Balancing Act 2

To quote the Great Germaine Greer: ÈYou are young only once, but you can be immature forever.È Where is Germaine Greer these daysÉ For those of you who have never heard of her (and shame on you if you havenèt) she is an Australian academic, critic, writer and feminist extraordinaire, famous for her book that came out in the seventies, ÈThe Female Eunuch.È (station pause, Gentle Reader, while I correct my keyboard which is creating some rather wonky looking letters again. Ever since Microsoft shoved Windows 10 down my throat, this has been an ongoing problem and they do absolute squat to fix it! I am going to leave this portion uncorrected just to give you an idea of what I am putting up with every day when writing this blog.)ééééééééééééééééÉééééééÉééééééééééééééééé/?/// Now I've got it, I think. It took about two minutes of simultaneously holding down the control, shift, and the question mark key and I am leaving the results for your viewing pleasure. The question mark, forward slash key turns into an e with an accent over it, and this also happens to the quotation mark and apostrophe keys. Germaine is still around. She would be 79 now and writing opinion pieces for various British newspapers. You are young only once. This is so true. Too true. Youth doesn't last. It was never meant to. Otherwise, it wouldn't be youth. It is that lovely passing phase of tenderness, growth and vitality that marks the spring season and childhood, adolescence and the early twenties in our human development. This is when we are physically most graceful, healthy, robust and vital. It is all growth, development. Is it any wonder that so many older people salivate for young flesh, but this is a kind of vampirism, since no amount of young blood is going to reverse the ravages of time. The obsession with youth and youthfulness in our society is legendary, with an emphasis especially placed on and aimed at women, but increasingly with men. It is axiomatic, how women, and increasingly men have to grapple and struggle with poor body image and self-hatred for not looking young and perfect, and so much the worse if, like many, not even while you're young are you able to measure up to the standard of beauty and youth. Youth is not meant to be a permanent state, otherwise, it wouldn't be youth. The appeal, the allure, the beauty of youth is in its fragile and transitory nature. It isn't a fixed state. It is that action of growth that is the incredible energy and vitality of youth, and that is not going to last. For anyone. You only have to look at a woman (or man) who has had cosmetic surgery. They do not look younger, no matter how well-done the intervention. They look preserved. Frozen in time. Like dolls or mannequins, Not quite human. They can were the mask, but the mask ends up wearing them, because the inner process of spring -like freshness, newness and growth has stopped long ago, and not it is just a matter of stemming and slowing the inevitable ravages of time. With this adulation of youth we also have the negation of age, deterioration, decline and death. We are terrified, in this culture, of death. We don't want our great celebrities to age, because they represent us. Madonna has to have regular adjustments made and she will be sixty next month, otherwise she will stop being Madonna and then millions of ageing gen X women will feel stuck and lost in a void. It is getting this way for men as well. I have no solution to offer, except to think of those who were smart enough not to go under the knife, accept that they are no longer young, celebrate that they have aged, and embrace their impending mortality. Two examples and they are both Canadian. One is singer Joni Mitchel. She was so young and fetching and beautiful as she would have six love affairs, write a song about each one of them, and that would be the first side of her new album. The songs on the other side were all about the break-ups. And the late Leonard Cohen, celebrated poet, singer who could never sing worth a shit, and famous ladies' man, though he wasn't much to look at. Joni will be seventy-five this year, and looks it. I don't know if she is still singing, but she celebrates her mortality by doing not one single thing to alter her appearance. Some of you might think she looks like hell. I think she's beautiful. Likewise with Leonard who died at eight-two, a cosmetic surgery virgin to the very end, and losing absolutely none of his appeal though he looked every minute an octogenarian. There is a fire that kindles the soul and it is what keeps us always learning, always growing, loving, thinking and laughing, and I think it is this same candela, or little flame that keeps some of us young no matter how many wrinkles mark our skin or how gray we have become or how much hair we have lost. This vital wisdom that transforms the old into human libraries is the beauty of age, and no cosmetic surgery will ever do anything to enhance this.