September 17, 2005
"How old are you?"
Usually the most inspiring question on a Friday evening is not the common inquiry, “How old are you?” Last night, we were walking home from the second of two parties, the first of which revealed a disturbing exhibit of human movement set to music, the second of which offered a delightful disarray of empty liquor bottles and a group of friends chatting about their accomplishments since undergrad. One boasted that he had developed a drug habit and kicked it, another was entering the U.S. Open without having seriously trained for squash in two years, and I mumbled something about getting past Stephan Dedalus’s refusal to pray for his mother on her deathbed.
Tropical rainstorms had found their way up to Cambridge this week, but on our way home from the party, they had taken a break and left a comforting layer of thick, balmy air that hovered over the city. The girl with whom I had come was only a few steps in front of me when she asked another friend from the party, “So, how old are you?” Casually questioning another’s age on the way home from a party, at least in the U.S., probably has a sexual subtext. So while they discovered that they were the same age and more, I dodged puddles in my flip-flops, mesmerized by the reflection of the streetlights in the dark pools of the cracked sidewalks.
Yet our society’s conception of age and the conventions we employ to measure age seem a bit imprecise. I couldn’t help but thinking that although they both looked their age in years, one seemed much younger and the other much older.
Measuring one’s age in Gregorian calendar years has always been somewhat disturbing to me, especially since it assumes a linear and progressive conception of time. Although I make no claims of originality, my inclination has always been to measure a person’s age in seasons of suffering, or something close to it. My apologies if this approach to age in terms of “seasons of suffering” appears cynical, but it has been more useful to me than the convention of the solar year in understanding the human condition and conceptions of aging in relationship to the person. The history of the solar calendar is quite messy, and has proved itself useless to me in social interactions with individuals who have distinct historical traditions for measuring age and time. Even for societies who use the solar calendar, the equinoxes and the seasons continue to be juggled and jumbled as powerful individuals have courageously fought to pin the thing down. Using the term “season” also seems appropriate in a discussion of age and suffering, for although the season is rooted in quarterly changes of weather in the solar calendar year, its popular use has a wonderful tradition of blurred beginnings and endings. In order to define the seasons of one’s age in suffering, then, whose beginning, middles, and endings are less than fixed, one cannot simply dictate a number or a date but must describe that season and the suffering—they must describe their own human experience.
Through this description of human experience, we thus arrive at an entirely different creature, and ultimately we find a piece to the story of a person. Unlike the Roman calendar’s solar year, at least since the most recent official Gregorian modification in 1582 with the American colonies following suit in 1752, the term “season” serves as a more malleable convention for telling the story of a person, for connecting the story of a person to the human condition and conceptions of aging in society.
I remember killing a living creature at age six, hoping to regenerate life by cutting an earthworm into pieces after learning that its ten unique hearts could be divided. At age six, I thought the heart was at the core of our living person, especially since I had asked Jesus to come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior a few months prior (my family recorded it on cassette tape in case I ever forgot). Thus, this crawling creature seemed to defy death through a miracle of multiple hearts, and in defying death, defied time. Yet during my experiment with the hearts of the earthworm on the hot cement patio of my backyard, I realized while making incisions in the carefully chosen fat, pink specimen that I had no way of knowing whether the stainless steel butter knife was cutting into or between its tiny little hearts. After only seven incisions, with sticky worm juice and blood adorning the butter knife and my hands, I stopped and waited.
Yet the earthworm did not move nor even make an attempt at life. It simply lay there in eight equal parts on the hot cement. With increasing panic and guilt, I put four of the worm pieces on the moist cool grass, thinking that the hot cement was not a good environment for any worm, much less one recovering from surgery. But none of what should now have been eight unique worms moved. They were dead. With tears in my eyes, I brushed the other four pieces of worm into the grass. Instead of extending life, I had imposed immediate death.
Horrified, I sat mourning in the cornstalks amidst the jumping grasshoppers, suffering in the knowledge that I had not only caused the suffering of a living creature, but death. It was one of my earliest memories in which I experienced a kind “suffering” that for a variety of reasons impacted me more than other experiences prior to that age.
Of course, suffering is understood uniquely by various individuals and societies, and no single definition can be argued. I only suggest that suffering is a human condition that we experience, and experience universally. Perhaps it takes the form of physical, mental, social, emotional, religious, psychological, political, economic, or ecological isolation. Perhaps some would describe their seasons of suffering in terms of bearing children, of natural events such as earthquakes or hurricanes or drought, of political violence and of war, of debt or economic hardship, of physical suffering and disease and death, of “falling in and out of love,” or of any imaginable or unimaginable form of social suffering. Many scholars have written about suffering, and I will not repeat their work here. All I know is that to me, the aging that occurs through seasons of suffering, the kind that cuts to the core of the human condition and marks us in ways we cannot measure in days or months or years or lifetimes, is one way of explaining why two acquaintances who had successfully acquired the same number of solar years appeared very different to me in age. Many forms of suffering are hidden, and on that balmy walk home, I recognize that my own, flawed analysis of how two individuals might have suffered during their human existence is grossly presumptuous. But whether it is portrayed through a person’s words or through a particular expression when your eyes meet from across the room, whether it is experienced in a person’s memory or on one’s body, measuring the age of our fragile human condition in terms of our experienced seasons of suffering feels more accurate than reciting one’s acquired solar years with a number.
Posted by Jennifer at 09:46 PM | Comments (1)
September 08, 2005
My body is #ffcc00
Websites are bizarre profiles. My body is #ffcc00 (bgcolor) but my words are #000000, and I am div align="center" big big font color="#990000" big b i br Jennifer Leigh Tucker. Do you fancy my #ffcc00 body, or does it disturb you? Perhaps my #ffcc00 body and #990000 words are all you will know of me.
Posted by Jennifer at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)