Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

But uncertainty has also become a sort of island of intellectual excuses—reasons for deferring deeper study. The problem with making a place for mystery is that it so easily gets co-opted into an eddy, where ideas go in easy circles instead of lending themselves to the movement of a wider stream. While there is a kind of sweetness and beauty to this deferral, it is also an entry point to binary thinking. There soon exist in that epistemology just two categories: that which we know and that which we do not. This is a divide that soon gains potency and can contaminate our work: both in terms of what we feel we can understand, which assumes a more rigid and possibly arrogant form, and that which we can’t, which turns to fluff and quickly blows away in the wind. I would suggest a more modest motivation, which is neither to completely understand nor to label as mystery, but to simply deepen our understanding. The deepening is not finding the answer, not looking for a final truth, but becoming increasingly familiar with the many