With the release of the new Rolling Stones record, I have found myself less interested in the songs than in Mick Jagger’s interviews. He speaks about John Lennon, David Bowie, Little Richard, the judgments of the press, the strange experience of performing before a stadium audience, and the privilege of lived past so many contemporaries. Here is a man in his eighties stepping out of a limousine, walking carefully over curbs and barriers. Yet a few hours later he occupies a stage where tens of thousands still project onto him the image of the tireless twenty-five-year-old. There is the biological body, obedient to time, gravity, and arthritis. Then there is the symbolic body, in our collective imagination. We know intellectually that these are elderly men. Emotionally, we continue to think about their youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is that why I’m watching?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe it is an unspoken inquiry into mortality. How does charisma age? What becomes of rebellion when the rebel qualifies for a senior’s discount? Does the stage preserve something that time ordinarily erodes, or does it merely postpone our willingness to notice? There is no escape from aging, only different ways of inhabiting it. Maybe that is the deeper performance now. Not another guitar riff. The quiet philosophical spectacle of watching someone carry an identity that belongs simultaneously to youth and old age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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