Creativity in Later Life

Beyond Late Style

David Amigoni, Gordon McMullan, David Amigoni, Gordon McMullan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367582494
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This collection begins with two premises: that our understanding of the nature and forms of creativity in later life remains limited and that dialogue between specialists in gerontology, the arts and humanities can produce the crucial new insights that are so obviously needed. Representing the outcome of ongoing dialogue across the disciplinary divide, the contributions of this volume reflect anew on what we share and how we differ; creating new narratives so as to build an understanding of late-life creativity that goes far beyond the narrow confines of the pervasively received idea of 'late style'.

Creativity in Later Life encompasses a range of personal reflections and discussions of the boundaries of creativity, including:

• Canonical artistic achievements to community art projects
• Narratives of carers for those living with dementia
• Analyses of creative theory

Through these insightful chapters, the authors consequently offer an understanding of creativity in later life as varied, socialised and - above all - located in the cultural and economic circumstances of the here and now.

This title will appeal to academics, practitioners and students in the various gerontological, arts and humanities fields; and to anyone with an interest in the nature of creativity in later life and the forms it takes.

Part I

The challenges of late-life creativity

1 Imagining otherwise

The disciplinary identity of gerontology

Ruth Ray Karpen

Today I assume the role of advocate for the humanities. In terms of our conference agenda, I will be addressing this question: how can or should our primary subjects – the study of ageing and old age – affect the disciplinary identity of gerontology? This issue of disciplinarity and identity – what is gerontology, and what is a gerontologist – has been a defining issue of my career. Because I was formally trained in rhetoric and linguistics and informally trained myself in gerontology, I have always felt the need to carve out a place for my work in this field, which has been so much identified with medicine and the social sciences.

I take as my point of departure a recent quote from Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors and Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. In an article entitled, ‘Fighting for the Humanities’, Nelson responds to the critique that the humanities are not self-sustaining in a market economy and are not crucial to the mission of higher education in America. Funders and the general public readily accept the need for scientific research but they ‘often – unreflectively, uncritically, and in a learned form of self-deception – assume that we largely know ourselves and our history’ (Nelson 2012). The same might be said of the general attitude toward age research: people support the scientific study of ageing, particularly if it will tell them how not to get old, but they do not as readily accept the need for artistic or humanistic studies of ageing, nor do they understand the importance of questioning common beliefs and attitudes about old age, even when these beliefs are negative and limiting of human potential. This is why the world needs the humanities – to penetrate illusions and challenge what we think we know and need to know. As Nelson reminds us, ‘[t]he humanities are a project of both learning and unlearning, of celebrating old and new achievements while working to divest ourselves of error and blindness’. Scholars in the humanities are engaged in the ongoing project of rethinking, questioning and reassessing, recovering knowledge lost and forgotten, and reminding us that there are many ways of knowing. Unlike scientists, who try to control as many variables as possible, humanists embrace the unknown. They deal in complexity, ambiguity, instability and contradiction. Curious, doubtful, skeptical, contemplative, reflective, probing, speculating, critical – this is the humanistic turn of mind. The humanistic disciplines – languages and linguistics, philosophy and rhetoric, history, literature and literary criticism, theology, film and cultural studies – have much to offer in times of rapid change and uncertainty. Trained to compare, interpret and synthesise, humanists offer essential skills to an Information Age in which data proliferate.

Why does gerontology, in particular, need the humanities and humanistic scholars? Here is a brief summary, in list form, of what cultural historian Thomas Cole and I said in the Introduction to our Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging (Cole and Ray 2010). We rather grandly titled this chapter, ‘The Humanistic Study of Aging, Past and Present, or Why Gerontology Still Needs Interpretive Inquiry’. We said that humanistic study is needed

• to remind age researchers that moral and spiritual issues are just as important as medical and social ones;
• to hold researchers to a higher standard by showing the limitations of highly specialised, fragmented studies that oversimplify the complex phenomenon that is ageing;
• to validate research that is deeply thoughtful, creative and reflective, and to reinforce the importance of language, image, metaphor, emotion, imagination, the body and lived experience;
• to explore the limits and conditions of the field of gerontology itself; and
• to keep raising the most basic human questions: Why do we grow old, not just biologically but existentially? How does growing old affect cultures, families and individuals? How is the ageing process changing? How is the experience of old age similar to and different from experiences in the past? How will it be different in the future? Why should we care about old people, especially when we are not old ourselves?

