Composing a Life

An Excerpt from Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life:

"In a stable society, composing a life is somewhat like throwing a pot or building a house in a traditional form: the materials are known, the hands move skillfully in tasks familiar from thousands of performances, the fit of the completed whole int eh common life is understood...Today, the materials and skills from which a life is composed are no longer clear. It is not longer possible to follow the paths of previous generations. This is true for both men and women, but it is especially true for women, whose whole lives no longer need to be dominated by the rhythms of procreation and the dependencies that these created, but who still must live with the discontinuities of female biology and still must balance conflicting demands."

"The model of an ordinary successful life that is held up for young people is one of early decision and commitment, often to an educational preparation that launches a single rising trajectory...Graduation is supposed to be followed by the first real job, representing a step on an ascending ladder. We don't expect long answers when we ask children what they want to be when the grow up, any more than we expect a list of names in response to questions about marriage. In fact, assumptions about careers are not unlike those about marriage; the real success stories are supposed to be permanent and monogamous. These assumptions have not been valid for many of history's most creative people, and they are increasingly inappropriate today. The landscape through which we move is in constant flux...Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. Just as it is less and less possible to replicate the career of a parent, so it will become less and less possible to go on doing the same thing through a lifetime. "

"The twentieth century has been called the century of the refugee because of the vast numbers of people uprooted by war and politics from their homes and accustomed lives."

"In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time...Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain."

"I found myself looking again at a patchwork of achievements both personal and professional and questioning how they fit together; whether they composed - or began to compose - a life; whether indeed the model of improvisation might prove more creative and appropriate to the twentieth century than the model of single-track ambition."

"Change proposes constancy: What is the ongoing entity of which we can say that it has assumed a new form? A composite life poses the recurring riddle of what the parts have in common."

"Just as change stimulates us to look for more abstract constancies, so the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully piece together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world."

---Mary Catherine Bateson, excerpts from "Emergent Visions" in Composing a Life


Echoes of place. Globalization (Friedman's The World is Flat) and Gender Transformation (Taber's Wanting all the Right Things).

Place & Pamuk

I've recently been on a bit of a Pamuk binge.

Here I am referring to recent Nobel Prize-winning Turkish journalist Orhan Pamuk who is known for such novels as Snow and My Name is Red, as well as the memoir Istanbul. My father snatched up these three books before he embarked upon travels to Turkey and Greece last spring and ever since they have been sitting upon the shelves of the study/my room taunting me because I had not had a chance to sit and read them yet. Thus the Holiday break Pamuk binge.

Though Pamuk's writing brings up a plethora of issues and problems, not least of which is the political and social melancholy of Turkey, my mind grabbed hold of one particular theme that is woven throughout his writings: the significance of place.

This theme began to intrigue me after reading some of Wendell Berry's essays in which he lifts up the significant connection between land and people, of home, and of working to strengthen the local communities that have shaped us. Echoing Gandhi, Berry (and Pamuk perhaps) seems to make "place" the focus of problem-solving, vocation, life sustenance and the answer to all meaning-of-life questions. Okay, they don't suggest that all of life's questions can be understood in the context of place. But for these men, the "places" in their lives have been the lenses through which they have understood the world, determined their vocations, undertaken their work, and discerned the meaning of their lives. Place is no small thing.

For Pamuk, the place is Istanbul.

"Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." -Istanbul (pg 6)

Such is this connection that his memoirs cannot be complete without describing both his life and the city he has lived his entire life in.

"The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own."
(pg 6)

This connection between place and life…of land and people…triggers so many complexities. Questions of community and society. Problems of country and allegiance…

"At least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date? These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to which the lottery of life has assigned us - they expect love from us, and in the end, we do love them, from the bottom of our hearts - but did we perhaps deserve better? -Istanbul (pg 7)

…history, civilization, art, music…

"If we see our city in black and white, it's partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by Western artists: the glorious colours of its past were never painted by local hands. There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes. Nor is there a single piece of writing or work in today's world that can teach us how to take pleasure in Ottoman art of the classic Persian art that influenced it...when magazines or schoolbooks need an image of old Istanbul, they use the black-and-white engravings produced by Western travelers and artists." -Istanbul (pg 39-40)

It is fascinating to me how Pamuk translates this need and desire for place into also an explanation for the misunderstanding between peoples.

"Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them?"
- Snow (pg. 259)

It’s as if place and life and culture are all intertwined so tightly, that if we don’t understand how people live in another city, another culture, in a sense another world, we are also incapable of understanding their sufferings, their joys, their views.

My first reaction to this is one of thoughtful fascination. Firstly, because this is an explanation of the clash between civilizations that is rooted in culture, in empires and cities and communities. An explanation that fiercely puts the diversity of peoples and life at the focus, and calls for the need of understanding between peoples. Though, not without providing a base of pessimism in regards to whether this can be accomplished, and perhaps an idealistic sense of hope…

It is also fascinating because I’m not sure what this says about today…when globalization is mobilizing people to new places, new homes, and new identities...when the borders that we have often seem so superficial and archaic...when the economic, political, and societal forces at play make it impossible to see a world where people would be rooted to one place and in fact dissuade this option in favor of choice, modernization, and the market.

