We got to let Love rule, spake Lenny. I saw John Korty’s amazing film The Crazy Quilt as a young adult in its early release, and it profoundly shaped my worldview. Our priorities change, values shift, but love remains. I am amazed here in the evening of my life how Love rules me as never before. I’ve been surprised at the ways my emotional reactions have shifted as I have gotten older. As I’ve watched my perspective stretch out with the years I’ve found that I tend to care less about the things that felt like a really big deal when I was younger. Status, success, even the condition of the material culture around me, have all faded as they were contextualized to an expanding set of priorities that put them into a broader perspective.
But one of the few things that have gotten to feel more important as I’ve aged, perhaps at the behest of our Selfish Genes, seem to be related to reproduction. I loved my kids more than anything in the world, until I met my grandkids. I can hardly describe the depth and power of my feelings for these two little girls. I feel a love that almost redefines its meaning, and I suspect this is a call from those genes, doubling down on the fewer potentials I retain as an old man. I suspect this may be the essential grandmother impulse, which perhaps I triggered it by spending so much time in my younger life trying to be the best mother I could be to my kids. The male stereotypes of fathering were too aloof, too practical and harsh to fit the profund transformative love I felt as a single parent. Though I’ve often wondered if that impulse was more an effort to somehow recover my own lost father. Still, I remain surprised and grateful for how, only now in the dusk of my life, I am experiencing a depth of love I hardly could imagine as a young man.
Another odd and somewhat paradoxical change in my experience of love as an old man is that I find myself much more affected by the erotic pull of a beautiful woman. When I was younger and yearning for romantic partners, my attraction to women was more based on their potential as a mate. That squirt of dopamine, or whatever suite of endorphins represents lust and romantic desire, was part of a larger social cognitive process; it was more like seeing an interesting book cover at the library, eliciting a review of the synopsis and biography on the cover sleeve, then skimming a few pages, and so forth. Now when I feel that tug it presents itself more as sort of alarm. I find myself doing double takes on the street when some woman triggers whatever desirable-woman archetypes I’ve stored. I feel gobsmacked by it, even as it has become less relevant, with the chance that I would follow through on the emotion near zero. I also notice being drawn to watch films or TV shows just on the basis of an attractive face. Never when I was young would I have been so shallow. Odd that as my libido has waned, this twitch of attraction has strengthened. Seems I really don’t know love at all.
I’m not sure if these two agings of my emotional life are related, they feel a bit of-a-kind, they are certainly changes to my desires, and I can’t help wondering if there is some sort of evolutionary psychology at play. The central goal of my life has become a weirdly ambiguous desire to live long enough to assure that these grrls remember me. This is very selfish in some ways, just my ego wanting to live on via their love of me, but of course holding the love I have for them in their hearts will also be something that strengthens them, something they may be able to draw on throughout their lives when they are feeling low. But of course, they are my legacy, they carry my genes who can’t help but want to help them be more successful. The hunger for legacy of these gene’s may also underlie this odd late-blooming-adolescent eros. I could indeed still sire children, so perhaps, the same calculus that focuses my devotion on my grandchildren also wants me to sow the last of my wild oats to make more of them.
This trinity represents, as I’ve so often pointed out, the central values I selected as a boy to substitute for the laughable ten commandments, or patriotism, hedonism, activism, or any other the other ideas we human hold to focus our attention on the future and use as guideposts to a righteous life. Love has only swelled in its significance in my philosophy. The other two, Truth and Courage, have gained some shadings, e.g. white lies and appropriate caution respectively, but about Love, I have no reservations. The closest I can come to any theist proposition, the only one I will never argue against is God Is Love. Given the dysfunctional personality of most of the gods described in various scriptures though, I’d prefer they embrace on faith the proposition that Love Is God.
HOLLY DAYS 