The inevitable

Quote from Runaway Horses by Mishima Yukio:

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.

I was recently involved in a film project with people I have worked with before. Accomodation was hired for the shoot. At one point, someone turned to me and said, in a matter-of-fact and yet unanswerably solemn voice, "We're getting old, Q."

This is the kind of statement to which, indeed, there is no answer, unless an equally matter-of-fact and equally solemn affirmation.

I was to hear the same phrase, or permutations thereof, a number of times independently during the two days I spent on the project.

How do you know if you're getting old? There are those who say, with some justification, that age is only a number, or that it's only a marker of how long you've spent on the planet, and that it doesn't make a difference. In a sense, I agree with this, and yet there are other ways in which growing old is impossible to ignore. I think it's less to do with how long you've been around and more to do with how little time you have left. Feeling old – feeling legitimately old – it seems to me, comes with the knowledge that one is closer to death than to birth, that where once there stood a future full of possibility, now there stands an unalterable past composed of regret. That one is moving away from the time of productivity and reproduction, and towards the time of decomposition. That the room for new beginnings is becoming narrower and shorter.

It occurred to me that a large part of the feeling of growing old, is the feeling of uselessness. Many mass-produced goods, it seems, have a built-in expiry date. It seems to me that this is a trick learnt from nature, which builds an expiry date into human biology, in order that each generation will become obsolete and be replaced. To be obsolete and still hanging around – that's where the feeling of uselessness comes from.

It's not just uselessness, however. At the edges of this uselessness is a tinge of fear that sometimes spreads until it occupies the entire view of existence. Death may be seen as a simple fact, an event that ends one's life. More than an event in time, however, it is the greatest retroactive influence a human can know. It exists not only as the termination of things, but in a nebulous, all-pervading way, as the loss one feels when love ends or is absent, as personal failure of every hue, as envy, as frustrated lust, as alienation, as a vast sense of being lost, and, perhaps ultimately, it reveals its nightmare richness and complex profundity in the abyss of madness. Death, for humans, is not just death. It is DOOM.

This awareness of doom is – I imagine – mitigated to some degree by having children. One may be approaching one's undoing, but a portion of oneself remains to carry on, and parents are often anxious also to be grandparents. In this long chain we find the meaning of religion, concerned as it is with sex and death. To partake of the life everlasting, one must have faith, and affirm life by having children. As long as no one breaks the faith, the line will continue, and life in general – if not of the individual – will indeed be everlasting. As long as. But what happens to the individual must also, some day, happen to the race. Death is doom in part because in each death there is some meeting with the extinction of the race. And death is doom, therefore, most especially to those who do not have children, since they are naked to doom, and feel themselves to be a barren dead end of biology and consciousness protruding for a while into void.

The situation can be compared with that of the hapless protagonists of the Japanese film Ringu. In Ringu, there is a mysterious 'curse video'. Anyone who watches it dies within a week, their corpses bearing the marks of terror on their faces. Someone, however, discovers a way to avoid this fate. There are those who have watched the video and survived, and all of them have passed the video on to someone else to watch. To pass the video on – this is the only way to escape naked DOOM. (Or to postpone it, at least.) In the same way, the confrontation with DOOM (rather than lower case death) is avoided by having children, whom they hope will avoid it in turn by also having children. It's a precarious situation, and strange, anxious phantoms haunt its interstices, ever ready to invade the centre of existence and take charge of all.

In the film, this phantom is Sadako, a half-human hybrid child with paranormal powers, who was murdered and thrown down a well. Her evil spirit lives on through the curse videos. It is she who comes to get those who are cursed, crawling throug the screens of their televisions just as death itself penetrates what we thought was the impenetrable screen or our mundane reality. This tale of horror hints – as many others do – that death is not merely a switch that flicks existence from on to off, but that it is the fulfilment of all the fears that have ever haunted one throughout life. It is that towards which we draw, and that whose proximity is more and more apparent as we age, and, as I say, especially apparent to those who do not and shall not have children.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, happy birthday, Renee Zellweger!