Peripheral Visions

talking, bye-bye and peekaboo, the intricate rhythms of life within a household—is learning as homecoming. It proceeds at dazzling speed compared with school learning, yet it is underestimated nearly everywhere. Infants have visible states of intense alertness from their earliest weeks, and as they mature they continue to be engrossed in learning, as if they were aware of what they needed to know and how to discover it, with an unfolding promise of participation ahead.
    Many people have seen photographs or read descriptions of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz followed by a line of ducklings convinced that he was their mother. Ducklings are mobile almost immediately after birth, able to wander away from nests set on the ground and vulnerable to predators. Their survival depends on learning to follow and obey a parent within a very limited time after hatching, so they are born knowing what kind of creature to look for (approximate height, waddle—Lorenz had learned to do what we aptly call a “duck walk,” walking in a squat) and how to listen for a quacking sound already heard dimly within the egg. Since there is no way that the exact image of a particular parent could be supplied genetically, ducklings emerge with the analog of directions for when and how to obtain information: “when you come to the big square, look for signs.” “I don’t know which turn to tell you, but you’ll know it because all the traffic is going that way.” “You’ll know it when you get there.” Of course. When a particular kind of learning, like the ferret’s learning of a new maze, is anticipated in the genome, new learning feels like something known forever.
    We have such experiences not only in infancy, when the first moment of recognition may be lost from conscious memory, but in youth and adulthood. Learning about sexuality with a lasting vividness of delight; learning to hold and nurse an infant. There are sports where within the needed complex of skills particular components are immediately recognizable in their complete rightness, like the impact of a tennis ball on the “sweet spot” of a racket wielded just so. Love at first sight has the same quality. Long ago I fell in love with a man who happened to stand beside me for a few seconds at the corner of Broadway and Quincy Street in Cambridge, waiting to cross; he must have matched some readiness of mine, forever unexplored. Blond, tall, thin; the image has faded with time, but for years it remained photographically impressed on memory. In such experiences, an initial, instantaneous grasp is overlaid with more gradual learning unless it is isolated or repressed.
    The preservation of the image of a newborn is surely akin to imprinting, for human mothers, whose infants are not mobile, must learn to recognize them as part of the broader learning process referred to now as bonding. Usually they are lucky enough to have time and the overlaid impressions of all the senses, growing into a complex blend of love and knowledge, while the first image blurs. For years I recalled perfectly the image of my firstborn seen for only a few minutes in the delivery room in Manila, dead a few hours later. Whatever innate preparation human beings may have to be parents is probably a readiness to learn, to enter a new and strange relationship and move quickly to the certainty, This is where I belong, for this I was created. The same intense sense of homecoming often accompanies religious experience. Going back to the beginning to “know the place for the first time” must also be learning as coming home: “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts” (Psalm 84:3).
    It is curious that the experience of homecoming in the intuition of the sacred is then so often removed from ordinary life, segregated like much of learning into institutional frameworks that are anything but homelike. It is common to deal with moments of vision by setting them apart from the rest of experience, protecting them behind a conventional veil, whether a physical veil or a veil of ignorance or secrecy. Traditionally, the sacred has been surrounded by anxiety as well as delight. Heads must be covered or uncovered, shoes put on or taken off, eyes averted and voices lowered. Often menstruating women are regarded as too unclean to touch sacred books, enter sanctified precincts, or even pray. You can find this kind of