Small Arcs of Larger Circles Read online

  Published in this first edition in September 2016.

  Triarchy Press

  Station Offices, Axminster, England

  [email protected]

  www.triarchypress.net

  Copyright © Nora Bateson, 2016

  The right of Nora Bateson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All rights reserved

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover image: Karl Blossfeldt, Cosmos bipinnatus, 1898-1932

  Reproduced with the permission of Karl Blossfeldt Archiv / Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München

  Block prints by Mats Qwarfordt

  Cover design by Sara Lundström

  Print ISBN: 978-1-909470-96-5

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-909470-97-2

  For the children, mine and yours.

  For the parents, mine and yours.

  For the generations who have not yet arrived, mine and yours.

  For the generations who came before, mine and yours.

  You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.

  —Isadora Duncan

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  If You Knew Me Well

  Breathable

  Mental Mono-Cropping

  (inter)Facing an Ecology of Mind…

  Identity with an I

  We are Wine

  Policy for Governance in the Future

  Nourishment

  Rain

  Knowledge and Complexity

  Crispy Dry Moods

  It Goes Without Saying

  River’s Muscle

  Old Growth Redwoods

  Daphne and Apollo

  Configuring

  What’s the Opposite of Opposites?

  Tears at the Bus Stop

  Therapy

  Zombies and the Hitchhiker

  The Thing Is…

  Transcontextuality

  Leadership Within the Paradox of Agency

  Nothing’s Changed

  Framing the Symmetry

  Almost

  Reckless

  Non-Trivial Economy

  Liminal

  An Ecology of Hurt

  Quo Vadis? (for Tobbe)

  Me Watching You Watching Me Watching You

  Whole Peace

  The Fortune Teller

  While We Slept

  Fools See Outlines

  Practicality in Complexity

  Sound of Sun

  What Do You See When You Look at Her Face?

  Stop That Thing You Do

  Ecology of Love

  Parts & Wholes, Hope & Horror

  Symmathesy

  Integrity

  Who are we Now?

  Filmmaking in the Tide-Pools

  Christmas is a Time Pivot

  Ink

  References

  Afterword: Allegory

  Acknowledgements

  There would be no book without the ideas. They have been born into language through the kneading of my heart, the bending of my mind, an undying itch to communicate. They are made presentable through the care of many eyes.

  The blind spots in these pages are my own, but the sensitized areas are alive in their interplay with those people who have loved me, hurt me, inspired me, bored me, infuriated me and those who have engaged me to join them in their thinking. In my travels between institutions, disciplines, jargons and contexts I have the opportunity to find patterns that enmesh them into what we call society; and in their differences, to compare my observations. They are all here.

  But the mountainsides of Big Sur, California, the scent of sage in the warm sun, the salty fog of the Pacific Ocean, and the ancient redwoods are the bible upon which I swear my truth.

  While I am uncertain who to thank for this odd brew I am mixed up in, there are some people I would never have been able to complete this book without.

  Of course my father was the one who opened this world up for me, but my mother, Lois Bateson, gave me the spirit of adventure to step into it. My children, Sahra and Trevor Brubeck, have taught me to relearn endlessly. They have shown me that in giving more than I ever thought I had to give I have begun to sense the raw grace of life. My grandfather, William, whom I never met in person, is here too—casting long shadows across the centuries. My cherished colleagues in the International Bateson Institute have been a fellowship of intellectual rigor, and courageous exploration into untold, unfound idea-scapes. I am grateful for these people.

  There have been countless moments when I wanted to hide this manuscript under the bed and never reveal the nakedness in these pages. Money was tight, time was scant, and running around the world gathering a bouquet of impressions might not have appeared the most sensible way to proceed. In moments of distraction I repeatedly attempted to duck out of this project, but my husband, Mats Qwarfordt, softly repeated, “Where is your book?” The pages began to gather.

  Then, Andrew Carey, my mirror, publisher and editor turned up. In the few pages I gave him to read one afternoon in London he saw me. Andrew made the book happen. Others began to pitch in, reading pieces and offering their efforts to help refine it. I thank Phillip Guddemi, Gail Kara, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Tomas Björkman, and Bo Ekman.

  Every word of this book has been weighed and tended by Sahra Brubeck, my daughter, and Cary Long who spent the dark hours of a winter in Stockholm buried in these pages.

  To Torbjörn Jiredal, Imelda McCarthy, Gail Simon, Rex Weyler, Paul King, Mark McKergow, Jenny Clarke, The Vancouver Bateson Salon and so many more: thank you.

