No Postcards from Old Age

    Cohen, in titling his text No Aging in India, sets out, self-consciously, to construct a palliative to the at once reductive and essentialist gerontological texts consistently titled "Aging in India."  Arranging his text as a series of recollections, which the author suggests mirror the manner in which one encounters the old passing into what is variously called senility, dementia, Alzheimer, sixtishness, etc., as such individuals struggle to retain and regain memories, Cohen at the same time reproduces a travelogue, a travel diary, of his own journeys in the as yet for him still alien land of the significantly aged.  

    In his intent, through the organization of his materials, to ape the caricatured first-person performance of senility grasping at memory, he enacts another caricature, that of the second-person relation of seemingly disjointed yet organized (if only by happenstance and the passage of time) encounters of the natives by the narrator tourist.  Here however, the lands to which he travels sharing such porous borders with younger clines, he also captures the third-person account of others like himself, tourists and others from across the borderlands--the young as so many foreigners--at once curious about and frightened by the old in their native setting, just yonder.

    This, I would note, is not entirely how Cohen set out to explicitly use first-, second-, and third- person perspective.  Yet I would suggest that these perspectives--and not the perspectives of the very old, those who know the very old, and those who study the being of old age--get at something perhaps more interesting than the question of how the people in a given nation or religion or class or pick-your-criteria-of-discrimination encounter and understand aging. For implicit in his study of the cultural coloration of aging and the aged is an appreciation of the realm of the aged as a territory one might be a tourist within.  While the Deepak Chopras of our time continue in a long and storied line of alchemical promissories, investigating and offering elixirs of life to stave off decay as process, Cohen launches his boat into the unfamiliar waters of a River Lethe, that is, a place of forgetting.  

    This is a River Lethe that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient Greeks, so built up are its banks now with retirement condos and care homes and railway stations full of abandoned passengers.  For, while the Greeks recognized a land of the dead, a foreign country the other side of the River Styx, the land of forgetting, on the banks of the Lethe, was a barren landscape.  How then, in India as in the United States and Canada, has this domain come to be so richly developed and densely populated?

    Moreover, just as the Greeks had their priests and priestesses to mind the temples of Hades and of Persephone, so--in superficially very different cultural contexts, those of North America and the Indian subcontinent--we find the priests of the land of forgetting.  Cohen opens with a gathering of such officiants:  a gerontology conference.  In recognizing this, one might ask:  how is a study of aging produced?  How is a realm of old age produced such that Cohen, like Hercules or Dante or Sparrowhawk before him, might travel there, exploring those weird spaces and bringing back his stories from abroad?  This view from the river begins with the river as someplace having a view.

    That this river has a view at all, that age is visible at all in this way, seems to me a much more interesting question than how that view might differ from one boat or another.