Peripheral Visions

“When you come to the big square, look for signs.” For that looking, we can provide models for multiple kinds of attention, not attention paid like a tribute to an enforced lesson, but attention claimed and honed as a right of entry and a rite of initiation. You will always be acting under uncertainty. You will know the future when you get there. Only so can you make it your home.
    There is another sense in which learning can be coming home, for the process of learning turns a strange context into a familiar one, and finally into a habitation of mind and heart. The world we live in is the one we are able to perceive; it becomes gradually more intelligible and more accessible with the building up of coherent mental models. Learning to know a community or a landscape is a homecoming. Creating a vision of that community or landscape is homemaking.

    * Collect examples to show that the plural suffix written - s or - es has three pronunciations; which occurs where? To confirm that the choice of pronunciation depends on meaning as well as anatomy, compare the sounds of knees and niece or whores and horse . Then find the same pattern of variation in the regular suffix on verbs indicating the past, written - d or - ed . How elegant it is that the patterns are so similar.

The Seemly and the Comely
    L IKE MANY CITIES in the third world, Manila has huge areas of slum and squatter settlement, of which the most famous is Barrio Magsaysay in Tondo. Back in 1967, when my husband and I were living in Manila, I considered doing fieldwork there and visited several times with Filipino social scientists, but in the end research in the Marikina Valley seemed more workable. In those brief forays, however, visiting both squatter shacks and housing projects in Tondo, attentive to the dissonances imposed by extreme poverty and the need to make do with whatever is available, I found myself noticing harmony as well and seeing patterns in a different way.
    In remote rural villages, Filipinos traditionally live in small cubical dwellings raised on stilts and built of nipa palm and bamboo, with peaked roofs that drain off the heavy tropical rain. In the provinces you sometimes see elegant old wooden houses, built by the aristocrats of previous generations, preserving some of the same proportions on a larger scale. The windows are not glass but dozens of translucent white capiz shells mullioned in square frames.
    In Barrio Magsaysay, houses are made of shipping crates, scavenged billboards, flattened oilcans, and odds and ends of wood and metal. Walking between the haphazard rows of ramshackle dwellings, with their patchwork textures, your first impression is one of chaos and probable violence. Yet, just as you can sometimes recognize an adaptive pattern best when it is transferred from its original setting—watching a dog or a cat turning in circles a few times before lying down on a carpet where there are no ferns or grasses to flatten—the makeshift betrays an underlying pattern. It suddenly occurred to me that again and again, in the patchwork of squatter shacks, I was seeing not quite perfect squares. Window openings were square, walls were square, sections of fencing around tiny yards were square, doors were frequently divided into two near squares. The effect of this was that the hodgepodge of slum dwellings presented a spontaneous aesthetic order, one that I noticed more readily because it was strange to me, for the architectural aesthetics of the West are based not on squares but on rectangles. Perhaps my liking for patchwork quilts today comes from this recognition of an aesthetic order worked into the improvised housing of the very poor.
    On the outside of many of the shacks there were skillfully knotted and twisted ornaments made from the palms of Holy Week, like the woven ornament I have now on my studio wall. Rows of colorful croton plants and bougainvillea were often lined up in big, rusty oilcans, and the bushes around the houses were decked with emptied eggshells, like glowing white buds. Shacks were crowded together, blocking access for firefighting, unsupplied with electricity and running water. Yet working with very limited materials, the people of the district, migrants from the countryside, were constructing a world that was, what? Comely. Seemly.
    Once I began to look in that way, it was possible to see the lingering preference for near squares in other settings where the indigenous aesthetic was almost overwhelmed by