Peripheral Visions

that suburban living room full of young charismatics were another path to wondering what happens when different codes and roles are mingled. There was considerable diversity in that group. Some were working class, others were graduate students; some were preoccupied with a vision of love and others with a vision of judgment. Some seemed to manage their shifts of consciousness well, having found a context where they were approved and valued, but there were others who, I suspected, were unstable and erratic in ordinary life.
    Learning to speak in tongues, like becoming part of any community, is a powerful psychological transition, involving trust and surrender, group pressures and fear of loss of control. Becoming a participant here involved learning the rhythms of a group with no clear leader, putting together the intelligible and the unintelligible: wild emotion alternating with pauses to pass cake and iced tea and chat about the weather. I discovered that there was much that was routine in the group’s spontaneity, a recurrent limited vocabulary. I wondered whether members felt estranged from themselves when they lifted up their voices in words that felt involuntary, as if coming from somewhere else. Later, I visited black Pentecostal churches as well, shy and imprisoned in my whiteness, puzzled by the simplest questions of how to participate, like what time to arrive for a nine o’clock service.
    The concern for spontaneity is based on the assumption that real feeling moves outward from within, but emotions often work their way inward from actions or arise from learned forms and symbols. The slow loss of the capacity to use form with and for conviction is not only a loss for society but ultimately a loss to the individual’s own capacity for experience. During one of the World War II studies of Japanese culture, an interviewer made a comment to a young Japanese woman about Japanese respect for the father. “Oh no,” she said, “in Japan we do not respect the father.” The interviewer was flabbergasted, all his expectations contradicted. “You see,” she said, with the most delicate emphasis, “we practice respect for the father.” “Why do you do that?” he asked. “In case,” she said, “we someday find someone who deserves that respect.” Often practice precedes experience and makes it possible. With the decline of those interpersonal rituals called courtesy has come not an increase in “authenticity” but a decline in individuals shaped by these forms into personifications—and models—of the virtues they have rehearsed.
    Some ideas can only be passed on through participation in sound and movement, through art or ritual. There must also be ideas which can only be arrived at, only be invented, through such activity. Dancers, from Martha Graham to Zorba, have said, “If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.” Patterned motion on a basketball court or a dance floor invites participation in fluid form that may even serve as a medium for shared thought, inviting practice and offering the pleasures of skill. Indeed, for many contemporary people, sport and exercise, devoutly pursued, are the best available models of practice. Abandoning ritual we become like children who go through an important early stage of life in a language which is then forgotten, so that a body of experience and thought remains frozen and inaccessible to review. Some kinds of understanding grow only in repeated participation in forms that are not fully understood. Answers are given at the Seder to the child’s question, but the Seder teaches more than these answers.
    I learned another lesson about boredom in the Philippines. Doing fieldwork in the Marikina Valley, I brought with me the disabilities of American society. I was coming from a culture in which every moment is likely to be flavored with extra stimuli, a magazine to read on the bus, music in the elevator, television or radio dissipating the musing peace of early morning. Too much stimulation had jaded my palate, putting every activity under threat of boredom. But in the village my commitment to learning gave me an alternative stimulation, for every moment became interesting. All the trivial chitchat, repeated over and over, whereby people reaffirm their connection to each other, was part of my growing understanding of the culture I was there to study, a ritual I gladly learned to join.
    It was not until after I ended my research and left the field that I