Religion

M A RY CAT HERI N E BATE SON

T,ro roads diverged in a yellow wood , And sorry I could not travel both And be on e traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then wok the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And bo1h that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh. I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doub1ed if I should eve r come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhe re ages and ages hence: Two roads dive rged in a wood , and I - I 100k 1he one less traveled by, And that has made all th e difference.

"Composing a Life Story"

MARY CATHERINE BATESON

"Co mposing a Life Story"

Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer and anthropologist who has spent many years study ing ho w human beings grow and change over time. One of her best-known books , Composing a Life (1989), is a comparative bio-

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Fro rn Ma C . Si«r1 ry aiherine Ba1eson , Willing ro Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery (Hanover, NH: onh Press. 20 04 ), pp. 66-74.

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I CATHERINE BATESON • "Compo ' QUE STI O NS • 7. How Shall I Tell th e Story of My Life? tvfARY smg a Life Story" . hing that women have been especially aw f . graphical study of five very different, creative women. In observing th . ·s sornet 1 h bl f . are o m recent years . . . . b . . eir ance I an not so vet e pro em o composing th d'f' lives and listening to their life stones , on remem enng the lives of h c se they c ki h e I ,erent elements

d er ,a. becau •mply by ma ng t em separate as me h mous parents Gregory Bateson an Margaret Mead, and in th · k· h ir lives SI b • . n ave. ' h b ,n 1ng oft e less and less are men a le to compa t 1. about the different ways she had thoug t a out her own life, she ca of course, 'bl c r menta ize their lives

• • 1 , me to . ·t was possi e 1or men to think in t f . · think of life as a kind of improv,sat,ona art ,orm. The essay below is b Jong urne i erms o a hne between . . . b·i · a out for a d h private. A man would go to thew k 1 the importance of our 1magonat1ve a , 1ty to compose our own liv . ublic an t e . or p ace, and then at a

h 'f es 1n the P . h would switch that part of the day ff d ' multiple and resourceful ways. It suggests t at , we become skilled i t II ·n point, e . o an go home to a I . n e - ,ertal h tmosphere was different He could · h ing stories to ourselves about ourse ves, we w,11 be more likely to lead Id where t ea · SW!tc gears from one

I d. d ac- wor )'' t the other tual lives that matter, more like y to 1scover an maintain a constan f t of his ue O · purpose beneath a surface of many changes, more likely to achieve s::e aspe~ut it hasn't been possible f~r w_omen to s~~arate their commitments in kind of balance among our sometimes competing obligations, even m . the sarne way. It is one thmg m the trad1t10nal nuclear family for the

i ore quite h ffi and stop th' ki b h' c likely to learn from the generation be ore us and to teach the generation husband to go to t e o . ice. _ m . ng out is 1amily during the follow ing. In other words, the capacity to "compose" our lives affects all of da because he has left his wife m charge. It IS qmte a different thing for both the several aspects of our identities and our life's work that we have thus pa~nts to go off and feel that they can completely forget wh~t is happening far considered. . h the farnily. Many women have the sense that the combmmg of different

Bateson also suggests that though there is always a good deal of in- :~:as in their lives is a problem that is with them all the time. vention in our life compositions, there is also some discovery as well. What this has meant is that women have lived their lives experiencing Moreover, we do not very often invent new plot lines; we typically absorb multiple simultaneous demands from multiple directions. Increasingly men them from our culture. When you think of the shape of your own life, do are also living that way. So thinking about how people manage this is be- you do so in terms of one of the story lines that Bateson mentions - for coming more and more important. One way to approach the situation is to example, as a conversion narrative? Finally, do we live our lives first and think of how a painter composes a painting: by synchronously putting ele- then retrospectively compose them , or do we first compose them and ments together and finding a pattern in how they fit. seek to live according to the plotline we have constructed or chosen from But of course compose has another meaning in music. Music is an art in the repertoire offered to us by our culture? which you create something that happens over time that goes through vari-

ous transitions. Examining your life in this way, you have to look at the change that occurs within a lifetime - discontinuities, transitions, and the

There are three meanings that "composing a life ," as a phrase, has to me. Two of those meanings compare living to different arts, in that I see the wa! people live their lives as, in itself, an artistic process. An artist takes ingred'.- ents that may seem incompatible, and organizes them into a whole that is not only workable, but finally pleasing and true, even beautiful. As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions , as you spend money, m~ke friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called: your hfe. The word compose helps me look at two aspects of that process.

h nts to find a way Very often in the visual arts, you put toget er com pone . 1 . make a vtsua that they fit together and balance each other m space. ou . 1., is . d . mposmga 11e composition of form and color. One thmg that you O m co f b 1 nee . kind o a a ' to put together disparate elements that need to be m some . of bal- like a still life with tools, fruit , and musical instruments. Thts sense

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growth of various sorts - and the artistic unity, like that of a symphony •ith very different movements, that can characterize a life.

