Composing a Life

projects, too.
    The usual words fit even less well when I apply them to myself as the fifth member of the group, to me interviewing myself, asymmetry within symmetry. Women have been particularly interested in the notion of reflexivity, of looking inward as well as outward. Perhaps this is because we are not caught in the idea that every inspection involves an inspector and an inspectee, one inevitably dominant, the other vulnerable.
    When I search for a word for my relationship with the women described in this book, I feel a need for a term that would assert both collegiality and the fact that the process is made possible by our differences. The thesaurus betrays me, denying me a term that affirms both symmetry and complementarity. The gap in the language parallels a gap in the culture. We are rich in words that describe symmetrical relationships, from buddy to rival to colleague. We are also rich in words that describe strongly asymmetrical relationships, many of which imply hierarchy and have curious undertones of exploitation or dominance. But none of the words meets my needs.
    This puzzlement that afflicts me is compounded when I ask these four women about their other relationships. All have many dimensions of difference, never steadily symmetrical, even though we may describe them with symmetrical language. Johnnetta laughed when I pressed her to describe the men and women she felt closest to in her years of research in Cuba, people who were surely both friends and informants. “This sounds like grade school,” she said, “everyone saying, who’s your ‘ABC’—who’s your ‘ace boon coon’?” But then she talked me through a rich network of relationships, some of them going back more than a decade to her first trip to Cuba, with artists and doctors and party officials, men and women—relationships of mutual discovery too different to rank in the grade school manner and indeed so different as to almost need separate words for each. These relationships are difficult to sort in other ways, too; people who at one moment acted as guides, at another as students. We are all aware of the importance of mentoring today, but the line between mentor and friend is evanescent. Friends guide and learn from each other, especially in unexplored terrain.
    Many years ago, I heard a sermon preached by a Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Nechung Rinpoche. This sermon comes back to haunt my thinking about human relationships and indeed coaxes me beyond human relationships to a vision of relationships throughout the living world. His sermon was a traditional meditation, he explained, developed to lead toward compassion for all sentient beings. He pointed out that we are all—humans, birds, insects, mammals—passing through multiple reincarnations, in and out of these various forms, and we have been doing this throughout eternity. Because time is infinite, so too is the number of reincarnations, so that all possible combinations must have occurred. It follows that I can contemplate any other sentient being—the dog sleeping on the rug by my feet who sighs deeply from time to time, the bird that hunts small insects across the window pane and taps and flutters against it again and again, the wasp caught in the screen, the next person to ring my telephone—and reflect that somewhere in that infinity of time, in some unknown form, this other being was my mother. And from this recognition, the monk said, it is possible to arrive at compassion for all sentient beings.
    The monk was a small man, standing in his orange robes and wrinkled by many years of age and exile. He paused at that point, looking a little weary, and said, “You know, I don’t find that my American students always feel that way about their mothers. So I advise them instead to meditate on the recognition of the best friend.”
    The monk was right at two levels about Americans. American men are firmly encouraged to move away from closeness to their mothers, with really strong ties considered slightly pathological, not quite manly. This is part of an emphasis on emotional separation and autonomy that may hamper certain kinds of intimacy—or even compassion—for many men throughout their lives. At a more abstract level, the monk recognized that the ethical impulse of American culture is toward symmetry. When we call it equality, it is both our best and our worst passion, as central to our ethical understanding as the impulse of compassion is to a Buddhist. When we