Composing a Life

commitments and multiple beginnings as an emerging pattern rather than an aberration, it takes no more than a second look to discover the models for that reinvention on every side, to look for the followers of visions that are not fixed but that evolve from day to day. Each such model, like each individual work of art, is a comment about the world outside the frame. Just as change stimulates us to look for more abstract constancies, so the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully pieced together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world.

TWO
IN THE COMPANY OF FRIENDS

    A LTHOUGH I HAVE NEVER SEEN HER DANCE , I have always thought of Joan as a dancer, whatever work she was doing, tall and graceful and athletic, with practical strong hands. She wears clothes that are fluid and uncluttered, flaring skirts and turtleneck sweaters and handwoven shawls. She often wears gray or black, which provides a background for jewelry of her own design and making. Often, her jewelry combines interesting beads from all over the world, the human concerns of prayer and exchange and mnemonic expressed in the fashioning of material counters. Joan explored the range of meaning of beads in her book,
The Universal Bead
, so every necklace or pair of earrings that she makes is shaped by scholarship as well as artistry. She has represented to me a distinctive relationship with the physical and material world, one in which the careful handling of metal or ceramic or wool becomes an expression of more abstract issues of human caring and strength.
    Women’s lives have always been grounded in the physical by the rhythms of their bodies and the giving and receiving of concrete and specific tokens of love, a ring or a teaspoon of cough syrup. Whenever this project has led me into academic abstractions about roles and institutions, I have used my images of Joan to keep me rooted in the loving experience of the sensory and the material. Joan is the oldest of the women who worked with me on this project. She seems to know fully who she is and how the pieces of her life fit together. She has combined her youthful identity as a dancer with her later work as a craftsperson and writer into a single unity, just as each of us, in our different landscapes, composes a life out of the materials that come to hand.
    Ellen Bassuk, a physician and psychiatrist, is the youngest in the group and my most recent acquaintance. I met her in 1983 at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, a women’s center for advanced studies, during a period of transition in both our lives, when I was working on a memoir of my parents. I became fascinated by Ellen’s work when she gave the colloquium that each Bunting fellow gives, speaking of the men and women she had interviewed and tested in Boston’s shelters for the homeless. Standing by the podium, with the disheveled images of loneliness and despair projected on a screen behind her, she was concerned and professional, and yet she projected an undercurrent of passion.
    In those days, homelessness was just beginning to be a matter of national concern, and the issue was new to me. Ellen had become aware of it early, publishing her first related research in 1976. She had tracked the slow increase in chronically ill and isolated patients in the emergency room at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, where she directed the emergency psychiatric service. Because she recognized the echo of an earlier period when she was assigned as a psychiatric resident to a state mental hospital, she was one of the first to draw the connection between the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that occurred in the seventies and the rise in homelessness.
    “Emergency services are the court of last resort,” she explained to me. “They cater to people who are not in the system and don’t have insurance, who want to remain anonymous and don’t want to deal with fixed hours or appointments. Compared to the rest of the population in the hospital, they are poorer and sicker, with a lot fewer psychosocial supports. The emergency room is the first place that reflects changes in social policy that uproot people, so when deinstitutionalization occurred, the ER was the first place that began to see the chronics in any numbers.”
    Ellen’s career has involved accepting undesirable