In addition to these two meanings of composing a life - one that re- lates to the visual arts and the other that relates to music - I want to em- phasize a third meaning , one that has to do with the ways in which you compose your own versions of your life. I'm referring to the stories you make about your life, the stories you tell first to yourself and then to other people, th

e stories you use as lenses for interpreting experience as it comes along. ;~at I want to say is that you can play with, compose, multiple versions of a lie,

There are advantages in having access to multiple versions of your life story. I a . . th m not referring to a true version versus a false vers10n, or to one ~-b· · h th . m a given therapeutic context as opposed to ot ers, or to one at Will sell t o I , c · g 0 reop e magazine as opposed to ones that wont. I am reiernn

Q UEST IO NS , 1. HolV Sl,a/1 1 Tell tl,e Story of My Life>

to the fre edom that comes nor on ly from owning y~ ur me.mory and Your life story bur also fro m knowing that yo u m ake creative choices in how You look at yo ur life . . . . . .

In the postmodern enviro nm ent m which we live , It 1s easy to say that no version is fued, no version is co°:p lerely true. I want. to push beyond that awareness and encourage you to thmk about the c rea tive responsibility in- volved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It's not that one is true and another is not true. It's a matter of emphasis and con- text. For example, one of the things that people do at meetings is to intro- duce themselves. I was at a conference recently where, in the course of two days . I introduced myself three times in different breakout groups. One per- son who had been there all three times came up to me and said, "You know, you said something completely different every time. " Of course I did. The contexts were different.

Imagine the choices you have in saying things about yourself and about other people. These are real choices, but they are made in the presence of a set of conventions. Think of a self-introduction as a literary genre. There are things you include and things you don"t. Tho se decisions are related to who yo u"re talking to and where you are, as well as who you're talking about.

You can do the same with versions of your life history. For instance, most people can tell a ve rsion that emphasizes the continuities in their lives to make a single story that goes in a clear direction. But the same people can also tell their life stories as if they were following on this statement: "After lots of surprises and choices, or interruptions and disappointments, I have arrived someplace I could never have anticipated." Every one of us has a preference for one of th ese versions, but if we try, we can produce both. My guess is that there are a lot of people reading this who think of themselves as growing and developing and moving on smoothly. That's part of the intel- lectual context many of us are in. But so me of us experience our lives as dis- continuous, interrupted processes.

For example, one version of my life s tory goes like this: I already thought of myself as a writer when I was in high school, and there hasn't been a year since college that I haven't published something. Now I spend half the year writing full-tim e and half the year writing and teaching. Many of my students are future writers.

That's one version of me. Th e other version goes like this: I planned in high school to be a poet. But I gave up writing poetry in college. The only writ ing I did for years was academic publis h-or-perish writing. When I be- came unemployed beca use of the Iranian revolution , shortly after _my mocher died, I dealt with unemployment by s tarting to write a memoir. 1

MARY CAT H ER IN E BATE SON "Composing a Life Story "

suddenly found that / could write nonfiction. Now I'm considering switch- . again and writing a novel. ing Both of these are true stories. But they are very different stories. One erson cold m e there had been so much disconti~uity in her life that it

~asn't hard to think of a discontinuous version, but tt was .pamful to telI It. I hink chat"s a problem many people have. Because our soctety has preferred

;ontinuous versions of stories, discontinuities seem to indicate that some- thing is wrong with you. A discontinuous story becomes a very difficult story to claim. .

I would say chat the mos t important effect of my recent book Composing a Life has been to give people who feel that_ they've been bu_mped from one thing to another. with no thread of contmu1ty, a way of pos1t1vely mterpret- ing their experience. You might be uncomfortable with your life if it has been like The Perils of Pauline, yet many of us have lives like that. One strategy for working with that kind of life is to make a story that interpret,; change as continuity. One of my favorites was someone who said, .. My life is like surf- ing, with one wave coming after another. " He unified his whole life with that single simile .

The choice you make affects what you can do next. Often people use the choice of emphasizing either continuity or discontinuity as a way of prepar- ing for the next step. They interpret the present in a way that helps them construct a particular future . ...

When I started Composing a Life, the issue I wanted to explore was dis- continuity. Part of my interest was based on two events in my own life . One was that I had just gone through the experience oflosing, in a rather painful way, a job I cared about. I had been forced to change jobs before, because of my hu sband changing jobs, and I had had to adapt co that situation. So what I set out co do was to look at a group of women who had been through a lot of transitions and who were able to cope with the c hanges. I was asking the quest ion "How on earth does one survive this kind of interruption?"

