The Graduate and Gestalt

In a tumultuous moment at the end of the 1960s movie, "The Graduate," Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross run onto a bus, go to its back end, and sit down. Then, very oddly, instead of kissing and being excited to be with one another, they look off in somewhat different directions while the soundtrack plays Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence." My reaction to this scene was, What? What the hell is going on? What's the matter with these people? Well, and now I have my answer. I am sitting here, very belatedly reading about Gestalt psychology, which I had heard of but never really did much with, and here's this reference to "The Gestalt Prayer," which begins with, "I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine." I am reading, that is, about the existentialist roots of Gestalt psychology, about the extremely individualistic orientation of that whole worldview, and particularly about the existentialist focus on the present moment and, you know, it makes sense. When they ran out of the church and climbed onto the bus, the present moment had moved on. The church thing was great, yeah, but it was over, and now they were on a bus, each continuing to live exclusively in his/her own world, with the interface to the other being a project rather than something taken for granted. Reading this stuff reminds me of how weird people were, sometimes, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Maybe earlier than that, and definitely later than that too (in e.g., the punk movement), but certainly there was a sense, among a lot of people, that it was OK, or possibly even normal, to be strange or different. I have long been aware that there was a freedom then that we don't have now -- that, even though a guy was much more likely to be harassed for having long hair, there was also an accessible mindset in which it was understood that there would be people hassling you for being yourself, and that this was just normal. You didn't have to be within today's broad lines of normalcy to be normal; you just had to be yourself to be normal, and maybe you didn't even have to be yourself.

Getting Old

It's odd to see these occasional photos, online, of famous people from the 1970s and 1980s, and how they look now. Not that they all look bad. I saw one, today, featuring Goldie Hawn. She still looks like Goldie Hawn. But she's the exception. We are getting older, and we look it. That's OK, for the most part. We are human, we should expect this to happen. If anything, we should be proud of it. We have learned some things; we have been around the block a time or two. My generation, the Baby Boomers, distrusted older people in our youth, back in our 1964-1974 heyday. That was appropriate at the time. But it was also too bad for us. Now we are older people, and we don't have the confidence befitting the office. We are lame-duck old people, occupying the position by virtue of seniority; but eventually we will be shuffled offstage by new, younger old people, who hopefully will have spent their lives learning and believing that experience and wisdom are priceless. None of this helps the fact that everybody is starting to look so damned old. But, as I say, it's really OK. Being with all these old folks helps me to see differently. When I was a kid, I would dismiss or avoid people with wrinkles or grey hair. It just didn't seem that they understood my world. Now that I'm one of them, I think my world is opening up. Imagine feeling that you are not so terribly removed, after all, from your 87-year-old mother. It is a bit of an epiphany. This year, I will turn 53. It sounds like a lot. I don't feel very old, but in a kid's eyes I know I look it. I'm grizzled; my cheeks sag a bit; I'm grey. Christ, I probably even smell funny. Those kids, they have noses like a bloodhound, when they get around someone my age. Alice Cooper thought he had problems when he sang, back in 1972, "I'm in the middle / The middle of life / I'm a boy and I'm a man / I'm eighteen." What should I sing? "I've got an / Old man's face and a / Baby's heart / I'm 52 and I / May be an old fart ..." Ah, but see, I still have my sense of humor. I think it may have been the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who described a conversation with some guy: "So, Rodney," the guy said, "you lived your whole life in New York?" "Not yet!" Rodney replied with mock fright. That's how I feel. I'm in the middle of my adult life, if you start from 17 or so and run, like my folks, up into the high 80s. Who knew I'd be spending so many years as an old guy? It seems like a strange plan. But I don't write the music; I just dance to it.