a cask of the finest Salamancan, one claimed to taste iron, the other to taste leather. (As the subtle reader might expect, a key on a leathern thong was discovered when the cask was drained.)

A wet soul

One of the wettest souls must have belonged to a Victorian gentleman who boasted in the precincts of his club that over the previous evening he had drank three bottles of port after dinner. Asked whether he had required any assistance, he conceded that indeed he had sought the assistance of a bottle of Madeira. It also bears mention here that the venerable Locke subscribed to a "particle" theory of perception, the animal spirits being set in motion by the bombardments of tiny particles emitted to the eyes and our various animal sensoria via sensible objects. Burton as well brought to the world's attention the fact that "England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses: Italy is a paradise for horses, a hell for women" - and Burton didn't even know Silvio Berlusconi, who has become as irrelevant as most of the information in my brain.

 "So long, suckahs."

But there's no sanity clause in life's fine print - as Harpo Marx put it, "Ya can't fool me - there ain't no sanity clause." Oh God, stop me, what am I doing with all this stuff, it's completely irrelevant . . . I can't seem to clear my head . . . . 

The Man of Ready Wit

"[T]hose who joke in a tasteful way are called ready-witted, which implies a sort of readiness to turn this way and that; for such sallies are thought to be movements of the character, and as bodies are discriminated by their movements, so too are characters."

                                               - Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. IV, ch. 8 

With snow coming soon to the high country, I improved the time by taking my portable camp over the Divide to the Great Sand Dunes to soak up the last of the sunshine. I found a site, settled in, and prepared myself for a quiet evening at home. Presently a couple of youngish chaps from Vermont pulled in to the neighboring campsite, set up a tent and likewise settled in. The palpable indifference between my neighbors and me was all very congenial.

Home away from home

Before very long, the fellow from the site adjoining theirs on the other side wandered over and struck up a conversation with my neighbors. Neighborly of him, I thought. An hour later, it was time for my supper, and I realized that the fellow was still standing in the same spot, his two listeners having never moved in the last hour, and that the only sound I'd been subconsciously hearing in the interim was his drone. Better them than me, thought I - I'd have sent him on his way long before now.

After my modest repast I stepped out to enjoy the last of the light over the dunes, and the trio had now settled in for the evening by a campfire, the droner still holding court. As yet I'd not heard the sound of any other voice, no more than an occasional polite chuckle from his two captives. Well, I thought as I prepared to climb into the old rack, this can't go on all night. I tried to fall asleep, but after a quarter-hour the quiet night made the steady drone more audible and more intelligible. Sentences began with "Back in my day . . . " or "After I was through college . . ." or "You could get those things back in the 60s, 'specially in Mexico." The Most Interesting Man in the World, I muttered. His parents were probably both named for him.

Rather than let myself descend into sleepless irritation, I rummaged in my kit for my trusty rubber earplugs, inserted them, and promptly dozed off. I awoke hours later (I supposed), gingerly tugged one of the plugs from my ear, and heard the insinuating drone unabated in the darkness. The night was otherwise still, and I could hear the auto-fascinated sod plainly - "Well," he drawled, "no matter whereya go, thereya are."  Oh shit, I moaned in silent irritation, did he really say that? In went the earplug and back to sleep.

He did really say that. The cliche, of course, is the stuff of the "interesting" narcissist's conversation. The trite, the vapid, the lazy-minded, the speciously clever but empty phrase - nothing calculated, nothing thoughtful, nothing funny or clever, just blather intended to pass oneself as a "character," a "really interesting guy," or whatever. An outright insult is less maddening than a cliche.

By contrast, nothing is so pleasant as ready wit. Not buffoonery or puns or heavy-handed guffaws, but the gift of quickness, a sensibility to words and their nuanced meanings, a sense of when it's appropriate and when not. Such people possess a genuine social virtue - a minor one to be sure, but still a conversational polish that gives a complicated pleasure, that does not pale or cloy with acquaintance.We are all logophiles to some degree, so it is pleasant when we hear someone play with words in ways that bring us up short and make us think about the verbal turn we just took.