  Nora Bateson, July 2016

  Foreword

  As Nora’s daughter I may approach her writing from a different angle than most. Having grown up in a household in which her ideas flowed seamlessly through intellectual conversations, work, play, artistic depiction and description, etc., I have had the incredible honor of watching her ideas grow and shift with time. At no point in the years that I have known her has she ever claimed that the ideas she works with are static. In all respects she remains humble and open, certain of her uncertainty. Although it is difficult to put words to the experience of being raised in a family that never placed a premium on rightness, I can say that the way my mother raised me allowed for a larger internal questioning of the notion of authority to take place throughout my childhood and adolescence. If we disagreed about a given issue at any given time, my mother was always willing to at least attempt to see the argument from my side. My opinions and contributions were not only accepted, but valued. Moreover, just as I did not expect her ideas to exist in a state of inflexibility and unchangeability, she constantly gave my ideas room to fluctuate. My mother did so without teaching me to label and categorize each thought I had into any specific discipline that might limit my ability to further understand the multitude of contexts that those ideas belonged to.

  In Small Arcs of Larger Circles, I see my mother approaching topics that would often be relegated to a solely academic sphere with a form of exposure and vulnerability that is specific to her lived experiences. She actively chooses not to separate the aspects of her character that are personal from those that are political. There are moments in the text when her voice could carry the cold tone of academic contemplation, but those moments are immediately countered by her willingness to allow emotion to ble
ed into her words. In doing so she reminds the reader to never exclude their emotional, physical, and mental responses from the process of critical thinking. To form walls around these various aspects of the self is to deny the possibility of feeling and perceiving in more than one way at a time.

  Without undermining the fact that her work comes from her own set of interpretations, she gracefully incorporates the influence of her father’s and grandfather’s work. My mother refrains from placing borders between the ideas that are “hers” and those of her family, shedding light on the truth of mutual learning that is embedded in cross-generational conversation. In doing so, she places herself into the framework of Gregory and William Bateson’s writings without claiming it as her own - or as something other than her.

  After working with my mother on her film, ‘An Ecology of Mind,’ I found that she and my grandfather, Gregory Bateson, shared a similar pattern of reflective thinking. Despite the distinctness of my mother’s presence in the film - the cinematography that could exist only through her lens, the stories of relationship drawn from her memories - the film was often received as though it was simply about Gregory. The profundity of their thoughts as both individual and collective was often lost, their likeness mistaken for sameness.

  The relevance of my mother’s reflections on cross-generational similarities and differences is clear to me, because I now occupy the confusing space of likeness that she addresses in her work. If you were to meet me in person, it is likely that you would notice the striking resemblance that I bear to my mother. You might be able to see traces of her in my eyes, or hear some resonance of her character in my laugh, or even mistake me for her from a distance. And though I am not ashamed in the slightest to be so similar to a woman that I admire greatly, I am wary of the possibility that people will mistake me for her entirely. I imagine my thoughts hanging in the air for mere seconds before they become entangled in her legacy, and in that moment when my words become neither mine nor hers, I am reminded of how dangerous likeness can be.

  In many respects, this collection of stories, poems, and essays draws attention to the notion of individuality as it intermingles with her own complexity. Gregory’s father, William Bateson, highly influenced the ways in which Gregory learned to perceive the world around him, and that tradition of careful examination and reflection was passed down to my mother and her siblings. However, my mother’s approach to Gregory and William’s material is simultaneously similar and dissimilar to the inquiries into Batesonian ideology that have been made previously. Small Arcs of Larger Circles abounds with a true variety of literary voices and artistic explorations of the notion of multiple description. In this regard, the reader will find that my mother’s work is not devoid of pain, humility, vulnerability, or an immense amount of openness and care. Her ideas are not contained by the academic tendency to suffocate the personal in the presence of an intellectual inquiry. This is not a text that lacks courage.

  Sahra Bateson Brubeck, June 2016

  If You Knew Me Well You Would Know That I Would Give You Everything

  For you, a respite of uncontainability. Safe pages for words, to taste them as they find their rightness. Let them rest in their silky beds of lyrical dreams. Let them run like rivers down mountain-sides, arranging curves and switches where textures change along the way. Thoughts yet unmet arrive in cloaks of language, becoming bards to take you where you can see that you are wide inside.

  Words are delicious, but cannot say much. They often lose the water of meaning before it is delivered. But they can be stirred to form descriptions of the breath, glances, gestures, and pulses between lives. Perhaps writing is finding a scrape in the skin of knowing, where the sting and dirt and blood of the day is let out, and music is let in.

  There is no language to define the spiraling processes of the vast context we are participants in. We do not have names for the patterns of interdependency. To lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous. Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters.

  An inside-out kaleidoscope—a de-fragmenter—might be useful for looking at a fractured order through a lens of unity. A superhero in a comic book might have such a tool at her belt. The way we see affects what we do, in both the broad strokes of global study, and the details of a day. Playing with the limits of our perception, our knowing, and tweaking the cultural script is like using a lemon juice wash to reveal the invisible ink and unspoken scaffolding we inhabit.

