When I reached my intellectual prime is near-impossible to pin down, but my favorite guess—mainly, I suspect, because it’s a standardly Interesting Number, is the age of fifty.  One thing that makes the choice near-impossible is how to compare one’s breakthrough understanding of his subject (or, in my case, one of them) with his later, very gradual efforts to make that understanding full, coherent, and—perhaps most important, and definitely most difficult—accessible to others.

I came up with the basis, still unchanged except superficially, of my knowlecular psychology at the age of 26 and don’t feel I’ve yet made it full, coherent and accessible, although I’ve had many breakthroughs that (in my view, valuably) expanded it, and continuously simplified and clarified it—while simultaneously, alas, complicating and muddying it.

My peak as a poet is much easier to identify, although I’m uncertain of the exact dates involved.¹

My major breakthrough into long division poetry (after a minor breakthrough into mathematical poetry twenty years or so previous that I didn’t go anywhere with for fifteen years or more) happened when I was around fifty-five; my much less consequential breakthrough into my Poem poems occurred at about the same time.  Two definite peaks that all that nothing that followed reached although I am sure some of the poems I later made were my best till then.  I contend that making one’s best poem does not require more or even as much, intelligence, talent, or whatever, as making one’s first successful poem that is significantly and valuably different from all the other poems one has composed.  In fact, coming up with a bad poem may require more skill than making a very good one if the bad one is new in a wonderfully exploitable way.²

In short, I think I peaked as a poet at the age of 55, then held my own pretty much until recently, when I’ve become substantially less productive than I’d been between 55 and 70.  I don’t think the level of my poems has dropped, just the number of them.  An interesting possibility is that I may still compose the visiopoetic epic I’ve wanted someday to.  What kind of peak would it be?  It would probably be my major work as a poet.  I’m pretty sure it would include several poems I already consider major—for me.  But the intelligence and/or related abilities I’d need to bring it off would not need to be at the high level they once were, or even all that close to it.

I realize that I’ve not done much work on my psychology since I turned 70 or 71, either.  I want to pull it together into a unified whole the same way I hope to pull together my poetry into a unified epic.  Again, it would not take what its discovery and later additions and improvements did.

I don’t know of any thinker or artist who did anything after turning 70 or so that greatly changed the over-all value of his work as a whole.  Picasso, for instance, turning out hundreds of works, some of them as fine as anything he’d previously done, but meaning he’d made 654 masterpieces instead of only 611: so what?  We don’t really need them, happy as we should be to have them.  (For one thing, others are carrying on from where he left off—something true of all the other great artists, and thinkers who went on to do valuable work after 70.)

In every other way, people over 70 are nothing like they were at 35 or even 55.  For most jobs, a businessman would be stupid to hire someone that old instead of a much younger person.  Affirmative action will no doubt soon force him to.  As a matter of fact, I think there have been several cases of elderly farts successfully suing businesses that fired them.

Odd, the idea I had that sparked this discussion I almost left the discussion without mentioning.  It concerns the inability of elderly farts to acquire data significantly new to them.  In simplest terms, it concerns how these people stop reading complex books.  I was thinking of myself, of how it’s been, what, twenty years, since I read the equivalent of an undergraduate textbook on anything?!  My thesis, which I hope to get to tomorrow, is that we oldsters can no long fit knowleplexes larger than a certain not-very-large size into our brains—because of the size and complexity of the structures we’ve already erected in them.

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¹ I believe my diary has the particulars, or most of them, but I’m certainly not going to research it right now

 ² As Gertrude Stein’s specimens of prose (evocature, a sub-category of prose, is what I call the kind of literature they are) in Tender Buttons have been for many, albeit not her (although I would call a few of them more successful than not).

Egalapsychosis: the insane belief that no one is inferior in any way to anyone else.  A mental dysfunctionality common to American liberals.

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After typing the beginning of a short essay on my ageism, I found out I had suddenly gotten a day behind here.  So I needed to do two entries.  I decided the one for yesterday would be brief, and about old age since I’d already put it in that category.  Ergo, my opinion about being old: it stinks.  More about it in my entry for today.

As for the 18th of September, I did get something done on it: my latest Scientific American blog entry, although it won’t posted until Saturday, or maybe late Friday night.  I also worked on multiplication poems for dogs, one for my dentist and one for a local writer-friend.  I had silly ideas for a while that I could make money selling personalized copies of the thing, but soon realized there was no chance of that–although I hope to try it.

Okay, now to try to get today’s entry done, in spite of being already all worn out.

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