Eros and Thanatos

Thanatos, Ephesos* 

I've reached a stage of life where I think about mortality almost as often as about sex.

Well, maybe not that often, but still, more than I used to. As Dr. Johnson noted, an unappealable deadline concentrates the mind wonderfully.

According to the I.R.S.'s life expectancy tables (for calculating minimum yearly distributions from your IRAs), mine could be 30 years from now. (I'm 68.) A man could do a lot of damage in 30 years. Or a lot of good. But that assumes maintaining the physical vigor and mental acuity to do one or the other. And this is one reason I've so eagerly read Elkhonon Goldberg, The wisdom paradox: how your mind can grow stronger as your brain grows older. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Twice! Because I wanted to be sure I got it all, including the summaries of experimental results and the technical language. Goldberg was a student of the great Soviet neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria (1902-1977), who practically founded the discipline (combining knowledge of psychology with examinations of brain anatomy and processes), and is now doing some very creative work of his own at New York University. This book, and maybe some reflections on my earlier readings of Luria and Vygotsky, deserve another blog essay. But in short -- very short -- there is good reason to think that, with good mental exercise, we can keep our brains active and alert for a very long time.

My friend and mentor Walter James Miller is now 91, and still continuing his prolific writing and lecturing career.* I think I know how he does it -- he keeps reading new and challenging things, writing analyses, and exchanging ideas with students and other authors. Terrific brain exercises.
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* Walter died on 20 June 2010, about a year after I'd written this. Check out his Wikipedia page in the link above.

But I'm going to plan more conservatively, to try to get everything important done much sooner. In the next ten years. Some writing projects, both fiction and sociological, two languages I want to learn better and some others I'll have to learn from scratch, and in the shorter run, to learn to play the Albéniz' "Asturias" (transcribed for guitar).

And of course to enjoy as much sex as possible before wingèd Thanatos comes to whisk me off. That's also good for maintaining vigor. And it's such fun.

*Illus.: Winged youth with a sword, probably Thanatos, personification of death. Detail of a sculptured marble column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, ca. 325-300 BC. Found at the south-west corner of the temple. British Museum. Source: Wikipedia

Regeneration

Dirk (see his icon in the "Followers" box) just sent me this uplifting curiosity: The Phallological Museum. Amusing, but frankly I've always preferred this image: Gustave Courbet's L'origine du monde.

I love this painting, but I'm also fascinated by Courbet for other reasons, so much so that I wrote a short story (in the form of a screenplay), imagining his encounter with another icon of the Paris Commune. Courbet and the Red Virgin was published online by the Copperfield Review in 2001, but since it seems impossible to find old stories in their archives, I've posted it on my website. Maybe you'll enjoy it.

Madness seen from within

Bond, Alma H. Camille Claudel: A Novel. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2006.


"In my humble opinion, a woman who hasn't been made love to by a sculptor hasn't been made love to at all." (p. 119)

Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is remembered for her exquisite and emotionally disturbing sculptures, for her passionate 10-year love affair and complex professional relationship with Auguste Rodin, and the utter insanity of her last three decades, when she was persuaded that Rodin was out to destroy her and steal her work and ideas. This treatment of her intense, tortured life is very effectively written from her own, increasingly paranoid point of view. She is supposedly writing this account herself, in the last months of her life, on scraps of paper supplied her by a sympathetic nurse in the Montdevergues Asylum for the insane. The reader must accept the impossible premise that someone who has been so mad for so long could write so coherently, but will probably do so willingly; this is a literary device for understanding a brilliant, paranoid woman's world as she herself sees it. She is a classically unreliable narrator, but her paranoia did have some basis in fact. She clearly was a victim of stultifying anti-erotic and antifeminist attitudes, including those of her provincial mother and her super-Catholic reactionary brother, the writer Paul Claudel. And Rodin no doubt did steal some of her ideas, though on the whole he seems to have treated her better than most of the men she dealt with. Alma Bond's experience as a psychoanalyst and her deep familiarity with the Parisian artistic milieu of the period make the fantastic premise a tool for uncovering what feels like psychological truth. And it's very sexy, as was la petite Claudel.

For examples of her work, see Some Beautiful (If Tortured) Works
of Camille Claudel and these shots of L'age mûr (The Age of Maturity)

For more biographical details and chronology (with photos) in French, see Biographie de Camille Claudel. There you will find images of Oeuvres graphiques (sketches), Sculptures, Liens (links) and much else. There is also a musical about her.

Readers may also enjoy my story about another artist in Paris, exactly 10 years before the 17-year old Camille got there: Courbet and the Red Virgin.

At top: Photo of Camille as a young woman; her bust of Rodin

Recent research findings

The equality of the sexes has been much exaggerated. I have had a woman under close observation for over 25 years. Prior to that, I had occasion to examine closely several other specimens, some in brief laboratory encounters and others in prolonged investigations extending to weeks, months, even (on two occasions) years. I can confidently report that women in general are not naturally competent to load a dishwasher.

As a byproduct of this research, I can also confirm today's reports of scientific findings that love-making is more effective than chocolate for producing a sense of well-being. It is of course also less fattening.