Still here
Image: Peter Walberg
Berlin. 20.08.2024
I’d been thinking about this day for a while. How would I feel about it? How should I feel about it? I recognize how Ram Dass (from whom I have stolen the title of this post) felt, looking at his hand and seeing his father’s hand. How do I want to feel about it?
Now if you’re in adland and you’re too late to qualify for any “[insert number] under [insert number] list”, the workplace can, for all its thrills and spills, be a confronting environment in a way that say, sitting on the bus or standing in the checkout queue at Tesco never is. The workplace does not know this. The Google meanwhile is no help or solace, and just serves me an unending stream of “dance like nobody is watching” toxic positivity.
I had spent half of my life in advertising agencies. I had lived in three continents, and could count New York, São Paulo, Amsterdam, and London as my home towns. I had helped build transformative ideas for some of the world’s biggest, most iconic and creatively demanding brands and businesses including Allianz, booking.com, Citizen, Coca-Cola, Corona, deBeers, Decathlon, Electronic Arts, Evian, Facebook, Guinness, Heineken, Instagram, Kelloggs, Lux, Meta Reality Labs, Miele, Mondelez, Novartis, Ray-Ban, Samsung, Uber… I’d had the privilege of working with some of the very best creative minds in the business, and been schooled in the difference between the 1% of work that is extraordinary and the 99% that was everything else. I’d won sixteen straight pitches in the past sixteen years. I’d known the incalculable pride in helping others realise their maximum potential. But so much for the past. Like, whatever. What about now? How should I be thinking about that?
In his collection of essays entitled The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer writes:
"A condition of being able to go on creating late into one’s life seems often to be an inability to see what, for readers, is the most distinct quality of this later work: its deterioration in quality.”
This does not help. Mainly because it utter bollocks. Dyer pretends that he doesn’t know about Michelangelo, Turner, Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, Hockney, Orwell, Melville, Proust, Defoe, Miller, Chandler, Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, Janáček, Ives, Verdi, Cave…
Writing in The Guardian, Tim Dowling writes:
“The years from late middle age onward are also marked by a steady erosion of ambition. The cause isn’t so much a loss of drive as a growing realisation that you aren’t going to change the world after all. You’re just going to die and be forgotten, like almost everyone else. The knowledge that your existence doesn’t really matter is sobering, but also sort of a relief. It’s certainly changed my approach to paperwork.”
I reflect that I’ve lived outside the UK far long to find that peculiar English strain of performative middle class self-deprecation remotely amusing.
In his novel Inside Story, Martin Amis writes:
“At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself—and that’s your lot, that’s your destiny. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You have found your destined mood, and it has found you, too.”
The tone of fatalism and resignation aside (whatever happened to raging against the fucking dying of the light?) this feels a little more helpful. But what was my destined mood?
Henry Miller takes no prisoners:
“Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.”
This is a bit more like it. I am reminded of my favourite passage from Frank Herbert’s Dune. The ruthlessly glorious lines are written by Princess Irulan:
“What do you despise? By this are you truly known”.
The day I become a groove-clinger or bomb shelter-dweller is the day I grant permission to be taken round the back and dispensed with. This is my personal and professional Newtonian third law. The thing to push against and gain momentum from. Equal and opposite reactions and all that. But what was my destined mood?
Something tugs at my memory, and I have to reread M. John Harrison’s brilliantly weird ‘anti-memoir’ Wish I was Here. Ah yes. Here it is, defiant and joyful:
“Late style arrives when you realise that you are: competent enough to write those things you wanted to write when you were twenty-five; impatient enough to have one more go at going all the way; angry enough not to allow anyone else to persuade you to do something else. At the same time, late style is cold, amused, contemptuous and savage about everyone you have been or ever tried to be. Late style is when the monster down there has finally had enough of you.”
This is it. Finally, I feel seen. Time to let the monster down there hunt down all that that ever held me back from being fearless. My new friend Jon Kabat-Zinn approves:
“Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.”
I’m still here.
And now, finally, fucking ready.
Happy birthday to me.
***
Dedicated to all of you who like me, are too late to qualify for any “[insert number] under [insert number] list”/bullshit.