Gonne with the Geschwind (or, ‘Erin go Braless!’)

Quite recently, I was moved to write several lengthy paragraphs about the decline of my local air museum to a close coterie of museum confreres. Seems the museum, aside from being temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is suffering from a loss of confidence (by its volunteers and docent 'old guard') in the mission development work the present directorship is undertaking. And naturally enough, being a writer and a natural-born communicator, I articulated things as I see them, both at length and in considerable detail in the email I sent to my museum cohorts.

I have been told on occasion, by much younger individuals, that email is both dying out as a preferred means of communicating AND that it should be kept brief, perfunctory and not serve as a substitute for a carefully composed bit of correspondence. But as far as I am concerned, emails should be thoughtfully fleshed out, adequately developed in terms of content and expressed intent, and made as long as is necessary to get the message across and completely understood. If that belief makes me ‘old school’ and/or hopelessly antediluvian in my contemporary outlook, no apologies will be forthcoming, since I absolute refuse to get caught up in the Tweeting and texting exchanges that have become the primary & preferred venues for younger people (and even some older ones, who really should resist the urge, in my opinion).

At any rate, my ‘lengthy’ email message was duly sent out to the designated recipients and I waited for the responses with some interest, hoping that a greater number than usual would ‘break the Guy-Code canon’ that discourages men from really opening up about their deeper feelings and perhaps even spill their guts a bit. Some actually did take the opportunity to be a bit more candid than usual, but I was completely unprepared for one of the responses, however, sent me by one of my colleagues who is a former aerospace engineer and computer specialist in aviation applications of technology.

In his email, ‘P’ asked me: “Are you afflicted with epilepsy? You seem to possess two of the five principal characteristics (apparently referring to my lengthy and detailed email message) of someone who suffers from Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome.” Whaaaaat!?

Let me explain. Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome is a group of behavioral phenomena evident in some people who are afflicted with temporal lobe epilepsy. There is some controversy surrounding whether Geschwind’s is a true neuropsychiatric disorder or not, but I haven’t yet checked my DSM V to read what the leading shrinks have to say on this matter. Temporal lobe epilepsy can cause chronic, mild, interictal (i.e. between seizures) changes in personality, which slowly intensify over time, according to some ostensible authorities. Further, according to the sources, Geschwind syndrome is generally agreed upon to include five primary changes: hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, atypical (usually reduced or lessened) sexuality, circumstantiality, and intensified mental life. Not all symptoms must be present for a diagnosis, so say these experts, but most agree that only some people with epilepsy or temporal lobe epilepsy show features of what is categorized as Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome.

It’s a pretty even bet that my august friend was referring to my tendency to write extensively for one of the signs he claims I show, but he didn’t specify what the other one of the five supposedly was, that are manifest in people with this condition. Hypergraphia, by the way, is described as follows (which is taken from a Wikipedia entry on the syndrome).

“Hypergraphia is the tendency for extensive and compulsive writing or drawing, and has been observed in persons with temporal lobe epilepsy who have experienced multiple seizures. Those with hypergraphia display extreme attention to detail in their writing. Some such patients keep diaries recording meticulous details about their everyday lives. In certain cases, these writings demonstrate extreme interest in religious topics. These individuals also tend to have poor penmanship. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, known to suffer from epilepsy, showed signs of Geschwind syndrome, including hypergraphia. In some cases hypergraphia can manifest with compulsive drawing. Drawings by patients with hypergraphia exhibit repetition and a high level of detail, sometimes morphing writing with drawing”

‘Well! I NEVER!’, as my Irish granny would have put it! My erudite colleague (who has a rather elevated opinion of himself, so it would seem) felt that he could summarise (and by so doing dismiss) my writing abilities with a DSM V diagnosis! Privately, I was a bit taken aback by this rather cavalier aspersion and somewhat flummoxed to think that I could be so neatly circumscribed and pigeon-holed by someone who had at one time wrongly argued with me that the Douglas DC-10 commercial airliner had a fully operational Category-IIIA automatic landing system, just like that pioneered on the trail-blazing Lockheed L-1011 (it did not, despite the fact that he swore it did). At that time, I pointed out to him, self-rated aviation history expert that he fancied himself to be, that it wasn’t until the Douglas DC-10 became the McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 (an entirely new iteration) that the DC-10 airliner finally had the same Cat-3A landing capabilities that the L-1011 had had at the outset. He didn’t take that well, I gather, but discrediting a writer by accusing him of suffering from both a mental and neurological condition such as epilepsy in one swoop was an entirely new one on me! The novelty and intellectualized audacity of that erudite and lofty putdown of his still floors me, when I think about it (chuckling bemusedly, of course).

