Last Thursday was the first Thursday of June, which means that the Hailey Albertsons offered seniors a 10% discount on their groceries, including wine. Also, the store was having a wine sale—25% off six or more bottles of wine—which meant that an elderly person could buy wine for 35% off the usual price.
But June was supposed to be the start of a household austerity program. Julie and I have decided that this summer we will eat better, drink less, and exercise more. We’ll hike and bike and camp out and read uplifting literature. Eat lots of salads. Oatmeal. Broccoli. We’ll cut down our exposure to news of new Covid variants, the war in Ukraine, and Supreme Court decisions.
We came home with ten bottles of red and two of white, which under conditions of austerity should last us until October, or at least the first Thursday in July.
While waiting in the checkout line, I had an attack of the Get-Me-Out-Of-Heres. They’re a common occurrence for us these days, when two years of quarantines, lockdowns, masking, and vaccination misinformation have made being in a crowd —at least in our minds—a life-threatening experience.
Julie has learned to recognize the signs. She suggested I go gas up the car while she proceeded through checkout. I headed for the parking lot, grateful.
I had started the car and was about to back out when Julie started pounding on the driver’s side window.
“I forgot you had to be there to get the old person’s discount,” Julie said. “You have to show your driver’s license. You also have to pay.”
“Stick with me, kid,” I said. That’s been my go-to phrase when we’ve used my Lifetime Senior Pass to get into national parks and monuments, and—before Julie became an AARP herself—when we got an AARP discount for anything.
I shut off the car. Julie ran back to where her grocery cart was in line, and as I began to follow her, an ancient woman who had slowly and carefully gotten out of the car next to us shuffled up beside me and said, “Old person’s discount?”
I grinned at her. “I didn’t think this would ever happen to me,” I said.
She laughed, and her laugh turned into a rueful wail. “Neither did I.”
I didn’t have to show my driver’s license. Apparently, my appearance alone is adequate, these days, to establish geezerhood.
I was reminded of an incident from many years ago, before even I was an AARP. Julie and I were in Missoula, on a road trip. It was getting late in the day. We were tired and hungry and we stopped at the first motel we saw. We were AAA members, and I asked the desk clerk if the motel had a Triple-A discount. She said they didn’t, but they did have one for AARPs.
“Are you a member of AARP?” the desk clerk asked me. I shook my head.
“Well, you look like you could be,” she said, and gave us the discount.
It’s not worth it, if you’re wondering. Not the 35% cheaper wine, not the free entry to Yellowstone and Chaco Canyon and Zion, not the young people calling you Sir (I always look behind me to see who they’re talking to), not twelve dollars off on your motel room, not being first in line for new vaccines. I would give them all up to be twenty-five again.
Of course, I’d have to arrive at twenty-five with my seventy-one-year-old memories, because otherwise my life would be a tedious recapitulation of old mistakes and embarrassments. Also, Julie would have to lose a few years as well, because life would be a new journey, and she’s been a good companion on the old journey thus far, and I’d like it to continue without one or the other of us having to go on alone. Also, I have made far fewer mistakes and embarrassed myself far less frequently since she entered my life.
Not that mistakes and embarrassments don’t and won’t happen. But not so often. Anyway, if she could be twenty-five as well, I could say to her, “What do you know? You’re only twenty-five.”
I have a vague memory that this didn’t go over well the first time I said it.
Any back-to-the-good-old-days magical thinking is prohibited by entropy, which guarantees that no matter how much you’d like to return to your youth, you can’t get there from here. If you could, every choice would be reversible, every memory subject to free replacement by the manufacturer. Depth psychology would turn into plain old psychology, a series of life-hacks long on self-efficacy and short on what it means to have a self in the first place, what it means to be lonely, and what it means to die.
Most depth psychologists say that life would lose all meaning if we weren’t mortal. The immortal gods, they say, lead shallow, angry, obsessive lives. Gods spend eternity in a rut, trying to force the world into unquestioning worship of them, and since they have unlimited time, they think they will eventually get it. When they condemned poor Sisyphus to roll his rock to the top of a Hadean mountain and then watch it trundle back to the bottom, over and over again, they were showing him what it was like to be a god. It was a fitting punishment for escaping from the Underworld and, for a mortal moment, wandering the green earth in the delight of new discovery, feeling the soft wind and the sun hot on his back.
So although I’d go back to being twenty-five again if I could, it would likely be a long-lasting mistake, full of frustration, repetitive experience, and the transformation of joy into dead ritual. You don’t want that to happen. Live long enough and your expectations can overwhelm your experience, trapping you in a world of what-you-see-is-what-you-thought-you-would-see. Starting life over would guarantee that you’d be the most jaded twenty-five-year-old in existence.
Nobody was jaded in the Albertsons wine aisle last Thursday. Lots of grinning geezers crowded together there, reading the labels on previously too-expensive brands before putting them back and heading for the bottom row. Wine company employees unpacked cases and stocked empty shelves. The excitement level was pure carnival. The mood was carpe diem.