When I was a young man in college some time near the end of the Little Ice Age in Europe, there was a fellow in the college business office who was notorious for his unwitting malapropisms - a real butcher of the language. There was also a member of the faculty who was equally famous for his wry, glancing wit, an offhanded sort of genius he had for the mot juste. Together in conversation, the two of them were a lethal combination. I was not present for this exchange, but one of my professors, a faculty colleague of the wit's, reported it. 

Passing one another on the campus quad, the professor inquired of the business office chap whether he had passed a pleasant weekend. "Oh," he replied, "my wife and I did a bit of furniture shopping - bought a new sexual sofa."

"Well," drolled the wit, "nothing like an occasional piece in the living room."

The Lower Depths: Deconstructing My Plumbing

"No man can be judged happy until he is dead."  -  Solon the Wise

This cautionary ethical adage, instilling as it does the virtues of prudence, patience, humility and taking the long view, is the wellspring (if you'll pardon the expression) of my theory of plumbing. Aristotle demurred, on the grounds that happiness is not a state, but rather the active exercise of the virtues. My namesake on the other hand, with admirable perspicuity maintains that there's something to it. In this I am not an Aristotelean. It is, in a word, the whole matter, the kernel, the meat, the essence of plumbing. I have touched on this before.

If you give me an ordinary bicycle, let's say, I can probably fix it. I can usually figure out my way around it and, with a little trial-and-error and a modicum of profanity, I can put it right. It's quite simple, really. My technique is simply to buy the latest issue of Bicycling Magazine . . .

,

. . . riffle past all the articles about Lance's doping charges, go straight to the "Gear & Bike" section, and proceed to buy every tool the magazine recommends I own. So, for example, just to give you some limited idea, I now own the Crank Brothers multi-tool 19 ($33) . . . 

. . . Pedro's torque wrench ($140) . . . 

. . . the Giustaforza torque wrench ($185, just to be on the safe side) . . .

. . . the Lezyne Carbon 5 minitool ($80, also just to be safe) . . .

. . .  the Gimp Emergency multi/hanger tool ($40) . . .

. . . Pedro's Trixie ($30) . . .

. . . and a penis necktie for the post-ride pub crawl (priceless).

(More than just a) phallic symbol

Having assembled all my tools about me on the front terrace, my workplace resembles a shipyard.

In mere moments I can take an ordinary bicycle, disassemble it so that all the parts are laid out and visible, like this (always more parts than you expect there might be) . . .

. . . reassemble it, discard any "extra" parts, and Bob's your uncle. 

E pluribus Elliptigo.

But when confronted with a breech in the household plumbing, as I have been of late, no matter how simple on the face of it, I quail. Memories of past attempts haunt me. Investigating something as obvious as a leaky faucet, I encounter in the lower depths what seems (at first) easy enough, if always somehow inaccessible and usually something I've already fixed at least twice before . . . 

Investigating further, the system begins to branch out a bit, fractillate (if I may coin a word) beneath the house. The exact pipe I had located further up towards daylight seems to be deliberately sequestered by its compeers from discovery in the subterranean murk . . .

Following the tangled mass of iron onwards, I emerge into a neighboring back lot, where the system begins to build unaccountably into some hellish Escher puzzle based on exponentiality, the Simpson Paradox and Godel's Theorem . . . 

At last, having crawled on bloodied hands and knees for several miles, I encounter the source of the problem in a neighboring city . . .

There, with prayers and burnt offerings, I loosen the offending joint, valve, fitting, nut, or whatever is the source of the leak, putty it, tape it with plumber's tape, replace whatever needs to be replaced (after 27 returns to the hardware store and the plumbing supply), tighten it with bloodied knuckles and whatever remains of my vital force, and return to my home a shattered man. I hasten to the neighboring city several times during the night to ascertain that my repair is so far holding, the pipes are sound, the leak is dry, the water pressure normal. 