Be that as it may, I hope hearing of this amuses you as much as it does me, but pressing on, this peripherally ties in to my thesis here, somewhat: the unhappy condition of being regarded as increasingly irrelevant with accumulated age.

It’s always a sad moment in life when we realise that others are generally no longer interested in what we’ve been up to or what we have to say about life after involuntarily suffering through many decades of it. In my case it’s a mildly depressing realization that has been steadily growing for several years now. Time once was when I imagined that what I had to say actually might have had some noteworthy significance or interest to others. That a recitation of my lifetime of various adventures, experiences and perceptions might have more potential interest to the rest of the world than the 3000-word fine print at the bottom of a legal contract. The truth is that most people now regard any faint suggestion of a ‘complicated’ mind in others as having about as much interest for them as the question of what sort of IQ a can of ordinary white house-paint possesses.

I see the effects of this realisation happening to so many others in my age-group, as well. While many of my remaining friends are about as verbally articulate as a fence post, that sad, melancholic feeling of being experientially cast aside still comes through their sparse, occasional words in emails and other modes of electronic communication that pass between us these days. One of them, a retired Air Force navigator who flew many, many risky hours in jet aircraft of the early 50s, and who survived a whole range of startling close-encounters with disaster in the air, is particularly plaintive in his thinly disguised efforts to solicit some interest from others. He is substantially older than I, approaching 90 years, but he continues to fire off brief contacts to many of us, despite not having much to say now and being uncertain how to say it. Mind you, this is a man who has written several books about his adventures and who has flown thousands of hours in a wide variety of exotic and high-performance post-war (WW2) jet aircraft. Not the sort of stuff a yellow banana slug would put down in his memoirs.

He is, as are most of us in the 70+ age category, pretty much written off entirely by those who are 40 or under today, as relics of almost total cultural irrelevance and at best obsolete social artifacts not worth paying much attention to as the ‘younger generations’ continue to spin uncertainly out their formative explorations, suspended in the flimsy nexus of peer-support that they habitually tap into through ephemeral social media venues. It’s as if, despite being as confused and uncertain as any not-yet-fully-mature, still growing human organism can be, they utterly reject any possibility that those who have traveled down the path of life before them may have anything of value to offer in the way of useful experiential trail-markers.

Back in the 70s, which were my own formative years, a common saying was ‘Never trust anyone over the age of 30.’ As young, idealistic youths we felt (as do all youths of that age and that stage of development) that we were fully contained in our wisdom and understandings, that ‘older people’ had so miserably failed us that they were all so completely untrustworthy, deceptive, flawed and deceitful, and that for our purposes they were utterly useless.

While this seems to be a set, shared characteristic of all youths cossetted in the glory of their early 20s, prior to the 1960s ‘adult society’ was able to disregard this youthful blanket rejection of ‘traditional’ social and cultural values and categorise younger people as simply ‘going through a stage’ that they would emerge from, sooner or later, to finally take their place as fully mature, adult members of society.

One principal reason why ‘mature’ adults were able to exert this level of control over youthful rebelliousness was that communication between youths was largely limited to direct face-to-face contact between peers in school, which was usually associated with school activities, and were physically isolated from other youth venues. At home, parents exerted full control over kids, like it or not, and society remained relatively stable in general terms, despite expected generational rebelliousness.

Then, consequent to the sudden flood of wealth and middle-class affluence enabled in the post-war 50s, the machines of American mercantile capitalism, in the form of increasingly sophisticated commercial marketing and advertising campaigns, discovered the growing discretional spending power of younger people and began a relentless effort to cater to the youth consumer market. The intensity of commercial efforts to tap into that virtual aquafer of newly swollen wealth and affluence suddenly assumed exponential substance as advertising began to coordinate and carry out clever efforts to co-opt and cater to the ‘youth market’ with a ramping-up of consumer goods production targeted specifically at youthful naivete.