We all knew we might never see prices like these again. The world that had engendered them had already ended. I half expected to see crowds of penitents come marching down the aisle, swinging their whips over their own shoulders and chanting plague shanties.
Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who spent much of his life thinking about what it meant to have a self, and be one, and eventually lose one, had sobering theories about geezerhood. He said that humans, upon entering old age, reach yet another danger point in their development, a time when strong demonic forces, ones that we successfully contained during our middle years, threaten to break out. He characterized these forces as archetypes, mythic figures able to possess human beings for their own purposes.
The ironic thing about archetypal possession is that when it happens, you feel like you’ve never been more yourself. In fact, you’ve never been more in the grip of demons that will use you up, and when the human material is exhausted, throw you aside and go in search of a new host.
Jung bade us look at King Lear as an archetype of the geezer, an aging king deciding whom among his daughters is to be his heir, convinced that as king he can make the decision based on who loves him the most. Goneril and Regan, the two oldest, see him as a kingdom, not a king, and have no trouble telling him what he wants to hear. But Cordelia, his youngest, insists on seeing him as a mortal human being needing pity and truth more than admiration and servile lies. In a rage, Lear disinherits her.
No prophet is needed to foresee Lear’s betrayal by Goneril and Regan and their ambitious husbands. Lear is reduced to a pathetic old man, trading jokes with his Fool (another archetype), cradling the body of his beloved Cordelia, and raging at the night and the implacable storm that finally destroys him.
Jung considered archetypes hostile to human fulfillment, and it was a dangerous thing to invite any one of them into your life. Jung saw the Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman as traps to fall into. He said the Curmudgeon would happily occupy your being, as would the Invalid, and the Old Warrior, putting on his war harness for the last time to die in battle. He identified the Devouring Parent, the Eternal Boy and Girl, the Trickster, every man’s Anima and every woman’s Animus, the Earth Mother, the Hero and his sword, the Penitent and his whip. He drew from mythology and religion for these figures, but you can find them anywhere people gather, particularly when their psychic immune systems weaken enough to allow archetypes to take control.
Jung warned that archetypes simplify human beings into the sorts of characters found in movies based on Marvel Comics. The goal of the self is to become more complicated, not less, he said. In response to his followers, who tended to diagnose archetypal possession at the drop of a horned helmet, he said that he’d rather be Jung than a Jungian.
But Jung also noted that letting an archetype become your identity saves a human being all the fuss and trouble of having a real self. You don’t have to worry about being a conscious human if you can adopt a ready-made identity, mindset, and worldview.
To use an extreme example, the Nazis knew being human involved hard and painful work. They designed the SS death’s head for people who didn’t want to make the effort. The death-wish, whether you project it onto other people or not, happens when you get tired of the work of living.
Archetypes were in Albertsons last Thursday, buying wine. Get old enough, I thought, and you get your own comic book. In moments of weakness—e.g., one’s seventies—Jung didn’t think you could avoid archetypal possession, but he thought you could moderate it by staying conscious and identifying which of your thoughts were your own.
You should probably keep those thoughts to yourself. Nothing causes archetypal possession more quickly than getting beat up by somebody already possessed by an archetype.
Going over Galena Summit, headed for home, I asked Julie if the twelve bottles of wine clinking merrily against each other in the backseat were sabotaging our austerity plans.
“We did save a lot of money,” I said. “That’s austerity.”
Julie gave me her You Just Keep Thinking That If It Makes You Happy look. I see it a lot.
Julie and I really are moderating our rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, and not just so we can be self-righteous about it. We don’t have a choice.
We’re not imposing austerity on ourselves. Austerity is imposing itself on us.
We have passed the point where we can share a bottle of wine with dinner and not experience unpleasant toxic effects the entire next day. A single rib steak, split down the middle, will wake us both up in the middle of the night with dyspepsia. Brie, gorgonzola, cashews, and strawberry-rhubarb pie do the same for one or the other of us. Beer gives me an instant headache if I drink anything heavier than Bud Light. A thick slice of bread, fresh out of the oven and slathered with butter and marmalade, will send me to the couch for an afternoon nap. Dinner is coming earlier and earlier because we digest it better when we’re upright.
These are the kind of adjustments you make when maturity strikes, and they’re not restricted to what you eat. A creeping minimalism has entered our life, and prized possessions are mutating into mere stuff.
We’ve stopped accumulating stuff, and we’re giving away stuff we don’t need. It’s sobering how much stuff we’ve accumulated, and how much of it hasn’t been used or even looked at for years.
There is, of course, a Hoarder archetype. It’s around here somewhere, buried under a pile of stuff in one of the closets.
Jung saw old age as a final battle between the self and the archetypes which, like shingles, have been there all along. They come out and take over, and that’s why so many old people become caricatures of themselves. The only defense is moderation, humility, and witnessing the beauty and intensity of each day until the days stop coming. That’s the one effective weapon we mortals have against the gods.