OUR BIOLOGICAL CALENDAR

In our time, the medical profession, and through it, the mass media, have taken an interest in the study of the process of dying. In schools there is more talk about death than ever before. Gerontology looks for ways to ease the symptoms of old age.

But the very problem of aging and dying remains timidly on the periphery.

As a result, science and pedagogy give more attention to the cosmetics, i.e. trying to push the problem away instead of dealing with it at its very core.

But the only true question is this: Is it possible to stop the process of aging and dying? We know of course that the cycle of birth, breeding and dying is at the base of the ecological and social equilibrium. But this doesn’t answer the question: Must aging and dying be the inseparable companions of life?

Old age and natural death do not exist among unicellulars. So this "natural process" of aging and dying showed up relatively late in the life history of our planet.

Roughly speaking, the multicellulars poison themselves with their own excretions and that’s "old age" and finally death. Each species possesses its own biological calendar.

A 15 year old dog is an old dog, while a human of the same age is adolescent. The human is one of the slowest aging species, and is perhaps unique in nature with its big variations on an individual scale. There are people who keep youthfulness and longevity more than others. So, there must exist a self defense mechanism for species or individuals against aging and death. This alone should impel us to take an interest in this self defense. Science, in this matter, tiptoes in the same place — perhaps because, as in the struggle with cancer, it doesn’t know from which point start. The Human differs from othere species in behaviour and intelligence. It would be tempting then to try to link the human mental faculties with longevity. In other words we could ask if intelligence serves only as a weapon against external adversity or if it may serve also on the internal — organic — front.

In the affirmative case the prolongation of youth and life could be a psychosomatic affair. The human could have developed such a self-defense mechanism as, among species, he is perhaps unique in predicting death and living constantly in its shadow.

The French painter Le Bel (XVI-XVII c.) wrote: "in the love of painting... one feels a pleasant warmth in the chest. The pulse beats slow and regularly. Digestion is easier. Thus, this passion is good for the health." Le Bel is perhaps the first observer of psychosomatic phenemona who makes us think that creativity for granted; biologists and physiologists are interested in creative activities only as consumers after their working hours, leaving it professionally to psychologists and philosophers. As for the creators themselves. Nevertheless, creativity could be an expression of organic "hunger" similar to other hungers.

If aging is a sickness as gerontology considers it, it’s a painless sickness. We don’t feel the process of aging, only its most advanced consequences. But an "anti-aging" instinct may be present in the body and creativity may be its expression.

If we study the life stories of the famous creators, those who did not die prematurely because of some sickness, we see that those were individuals who held youth and longevity more than others (even in appearance). The 90 year old Titian exclaimed, "Let me live 10 years more and I will learn how to paint".

We have also Shaw, Tolstoy, Goethe, Bach, and many others. The constant nourishment of the positive emotions — "positive stress" — might be the motor of longevity typical to creators and great mystics. The mystical trance common to all religions, gives its adepts, according to many testimonies, a power of endurance and legendary longevity. An english poet of the XV c. wrote: "Death — you too must die."

Life is the enemy of death and all the "high" experiences, creative or mystical, could be the highest expression of life. While creating we perhaps obey some biological order, and without knowing it we chase far away from us the spectre of aging and death. Perhaps one day the human will understand and dominate the mechanism of a long, very long, youth and life.

WILLIAM MARKIEWICZ