Part of this effort by commercial organisations was to convey the impression (to the youths themselves) that what youths felt, thought, desired, prized, chased after and/or were interested in constituted an inherently important, perhaps even vital dynamic that deserved to be singled out and glorified above all others. As youthfulness began to become elevated into a sort of exalted super-status by commerce (abetted in no small part by Hollywood film celebrations of youth-culture), there was no pause given anywhere along the line to reflect upon the fact that commercial consumer-driven interests were instilling in youths a mercilessly unrealistic, grossly distorted and narcissistic impression of the relevance & value of their ‘youthful immaturity’ (which is, after all, an incomplete, usually not fully informed and often quite naïve state of being) in the greater overall fabric of American society. Thus, the ‘youth culture’ obsession was born and soon permeated almost every aspect of American life in the late 50s, 60s and 70s. If anything, it is even more so today.

Youth movements such as the Teddy Boys and ‘Rockers versus the Mods’ social upheavals in 50s & 60s England and the Beat and rock & roll fads in the United States (along with pop music cultures in both countries), served to escalate that simplistic & unquestioning belief of youths in their own 'special', elevated social ascendancy.

Naturally, every generation has its youthful teething-period phase, mainly characterised by rebelliousness, reactivity and resistance to the prevailing contemporary social norms, and every generation has to pass through that surging maelstrom of surging, often conflicting biochemical matrix of raging hormones that drives human beings during their early, procreative stages of growth. Only once the bloom has faded from sexual desires, drives for power and personal identity quests does the too-often errant and misleading intuition of youthfulness become apparent. That is not to say that age and accumulated experience makes one any better equipped to deal with the uncertainties of human life, but at least the ability to look back, make wise comparisons and deal with things accordingly provides a suite of assets that, used wisely and employed appropriately, may be quite useful to society as a whole.

The sad fact is, however, that all human beings eventually sicken and die, a perplexing paradox that has engaged the idle moments of philosophers throughout history and may be be looked at (justifiably, in my opinion) with extreme pessimism and frustrated resignation; hence just as we reach the point where we may finally be better able to make balanced, rational assessments of life, we expire. Where's the overall gain in that, if not in passing along observations and discoveries to younger people?

As the decades passed and it became more and more apparent to youths that wars (such as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts…not to mention the ubiquitous ‘cold war’ cultural clash between Soviet Russia and the USA, which all had their greatest impact on the younger individuals  called upon to fight them), were conceived and directed by older individuals (who did not have to fight them and remained safely out of harm’s way, in most cases), the so-called generation gap between older and younger members of society widened appreciably. Before long, what had earlier been merely an expected (but manageable) transitional dynamic in the growth curve to maturity became permanently institutionalized, with the result that today, in the early 2020s, older individuals as a group are so disregarded has having little relevance to the young that they may as well not exist.

Conversely, youthfulness has been supremely elevated above all else in our culture as the most desired and sought-after state of being. Sadly enough, instead of older people viewing America’s youth-obsession with nuanced objectivity and distanced regard, far too many of them have been socialized to reflect those same puerile biases & liabilities. Show me an older man who doesn’t regret losing his hair and abs, or a woman who doesn’t want to drop about 20 pounds and a double chin! Worst of all are those late-middle-aged males who walk around wearing a reversed ball-cap like the commonest, most clueless puerile adolescent imaginable! Yuk!

Regrettably, when any society loses its crucial overall age-related social integrity in this manner, it begins to come apart, to slowly but steadily erode and disintegrate in every one of its nuances, until that society succumbs utterly to the fate experienced by virtually every human society ever to exist on the planet Earth (i.e. subsidence, decay and total dissolution in perpetuity): extinction.

American life (and that of the entire world) became exponentially complicated and compounded with several revolutionary development trends in electronic technology, after the 50s. First came the sophisticated, compact and lightning-fast hand calculators of the 60s and 70s (such as the HP-40 and the Texas Instruments counterparts), enabled by rapid solid-state advancements. This was closely followed by the introduction of small, personal computers that were exponentially smarter than ever. After that, modern modes of electronic communication were introduced that quickly put small, easily transportable devices (cellular phones) into the hands of even the dumbest among us, themselves giving rise to another disastrous phenomenon (the Zuckerfuc*er person’s ‘social media’ venue: FACEFULL) and its many inane counterparts (Twitter, Instagram, et al).

Suddenly, with the rise of the so-called smartphone, it became the easiest thing imaginable for just about every three-brain-cell-moron under the sun to not just communicate incessantly, but to incite and influence the already uncertain and anxious masses that now comprise the majority among us (under the age of 70) to emulate that trend. Concurrently, no longer was journalism (and writing) the exclusive preserve of the highest-educated, most far-seeing and intellectually capable amongst us, but available to everyone on down the intelligence food chain to absolute ZERO (reckoned as total idiot level). Even the most vapid prole among us now had a personal ‘blog’ in which his or her rubbish-heap thoughts could be and usually were aired to an audience of reflectively brain-dead peers, now numbering in the millions, at the push of a key.