The other circumstance that made me focus on the iss ue o f discontinu- it y had ro do \vith my experiences in Iran. At the time of the Iranian revolu- tion, my hu sband and I had been living and working there for seven years . We, and a great many of our friends, had to make fresh starts; many Irani- ans became refugees. The way they interpreted their situarion was abso- lutely crit ical to their adjustment. I could see very clearly, among them , that there were those who came into the refugee situation with a se nse that they had skills and adaptive patterns they could transfer to the new situation. They were emphasizing continuity. Other people came into rh e refugee s itu - ation feeling that their lives had ended and they had co s tart from zero . You

Q UES T IONS • 1. How Sholl I Tell th e Story of My Life?

coul d see th31 ihc choices people made about ~ow t.o i~terpret the continui~ ties and discontinu ities in their lives h ad great imphcatlons for the way they approached the futu re. . . . _

~,luch of co p ing with discontinuity has to do w1th discovering threads of continuity. You cannot adjust to change unless yo_u ca~ recognize some analogy betw een your old situatio~ and your new s1tuat1on_- Without that analogy yo u cannot transfer learning. You ca~not apply skills. If you can recog nize a problem that you've solved before, m however different a guise yo u have 3 much greater c~~nce of solving that proble~ in the new situa~ ti on . That recognition is cnt1cal to t~e transfer of_ learn~ng.

It can be very difficult to recogmze the ways m w~1ch one situation or event in your life is linked to others. \Vhen I was working on my memoir of my parents, Wirh a Daughter's Eye. I found an example of this in my father's life. Some of you may know my father, Gregory Bateson, as a great anthro- pologist , a great thinker. But in the middle of his life, he went through a diffi. cult period that lasted for some time. From year to year he didn't know whether he would have a salary, whether there would be anything to live on.

His career at that time must have seemed totally discontinuous. First he was a biologist. Then he got interested in anthropology and went co New Guinea. He made a couple of field trips that he never wrote up. Then to Bali. During World War II he wrote an analysis of propaganda films and worked in psychological warfare. Then he did a study of communication in psycho- therapy. Then he worked on alcoholism and schizophrenia, and then on do!. phins and octopuses. Somehow he turned into a philosopher.

One of the things that I realized while I was putting together the mem• oir is chat only when he drew together a group of his articles - all written in very different contexts for very different audiences, with apparently differ• ent subject matter - to put them into the book called Steps to an Ecology of Mind did it become clear to him that he had been working on the same kind of question all his life: The continuous thread through all of his work was an interest in the relationships between ideas .

The interruptions that forced him to change his research focus were ab· solutely critical to pushing him up the ladder of logical types, so that ulti- mately he could see continuity at a very abstract level. His insight, his under· standing of what he had been working on all his life, was a result of a sometimes desperate search for a continuity beyond the discontinuities. So even when I was working on the memoir, I was picking at this question of continuity and discontinuity, and examining the incredible gains th~t can come from reconstruing a life his tory by combining both interpretauons.

Of course, in composing any life story, there is a considerable weight of

MARY CATHERIN E BATE SON • "Composing a Life Story ..

ltural pressure. Narratives have canonical forms. One of the stories that ~\~C . as a culture, respon_d t~ is the story in which the hero's or heroine's end is contained in the begmmng ....

One of my favorite examples is a story from the life of St. Teresa of Avila, a Counter-Reformation saint. When she was a child, part of Spain was still controlled by the Moors: part of the country was Catholic, and part was Muslim. When s he was ten or so. she set out, with her younger brother, for the territory controlled by the Moors in order to be martyred and go co heaven. This becomes an appropriate story to prefigure a life of self-sacrifice and dedication to God. Many biographies and autobiographies have this pattern ....

Another popular form is one that we can think of as the conversion narrative, It's a simple plot. Lives that in reality have a lot of zigzags in them get reconstructed into before-and-after narratives with one major disconti- nuity. One very interesting example is the Confessions of St. Augustine, which tells the story of his life before and after his conversion to Christianity. The narrative structure requires that he depict himself before conversion as a terrible sinner, that he devalues all he did before he was converted, and that he dredge up sins to talk about so he can describe a tota1 turnaround ...

A more complicated conversion story is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Much of the book tells of how Malcolm X, who had been a small-time crook, was converted in prison to the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad's American Black Muslim movement. About two•thirds of the book is writ· ten as a conventional conversion narrative: "I was deep in sin and then I was saved by Elijah Muhammad."

