Peripheral Visions

what is ungoverned and spontaneous fits into a repeated form that feeds upon it.
    The timeless must flow into time to suggest a way of being in the world. This is expressed in the curious and paradoxical word practice : saying the words whose meaning you do not yet fully know but whose form may someday be so habitual that it feels spontaneous. It is not only in religion that learning can link the rare moments of sudden understanding with gradual change through practice, the longitudinal epiphanies. To practice—anything, playing the violin, extracting DNA in the laboratory, rock climbing, doing Zen meditation, bathing the baby—is to repeat what appears to be the same action over and over, attentively, mindfully, in a way that makes possible a gradual—almost imperceptible at times—process of change. Practice links the greatest virtuoso with the child beginning piano lessons and refutes the notion of learning as a single, one-way transfer of useful knowledge, a replacement of the unknown with the known. Communities of practice blur the line between aspirants and adepts because both are still developing. To attend—even when attending means sitting on the sidelines, like a medical student watching a surgical procedure—is to become a participant.
    The tasks that have provided the basic textures of human life, like farming and child care, can be experienced as menial and repetitive, but for some they are really gradual paths of learning, forms of practice that deepen from day to day with the piquancy of minute difference. From the outside, it seems that actors must find repeated performances deadly—the same lines and gestures, night after night—but they say that every performance can be different. The rejection of repetition puts the possibility of practice at risk.
    The liturgical movement was much concerned with authenticity or sincerity. When an action is sincere, we seem to believe, it comes spontaneously from within. Following a formula, as in reciting a prayer from a book or repeating prescribed gestures, would seem to be the antithesis of sincerity, yet such repetition can be the beginning of practice, so that words from a book eventually come from the heart. In much apparently spontaneous prayer, old words with the power to link the user to the faith of past centuries are paraphrased—only to become hackneyed as soon as they are spoken. Worry about sincerity is almost as self-defeating as worry about boredom, creating an internal division and spilling out to corrupt the arts and the texture of human relationships. Love must be expressed more often than it is felt. Living in unfamiliar cultures, learning to feel and express culturally appropriate emotions, I have been nagged by the issue of sincerity, yet this is a singularly American concern, which only arises in the context of a belief in some autonomous inner self separate from interactions with others.
    Western expatriates in Iran often criticized elaborate Iranian courtesies and the emphasis on keeping up appearances and the dangers of losing face as insincere. Yet these coexist in Iranian culture with a deep concern about integrity that is related to but not the same as American notions of sincerity. For one thing, honor and shame and public respect ( ab-e ru , “water of the face,” which can be taken away or spilled) are not entirely individual, for a man’s vulnerability to disgrace is connected with his whole family and especially his female relatives. Iranians regard disparities between inner and outer as an expected result of social life, yet they express a persistent nostalgia for a sort of purity ( safa-ye baten ) in which these are in harmony and a persistent suspicion that others may be dissembling. “The whole of ignoble conduct lies in falsehood,” said Kay-Ka’us ibn Iskandar, an eleventh-century Persian writer. “The essence of truth is the negation of ambivalence.”
    Weeping is a good example of the relationship between feeling and performance in Iran, for weeping is taken as evidence of overriding emotion breaking down the disparity between internal and external, yet it is also a major ritual activity. One of the principal religious activities of Shiite Islam, the form commonest in Iran, is mourning the deaths of the imams, Muhammad’s descendants through his daughter Fatima, believed by Shiites to have inherited the leadership of the community and persecuted through the centuries by the majority Sunnis. Weeping for the