Help the ageing.
The title of this very short, still incomplete text-manifesto is a play with the title of a Pulp song, Help the aged, in which Jarvis Cocker, with his nasal and lingering voice, hits you with some truth bombs with that ‘who, me?’ look on his face. Half way through the music he sings And if you look very hard Behind those lines upon their face You may see where you are headed And it’s such a lonely place, o h
Text : Patrícia Azevedo da Silva Drawings : Júlia Barata
So we are not aged yet, hence the ageing. We are ageing. And we kind of know where we are heading and might feel like a lonely place. Like Mr. Cocker sings himself, When did you first realize? For me, the realization is yet to come. I know nothing about growing old or older, except that I began to grow a sense of time unlike my children: ‘a month ago’ seems like yesterday, a year goes by very, very fast. In a weird way, the only thing changing for me is the notion of time. “Only”.
The notion of time, so it seems, changes throughout life, because time seems to be running out and because, as a consequence, these different experimentation stages transform different experimentations of time into measurements (my children actually use the expression ‘a children’s pause v. an adult’s pause?’ as a measure to understand how long it will take them to get something they want.) But also: for me, it is the realization that time is not linear and there is some time-traveling one experiments in different moments, back and forth, simultaneously
and
also
ghosts.
Regarding time: it is the acknowledgment that there are different temporalities (and spacialities) happening at once, like you timetravel constantly in your life, kind of how it happens in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, but also like in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, when there are ghosts from the past – and also the future – paying you a visit.
This idea of ghosts haunting you is somehow connected to Derrida’s Hauntology, when he talks about the specters of Marx, and also ghosts of the future, when Mark Fisher dwells on Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s catchthought of, as he puts it, ‘The slow cancellation of the future’. As if we had stopped believing in a futuret o - c o m e
.
I n t h e words of Mark Fisher then, ‘Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken t i m e’.
This i d e a of “broken time”, and also the idea of “place stained by time” (“stained” as in haunted, perhaps) has made more visible, for me at least, during these pandemic and post-pandemic times, the need to become or reclaim your skills as a storyteller. In her text ‘Walking with goats and Gruffal’o, Angharad Saunders argues for the existence of “fourthspace” when in comes to storytelling, when she states that, following Gérard Genette, ‘telling produces a doubled sense of time: the time of the telling and the time of the narrative. It also generates a doubled sense of place: the place of the telling and the place of the narrative.’.
So naturally, what I started thinking was not so much the anthem ‘no future’ but rather ‘MANY FUTURES’, the making of futures now with teachings and caring from all over, futures that have come to haunt us with a very vivid image of what can/ will/is happening, and what changes can be made now so that life now and soon(er) will be easy, calm, transforming.
So what I am kind of proposing here is the beginning of the writing of a text-[visual]-manifesto, in which very clearly we the ageing start drawing cat’s cradles if you will, to intertwine our lives&visions, to become entanglements (both in Donna Haraway’s and in Jada Pinkett-Smith’s ways) with our surroundings and landscapes and animals and humans.
1. Rest. 2. Make as many friends as you can – and keep them. Engage – maintenance is key. 3. Recognize the importance of connecting – and also disconnecting. [recognize the importance of i n t e r m i s s i o n s ] . 4. Start building your plan to live close® to a few people you might consider growing older with. 5. Embrace the storyteller within you (write\draw\make a montage of your visions) 6. Walk and do regular checkups (keep in mind the importance of making routes, both real and s y m b o l i c ) . 7. Practice regular gestures and repetition. These are 7 out of 10 to 20 points that are to be included in this manifesto. Hopefully, others will join me and collectively we will agree in writing it as our #entanglement. Naturally it is incomplete. But it’s a good start, t h o .