These questions are highly interdisciplinary or, more precisely, transdisciplinary. Answering them necessitates research that cuts across academic specialities and integrates methods and findings from many disciplines. Gerontology is typically characterised as already multidisciplinary, but in practice, these disciplines function alongside each other with little interaction or reciprocity. Rather than expressing an integrated field, ‘multi-disciplinarity’ means that we have many gerontologies – geriatric research for those in medicine, social gerontology for social scientists, critical gerontology for theorists, cultural gerontology for anthropologists, humanistic gerontology for humanists. The fact that we rarely speak to each other, and in fact sometimes speak at cross purposes, is a point Stephen Katz made 15 years ago in his Foucault-inspired critique of the field, Disciplining Old Age (Katz 1996). Such fragmentation is now simply untenable. The pallid binaries of science and art, quantitative and qualitative, objective and subjective, must be retired. Cathy Davidson, Chair of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, puts a finer point on the interrelationship of science and the humanities in our technology-driven twenty-first century: ‘Numbers matter to humanists’, she says. ‘Humanistic interpretive skills matter to a data-rich world. [We need] skillful, critical, creative interpreters of data … . [of] reading, writing and arithmetic. Together again, at last’ (p. 17). Much of the best scholarship today in areas such as ecological studies, cultural and new media studies, and the medical humanities, is deliberately and self-consciously interdisciplinary. These scholars ask questions and tackle problems that cannot possibly be addressed from the narrow confines of a single discipline or a single research method. What distinguishes this work as ‘humanistic’ is its intent – greater understanding of the human condition in all its complexity – and its perspective on knowledge-making as contextual, flexible, synthetic and creative.

There are some gerontologists doing interdisciplinary work of this kind, and their work can help us imagine a bigger place for gerontologists in the world. One example is Helen Small, whose trenchant book, The Long Life, though primarily a work of philosophy and literary criticism, also reflects extensive reading in the biology of ageing. Small draws on a long history in Western philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle, a range of literary texts to help her explain basic philosophical principles and evolutionary theory to explain why, how and to what effect the human ages. She concludes that we need to take a long view so as to contextualize ageing. In her words, ‘we understand age best when we view it, not as a problem apart, but always connected into larger philosophical considerations’ (Small 2007, p. 266). These considerations involve perennial questions that apply across time and place and across the life course: What is a person? What is a good life? What does it mean to be happy? What can we know by thinking? What else can we know, beyond thinking? In academic terms, old age focuses our attention on issues of ‘epistemology, virtue, justice, self-interest, metaphysics’ and, not the least, what it means to be human (p. 272).

A second example of an interdisciplinary scholar in gerontology is Simon Biggs, whose humanistic impulse is reflected in the title of his book, The Mature Imagination (1999). Biggs builds on Freudian and Jungian psychology, theories of postmodern ageing, community care and policy studies to argue the need for legitimating spaces in society that ‘contain’ ageing in all its variety. Such spaces, be they located in communities, institutions or the collective imagination, help mature adults to nurture emerging age identities and negotiate a meaningful place for themselves in a world that so often dismisses old people. The ‘mature imagination’, in Biggs’s formulation, is a coping strategy, a means to continue developing as human beings from midlife through deep old age, despite what society says about the limitations of age. The mature imagination is also a paradox, a juxtaposition of the known and the unknown. ‘Maturity’, scientifically studied by cognitive psychologists, traditionally connotes completion. ‘Imagination’, on the other hand, connotes a moving beyond the known into the realm of possibility – areas more often explored by artists, musicians and writers. All of us in midlife and beyond, including researchers in gerontology, need a mature imagination to make sense of, in Biggs’s words, the ‘contradiction between the apprehension of completion and the promise of further and deeper … development’ (Biggs 1999, p. 2).

This brings me to the purpose of scholarship on ageing and old age. If twenty-first century gerontologists, as I have argued, should be conversant in multiple fields and interdisciplinary in purpose and scope, we must also be able to speak to scholars in other disciplines and to the larger public outside the university. Otherwise, we are spinning our wheels in obscurity. I have two suggestions for making our research more relevant to a wider audience:

1. We must take up issues that matter to most people in and out of the academy, keeping in mind that, as the great sociologist C. Wright Mills told us over 50 years ago, personal troubles often reflect larger social problems. My 60-year-old friend’s inability to pay for the knee-replacement surgery that would get her out of a wheelchair, for example, is the result of long-term unemployment and lack of a national health care plan. This sociological fact calls for researchers to develop what Mills called a ‘sociological imagination’ – a quality of mind that leads to deeper ‘understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities’ (Mills 1959, p. 15, original emphasis). Developing and exercising this imagination requires that we scholars use both narrow and wide-angle lenses, engaging in micro and macro analyses to respond to the most pressing concerns of our time. In our forum today, then, we might discuss what makes ‘creative ageing’ a pressing issue of our time? We want to make sure this is a people’s issue, not just one for the gerontologists, and that our definitions of ‘creative’ are inclusive of everyday life and the attitudes, values, dreams and abilities of ordinary people. I suggest that we begin this conversation by converting the static noun phrase – ‘late-life creativity’ – into active verb phrases, such as ‘creating in later life’, ‘living and ageing creatively’ and ‘becoming more creative in our research and writing about creativity’.
2. Related to this issue of inclusivity, the writing we do about our research should be rigorous according to the standards of gerontology, but accessible to a broader range of readers. This kind of writing starts with the selection of subject matter and includes our orientation toward that subject. I think we would do well to adopt Mills’s process of inquiry: 1. Take up a big, important question that concerns many people; 2. Approach it with all the intellectual curiosity, creativity imagination and discipline you can muster; and 3. Write about it as if you were on a mission to bring great clarity to as many people as possible. Mills claimed that all really good scholars write in what he called ‘the context of presentation’, first presenting the material to themselves in a way that makes the most sense, and when they have it straight in their own minds, presenting it in a variety of venues, private, public and academic. These venues become ‘contexts of discovery’, where the scholar finds out that what seemed crystal clear to him or her is not nearly as obvious to other people (p. 222). This orientation to research would challenge the gerontologist to learn and explain why her or his work matters. Held to this standard, we would more likely assume the role of social change agent, extending the field of gerontology while also creating what feminist theorist Catriona Mackenzie (2000) calls ‘imaginative repertoires’ that assist us in thinking ‘otherwise’ about ageing and old age. We would create a more innovative cultural imaginary by resisting the ‘dominant cultural metaphors, symbols, images and representations’ (p. 125) that circulate in society. By introducing alternative images and counter narratives, gerontologists would help liberate the general public’s individual and collective imaginaries. Since the imagination has, as Mackenzie notes, both ‘affective force and cognitive power’, it can dislodge our habitual understandings and provide strong incentive for resistance and change (pp. 143–44). Without this creative force, we gerontologists will not likely move beyond our familiar disciplinary boundaries to envision a better life for any of us in old age.

References

Biggs, S. (1999) The Mature Imagination: Dynamics of Identity in Midlife and Beyond. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Cole, T. and R. Ray (2010) Introduction: The Humanistic Study of Aging Past and Present, or Why Gerontology Still Needs Interpretative Inquiry. In A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging, Eds T. Cole , R. Ray and R. Kastenbaum . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1–29.

Katz, S. (1996) Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge. Charlottesville, VI: University of Virginia Press.

Mackenzie, C. (2000) Imagining Oneself Otherwise. In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and The Social Self, Eds C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar . New York: Oxford University Press. 124–150.

Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nelson, Cary (2012) Fighting for the Humanities. Academe (American Association of University Professors). Jan–Feb .

Small, H. (2007) The Long Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 The singing voice in late life

Jane Manning

After 47 busy years travelling internationally as a singer specialising in contemporary music, I’m still enjoying a varied professional career, which includes a fair amount of singing as well as lecturing, coaching and writing. I have remained self-employed virtually throughout and am quite proud to have managed to sustain a freelance career well into my seventies. There were just two exceptions to the gypsy life. After leaving the Royal Academy of Music in 1960, I taught in a Norfolk school for 3 years before making my break for freedom, living as a student once more, for one blissful and crucially important year of intensive voice training in Switzerland. More recently, I enjoyed a Research Fellowship salary for 3 years, attached to Kingston University, which was an unexpected and welcome injection of regular earnings at a time when well-paid engagements were becoming less frequent. When you reach a certain age, people assume that you’ve given up singing in order to teach: ‘Where do you teach?’ is often their first question.

Now approaching 74, I’ve found it a huge advantage to be a late developer. I was always immature physically – the last to reach puberty in my class at school and the subject of sneering ridicule by classmates. I am still considered young for my age. At 17, my light schoolgirl soprano was not thought adequate for a singing career. At the Academy I went largely unnoticed, except for prowess in aural training and generally decent results on paper. Heavily-made-up Welsh ladies in their twenties tended to win all the singing prizes. My voice needed time to develop, and I now realise what a boon it was to be allowed to discover its possibilities gradually, away from the spotlight.

I can now perceive slight signs of ageing. Very few female singers seem to have continued well past the menopause, so one is somewhat alone in navigating the potential hurdles. As an organic instrument, and part of oneself, the voice is uniquely subject to the ravages of time, wear and tear. I’ve always been pre-occupied with technique and the need to acquire good habits of vocal production that will serve for all situations and repertoire. I put my voice under the microscope continually, looking for signs of deterioration. It is often the singer’s lot to be judged subjectively by others, according to highly personal tastes and prejudices. I am especially wary now when having to sing with a cold, as it can be hard to distinguish between the symptoms of ageing and temporary difficulties caused by the infection, and people are all too ready to jump to conclusions and claim evidence of decline.

I have to admit ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beyond late style
• Part I: The challenges of late-life creativity
• Part II: Rethinking late style
• Part III: The varieties of late-life creativity
• Part IV: Narrating dementia
• Part V: Old age, creativity and the late city
• Conclusion
• Index