Overlooked by Mermaids
By Andrea Lingle
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.I do not think that they will sing to me.
An Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot
At what moment did you realize you were mortal? If you haven’t yet, this can be your moment. You are mortal. Born to die, to wither like grass, to “wear the bottoms of [your] trousers rolled.” It is one of two certainties in this world.
The human lifespan seems too short. There over 160 million books to read; 7,500 varieties of apples to try; and nearly 100,000 museums to meander through. A life-time seems laughably inadequate to soak up this world—but a lifetime is relative. Your, on average, 84 years, feels immense next to drosophila’s 0.125 years and minuscule next to the redwood’s 3000. A lifetime is what we get, be it a Mayfly’s worth or an eon.
Does the fruit fly change its hair and upgrade its wings three weeks in? Does the Redwood suffer over becoming irrelevant or mourn the attention of mermaids?
Probably not.
But we do. We strive and fight against the passage of us. We micromanage or ignore our bodies hoping they will last forever or to forget they won’t. Paul Tillich pondered the ability to live through the anxiety of mortality in his book The Courage to Be. Tillich wrestles with this question for hundreds of pages. I only have hundreds of words, so I will skip to his end:
[Thomas Münzer, the Anabaptist] speaks of the ultimate situation in which everthing finite reveals its finitude, in which the finite has come to its end, in which anxiety grips the heart and all previous meanings fall apart, and in which just for this reason the Divine Spirit can make itself felt and can turn the whole situation into a courage to be whose expression is revolutionary action.
Yes, mortality is certain, lifespan is relative, and, according to Tillich via Münzer, it is only when we exhaust all our reason, when the sheer terror of ceasing to sip tea in the afternoon or ferry children to activities or craft pointed emails, unravels our carefully woven self-tapestry, that we become capable of hearing the revolutionary whispers of the Divine Spirit. It is not until you glimpse your middle-aged self in the grocery store security camera one Tuesday and shatter among the apples and avocados, realizing that your curated world is a below-the-fold comic strip, that you are awake enough to feel the nudging of Spirit.
And that takes time. Or heartbreak.
Or both.
I have had a bumpy decade with regard to health. I have more than philosophically contemplated my own mortality, and, through a series of unfortunate events, became “a woman of a certain age” at 39. Now at 44, five years into menopause, I have had to reframe my self-concept more than once. What does it mean when the mermaids look right past you? What does it mean when the sights and sounds of the dentist and the grocery store are more targeted to you than the social scene?
Apparently, it is just the right recipe for revolution. Not a fiery apple-cart-turn-over-revolution. A revolution of those who have left the gene-pool and entered the thought-pool. I always hated that wisdom does not come by the turning of multitudes of pages but through the maceration of anxiety and time. Time and trauma are not a recipe for courage or wisdom. It is a correlation not a causation. It is quite clear that wisdom does not grow in with white hair and trauma does not always beget sagacity. In fact, I have spoken with many wise children and sat at the bedside of many crippled by sorrow.
But...there is a certain freedom that comes when you can sneak past mermaids, whenever in life that happens. What can you do when you can roll up your trousers with impunity? What risks would you be willing to incur? What can you try that others in your community can’t? Won't?
Spirits of a certain age, what revolution can we test drive? We can become foolish in the service of the Divine Spirit without risking our “riz” or “aura” or whatever the kids are calling reputation these days. Perhaps you are four or fourteen or forty-four. Age makes no difference with grace and Divine Spirit; all you need is the credulity to saunter into the sunset in rolled-up mom-jeans or a kimono or Birkenstocks willing to acknowledge that the mermaids were always wondering if the sunset set off their golden highlights anyway.
Being a part of the holy is knowing that the ineffable journey has no hero. It is a wandering pilgrim’s way worn by generations of feet of all sizes and stages of arthritis. It is a way:
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.An Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot
If you feel inclined, comment with one word or one sentence that answers: What holds you back?