Peripheral Visions

projects, often, however, leaving their completion rather vague. However, the appropriate behavior of simply watching was not abhorrent to most of the Filipino crowd: the fire was indeed beautiful and dramatic, and the Filipinos present could relax and enjoy it. The frustration Americans feel when they cannot take action is an internal experience that many Filipinos have not learned to have. Yet who knows but that the world we share may not sometimes be more harmed by the American tendency to overreact (or perhaps, in the Manila slang of the day, “over act”) than by the Filipino tendency to underplan.
    Americans and Filipinos, Iranians and Israelis, all peoples can be driven to dysfunctional behavior by their cultures; but individuals from any of these groups can learn to transcend their cultures, often because they have met others with respect and pondered their differences. After a while I noticed the executive of a company with offices in the upper floors of the burning building moving around casually in his weekend clothing. He was able to combine a graceful capacity for inaction, an exterior tranquillity that corresponded to the situation in which nothing could be done directly, with an immediate realization and pursuit of the only meaningful sort of initiative. Chatting with other businessmen watching the fire with their families, he was negotiating for rental space so that work could be resumed at nine o’clock the following morning. He was a Filipino who had had extensive contact with Americans, including study in the United States, so he had two cultural styles available and the skill to combine them in a third pattern.
    Sometimes you meet people who have learned their way around the culture of the “other” well enough to have access to a second way of seeing the world. They then have a unique capacity to pick and choose among behaviors and assumptions that would otherwise have remained unquestioned, and even to invent new ones. Tiresias the seer is said to have acquired his vision as a compensation for his blindness, yet in the myth he had also become wise by experiencing life both as a man and as a woman. I have sometimes wondered what Tiresias would have been like to dance with.

Composing Our Differences
    D URING THE WINTER there is space for some two dozen artists at the MacDowell Colony, staying for periods ranging from a fortnight to two months. One encounters new arrivals in the evening, waiting in Colony Hall before dinner, reading the papers and chatting. Most colonists introduce themselves by first name only, sometimes adding an identification of their field. “Hello, you must have arrived today. I’m Joe. I’m a sculptor.” “Hi. I’m Mary. I’m a poet.” Some colonists have been there more than once, or know each other from elsewhere, but for most the use of first names tactfully avoids the issue of who is well-known and who is not. Everyone is working on some kind of project, so “What are you working on here?” is the next question, followed by the standard American “Where do you come from?” The questions asked are those to which everyone is supposed to have a ready answer, though I had some difficulty explaining this project or my own nomadic life. More sensitive questions of economic or marital status or sexual preference are deferred. The Colony does not provide address lists, but from time to time someone about to leave will collect addresses by circulating one of the paper place mats from the dining room, making a list to be photocopied. That’s a tradition.
    Max, a composer, joined the table I was at on his first day and was offered a glass of wine. “How are you doing the wine this year?” he asked. “It seems to go by a different rule every time I’m here.” This time the convention was that one person or another would show up at dinner with a bottle and offer it around the table. Those who accepted would take their turn at offering another day. It is easy to imagine the pattern shifting as different groups come and go. Each new arrival is trying to decode the customs of the place, but with so much turnover it is easy to take a chance observation as a sign of ancient custom. Old-timers in my group plotted confusing rumors to pass on to new arrivals—just a trace of hazing.
    Arriving at the MacDowell Colony was certainly different from arriving as an anthropologist in a Philippine village, but, because I think of artists as inclined to defy convention, I