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Children of the Elderberry Bush
Experimental Gerontology, Vol. 33, Nos. 1/2, pp. 189 –190, 1998 Copyright © 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0531-5565/98 $19.00 1 .00
PII S0531-5565(97)00070-3
CHILDREN OF THE ELDERBERRY BUSH (for Alex Comfort)
ROY L. WALFORD Department of Pathology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90095
WHY WE age is laid out nicely in the primitive Eskimo myth of the trickster god, Raven (Goodchild, 1991): “Raven went up along Nass River and came to where Stone and Elderberry Bush were quarreling, discussing who should give birth first. Stone said, ‘If I give birth first, people will live a long time; if you give birth first, people will live a short time.’ Raven stepped close and looked, and behold! Stone had almost given birth to her child. But Raven touched Elderberry Bush and said, ‘Give birth first, Elderberry Bush.’ And Elderberry Bush gave birth to a child. For that reason people do not live many years. They die soon, and elderberry bushes grow on their graves.” Other myths of gerontology are more positive. They fall into three types: 1) those concerning long living or immortal beings. Dracula was a very successful practicing gerontologist. The Frankenstein monster does not age. Ahasuerus, the mythic “wandering Jew,” who mocked Christ as he was carrying his cross to Calvary, was told by the Saviour (evidently Jesus got quite irritated by this upstart), “I go, but thou, thou shalt remain ’til my return.” So Ahasuerus is still hanging around, under a pseudonym of course, still outwardly a young man, a bit lonely perhaps, waiting for science to catch up with him, to give him equally long-lived companions. 2) Myths of place or of time. In a far-off land, in Shangri-La, in vilcabamba . . . are people who live extraordinarily long lives. Let’s go there and see how they do it, is the implication. Or myths of time: in antiquity, when life was simpler, life was long. Witness the preflood patriarchs, Adam, Seth, Cain, Methuselah, Noah—they all lived over 900 years, and lived well, too, for reproductive senescence was retarded in the patriarchs, so it ain’t necessarily so that “no gal is givin’ to no man with 900 years,” and indeed I know few ladies who wouldn’t opt for an amorous night with Adam or Cain, for example, and you can bet that for Cain they’d be lined up for blocks, eager to kiss the mark of this all-time primal action outlaw and antihero, compared to whom Schwarzenneger and Eastwood register as pip-squeaks. And the Hsien of the Taoists, they lived forever, having attained the way, their bodies becoming as diamonds. 3) The third type may be labeled “treatment myths,” or quests for the secret of long life or immortality. The
(Accepted 22 October 1996) 189
190
R.L. WALFORD
Elixir of Life, for example, sought by the Alchemists. The Faustian bargain with the devil, and then Faust’s evasion of the bargain, as William Empson has so cleverly argued. The Fountain of Youth (if you want to know where it really is, or at least the one Ponce de Leon was vainly searching for, I’ll tell you: it’s in a hard-to-find cave on the east end of the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean, and I’ve been there, and the cave is full of bat shit but the floor is covered by shards from the Arawak Indians, the pre-Carib guardians of the place, and there is a big pool of clear water on one side of the cave.). Unlike these older ones, the modern gerontological myths are mostly not so good. They reflect culturally ingrained notions about aging and the prospect of life extension that we adhere to unreasonably, and which influence the way we think. Almost everybody reading these words has been programmed to accept a life span of 80 to 100 years at best, with the last 10 to 15 years being frail and rather unpleasant, and to accept this lousy deal as though it were an inviolable law of nature. Look into yourself now and see if I’m not right as I recount The Star Trek Inconsistency. Star Trek takes place in the 23rd century. Many marvelous scientific advances have taken place, Starships traveling at the speed of light, people disassembled in one place and reassembled elsewhere (“Beam me up, Scotty!”). Artificial Intelligence combined with Robotics has progressed to where a humanoid like Data can be put together, so complex that after his adventures aboard the Enterprise he will occupy the Lucasian Chair of physics at Oxford University (a chair formally sat in by Isaac Newton and currently by Stephen Hawking). All very heady futuristic stuff, and we accept the fables of Star Trek as being . . . well, exaggerated but not absurd. But listen to Captain Kirk or Picard attentively and you’ll hear them say something like “When I was a cadet, back at the academy 30 years ago.” The science of the biology of aging, a regular branch of medicine, has apparently not made one step forward during the next 300 years. Obviously it did not strike the writers of Star Trek that this was inconsistent with the rest of their portrayal of scientific advances. Furthermore, I’ve found that when I point this out to people, they invariably say, “Oh yeah, it is inconsistent; I never thought of that.” Why not? Because the thought of death, of the oblivion of death, is so unpleasant that man has invented all sorts of reasons for not thinking about it, or for making it seem OK. Religion, for example: you die, you go someplace, you don’t really die. Or life if lived too long would be boring (the Stoics’ position). Or death is “natural,” it’s Nature’s Way. And so on. The side effect of these evasions is that we get so programmed to accept the inevitability of the “normal” life course— or as T. S. Eliot put it, “Birth and copulation and death, these are the facts when you get to brass tacks!”—that we simply don’t notice the Star Trek Inconsistency when we see it on the tube. We unthinkingly accept life span as we know it as being fixed for all time. It isn’t. The 21st century will see a life extension revolution that will shake all social institutions. It’s not here yet but it’s surely coming. My advice in the meantime is, eat a low calorie nutrient-dense diet, and lie not down under elderberry bushes. REFERENCE GOODCHILD, P. Raven Tales: Traditional Stories of Native Peoples, Chicago Review Press, Chicago. 1991.
