The Signs of Old Age

Malatesta square. Rome, 18 December 2021

A few days ago I happened to see on the ground, on a cold morning in Rome, this pair of gloves next to each other, still with a sprinkle of frost from the cold of dawn; just half an hour later, when I returned to see, the frost had already melted as well as the aura around the gloves on the damp ground. Luckily I had already photographed them.

Like all images, this too is nothing more than a set of signs, in some cases what the signs mean is clear and didactic, in others, everyone can interpret them as they see fit and feel.

I was immediately struck, without understanding the reason: before the intellect was set in motion, the heart had already collected for itself those signs resting on the ground.

Then, in that time that I call “cheese time”, that is the maturing in the cellars of the cheese wheels so that they reach maturity to be tasted, which can even last many months, one of the possible meanings of that image flashed to me.

I state that, in my opinion, the meaning and motivation of what strikes us, what we like or move us, is already within us before our rationality can decipher it; however, it seemed like a great picture of our present time.

Or rather, of old age.

My birthday is near, with the age of fifty starting to glimpse in the fog; even though in my heart I still really feel like a teenager. But I have been thinking about old age for some time.

This pandemic has certainly not made things better.

On the one hand, we have the latest demographic data on our country, with an Italy that is increasingly old and in which Covid 19 has accentuated the trend towards demographic recession already underway:

“The picture that emerges from the new 'Population census and demographic dynamics – 2020', Istat reports a new minimum record of births: 405 thousand, aggravated by the high number of deaths (740 thousand). And so the natural replacement deficit between births and deaths (natural balance) in 2020 reaches -335 thousand units, a value lower, since the unification of Italy, only than the record of 1918 (-648 thousand), when the epidemic of ‘Spanish’ helped to determine nearly half of the 1.3 million deaths recorded that year.

The Italian population (59 million residents, -0.7%) thus becomes increasingly elderly: the average age rises from 45 to 45.4 years. But the imbalance of the age pyramid of the population is clearly highlighted by the comparison between the number of elderly people (65 years and over) and that of children under 6 years of age. Suffice it to say that in 2020 for each child, there are 5.1 elderly people nationwide, a value that drops to 3.8 in Trentino-Alto Adige and Campania, and reaches 7.6 in Liguria.” (cit. “Corriere della sera”)

 

Added to this is the sad primacy of the elderly killed by Covid: in these two years, we have witnessed helplessly the tragedy of broken families, of children who could not hug or give a last farewell to their elderly parents or grandparents. Up to the symbolic and unforgettable images of elderly couples in an embrace separated by a plastic curtain, which remains – for me – the true icons of the tragedy of the beginning of the pandemic.

© Valeria Ferraro. Hugs Room. Casa di Cura Madonna della Catena, Dipignano, CS. Date: 09.12.2020

All this also has an absolutely involuntary merit, which is that of having “cleared customs” (what a bad word, as if it were a commodity) precisely old age.

Several times I have written here about the psycho-philosophical implications relating to Western society, citing the great Zygmunt Bauman and his “The Theater of Immortality” (1992), in which he peremptorily describes the vain attempt of human culture to emancipate itself from mortality, deconstructing the very concept of death, transforming it from a distant but inevitable horizon to a series of avoidable causes, closer to us but controllable, especially with “post-modern” practices of concealing every sign attributable to death, such as physical and mental diseases, old age and death itself. Bauman speaks of “segregation”, everything that is attentive to our imaginative construction of immortality must be segregated, removed from us, if not from our souls that it is at least far from our eyes: here arise asylums, hospitals, gypsies’ camps, the hospices, the cemeteries with high walls.

 

Despite the deep love for our loved ones, for the elderly, we have decided to silence our most ancestral fears by segregating them in closed and distant places, at the cost of taking out a very heavy mortgage with our consciences.

“The failure of communication with the dying is the price that we, citizens of the modern world, pay for the luxury of life from which the specter of death has been exorcised for its entire duration.” (Z. Bauman)

 

I found this same concept, in another form, in the book just published by Adelphi “Whose are the empty houses?”, by the architect Ettore Sottsass. In this collection of thoughts, memories and ideas, there is a short chapter entitled “When the day is about to end”, very special.

It starts like this:

“When the day is about to end, that light comes that you don't know well, that slow light of death, then you use the light bulb switch, a little to see what's around you but also to see yourself live in spite of the darkness coming.”

 

Until now I had never had the curiosity to know the point of view of an architect, always behind photographers, philosophers, or writers. Certainly, Sottsass had a vast culture and in any case an inevitable interest and love for light and forms, whose work led him to reflect also on existence since he was the one who designed the places, and their embellishments, inhabited by people.

He called it the feeling of having “darkness sitting on your head,” which made people continually seek the light. If in Bauman the discourse was of a high level and of a philosophical matrix, in Sottsass humanity was reduced to a mass intent on small daily rituals that would ferry it from one day to the next, understood precisely as sunlight.

The same fashionable practice of “living the night” is just another way of avoiding the night, with its darkness: it is an extension of the day, “as if to say that along the night one prepares to experience everything that has failed to live by day or everything he thinks has been taken from him by day or, worse, everything he hasn't even realized he hasn't lived by day.”

All this before our eyes were filled with the heartbreaking images of the sick bodies of the elderly in the nursing home, hugs, and wrinkled handshakes separated by plastic curtains.

It was no longer possible to look away. Pretending not to know that we are doomed to old age and death.

We had to carry the giant stone on our human shoulders of Sisyphus again and go back up the slope of the mountain.

Because if we no longer have children, our country becomes a place of elderly, fragile but rich in their knowledge and experience.

Time to love them.

To listen to them.

Segregating and driving away old age does not make us eternally young, just as locking up the mentally ill does not take us away from the madness.

Better to have darkness in front of us than sit on our heads.

 

Indonesia, November 2017

Here the signs take their place in the image of the gloves.

Their romantic closeness, their being used and abandoned, the gray patina of frost that fades with the heat, the white aura that pushes them away and separates them from the rest of the damp pavement of the street.

That position was as if they were in prayer.

As if to beg not to be abandoned on the ground, in the cold, in the silver of age.

 

But this is just my suggestion, one of the dozens and dozens of possible interpretations of the signs of an image.

It seems to me as the best way to wish happy holidays to everyone and to start the next year with a lighter heart and better attention to those who live on the edge of our cities as well as of our lives.

“I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything – no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

P.S.
I want to thank my dear friend Valeria for allowing the use of a photograph of her taken in the RSA during the first phase of Covid.

Italian version