Thereafter on subsequent nights I lie half awake in a troubled doze, imagining that molecules of water are massing once again behind my shoddy work and my pathetic teflon plumber's tape, and having failed by main force to burst their bonds are insidiously attempting to undermine me, never sleeping, filing up silently behind the lead molecule to follow it through the microscopic breech that will open behind its escape, the whole mass of water tumbling through the tiniest issue in the valve, submerging me in my feverish plumbing dream.

Hence, after Solon, my compleat theory of plumbing - that no leak is ever finally repaired until a man is dead.

Enough Money for Oysters

"My hopes of being a little old bald tubby man with money enough to eat oysters every day are shot."

                                                                                             - Richard Selzer, "Diary"

I could picture myself eating oysters every day. I probably have pictured myself doing just that, but like the diarist I suspect my modest stipend may not support my inclinations.

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

I could even picture myself "being a little old bald tubby man," although I've never really pictured myself as tubby. Nor bald either, come to that, when I was younger and wondered what age would bring; but baldness comes or not, no matter what our senescent self-portrait. The choice is no longer mine whether to picture myself that way or not. I suppose, if pressed, I had pictured myself something like this:

When I was much younger I pictured myself in old age smoking a pipe, sitting in the sunlight and (finally) reading Kant through from beginning to end. I may yet do that if I can stay awake, but surely without the pipe. I've smoked a pipe enough in my time to know that while the idea is pleasant enough the fact is repellent. My grandfather smoked a pipe of "Half and Half" which was fragrant through the house, but his empty pipes in the rack were rank and evil things. Whatever I decide about a pipe, though, this isn't quite what I have in mind:

"The chart, dammit - who smoked it?"

But picturing myself, eating oysters every day or not, bald or hairy, tubby or lean, not much in fear of what's to come, it occurs to me that one of the blessings of an increase in years is that giving a fig becomes a less pressing affair. The onset of age means that there is a sort of geological settlement in the character, and that it, like my tonsure, will be what it will be.

The irascible old fart is a cliche, a stock character, common enough but by no means inevitable. Ill-temper can seem to be a right earned simply by having survived long enough to have seen it all and lost all patience with the human comedy. Perhaps it works that way, but irascibility when it occurs in middle-age, can make the person preternaturally old - an "old soul," as they say. Max Reger, dead of a surfeit of beer and sausages by the age of 43, was an accomplished composer and organist at the turn of the century (the one before last), as memorable for his loutishness as for his music. To the critic on the Munich newspaper who had given his recital of the previous evening an unfavorable review, Reger wrote matter-of-factly: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me."

Max Reger

In the circumstance, when attended by a quick wit, irascibility has its undeniable charms (speaking for myself). It is Reger's quick-wittedness I imagine having, which of course assumes that I will have wits in the first place. But then it's nearly as difficult to imagine oneself devoid of one's wits as it is to imagine oneself devoid of vital signs.

One must always bear in mind the Aristotelean mean to be rigorously hewed to when behaving irascibly, as in the exercise of any virtue. A deficiency of the quality makes an old man bland, anodyne in company, dull and overly forgiving of neglect or impertinence.  By contrast I remember a story in the local paper many years back - an elderly gentleman whom time had passed by found himself embattled in his own house by the deterioration of his neighborhood. Schoolchildren, to his deep chagrin, made his yard their regular shortcut, whether because of or in spite of his harangues and fist-shakings. When the police finally carted him away he had just run a group of the young interlopers off his property with a hatchet. Heroic in a feeble way, plainly exceeding the bounds of a dignified irritability. Perhaps a claw hammer would have preserved a morsel of respectability.

As for a ready wit, it is the sauce of conversation so long as it is not continually at the expense of another's dignity, propriety, amour-propre and good humor. The admonition of my alter ego serves as the surest bound of taste in exercising wit: "We are as able to be laughed at as we are able to laugh." The older we get, the truer that becomes.