Ageing:  Decline or Intensity?

In a counter-punch to ageism’s ideological narrative of “inevitable decline” (e.g., Gullette 2004), Jungian analytical psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell said in her autobiography, at age 85, “I grow more intense as I age.”

Today, age critic and social activist Margaret Morganroth Gullette would celebrate Scott-Maxwell’s growing sense of emotional intensity as she aged. Yet she would also point out the increasing ideological intensity of age-related shaming these days. In her new book, Ending Ageism or How Not to Shoot Old People, Gullette argues that age-shaming has reached the point of public crisis.

“In each era,” she writes, “many people wake up to immoral suffering inflicted by a system.” In Ending Ageism, Gullette presents what she calls “increasingly grave instances from the array of ageisms.”

Hearing sessions

Creatively imagining her book as like a truth and reconciliation commission, Gullette presents her arguments in a series of five “hearing sessions.”

Her evidence includes:

1. photography and visual culture that acts as a “perennial enforcement mechanism”
2. hate speech in social media and the need for “sages” in college curricula and experiential learning;
3. farming and age-hostile rural communities that are often ignored in the shadow of age-friendly cities;
4. the “pile-on” stigma of the Age of Alzheimer’s
5. the “duty-to-die” ideology of euthanasia and preemptive suicide

Shame

Central to Gullette’s five hearing sessions is toxic shame. “The shame of becoming old may batten on earlier experiences of shame,” she writes. Still, because it comes unexpectedly much later in life, Gullette suggests there is a large part of age-related shaming that feels “freshly sharp” ~ like “a shiv into delicate skin.”

Ageism makes the late-life self feel it has lost control that it once possessed over the outside world, the way illness or accident may lead one to feel the body is gone out of control.

Awakening

Reflecting on her own story, Gullette recalls a time when she heard the series of lectures by Toni Morrison that were later published as Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination (1992).

I heard Morrison give the original lectures on how whiteness imagines blackness. I was irritated to be told, even ever so nicely, that I had missed the racism when reading Henry James and other canonical writers. Rushing home to search favorite texts, I was chastened. “Morrison is right!” She had given me new impetus to read writers vigilantly for any of their inchoate, fearful projections.

Now, she asks, critically,

How is the reader being positioned in texts when younger writers imagine disabled old age?

Counter Story

So, how do you shoot old people? With a camera, of course. And to uphold the humanity of older subjects in portrait photography, Gullette suggests that, in general, subjects should not be

• naked
• headless
• clichéd
• or appear to be abjectly lonely

She also encourages shot composition that offers context to the subject’s life, surroundings, and relationships; that depict abundance over scarcity, and joy and surprises that disrupt ageist expectations.

The picture I’ve chosen to attach to this post illustrates Gullette’s criteria well, I think.

Yet I wonder about other images that also come to mind. For example, do the nude portraits of realist painter Lucian Freud achieve these aims?

Congruent with Gullette’s anti-ageism perspective, another encouraging counter-cultural sage put it this way,

To you standing triumphantly at the summit, I say, “You made it!” And to you who are still climbing the mountain of life’s promises, I say in all sincerity, “Keep climbing! You have so much to look forward to in aging.” ~ Zalman Schacter-Shaloni, From Age-ing to Sage-ing

Still, in my clinical work I have become attuned to stories of spiritual pain born of a particular kind of loneliness that I believe is unique to the very old. I hear and bear witness to stories of outliving siblings and friends, of being “the last one left,” forgotten by God.

The more we hear and speak openly and directly about loneliness, the less fearful it becomes, I suppose. Like everything else. And the more it can be addressed with good care and support, including narrative care that counters the narrative of inevitable decline, the better off we’ll be. All of us.

I too grow more intense as I age.

Joyfully, for the most part. And more so now in my 50’s, proving the Happiness Curve correct.

What about you?

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. (2004). Aged by culture. University of Chicago Press.

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. (2017). Ending ageism or how not to shoot old people. Rutgers University Press.

Morrison, Toni. (1992).  Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press.

Schacter-Shaloni, Zalman. (1995). From age-ing to sage-ing: A profound new vision of growing older. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Scott-Maxwell, Florida. (1968). The measure of my days: One woman’s vivid, enduring celebration of life and aging. New York: Knopf.

See also 

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. (2011). Agewise: Fighting the new ageism in America. University of Chicago Press.