Today's Yesterday's: Escher's lesson

Tomorrow, and manana, and tomorrow slip by at panting pace from day to day till the end of time when yesterdays have lit our way to the infinite Fini. And so it goes, the muses not willing to help my musing on Change as creator of character as in the two major stereotypes: the conformist, insistently traditional, fearful of and enraged by change, or the nonconformist, insistently optional, impatient with and bored by tradition. How one confronts change defines his age and predominant traits. Which is more important: today or yesterday? Escher's lesson. Equal rights to interfacing, my title.
Anyway, I had mentioned the roads leading to my gridlock over change, forgetting one and since thinking of another. The one I forgot that affected my current thinking and subject choice was Kurt Wallander and his fellow police staff of Ystad, Sweden, constantly grousing about the cultural changes, especially toward more violence, occurring in an excellent detective series by Henning Mankell that I am pleasuring my way through. The books are set in the 1990s mostly, confronting several current issues: The White Lioness, e.g., deals with elaborate preparations to assassinate Nelson Mandela in South Africa; The Dogs of Riga deals with Soviet-bloc nations trying to leap into a democratic present still chained sadly by grim remnants of communist totalitarianism. All except these two novels stay in Sweden, the proudly progressive Scandinavian state whose prime minister, Olof Palme, was gunned down outside a cinema in Stockholm in 1986. In his 40s, a bit overweight and underexercised, recently divorced, with a difficult daughter and an even more difficult father, Mankell's detective, Kurt Wallander, thinks his way intuitively through very grim murders while philosophizing on social changes. His father is a real study in conservative traditionalism, a painter who paints only one landscape over and over, reminding me of my sister's boyfriend, a rigidly conformist carpenter who does beautiful work but who, in our first acquaintance, went into an irrational tirade about an award-winning, very creative building that was in response to an announced experiment to avoid all right angles or "the usual," putting us at odds from that event forward. Likewise, lacking Wallander's intuition, the other Ystad police complain as youth, technology, violence (social collision) flood into their formerly safe backwater.
The brand-new road that suddenly fed into my traffic jam was a cinematic result of our hugely irrational culture, one confounding time, producing poignance, reminiscent of children having to deal with multiple Santas. In our present celebrity-drunk religiosity, we have to deal with several media effects based on Image, unfortunately key to our politics as well as other social insanities or inanities (depending on perspective). What does one do as an aging American who can turn on his TV and see Jimmy Stewart as the bit player from the 1930s become the suave wealthy suitor meeting a wildly eccentric family in You Can't Take It With You (1938) become the seasonal Christmas hero of It's a Wonderful Life (1946) become the invisible rabbit's pal of Harvey (1950) to the wheelchair detective of Rear Window (1954) to a beloved white-headed, quivery voiced elderly spokesman in his dignified 80s, a long lesson in change and mortality. Or, worse, deal with June Allyson and Ernest Borgnine shilling embarrassing products in their last years or William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy playing cute for insurance or botox-blimped Elizabeth Taylor, whose beauty and violet eyes remain a prototype from The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954). Sometimes it works as when Leslie Nielsen mocks his aging or Ron Howard (born in 1954) grows from Opie Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show (1960s) and the lisping Winthrop Paroo of The Music Man (1962) to a bald movie-directing genius . And it is exciting to discover Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) or in Boris Karloff's The Terror (1963), to work backwards, so to speak, and then to judge the distance he's come, to judge how he's dealt with aging, change. The examples are legion of celebrities arcing from unwrinkled youth and fame to plump, dewlapped elderly clinging on or disappearing. (Plastic surgery, incidentally, cannot do much with the chin or hands, if you want to accurately judge a person's age.) Our media cult of youthful beauty demands we fight the gravity of age sagging our excess flesh and arthritic limbs downward while we gain experiential knowledge to uncertain ends. What kind of cultural comment is that?
I was supposed to talk about my reunion with an ex-student of mine. Reunions are very risky: if familial, exposing one to relatives he may prefer distance to; if otherwise, dauntingly disappointing as my 40th college reunion was. Who the hell were all these smug, wrinkled old white-haired coots? How did the "most popular" cheerleader, as she brazenly reminded us, become such a homely old matronly bore? But, of course, I get my answer in the mirror every morning. My reunion with Forrest went very well, as I met his fiancee, his generously hospitable older sister and brother-in-law, his lively, petite mother (surely in her 80s) who has been back to the Swiss homeland many times. Forrest hasn't changed much, tall, slim, neither wrinkled nor very grey-haired, as thoughtful as ever. What I brought him in for here was not to deal with 1971, when we last saw each other, but as introduction to my grandparents on the farm, for, as I said, while his brother-in-law and I were discussing times past on farms not in Proustian style but pragmatically, Forrest asked innocently enough what life was like before REA, which re-wound my movie mentality to the 1940s and 1950s. My grandparents didn't get electricity until about the time I was in high school. I have to remember their two farms the next time. (I won't be a bright Annie, singing out "Tomorrow.")