Full Circles, Overlapping Lives

Book by Bateson Mary Cather

W e live with strangers. Those we love most, with whom we share
a shelter, a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and
flow together, there are depths of unknowing. Parents and children,
partners, siblings, and friends repeatedly surprise us, revealing the
need to learn where we are most at home. We even surprise ourselves
in our own becoming, moving through the cycles of our lives. There
is strangeness hidden in the familiar.

At the same time there is familiarity hidden in the strange. We can
look with curiosity and respect at the faces of men and women we
have never met. Learning to recognize these strangers with whom we
share an increasingly crowded and interdependent world, we can
imagine ourselves joined in a single family, perhaps by a marriage between
adventurous grandchildren.

"I loved him, but I couldn't really know him. So I learned to stop
and think before I let myself get all upset." This was my sister Nora,
who had lived in Thailand with a Thai partner. "Then, when I married
an American, I found I had to keep on the same way." Living with
someone from another culture had taught her not to expect to under-stand
her husband. Strangeness and love are not contradictory; to live
at peace we need new ways of understanding these two realms, each
one embedded in the other.

Strangers marry strangers, whether they have been playmates for
years or never meet before the wedding day. They continue to surprise
each other through the evolutions of love and the growth of affection.
Lovers, gay and straight, begin in strangeness and often, for the zest of
it, find ways to increase their differences.

Children arrive like aliens from outer space, their needs and feelings
inaccessible, sharing no common language, yet for all their
strangeness we greet them with love. Traditionally, the strangeness of
infants has been understood as temporary, the strangeness of incomplete
beings who are expected to become predictable and comprehensible.
This expectation has eased the transition from generation to
generation, the passing on of knowledge and responsibility, on which
every human society depends. Yet the gap between parent and child,
like the gap between partners, is not left behind with the passage of
time. Today, in a world of rapid change, it is increasing, shifting into
new rhythms still to be explored.

I have learned to work on the assumption that my daughter and I
were born in different countries--not according to our passports but
because our country has changed, making me an immigrant from the
past. But she, in her twenties, has the same comment about today's
teenagers: they have grown up in a different country from hers. She
cannot look inward, drawing on memory to understand them, but
must learn from them, warned only by her own wry memories of the
incomprehensibility of adults.

Differences of age and sex crosscut all human lives with the experience
of Otherness, that which is different, alien, mysterious. These
differences, occurring within the household, offer a chance to learn
about strangeness in a familiar setting, so we can say with Annie Sullivan
in The Miracle Worker: "Oh, strangers aren't so strange to me. I've
known them all my life." In a world where waves of strangeness rise
or enter constantly, these are important lessons to learn. When we en-counter
new immigrants from other faiths and continents, we can re-assure
ourselves by remembering the utter strangeness that coexists
with love within every household. We can even learn to look at the
sun or the moon, a tree or a snail or a forest pool with affinity and
greeting, then look again and acknowledge their strangeness.

When you pass strangers on the street, the unfamiliar faces blur.
When you let your lives touch and make the effort of asking questions
and listening to the stories they tell, you discover the intricate patterns
of their differences and, at the same time, the underlying themes that
all members of our species have in common.

I have tried in this book to suggest a way of thinking about differences
by setting the heightened differences between generations, produced
by social change, alongside other kinds of differences, all in
stories and fragments of stories, lives in motion. The strangeness of
others is most off-putting when it is experienced as static, most approachable
when it is set within a narrative of continuing development.
The people in this book, named and unnamed, will strike the
reader as both strange and familiar, individuals growing through their
own eras of knowing and unknowing, as they work out courses
through an unknown landscape, the changing shapes of lives.

For nearly a decade I have taught a course at George Mason University
on the way lives differ from culture to culture, using autobiography
and ethnographic life history. There I get a cosmopolitan
medley of students, from eighteen-year-olds to those returning to
school at midlife for a second career and sixty- and seventy-year-olds
pursuing learning in retirement. Reading the papers my students
write, stories drawn from their own lives and from the interviews they
conduct, I have had the privilege of moving through multiple lives. In
the spring semester of 1996, I was invited to Atlanta to teach a version
of my life history course at Spelman, a historically black women's college.
During the planning for my visit, however, I balked at the probable
makeup of my class, the lack of a kind of diversity I needed, that
would allow members of the class to learn from one another. What I
balked at was not that all the students would be female or "of color"
but that they all would be at the same stage in their lives. Instead of
worrying about whether I was the only white person in the room, I
was worried that everyone else there would be less than half my age.
Since I would be teaching about life histories, I wanted students who
had experienced aging and childbearing, but I had another concern as
well. I wanted to use differences of age within the group to set the
stage for learning from one another and opening up further differences
within the group, even as we read life histories from other times
and cultures.

I went to George Mason University, and later to Spelman College,
to have the experience of teaching in unfamiliar regions and kinds of
institutions. Mason is a newcomer to Virginia's state university sys-tem.
Located in Northern Virginia, just outside the District of Co-lumbia,
where more and more immigrant groups have come to live, it
attracts a wide variety of students--Dominicans and Somalis, Cambodians
and Iranians--echoing the upheavals of recent history. Washing-
ton was a small town until World War II, when it became a community
of migrants within America, and it is still full of transients passing
through or recently returned from service overseas. The Mason cam-pus
is ringed with parking lots, and the student center is reminiscent
of a mall, drawing in a population on the move.

Spelman, by contrast, represents over a century of tradition. It is
one of a cluster of historically black institutions in Atlanta that affirm
the commonalities of the African American community while at the
same time providing a sheltered place to explore the variety within
that community. Spelman's whole existence is a reminder of the val-ues
and dilemmas of difference that must be addressed in an interdependent
world.

I first visited Spelman a decade ago, when a close friend, Johnnetta
Cole, became its first black female president. I wrote about her in
Composing a Life, using a series of conversations with four friends to
explore the creativity of how women and men increasingly live, with-out
scripts or blueprints, composing and learning along the way.

Spelman fits a model familiar to anyone who has explored Ameri-can
education, the elite liberal arts college, designed to select promis-ing
young people after high school, give them both depth and polish,
and prepare them to go out and live their adult lives, often with a
stopoff in graduate school. Spelman has struggled to give its students
confidence as women and as African Americans, to help them claim
and value their own variety and draw on the models and achievements
of people of color in other countries and especially throughout the
African diaspora.

Often white Americans lack a sense of the diversity within the
black community, and becoming aware of that diversity with curiosity
and respect is a first step into familiarity. Those who repeat the old
alibi "They all look the same, you can't tell them apart" often leap to
conclusions about an entire community from a single anecdote or the
remarks of one person, assuming other kinds of homogeneity, economic,
social, or political. No wonder the encounter feels uncomfort-able--
natural human groups are not monolithic, and the illusion of
uniformity is daunting to outsiders. At the same time one of the great
burdens on members of any minority in an integrated setting is the
expectation that they will be interchangeable, with an implied obligation
to represent the group.

There is a more subtle dynamic than similarity when groups with-draw
from the majority and hang out together, and this is the pleasure
of differing among themselves. It is true that social scientists can predict
much of what each of us is likely to think or do from a set of
descriptors--age, gender, class, ethnicity, and background--but there
is a core that is distinctive and individual for every person. That core
of individuality shines out when I am with others who are similar but
not the same. Ironically, we seek out similarity to discover and cele-brate
uniqueness. In any group that has...