  The ink of interrelationship bleeds across the boundaries between professionalism, academic research, and the banality of daily life. Theory and philosophy are stained with the mundane and both are vis-à-vis. What holds this collection of sightings together? What holds anything together? Glue is superficial, so not that. Thread is better, sewing, mending the torn-apart seams of perception—possibly. It is the right question—what is holding it together?—and the question alone might be the source of inquiry. Surely a search for the elegance in a mess of weighted compensations, and river-washed shapings of the context of life, is enough of a spine. Perhaps?

  The thing I want to say in this book is not in any of the pieces, but is woven by you in the way you make linkings and meta-linkings.

  In the wake of human history thus far, devastation and destruction point to a misconception about the ‘way of things’ or, as some might say, the ‘order of life.’ Whatever the errors are, they are brutal to our inner worlds and the larger ecology of which we are a part. It might be that we are navigating with the wrong map. The way in which sense is made of this smorgasbord of ideas today will differ from how that same sense-making fits tomorrow. Unwritten, uncondoned.

  To break away from the bricklaying of evidence-based strategic solutions is a huge risk. The loose threads of golden flexibility are a pirate’s booty of unproven and mock-able guesses. This is not allowed, and I am not qualified. Interloping across disciplines and subjects, I am just here with two eyes to see the parallax, and to blindly feel for the hidden thinkings in the bottom of a black handbag. My father, Gregory Bateson, a scientist of many shades and a thinker, has given me a great deal to work with, and hopefully to give my own extension to. I cannot know where his thinking ends and mine begins, nor do I care to draw those lines. Both of us are here, along with 3,500 years of western civilization and the long history of human evolution, wondering how to change the course of this story. Conceptually I am walking the thin glass plank barefoot—chaos peppered with elusive still points on both sides.

  The depths to plunge are the abyss of love at the end of the plank. In fact, in each glimpse of this collection is a love story. These pieces are naked flirtations within a landscape of longing, a melting point of meetings in a panorama. To be a participant in a complex system is to desire to be both lost and found in the interrelationships between people, nature, and ideas. It is an infinite expansion where a small bird’s nest is tucked into the twigs of a gnarled oak tree that stands patiently atop a hillside. A pond below reflects its branches against the clouds, and tall grass is led by the wind to dance like water. They are in conversation together with us. Are there edges? The tree is in the park, which is in the city, in the Pacific Northwest, in the northern hemisphere, on a spherical globe of vitality, orbiting a larger globe of fire. Anyone’s heart is liable to be broken open by the simple poetry of the many entanglements captured in a single blink.

  Written in geological calligraphy, we are swirled and looped into each other in movement and pattern. We learn together, with the trees, and the trade winds, the living maps of cities, and the soup recipes of our ancestors. Cause and effect trade hats like a shell game, losing count on purpose. The limbs of history and the future’s lust are always synchronizing.

  These are the dipping breadsticks, the stewing roots and the wild herbs of my unauthorized knowings. These are living things, barely interested in the page, but swarming into warmth. In the kitchen, in the street, in the forest, in the se
a, in my cells and in the cache of breaths I cannot count—there is something holding all of this together, all of us together. There is an alive order that we are within and that is within us.

  Breathable

  In the looking, is what is seen.

  The baskets to put ideas in

  have open tops and holes in the sides

  woven in sleepy stitchery,

  loose loops cradle lightly.

  ‘It’ does not awake in form

  but dreams willy-nilly

  of the treetops reflecting the roots.

  While light changes angles in water,

  playing with geometry

  seconds pass into songs for transport

  because rain on dust is a beginning of mud

  and life.

  Mental Mono-Cropping

  Boxes, labeled and stacked, ready for a move. The unpacking will be messy. So much of what I face now can be attributed to what I have come to call ‘Mental Mono-Cropping’: generating ideas in singular fields that are bred to be resistant to cross-pollination. Education, media, and social structures present overlapping patterns of compartmentalization. Why just one concept of birth, marriage, death, friendship, work, economy, right, or wrong? To generate swathes of homogenized perception is not only zombie-like, it is a crisis of metaphor. It is, in fact, just the sort of metaphor that leads to the practice of mono-cropping agriculturally. The snake eats its tail. Evolution prefers diversity.

  Specialized and separated, the ideas that so badly want to twist and frolic around each other are captive. Held in hoarded holding patterns, the poor things are braced to fear thieves.

  This language and culture favor singular focus, clear definitions, and linear narratives of causation. A plus B equals C. If you do not have enough data on A and B, then you should seek the authority of the experts of either A-ness or B-ness.

  But the world is not made that way. Ideas live into the architecture of culture. They take up residence and make a home. Then they stain the carpets of our minds with spilt drinks. And then one decides to protect itself from outsiders and puts locks on the doors. Ideas are not tidy guests.