Consequently, mass society began its hasty ‘devolution’ to the lowest-common-denominator level conceivable…and unconstrained commercialism (via relentless consumer exploitation) began to dredge that huge mass of potential revenue (that the new ‘youth herd’ comprises) with the same amount of focused, unreflective, grim determination that characterises commercial extraction of the planet’s natural resources for conversion into monetary wealth & profits for a select few.

Meanwhile, the value of ‘older people’ in America (and just about everywhere else throughout the world, actually) continued to plummet like a feather in a pure vacuum, hence the growing frustrations of so many ‘seniors’ that are now regarded as no longer socially relevant, a circumstance that afflicts all of us (such as my friend whom I mentioned is the retired Air Force navigator, earlier). Agreed that no one should be celebrated (or at least acknowledged) merely for having survived the hazards of youthfulness largely intact and remaining still more-or-less fully functional, certainly, but prior to America’s ‘arrival’ as an nation of ostensibly ‘free’ individuals, age was usually regarded as a sign of acquired wisdom and successfully applied survival skills. In our ‘everything reduced to a dollar value’ modern world, age is now looked at as an awkward liability: what to do with all these worn-out, decrepit, senior members of society who have outlived their usefulness? The Inuit native American tribes solved that problem by putting their aged elders on an ice floe and pushing it out into open water! Que sera, sera! Write if you find blubber, Grandpa!

It won’t get to that point in our 'civilised" nations for at least another several hundred years as I reckon things but maybe the Inuits had a good idea, after all the cloying sentiment is cleared away. Fortunately, most of us won’t be around to test those eugenic open waters as human lab hamsters, figuratively speaking!

Meanwhile, one effective interim stop-gap solution would be for people to stop generating all those ignorant little copies of themselves that you see being pushed around by the twos and threes (thanks a heap, fertility drugs!) in state-of-the-art baby carriages these days (by already very pregnant mothers!). Contrary to our best efforts, the thrill of recreational copulatory urges still bring millions of new kids into the world every year and the planet’s population continues to rise exponentially among all the least qualified populations (and, conversely, fall among the brightest and most highly educated groups…the very ones that should be encouraged to reproduce!).

Speaking from my own experience, I made a rational decision very early in my life to forestall having any children, since humanity needs more children about as much as the planet needs more mega-tons of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. In many selfish ways I have always regretted this decision (since old-age can be terribly lonely without narcissistic, self-centered kids to totally ignore you, after all, as you stain your shorts yellow in a sub-standard 'persistant care facility'). But, from a purely intellectual standpoint (and as a subscriber to more than a dollop or two of Stoic philosophy in my makeup), I remain convinced that childlessness is a preferable status to maintain. Besides, who in his/her right mind would actually consciously condemn a child to growing up in our present, socially chaotic, liberally reactive modern society, if there was a choice? Or attend our anally-retentive public schools? (Only a good little, God-fearing Christian or Muslim, I’m afraid, who has been taught to believe that child-bearing is a sacred duty to their God). Ptah! To paraphrase Celine, “I piss on that idea from a considerable height!”

Last night, early in the wee, dark hours, I had another of my numerous brain fart flashes that serve me as creative stimuli. This one related to clever titles for chapters in a book I have yet to write, since clever chapter titles are almost a necessity if one wishes to keep a reader’s interest sufficiently piqued. Among a few of these, zapping between synapses in my brain, were these: 1) “Gonne with the Geschwind”, whose relevance I’ve already commented upon except for the fact that the ‘Gonne’ refers to Irish feminist, militant and poet Maude Gonne, a brilliant and inspiring revolutionary character from Ireland’s immediate past; 2) “Erin go Braless”, which is a sly reference to a buxom young Irish lass I once knew whose name was Erin; 3) “Tails (sic) from the Old Irish South”; 4) “Dipping the Wick in Wicklow”, and a few other less-abstruse titles that probably don’t bear repeating here.

And with those final words, I’ll put my ‘hypergraphic’ tendencies back on the shelf for the moment and take the pup out for her mid-day walkies so that she can sneer at all the young ladies leading their fluffy little 'foo-foo' dogs around the park's paths. Woof!