Interesting book I’ve started reading this week. It’s one that I’ve had on my Amazon wish list for absolutely ages, and whilst I was ordering a Sykpe camera for Molly off Amazon recently, I decided that I’d treat myself to it, it wasn’t very much.
It’s called ‘Composing a Life’ by Mary Catherine Bateson. I’ve been wondering what she’d be like as a read because her father Gregory Bateson is one of my favourite writers on anthropology, [double bind theory amongst other brilliant things] particularly a book he wrote called ‘Steps to an ecology of mind’, in which several chapters are essentially a father daughter conversation with her. Her mother was the equally famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, who’s life was more career oriented than Mary’s.
Coincidently, last night I went to a meeting of the Brisbane RSA which was hosting a talk by an Australian couple who are developing a sustainable village about 4hrs drive north of Sydney. The gent was the speaker, and at one point he quoted Mead… ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’. I was sitting there, still holding my new book by Mead’s daughter, thinking how funny it is that these kinds of synchronous things happen. But then something happened just now that was even weirder! Margaret Mead was mates with Ben Spock the best selling author [Baby and Child Care 1946] and paediatrician (Mary’s paediatrician as it happens) and he had been influenced by her in his advocation of breast feeding on demand rather than at preordained times. I’d just read about that, when Daile walked in with a grimace on her face saying that she’d just seen a thing on the box about an 8 year old girl that was still breast feeding! (Plays the Jaws music!)
Anyway, I digress…. (I get that from my mother you know). Mary’s book begins by talking about the fact that we have embedded in folklore the idea that exceptional people pursue objectives through their lives as if it were a straight line plotted as if from early cognition to completion or death, as if they were able to hold it as a pilgrim’s progress or a guiding vision and as if it were a single rising trajectory from which their very greatness prevents them from wavering. Life of course, is not really like this, at least it isn’t these days. What I love about what she’s getting at is that life is an iterative and flawed process, but in my view, so much the better for it.
I know this is getting to be a theme with me, but as I’m maturing, which is a shorthand for getting a little less vain, I’m less and less worried about all that social ‘climbing’ or ‘success’ rubbish and more and more impressed with genuine connection to a society, a human principle, a modesty of genuine proportions.. which is of course immense and impossible to fake well, and just plain kindness.
Bateson quotes one of her dear friends to illustrate that a life is emergent and crafted very often from fragments of opportunity or hope, snippets of time, and deft manipulation of opportunities that to a younger person would be an insult or irrelevant. The passage of time is, I’m sure, the ONLY tenuous passage, that leads on occasion to the kinds of wisdom that Joan Erikson seems to exhibit here as she describes her shaky start in the jewellery business as a mother in her mid to late thirties:
“I used to find places in the house to work, a hole here or a hole there, and after I’d gotten far enough along so I could do something, I asked a man who was a very good craftsman in Berkley to let me work in his workshop and he promptly said, ‘No way!’” Joan laughed. “So I said, ‘Well, just wait a minute, I’ll tell you what I want, I want to learn a few skills from you. I’m not good enough to be your apprentice, but there are a few things you could teach me on maybe a Saturday morning to keep me going.’ And he said, ‘I don’t even know if you have any skill or imagination or anything else.’ I didn’t have much to show him, just a few things I had made, but I guess that I was kind of persistent, so he gave me a box of junk – you know, when you’re working you always have some bits and pieces here or there – and he said ‘Put me something together out of that.’ And when I did he said ‘Humph, so when can you come in?’ It was very sweet. My gosh, craftsmen are so nice. When they’re nice they’re very generous. I went on doing that for quite a while, coming in with a list of things that I needed to know. But the next year he left to teach, and when he left he gave me his workbench and the tools he didn’t want to take with him. At that point I had to find a better workshop, so I added something onto the garage for a little place to work”. Several years later Joan’s designs were appearing in regional and national exhibits. But doesn’t she sound lovely?
I’ll stop for now… I could really REALLY bore you. I realise that, but it’s so refreshing to see people that are so syntonic (to use a word that Joan uses).
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