"This book is about life as an improvisatory art," and it's an art I would do well to learn. The first chapter of Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life might as well have been written for my group of friends: female scholars and artists whose life trajectories have been interrupted by marriage, children, the economy.
Bateson brings insights from the lives of five women, as well as commenting on the disciplines of improvisatory art: Jazz, Arabic poetry, Homeric epics--performances that are sensitive to "context, interaction, and response." She's not suggesting some half-baked just-wing-it life. Meaningful improvisation (in art and life) is a discipline--something that can be practiced and achieved.
The following are excerpts from the first chapter (which I have not yet finished). I'm posting them here, because I know at least one other woman who needs this as much as I do.
"I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist's vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies."
"There is a pattern deeply rooted in myth and folklore that recurs in biography and may create inappropriate expectations and blur our ability to see the actual shape of lives. Much biography of exceptional people is built around the image of a quest, a journey through a timeless landscape toward an end that is specific, even though it is not fully known. The pursuit of a quest is a pilgrim's progress in which it is essential to resist the transitory contentment of attractive way stations and side roads, in which obstacles are overcome because the goal is visible on the horizon, onward and upward. The end is already apparent in the beginning. 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. Ambition, we imply, should be focused, and young people worry about whether they are defining their goals and making the right decisions early enough to get on track. You go to medical school and this determines later alternatives, whether you choose prosperity in the suburbs or the more dramatic and exceptional life of discovery and dedication. 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 they grow up, any more than we expect a long list of names in response to questions about marriage."
"Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers." We need to "recognize the value in lifetimes of continual redefinition, following the Biblical injunction, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might' (Ecclesiastes 9:10)."
"Many of society's casualties are men and women who assumed they had chosen a path in life and found that it disappeared in the underbrush. . . . [They] defined . . . self in terms of a niche that proved evanescent."
Mary reminds those of us dealing with this "discontinuity" that "even those who continue to wear the same professional label survive only because they have altered what they do. Being effective as a banker or a restauranteur or a general means that one has relearned one's craft more than once."
The rest of the book (as far as I can tell) presents five biographies of the sort Bateson wishes were more common: biographies that focus not on the slavish pursuit of a looming goal, but biographies that revel in the twists and turns of life, that highlight the grace and beauty of successfully remaking the self to fit new circumstances.
The first woman, I see, is Joan. She's in her eighties now, "has three grown-up children and a career that includes several books of her own as well as a complex weave of collaborations with her husband's work, which led Brown University in 1972 to give them simultaneous honorary degrees." But is that what she set out to do? Of course not. She "was trained as a dancer and dance educator, the first of several careers that became subordinated to child bearing and a husband's work."
I'm looking forward to meeting Joan--and all the women that follow.
Posted by stephanie at July 22, 2008 10:17 AM | TrackBack