Peripheral Visions

by my editor, who recognized another of my concerns, and I set out other mementos around the room. The old verse about what a bride should wear to her wedding is a good rule for all transitions, “Something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue.” At one time, I thought the blue was there only to provide a rhyme. Then I wondered whether it was included as a reminder of the sorrows and failures that lurk within any new commitment. Once the word was set into the tradition, a dozen interpretations would have been invented, in the human habit of seeking for meaning. Today on my worktable the blue and green of the miniature globe stand for the integration necessary for life, waters where the ammonites propelled themselves long ago, the ponds drying up and leaving frogs and salamanders bereft. The rhyme suggests not miscellany but the complex spiral of exchange from generation to generation, replication and recombination.

Double Helix
    T HERE WAS A LOT OF SNOW in New Hampshire during the winter I was at the MacDowell Colony, turning the route to my studio into Heraclitus’s river, different at every passing. As my writing moved along, forage became scarce in the woods, and I often saw deer. Each return over the same ground represented layers of change: in me, in my manuscript, in the landscape.
    Even what appears to be a repetition is often a return at the next level of a spiral or, more mysteriously, the other side of a Möbius strip. Take a narrow strip of paper about six inches long and give it a single twist before taping the ends together. Then start anywhere to draw a continuous line along the surface. The first return will be to the opposite side of the paper; only on the second full round will you meet the beginning of your line, “And know the place for the first time.” Mathematicians call this a one-sided surface since the entire surface can be covered without ever lifting the pencil.
    Barkev reminded me of the Möbius strip when I started talking about spirals, so I made one to put on the table with my other visual aids, a new-old desk friend constructed from paper. My desk was becoming crowded, not by these few objects but by the range of meanings they evoked. Much of my writing consists of taking ideas that are coiled within one another. Before spinning and weaving, wool must be carded, and in the same way thoughts must be opened into sequential prose. It would not do to lay them out too precisely, however, for I have wanted to convey something of the process of learning, and most learning is not linear. Planning for the classroom, we sometimes present learning in linear sequences, which may be part of what makes classroom learning onerous: this concept must precede that, must be fully grasped before the next is presented.
    Learning outside the classroom is not like that. Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications. The little boy staring wide-eyed at the sacrifice of a sheep may one day be a hajji , one who has completed the Meccan pilgrimage and seen the sacrifices and the Holy Cities and returned home looking at ordinary life differently. The effect of such partial repetition is to heighten contrasts, sharpen the differences created by context. A son will experience the Feast of Sacrifice differently as his father ages, discovering new pleasure if the family becomes prosperous enough to buy its own sheep. Through the years family constellations will shift and the society regroup as his own body learns about strength and illness, sex and dying. Morals are rarely drawn, and the comparisons are not made explicit, but anyone who has wept at a wedding knows that the past and the future are present in each single ceremonial.
    In the same way, the stories told here all have more meaning than I know how to unpack in the context of a single chapter, and the objects on my desk will shift to represent different concepts. It may be a good idea to begin reading from the beginning, but the reader who returns from the end to the beginning will find “a ring when it’s rolling” that has no end. We will not finish with the Persian garden in one visit, or the Passover meal, or the Filipino rage at arrogant Spanish noses. In recent years, I have been learning not only about improvisation as a mode of participation and observation in the present but about the possibility of recycling the