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Authors: Mary C. Bateson
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If children learn, even before words, that the unfamiliar is inimical, this will affect their approach to differences of all kinds, even those forays into the unfamiliar that we take when walking into a forest or a meadow, and they will never be comfortable in unfamiliar social worlds. If they learn that their way—or any single way—is always best, they will never see, and use, the alternatives, however widely they travel. To get outside of the imprisoning framework of assumptions learned within a single tradition, habits of attention and interpretation need to be stretched and pulled and folded back upon themselves, life lived along a Möbius strip. These are lessons too complex for a single encounter, achieved by garnering doubled and often contradictory visions rather than by replacing one set of ideas with another. When the strange becomes familiar, what was once obvious may become obscure. The goal is to build a complex structure in which both sets of ideas are intelligible, a double helix of tradition and personal growth.
I was a schoolgirl when I first went to Israel, a young wife when I went to the Philippines, and a new mother when I went to Iran. The landscape and I were both different at every turn of the spiral, almost decades apart; because it is impossible to step into the same river twice, one can learn from each return.
Something Blue
R ECALLING CHILDHOOD makes it possible to experience it again, to discover another way of seeing within one’s own skin. Even though children begin very early to fit in with adult expectations, they continue to be enigmatic strangers, so the visions of childhood could be treasured as alternative ways of seeing. The perceptions and experiences of childhood continue to be visible out of the corner of the eye in daydreaming, in free association, and in sleep. Some become the defining foundations of later learning, built up into the shared understandings of society, while others are disallowed in the adult culture, so that not only episodic memories but whole modes of consciousness are buried.
When I wrote a memoir of my parents, With a Daughter’s Eye , I found myself able not only to recover a wealth of memories but also to reconstrue those memories with the help of adult knowledge, to infer the motivations underlying mysterious adult behavior, to empathize with the adults in their puzzling world and with my earlier self. There is today a whole range of psychotherapies based on the idea of communion with an inner child, perhaps in need of comfort or perhaps, like Wordsworth’s, offering intimations of immortality. We could equally speak of communion with parents long gone, through maturing identification.
I was encouraged as a child to write stories and poetry, which I dictated to my mother. Once upon a time, I said in one of these stories, there was a sad, dreary kingdom that had no colors. Everything was black or white or gray, gray skies, a white-hot sun, black leaves. Even the flowers, although they had beautifully shaped petals and fragrant sweetness, seemed to the people of that kingdom to be no more than different shades of gray. Although the people had no idea that it could be different, still they lived gray and joyless lives. That was just the way things were.
But after a while the king and queen of that kingdom had a baby girl, and she seemed different from all the other children of the kingdom, who were solemn and docile. She was playful and full of laughter and curiosity. By the time she was a few years old, everyone knew there was something special about her, and she herself began to understand that the people around her, whom she loved, did not see the world with the same eyes of happiness. Gradually, too, she learned that in many cases where she saw differences other people saw sameness. Two kinds of flowers that they saw as the same she saw as different. The same was true of birds and butter and books and bedspreads. In fact, she was the only
If children learn, even before words, that the unfamiliar is inimical, this will affect their approach to differences of all kinds, even those forays into the unfamiliar that we take when walking into a forest or a meadow, and they will never be comfortable in unfamiliar social worlds. If they learn that their way—or any single way—is always best, they will never see, and use, the alternatives, however widely they travel. To get outside of the imprisoning framework of assumptions learned within a single tradition, habits of attention and interpretation need to be stretched and pulled and folded back upon themselves, life lived along a Möbius strip. These are lessons too complex for a single encounter, achieved by garnering doubled and often contradictory visions rather than by replacing one set of ideas with another. When the strange becomes familiar, what was once obvious may become obscure. The goal is to build a complex structure in which both sets of ideas are intelligible, a double helix of tradition and personal growth.
I was a schoolgirl when I first went to Israel, a young wife when I went to the Philippines, and a new mother when I went to Iran. The landscape and I were both different at every turn of the spiral, almost decades apart; because it is impossible to step into the same river twice, one can learn from each return.
Something Blue
R ECALLING CHILDHOOD makes it possible to experience it again, to discover another way of seeing within one’s own skin. Even though children begin very early to fit in with adult expectations, they continue to be enigmatic strangers, so the visions of childhood could be treasured as alternative ways of seeing. The perceptions and experiences of childhood continue to be visible out of the corner of the eye in daydreaming, in free association, and in sleep. Some become the defining foundations of later learning, built up into the shared understandings of society, while others are disallowed in the adult culture, so that not only episodic memories but whole modes of consciousness are buried.
When I wrote a memoir of my parents, With a Daughter’s Eye , I found myself able not only to recover a wealth of memories but also to reconstrue those memories with the help of adult knowledge, to infer the motivations underlying mysterious adult behavior, to empathize with the adults in their puzzling world and with my earlier self. There is today a whole range of psychotherapies based on the idea of communion with an inner child, perhaps in need of comfort or perhaps, like Wordsworth’s, offering intimations of immortality. We could equally speak of communion with parents long gone, through maturing identification.
I was encouraged as a child to write stories and poetry, which I dictated to my mother. Once upon a time, I said in one of these stories, there was a sad, dreary kingdom that had no colors. Everything was black or white or gray, gray skies, a white-hot sun, black leaves. Even the flowers, although they had beautifully shaped petals and fragrant sweetness, seemed to the people of that kingdom to be no more than different shades of gray. Although the people had no idea that it could be different, still they lived gray and joyless lives. That was just the way things were.
But after a while the king and queen of that kingdom had a baby girl, and she seemed different from all the other children of the kingdom, who were solemn and docile. She was playful and full of laughter and curiosity. By the time she was a few years old, everyone knew there was something special about her, and she herself began to understand that the people around her, whom she loved, did not see the world with the same eyes of happiness. Gradually, too, she learned that in many cases where she saw differences other people saw sameness. Two kinds of flowers that they saw as the same she saw as different. The same was true of birds and butter and books and bedspreads. In fact, she was the only
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