The middle age: on wonder
J. Vivian Chiu Have you seen a tree foam? It is disquieting. Tiny seething bubbles on bark. We were walking in the woods, it was spring and raining. The trees, still bare, offered meager cover and the cold rain fell, created rivulets under our boots, thick slicks of mud downslope, brown water pooling. The trees were labeled in the naturalist manner, American Beech, Pagoda Dogwood—and on an unmarked tree, a skein of glittering foam. We stopped, rain falling all around us, to watch the tree foam. On the weekend, my family hikes—two adults, two small children. The children wilt and are carried part way. Sometimes, we take the narrow trails, carved into the ground by deer hooves, animal paws. Inevitably, the trail ends, is suddenly erased in the leaves underfoot. We double back. We are never lost; it is paid for and cultivated wild, a peri-urban parkland. Even maintained, the forest can be a dynamic place, holding within it change and possibility. I can only think of one profession that pays a person to follow whatever curious path strikes them and compensates curiosity. But instead of writing, I make a living doing something else. I’ve traded on the promise that a creative life can be had independent of profession—Wallace Stevens writing poems between insurance sales—but time contracts and the myth conceals costs and unseen advantages. (How many poems for a stack of clean and laundered towels.)
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The foam, we discovered, is a product of the natural and the built worlds, created by a chemical reaction made from pollutants in the air, in the rain, and the sap inside the tree. The foam signals the interaction, evinces the permeability of all living matter. Later, we see the tree in our own front yard spitting and frothing in the same way. What does it mean for trees to react to the world that we make around them, for plant life to froth silently from the skin? Maybe nothing beyond proof that every choice we make produces consequence. It is 2020, then ’21 and ’22. Time has passed and continues streaming forward. As a parent of young children whose lives have been disrupted and re-engineered by the threats of coronavirus, I remind myself that every parent feels that the time they live in is unparalleled and uncertain. The moments of crises, black moods, are not singular. I fight the curdled edge of hours where the children stubbornly bicker; I find constant and not inconsequential comfort in consumption, food, books, sundry tedium. The present is seen in fractal, from too many perspectives that will not be discounted. It is not life within a bell jar, but one in which more and more of the peripheral action is inescapable. Aging. Back on the trail, under a fallen log stippled in fungi, my daughter finds a jellyfish. We were coming down the hill on Horseshoe Trail, following the prints of a horse that must have passed just an hour or so before us—the prints were still fresh. We could have been at the beach, toes wet, instead of hunched under soaking rain clothes, poking at the thing with a big stick. Fungi, certainly. “A jellyfish!” she cries, delighted. At the school that my children attend, the teachers are a marvel of patience, committed to a child-led view of the world. Under their gentle redirection, I resist the urge to label each child’s actions good or bad, to judge their character in their readiness to follow
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our lead. A child is not imperious in failing to follow instructions, but a master of herself and committed to the current task. The other is not looking for short cuts, but supremely efficient, the sort of person who outlines first and fills in details later. But I lose the ability to adjust my vision; I feel a boot upon my throat. “Listen!” I keep saying, but my instructions are dull little nails that flay the hour. Then, a squeal of delight, discovery; imagination is on equal footing with knowledge, both motors make a child’s world spin. A hole in a tall tree is a worm’s door, my daughter decides, never mind my son’s exhortations that worms live underground; partial knowledge in bud. (We later discover that some “worms” do live in trees. Larvae of worm boring beetles may look like worms, and live under wood, etching their unseen existence in loops on tree bark.) If I am asked for my profession, I write down Consultant. The title is pleasing because it is generic and that is good because it is never the full story and I want that obviated. I see an old friend after a long period and she looks smaller, as if her superior intellect is controlled in a tight spring that stretches the length of her, in her tawny skin, in her every small movement, all the potential energy en frieze and made kinetic. We laugh and drink a beautiful cocktail by a patio fire while the rain falls outside. She is thinking about the meaning of property, ownership, and the complexities of participating in a marketplace she cannot resist. We laugh about the absurd purchase of an Italian outdoor shower. For a moment, I am ashamed of my lack of creative output, my engine burns with the market’s lingua franca, made in PowerPoint slides, sidebars, and obsession over finding the most inexpensive vendor for a bounce house rental. If I go outside, there is the bright sunlight, the ground bees looking to roost, the creek moving heavily over its bed.
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For years, the pandemic imposed terrible distance between friends, neighbors; each person a vector in which lurked the possibility of disease. But the pandemic also provides a harsh light to see that it has been years of diminishment, of the corporate habit of Worker and of Parent, in which one sees what is not uncommonly exposed by middle age lighting—the yielding of former selves—not the style of my clothes or the company I keep or the music or books that exist as shorthand for community—but what survives. I have squirreled away my ambition as if a season for eating will arrive, my rodent brain fixed on the next task. A talk at the Royal Society has a scholar holding forth on the meaning of middle age and the genesis of mid-life crisis, points to all the familiar touchstones of expectation, the accretion of what should be, marbling of our meat. It is a product, the scholar holds forth, of culture and environment, hardly biological but an historic sociocultural phenomenon reaching backwards into time. It is, he claims, inevitable to feel unmoored in middle age, pandemic or no. Let me start here then, at the eternal middle, where I have some knowledge of what not to do and more fear about what I could lose moving forward. In this place, the onus for creation is on me and it has never been clearer. For now, we can choose to behave badly. Those we love are still alive and we can beg forgiveness the next day. We can pick up the phone and call our elderly relatives. We still have the opportunity. In the middle, all is not lost, we live in a state of tensions, of choice. I once believed that the profession, the house, the physical costume created legibility. Why not? Little by little, the certainty in my ability to understand something of those surfaces eroded. Not a bad thing. But there is also a cataract that comes, atop what was once familiar, threatening, and strange. Judgment, security, confidence—all the little waves create their own current.
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We make our own paths in the world; we are complex, and our appetites are only partially known even to those we love most. We are secret animals, surviving in a society holding so much interior life. I want to feel the elasticity of saying something and of coming out the other side with new knowledge. On wonder then, that inverted lens, the first touchstone, surprise. Can middle age be a period of voluptuousness, of sublimity, of self-possession? “What is it you want?” and the answer is a wish, two wishes that commingle and come apart: security and creativity, form and freedom. The helix turns and turns, spinning out a code for different worlds. The promise should elicit optimism because the centrifuge still spins and I still expect that our lives can be saved and purified.