Peripheral Visions

out one pattern from the mass and recognizing a kinship to it. To conserve and focus compassion, we often depend on single images, a poster child who represents a whole generation devastated, the spotted owl who stands for the preservation of an entire ecosystem.
    Like the design of a Persian garden or a carpet, the stained glass mandala reflects a cosmology, a theory of the universe, which it asserts. I could state that theory of the universe without accepting its complex elegance, but I remain moved and more than half persuaded by the artistry in glass. Its circularity argues a theory of perfection that will affect my day-to-day living and my attitude toward dying; its color suggests a hierarchy of values under heaven; its silence more than half-persuades me that the organ is playing the music of the spheres. Had I lived in the time when its prototypes were built, I would have found its argument overwhelming, for in those days most interiors were dark and unfinished, candles were expensive, and the drama of the liturgy put every other performance to shame.
    We have been taught to see in new ways because of the distances we travel casually and the extraordinary sights we see on television and movie screens. A medieval peasant would have seen this window as awesome. A modern adolescent can see it and name it as “awesome” and mean something quite different. It is worth studying the attenuation of the dramas and authority of the church that has occurred over the last two or three centuries, for it prefigures a similar attenuation of the authority of education, for many of the same reasons, and government may be next.
    Both interior and exterior landscapes can be made banal, drained of significance. Yet vision can be enriched as well as impoverished. Often symbols are infused with new meaning. We have the possibility of borrowing the stained-glass mandala to refer to the living planet of which we are part, setting it beside the actual photograph of the earth taken from space, making the medieval fascination with circularity a symbol of ecology. No other being that we know of, no generation in our history, is capable of juxtaposing these images or imagining that analogy. We live today with multiple representations, some we call science and some we call art, precise, abstract, vivid, and evocative, each one proposing new connections. I can hold the knowledge of these immensities in mind as I lift and hold the blue and green ball on my writing table, the “something blue” of this time and place.
    Ways of understanding are integrated works of art created by many minds, like cathedrals, as much masterpieces of the human spirit as the Greek tragedies or the paintings of the Renaissance. Human beings construct meaning as spiders make webs—or as appropriate enzymes make proteins. This is how we survive, our primary evolutionary business. We differ from other species in that clusters of human beings have constructed alternative visions to be passed on, often reshaping them in the passing. We live, more than any previous generation, in an era where these visions meet, each potentially compensating for the blind spots of the other. If we can find ways of responding as individuals to multiple patterns of meaning, enriching rather than displacing those traditional to any one group, this can make a momentous difference to the well-being of individuals and the fate of the earth. What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others?
    With the instruments and findings of science we can refine a given pattern of perception, but the mental imposition of a pattern of meaning is the only way to encounter the world. Without it we are effectively blind. We move through metaphors and analogies, learning through mistakes. We necessarily learn in every generation to put our faith in a flat and solid earth, learned with the first steps, even as we unlearn the containing sphere of the womb; then we learn that the flatness too is an artifact of perception. The rhetoric of merely, dismissing these makeshifts of understanding, suggests that there is some stripped-down way of knowing the world, but there is no alternative starting place. In the end, it is possible to combine the sense of being a part of a larger whole with the sense of riding a sphere through space, to combine the assurance of inclusion with solitude.
    It is not only in memories of childhood that moments of