Age brings with it an intolerance to the wasting of time, or resource. There seems less time available for indulgence of matters or people of lesser quality or return. This sounds business-like or cold, transactional, yet it is not. It seems that as a life spans itself along its arc, its tenant (that’s what we are, there is no such thing as home-ownership in the realms of finite human mortality) is subject to a host of external influences wanting something of your account. Whether it be your self, time, generosity, (perhaps) wisdom, expertise, or your more uncertain, more visceral and fragmental qualities such as love, your sexual self, aspects of your opinion or intelligence, or a facet of your experience, it seems that all is up for exchange, a barter yard or a market, as if anything has its price or fiscal imposition. How many of us ‘give’, unconditionally, yet see their accounts reduced somewhat by the more viciously acquisitive who march on once they have taken what is they require, having counted their beans and made their profit, where they will reinvest somewhere else?
Such is the ‘cost’ of a life, perhaps. The ‘tax to pay’ on our perorations. Is it age that changes your calculative output, once life has stained you somewhat with its lessons and rejoinders? In terms of transactions, does this bring a cynicism that acts as a currency convertor of a kind, that allows you to set in motion a Babbage-like turning of human cogs, the algorithms that are required to survive in a world that seems conditioned to peddle its wares, no matter their constituent content? I ask rhetorically. My own calculations come up with an affirmative conclusion, no matter the spreadsheet or back of envelope upon which they may be performed. One could label such deracinated thought as cynical, or one could examine it slowly and come to the conclusion that it is the forming of a philosophy, one that views the world in a manner that is sufficiently askance, a little paced-back, to assess and calculate, to calibrate, to allow for one’s own market forces to report, to project, to give a price or a set of odds, as life itself could certainly be compared to aspects of the futures market, it often being a gamble, rather than a safe bet.
So it seems to be that it is age, and its sharper, brighter cousin ‘experience’, that allows for such cynicism to convert into calculations. Innocent as children, and still pastel-brushed with the stain of its nursery ambivalence and naivety as we grow into young adulthood, we fail to possess the sharks’ teeth necessary to go forward into a world we are told ‘must’ or ‘should’ be. Now, this is different in a world where hunger and survival, or war or natural disaster renders lives even more at the caprice of chance, but it is what many individuals are shouldered with, over lives that seemed geared to the transactional. Each item of a life has its price, or cost. Yet as the years accumulate, as they compound, the interest in profit recedes, and the wish for some kind of stasis increases, an equilibrium, a balancing of the books. Where hot ichor blood once ran through those veins, looking for profit and value on a mind bent by other peoples’ thoughts, now runs a cooler menthol of the soul, at the tiller hand of its real owner.
So it is that one factors this in to the ultimate tax of mortality, and how its bottom line creeps up like a visit from the tax man. I find I quite like that feeling, that edge of thrill and fear, the one that allows for all the wisdom you had been offered across the years, yet had felt yourself rail against as you felt yourself ‘outside’, to be a nonsense, a form of prostitution. ‘You have to sell yourself’, being the mantra of the job marketeers in these scrabbling times. Once, a manager spoke to me of attending a social event associated with work that might ‘further my own ambitions’, assuming that he knew them. ‘What are my ambitions?’ I asked him, quietly, politely, having attended glad-handing sessions across the years that had made my stomach turn on the back of the levels of obsequiousness on display, the craven ‘buying and selling’. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said, but he did not. ‘What are my ambitions?’ I asked him again. He could not answer.
If I had told him that my ambitions were, to name some, to, by the age of fifty or so to have ‘looked good in a raincoat’, to have ‘fulfilled an abstract wish to have lived for a while in a railway siding’, to have ‘understood the nature of literary change in a romance language’, to have ‘dined alone in Paris in particular, enough times and with an aplomb that made me look insouciant’, he would have thought me plainly insane. Yet these were some of the things upon my list, ambitions and desires that didn’t sit well with the calculus of more accepted ways. The same man to whom, when he asked me where I would like to be in ‘five years time’, I had to give my honest answer as I could no longer factor in the calculation of lying. ‘Not here, listening to this,’ I said.
And yet I liked the man, as a person, he was blithe and affable. He’d had his head turned. What was my unit of currency in the face of expected return? Intransigence, perhaps, a trader in the same commodity, non-tradable. But I do not see that as a bad quality. To stand your ground, to be unmoved, to not give in, this is what sees you through, this is what allows the books, should they fall into the red, to be balanced again at some stage. I could not understand work, as I grew older, and none of the facets of it as it presented itself. I could not understand how some seemed to need its presence as a form of identifier, an accreditor of what one might ‘be’ as a human being. I could not understand its definition, ‘I am’, and that Martini question, ‘What do you do?’ I could not see for one moment how this applied itself to the notion of ambition, rather than its trace, its lower-order cypher, acquisition. We would go racing together, once or twice a year, unrelated to work at all, in friendship. ‘What’s your ambition today?’ I would ask him on the train. ‘To win loads of money!’ He would say, like an excited little boy, the answer never different. And often he would, betting big, speculating to accumulate, and letting the world know, otherwise winning meant nothing at all. I would lose, and budget for it, knowing that my return on the day was already calculated, gazing out of the train window on the journey home, regarding the passing railway sidings, wondering which one I might confess as being ‘home’.
Marginalia 