Peripheral Visions

a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
    Many tales have more than one meaning. It is important not to reduce understanding to some narrow focus, sacrificing multiplicity to what might be called the rhetoric of merely: merely a dead sheep, only an atavistic ritual, nothing but a metaphor. Openness to peripheral vision depends on rejecting such reductionism and rejecting with it the belief that questions of meaning have unitary answers. Twenty years after it occurred, in a world increasingly troubled by ethnic conflict, a remembered ritual on the Feast of Sacrifice came to exemplify for me layer upon layer of processes whereby human beings can join and communicate and learn in spite of profound differences. The story grew into this book as memories from Iran resonated with memories of years lived in Israel and in the Philippines. A Persian garden has become a magic carpet. The process of spiraling through memory to weave connection out of incident is basic to learning, so that in this and perhaps other ways the text is a demonstration of its subject matter.
    In my work, I have always been able to start from listening and looking, doing natural history along with the myriad small experiments that occur when one tries, tentatively, deferentially, to join in. These are skills that spill over into all areas of life. I cannot know which observation will propose a theme that proves key to understanding, narrowing in attention to a pattern that opens out to many others. It is common to gather data in fieldwork and continue to mine that data years later to illuminate questions still unposed when the original material was collected. Records of the past or of strange peoples in far places tell us not what always happens but what can happen, the depth of the human potential, the range of the capacity to muddle through. No single narrative is sufficient for understanding, no single model sufficient for aspiration. Even though they are spread around the globe, the societies—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—that I draw on for examples still have much in common, combining elements of Semitic and Greek traditions in their attitudes, still all acting in the shadow of Abraham. The human range is both wider and deeper.
    My mother used to list paths to “insight” in her lectures: anthropological fieldwork, the study of infants, the study of another species, psychoanalysis, the experience of either a psychosis or a religious conversion (followed by recovery), or “a love affair with an Old Russian.” The stories in this book do not cover all that ground, but the list is not a bad road map. Sometimes a narrative which seems to fit into one category metamorphoses into another. These are all ways of learning, by encountering and comparing more than one version of experience, that the realities of self and world are relative, dependent on context and point of view. Because we live in a world of change and diversity, we are privileged to enter, if only peripherally, into a diversity of visions, and beyond that to include them in the range of responsible caring.
    We live not only in the presence of different cultural visions but with different individual modes of perception, with access to the memories of childhood and of alternative states of consciousness. These resonate with the many layers of vision within any single cultural tradition, the mythic and the multiply metaphorical, the sacred and the invisibly empirical, the insights of the laboratory and those of poetry and sleep. To become open to multiple layers of vision is to be both practical and empathic, to practice the presence of God or gods and to practice wilderness. Learning the paths of human culture, we are attentive as well to the undomesticated outdoors and the essential wildness spinning on in subatomic spaces, forever generating new patterns.
    Courtesy is one of the great human inventions for bridging uncertainty. On the day of that ambiguous celebration of the Feast of Sacrifice, the gardener’s wife brought glasses of tea as the shadows lengthened. Our landlords packed the meat in plastic to take to Tehran, where it would be frozen to share with family members. We got in the car and rode back into the city, with Vanni falling asleep on my lap. We were in Iran, increasingly at home, for most of the next seven years, until the revolution.
    By now, that wealthy urban couple may be outside the country,