PII S0531-5565(97)00070-3
CHILDREN OF THE ELDERBERRY BUSH (for Alex Comfort)
ROY L. WALFORD Department of Pathology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90095
WHY WE age is laid out nicely in the primitive Eskimo myth of the trickster god, Raven (Goodchild, 1991): “Raven went up along Nass River and came to where Stone and Elderberry Bush were quarreling, discussing who should give birth first. Stone said, ‘If I give birth first, people will live a long time; if you give birth first, people will live a short time.’ Raven stepped close and looked, and behold! Stone had almost given birth to her child. But Raven touched Elderberry Bush and said, ‘Give birth first, Elderberry Bush.’ And Elderberry Bush gave birth to a child. For that reason people do not live many years. They die soon, and elderberry bushes grow on their graves.” Other myths of gerontology are more positive. They fall into three types: 1) those concerning long living or immortal beings. Dracula was a very successful practicing gerontologist. The Frankenstein monster does not age. Ahasuerus, the mythic “wandering Jew,” who mocked Christ as he was carrying his cross to Calvary, was told by the Saviour (evidently Jesus got quite irritated by this upstart), “I go, but thou, thou shalt remain ’til my return.” So Ahasuerus is still hanging around, under a pseudonym of course, still outwardly a young man, a bit lonely perhaps, waiting for science to catch up with him, to give him equally long-lived companions. 2) Myths of place or of time. In a far-off land, in Shangri-La, in vilcabamba . . . are people who live extraordinarily long lives. Let’s go there and see how they do it, is the implication. Or myths of time: in antiquity, when life was simpler, life was long. Witness the preflood patriarchs, Adam, Seth, Cain, Methuselah, Noah—they all lived over 900 years, and lived well, too, for reproductive senescence was retarded in the patriarchs, so it ain’t necessarily so that “no gal is givin’ to no man with 900 years,” and indeed I know few ladies who wouldn’t opt for an amorous night with Adam or Cain, for example, and you can bet that for Cain they’d be lined up for blocks, eager to kiss the mark of this all-time primal action outlaw and antihero, compared to whom Schwarzenneger and Eastwood register as pip-squeaks. And the Hsien of the Taoists, they lived forever, having attained the way, their bodies becoming as diamonds. 3) The third type may be labeled “treatment myths,” or quests for the secret of long life or immortality. The
(Accepted 22 October 1996) 189
190
R.L. WALFORD
Elixir of Life, for example, sought by the Alchemists. The Faustian bargain with the devil, and then Faust’s evasion of the bargain, as William Empson has so cleverly argued. The Fountain of Youth (if you want to know where it really is, or at least the one Ponce de Leon was vainly searching for, I’ll tell you: it’s in a hard-to-find cave on the east end of the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean, and I’ve been there, and the cave is full of bat shit but the floor is covered by shards from the Arawak Indians, the pre-Carib guardians of the place, and there is a big pool of clear water on one side of the cave.). Unlike these older ones, the modern gerontological myths are mostly not so good. They reflect culturally ingrained notions about aging and the prospect of life extension that we adhere to unreasonably, and which influence the way we think. Almost everybody reading these words has been programmed to accept a life span of 80 to 100 years at best, with the last 10 to 15 years being frail and rather unpleasant, and to accept this lousy deal as though it were an inviolable law of nature. Look into yourself now and see if I’m not right as I recount The Star Trek Inconsistency. Star Trek takes place in the 23rd century. Many marvelous scientific advances have taken place, Starships traveling at the speed of light, people disassembled in one place and reassembled elsewhere (“Beam me up, Scotty!”). Artificial Intelligence combined with Robotics has progressed to where a humanoid like Data can be put together, so complex that after his adventures aboard the Enterprise he will occupy the Lucasian Chair of physics at Oxford University (a chair formally sat in by Isaac Newton and currently by Stephen Hawking). All very heady futuristic stuff, and we accept the fables of Star Trek as being . . . well, exaggerated but not absurd. But listen to Captain Kirk or Picard attentively and you’ll hear them say something like “When I was a cadet, back at the academy 30 years ago.” The science of the biology of aging, a regular branch of medicine, has apparently not made one step forward during the next 300 years. Obviously it did not strike the writers of Star Trek that this was inconsistent with the rest of their portrayal of scientific advances. Furthermore, I’ve found that when I point this out to people, they invariably say, “Oh yeah, it is inconsistent; I never thought of that.” Why not? Because the thought of death, of the oblivion of death, is so unpleasant that man has invented all sorts of reasons for not thinking about it, or for making it seem OK. Religion, for example: you die, you go someplace, you don’t really die. Or life if lived too long would be boring (the Stoics’ position). Or death is “natural,” it’s Nature’s Way. And so on. The side effect of these evasions is that we get so programmed to accept the inevitability of the “normal” life course— or as T. S. Eliot put it, “Birth and copulation and death, these are the facts when you get to brass tacks!”—that we simply don’t notice the Star Trek Inconsistency when we see it on the tube. We unthinkingly accept life span as we know it as being fixed for all time. It isn’t. The 21st century will see a life extension revolution that will shake all social institutions. It’s not here yet but it’s surely coming. My advice in the meantime is, eat a low calorie nutrient-dense diet, and lie not down under elderberry bushes. REFERENCE GOODCHILD, P. Raven Tales: Traditional Stories of Native Peoples, Chicago Review Press, Chicago. 1991.