But then another big discontinuity occurs. Malcolm X becomes disillu• sioned with the corruption within the Nation of Islam and isolated by the politics around Elijah Muhammad. He separates from them. making a pil• grimage to Mecca and converting to orthodox Islam , and starts his own Muslim organization in the United States. So in this book you have the im- age of somebody who developed an interpretation of his life to support the validity of one particular message of salvation and then had to flip over into another one. It's an extraordinarily interesting and unusual story because the conversion happens not once but twice.

One very common example of the uses of the conversion story shows up in Twelve-Step programs. Twelve-Step programs essentially convey the message that if you can construe your life in such a way as to support a turnaround, we will help you construct a new life. But you have to define yourself, as St. Augustine had to define himself, as a sinner, or as Malcolm X had to define himself for his second conversion, as having been duped. An

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p • 7 How Shall J Tell rite Story of My Life' Q UESTIONS .

d becomes th e condition for moving on to th emph asis on a turna roun e nex.t

stag~he co nve rsion narrative ca n be a very empowering way of telling Your because it allows you to make a fresh ~ta~t. T~c more continuous

: ::ry, in which the end is prefigured in ihe begmnmg, ts powerful in differ- ent~'a s. But what I want to emphasiz~ arc the advantages of choosing a

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_ etation at 3 particular time, and the even greater advanta part1cu ar mterpr _ ge of using multiple interpretauons. . . .

The availability of multiple interpretao~ns of~ hfe story 1s particularly important in how the generations commu_nicate wlt~ each other. When we, as parents. talk to our children about our hve~, th~re 1s a great temptation to edit out the discontinuities, to reshape our h.1stones so t~at they look more coherent than they are. But when we tell stones to our children with the zig. zags edited out, it causes _problems for ~~ny of those children. lot of yo ung people have great difficulty comm1ttmg themselves to a relationship or to a career because of the feeling that once they do, they're trapped for a long, long time. They feel they've got to g~t on the ri~ht ~tr~ck" be~ause, af. cer all. this is a long and terrifying commitment. I thmk It 1s very liberating for college students when an older person says to them, "Your first job after college need not be the beginning of an ascending curve that's going to take yo u through your life. It can be a zigzag. You might be doing something dif• ferent in five yea rs. " That's something young people need to hear: th at the continuous story, where the whole of a person 's life is prefigured very early on, is often a cultural creation, not a reflection of life as it is really li ve d.

The ways in which we interpret our life stories have a great effect on how our children come to define their own identities. An example of th is occurred in my own life when my daughter was about to become a teenager. She said to me, "Gee, Mom, it must be awfully hard on you and Daddy th at rm not interested in any of th e things you're interested in." I said, "What do yo u mean?'' She said, "Well, yo u're professors. You write books about social science. I'm an actress. I care about theater." I said a secret prayer because it was clearly a very tricky moment. Maybe she needed to believe in that dis· continuity. Maybe it was worrying her and she needed to get away from that discontinuity.

But what I said to her was "Well, to b e a social scientist, to be an an- thropologiSt, yo u have to be a good observer of human behavior. You have 10 try and understand how people think and why rhey behave as they do. 11 ~tri kes me that that's pretty important for a good actor." She has been tell· mg that st0ry ever since because it gave he r permission to pursue what she deepl y wanted to pursue Without feeling she was betraying me and her fa·

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\VEN DELL BERRY • Jayber Crow

ther. But it also gave her permission to use anything she might pick up from us by giving her a way of construing the cross-generational relation- ship as a continuity .. •

WENDELL BERRY

Jayber Crow

Wendell Berry is a poet, essayist, and novelist who lives on a small , work- ing farm in Kentucky. In the short passage below from his novel Jayber Crow, which is about the life of a barber in a Kentucky hamlet , Berry raises important questions about the relationship between our actual lives and the stories we might be tempted to tell ourselves about them . Bateson makes a powerful case for our lives as improvisational art forms, but to what extent should we be free to improvise? Every life story omits some details and exaggerates others, selects some incidents as crucial and tries to diminish the importance of embarrassing moments. But to what extent should we be constrained by faithfulness to the record?

Here , Jayber Crow finds himself wishing that his life had been emplotted one way rather than another. But he seems constrained by what he actually did or failed to do, by what actually happened to him and by what he made of those events at the time, to tell his life's story in a way that is perhaps less coherent and admirable than he would hope. Bateson shows us how important it is to be resourceful in formulating our life's stories. To what extent is it also important that we be truthful? What does "truthfulness" mean in the context of our autob iog raphies?

Note that the first sentences of the selection refer to Dante's Divine Comedy, which begins in the Dark Wood of Error, and John Bunyan's Pil- grim's Progress, which follows the King's Highway.

From Wendell Berry. Jaybcr Crow (Was hington, DC: Cou ntcrpoilll, :woo), p. 133 .