Yet, this is perhaps most intriguing in the sense that for people interested in the world, in other cultures, in striving for justice, and making change...this concept of place is simultaneously a recipe for a success, a diagnosis for failure, and a deep philosophical quandary.

A recipe for success in that by making place your focus, by seeking to understand those around you, and make your own unique contribution to society through your community, one should be able to lift up your neighbors and take a stab at truly resolving some of the problems that torment society.

[My query to this recipe: if we all looked inward to our own communities, would not the communities that lack such leaders, resources, and power still be left out in the cold?]

A diagnosis for failure because of the limits of history and the limitless today. For example, Pamuk demonstrates that Turkey is haunted by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and demoralized by the Westernization of their culture. There can be no changing the past. Nor is there soon to be a halt to the economic and societal globalization that are homogenizing cities and erasing cultural identity worldwide. Yet within history and modernity is widespread misunderstanding and clashes between the truths and traditions of world cultures. Reconciliation of ideas seems impossible. Yet conflict is deemed terrible.

"Now one could understand us from so far away." -Snow (pg. 426)

A deep philosophical quandary because the above contradicting views still beg questions: where are we without place, without home, without roots? what will become of new generations without a collective consciousness rooted by place? is it good/bad or simply different for the world to have mass migration and people who make traveling, moving, and exchanging identities their place in the world? what is the true importance of place and are we losing it?

I am certainly not sure. And unfortunately neither is Orhan Pamuk.

"I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems [in the context of problems of religious tolerance in Turkey]. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting."
-Orhan Pamuk, in an interview with New York Times' Alexander Star

3:12 am

There's something honest about facing the mirror at 3:00 am when you can't sleep.

The body is not quite awake as usual, but the mind...the mind is awake.
Almost as awake as the heart.

Because let's be honest, if the mind and heart weren't awake, then the body would definitely not be.

At 3am, the mind and heart are forced to be honest with one another because there's nothing else to be done.

The body wants sleep. The mind and heart have to converge...what is wrong? what am I thinking? what am I feeling? what do I need to do right now? what do I need to do to feel at peace so that my body can sleep?

What if more moments in the day were like that? Ifevery moment was like 3 am in the mirror would we not be more honest with ourselves, with our friends, with those we work and play with?

3am forces you to confront the worst in yourself...though I'll admit provides that hazy edge that I think drinkers like because it softens the blow.

But mainly 3 am is a time when your brain doesn't really let you think about anything of substance because it is doing its work behind-the-scenes...confronting issues, healing, breaking, renewing, ripping off the bandaid, and pushing in a bit of reality, but of course being careful to leave in just enough fantasy to remain young, hopeful, and energetic...if nothing else so the body and heart last through finals.

But as important as that process is...3 am is really for the heart.

It's like this:

The heart is a small, bumbling, passionate creature that is always vying for standing room with the mind and the body and most of the time gets kicked to the curb. But she's tougher than she looks. And at 3am, she gets fet up. Kicks the body in the ass and says "sit down you fool." Then she turns to the mind, looks her up and down, and says "do your thang honey, but keep out of my way...it's my time." Then the heart takes the driver's seat...pulls it closer to the petals, turns on the iTunes that speak to her mood, and drives...

People & Life Places

So, I just told someone today that I try not to put personal anecdotes on this blog. Which is true. But this post, will attempt to be a reflection on one aspect of life in terms of social people-to-people intereaction that I think I've realized. I promise it's still very philosophical, you can put it under the "adult" category in my blog title I suppose.

I was thinking today that it's all well in good to make use of the lessons of life that you are taught - manners, "good character" stuff, the rights and wrongs, etc when life is normal. We all have bad days and we all have those ups and downs, but by and large when everything is "alright" we generally have no excuse but to begin to think about how our actions and words, and inaction and words unspoken affect others.

It's really when things are bad. When things are turned upside down, and one's inner world is a cascade of constant ups and downs that those lessons come in handy. Because it is then when all of those lessons are up for question. What is right? What is wrong? What is good or bad? Which action should or shouldn't I take? Does this action merit this reaction? Am I a bad person if?

It is then I think when we begin to realize...okay get rid of this third person. This semester has been when I have begun to realize that there are days when all I can think about is myself and my feelings and the general suckiness of life. And sometimes that's okay. I am human. And I am imperfect. And there are times in life to withdraw for a bit and let the heart and mind work itself out, or let God work it out. And there are times when civilization and society give you a bit of a free card to just be in a bad mood, or be "not okay." But that doesn't mean that my actions and my withdrawness doesn't cause problems, or hurt feelings, or sin by proxy. But at the same time that doesn't mean that it's not okay sometimes.

I'm sure I could go on theologically here about forgiveness and such, but I'm not really in that place.

I think for now, it's just more acceptance of certain thoughts, feelings, fears, etc. And hoping that beyond hope when I get to a better place that some apologies and some changes....won't erase them, but will let everything move onto a new place.

It's a thought.