Peripheral Visions

learning to live in a new place. One of the gardener’s sons may have grown up to die in the war with Iraq or been drafted to meet other new challenges, while the daughters have been held in more narrow roles. Everyone’s life has been redirected by political change. Yet the revolution that occurred seven years later was present in that garden, present in the class differences and the ambivalent relationship to tradition of the wealthy urban landowners, the cultural disparities between them and the villagers they were employing, the suspect presence of a foreigner. Iran was a society in which ways of understanding became unmanageably disparate, for the rise of fundamentalism within any tradition is always a symptom of the unwillingness to try to sustain joint performances across disparate codes—or, to put it differently, to live in ambiguity, a life that requires constant learning. The risk of such a failure is the challenge that faces our society—our entire species—today.
    That brief encounter in a Persian garden offered its participants many kinds of experience. There was room for hostility and anxiety, for fear of strangeness and distaste at reminders of the flesh and of mortality. There was room for awe in the presence of one of humankind’s transcendent visions imposing its abstract geometries, for in Islam all space is ordered in relation to Mecca and all time in relation to salvation and judgment day. The sacred was represented and so was the organic, intimacy and strangeness. There was room for boredom and for embarrassment and awkwardness. With so many layers of possibility, there was room for a great deal of learning, but reason too for rejecting learning. I remember my fingers and toes growing cold.
    In any experience other moments are present, and so they are here. We will move within paragraphs from a Philippine village to the Sinai desert. When we are in a Persian garden we will be at the same time in my New Hampshire studio. When I write about Vanni at age two I am accompanied by a teenager and by a woman in her twenties. Because the presence of many kinds of attention is central to my theme, I have included these other layers of awareness in my text; they are all relevant. Insight , I believe, refers to that depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

Learning from Strangers
    O VER THE YEARS , Vanni has often given me “desk friends,” small, friendly items grouped behind the computer to greet me during the day, familiar spirits. A small globe, blue and green. A beanbag salamander. The latest is an ammonite, the fossil of a prehistoric mollusk like a chambered nautilus. This graceful spiral of growth is related to the “golden section” of aesthetics and to the mathematical pattern called a Fibonacci series, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding, increasing rapidly. Cornu Ammonis , the horn of Amen, Egyptian god of life and reproduction, represented as a man with a ram’s head. Ideas are coiled one into another, the Mesozoic decoded in the Renaissance and architecture meeting with biology in what H. E. Huntley calls “mathematical beauty.”
    These tokens came with me to the MacDowell Colony, the artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where much of this book was written, along with reminders of the countries where I have worked. Each of us—writers, painters, composers spending a month or two in residence—had a studio in the woods for pursuing separate visions, where no one came unless invited. The studios of writers are the smallest, needing little but a worktable, but I chose what I brought carefully, spaced out where it would catch my eye to evoke the memories I was seeking to connect.
    Because I would be writing about Iran, I even brought a small tribal carpet, made to be loaded and unloaded by nomads pitching their tents in new grazing grounds from day to day, suitable for temporary habitation. I hung a Philippine Christmas ornament in my studio window, a mandala of palm fronds, the pervasive material of village ornament and construction; on my desk I put a small, carved figure of Christ, one of hundreds detached from crucifixes and sold in Manila as antiquities, usually armless, with their pointed European noses sliced off during the era when Filipinos rebelled against everything Spanish. I wondered sometimes, seeing