Page 45 - The Irony Board
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Into the Body
Shifting poles
Youth molded by
Attraction’s force
Aged hard can’t find
Its fickle source.
A recurrent character in folklore and literature is the bumbling
but lecherous old fool. The adoption of behavior appropriate to the
later seasons of life is lacking in this type of senior citizen. He
exhibits neither wisdom nor restraint, but continues upon a rigid
course of self-gratification established in younger days.
The imagery of this epigram is drawn from geological history.
The magnetic fields of molten rock align with Earth’s magnetic
poles, remaining fixed once the stratum has solidified. That pole has
wandered about the planet’s longitudinal pole (rotational axis)
constantly through the ages, as demonstrated by dating the different
magnetic orientations of rocks from different eons. Gluckman’s
analogy, then, hinges on the pun in “attraction”: what changes from
youth to age is, in Freudian terms, the focus of libido, migrating
along the human axis of rotation, the spinal column. If an older
person has not sublimated sexual desire into intellectual pursuits, he
will no longer find the fixated needle of his compass pointing in the
right direction.
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