Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

There have been countless moments when I wanted to hide this manuscript under the bed and never reveal the nakedness in these pages.

As Nora’s daughter I may approach her writing from a different angle than most.

4th generstion : William -> Gregory -> Nora -> Sahra

I have had the incredible honor of watching her ideas grow and shift with time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gorgeous!

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.

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.

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.

Glue is superficial, so not that. Thread is better, sewing, mending the torn-apart sea...

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.

To break away from the bricklaying of evidence-based strategic solutions is a huge risk.

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.

In fact, in each glimpse of this collection is a love story.

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.

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

There is an alive order that we are within and that is within us.

seconds pass into songs for transport because rain on dust is a beginning of mud and life.

‘Mental Mono-Cropping’: generating ideas in singular fields that are bred to be resistant to cross-pollination.

cf multiple definitions of the same thing... keep them all active

Held in hoarded holding patterns,

Need to let go and peripheralize

the world is not made that way.

Ideas live into the architecture of culture.

Then they stain the carpets of our minds wit...

Biology is history is communication. Anthropology is architecture is agriculture is what some old women have known all their lives.

i.e. metonymy

Ecology: …the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.

I like our garden best of all, it is bushy and happy and free… kind of in the style of 1970s’ pubic hair.

‘Ecology’ is often relegated to meaning simply ‘nature’

On a good day we understand ecology as a living pattern of relationships, a co-evolving set of relational dynamics between parts of a system.

I like to think of Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a garden of thoughts growing, changing, dying, and even composting in relation to one another. It

Take, for example, the body.

The determination of something as simple as the quality of breakfast cereal is a complex idea that carries along in its wake a long string of influences ranging from developments in agriculture to physical labor and politics, to social demographics and eventually to the place we call taste… but it is just an idea made of other ideas, in a living world of ideas all pushing and pulling each other.

‘An Ecology of Mind’ challenges me to ask myself: which thoughts are flourishing, which are composting, which are just budding, which are ready for harvesting?

Thought patterns I assume to be permanent and pervasive—like what is a circle, identity, god, money, language, dreams—are not perceived the same way from culture to culture, or even from generation to generation.

most ideas live in the body’s reading of its environment.

A lightness in the way we hold thoughts gives us room to learn, to shift perspective, and to keep a rigorous humility of confusion.

If I can begin to see an ecology of my ideas, thoughts, and cognition, then I can begin to see mind in ecology.

can I not see the leaves of a plant that turn themselves toward the sun, or the seduction of the colors and perfumes of a flower that lures the bees?

Biological adornment is as shameless as the adornment of the fashion world.

Did we grow to love the colors because of the plants, or did the plants increase their color because it helped their survival? Co-evolution is always biological communication.

An ecology of mind, and a mind of ecology—it cuts both ways. Their story, that of the other species, is my story. But ours is their story… finally a larger OUR story.

I am an ecology within ecologies.

The mind and the brain are not the same thing. One is in the head, and the other is spread everywhere.

Who am I? Grammar incorrectly suggests that I am singular.

The pronouns are misleading. ‘I’ carries the suggestion that I am somehow individual, independent, when interdependence is the law.

Grammar needs to evolve.