Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

I am not only what is in my body, I am also my personality, my culture, my emotions, my spirit.

Finding where exactly the outside world ends and I begin—is not so easy.

Knowledge is how I can define and separate myself.

‘Who am I?’ is a question that contains a treacherous mistake: it presumes I am independent.

I am an ecology of selves.

Before all else we are of the ecosystems.

Soaked in folded learnings, lost threads, unseen outcomes.

We are grapes always.

I have left this in letter form instead of turning it into an essay because I want the relationship to be visible.

What is policy going to be even in 35 years? How do we account for the shiftings in technology, culture, and ecology between now and then?

cf my manuscript on 21st century paradoxes

The problems that are arising are the result(s) of the fragmented way that we assess the world.

But the trouble seldom appears where it started. Such is the nature of complexity.

ecologies because the multiplicity is so important.

An immune system is a political territory.

cf Sloterdijk

To think of the future now is an act of optimism at the highest order, and to really engage in that thinking is to take on a meta level of dignity… the dignity of dignity, of all of life in integration.

I question now the metaphor in which seeds represent beginnings. Seeds of change, seeds of hope, and so on. Of course, in a world of linear thinking that would be the meaning ascribed to seeds. But hold on. Seeds lead us just as much into what came before as into what comes next.

I had never thought about seeds in that way before. I never noticed that they are travelers.

I had never imagined a history of seeds in bread.

Depleted of stories, our deep hunger is insatiable.

No one is qualified to talk about uncertainty.

We are talking about knowledge in complexity.

our ability to know and to make sense of our world underlies everything we do, including walking across the room, looking at a photograph, or picking up a flower petal.

how an ecology knows. The body is an ecology.

The complex system that is the body is a field of ways of knowing, all of which work together ecologically to provide the necessary information. The body does so at such a deep level that we are not aware of even half of the information we are utilizing.

The body is gathering multiple perspectives, like that of the toes, the eyes, the hips, the knees, the shoulders and the tone of voice that someone uses to speak to you. The long arms of science can reach some of this knowing, but the body goes well beyond. It also sources information from the emotions, the culture, the memory, the nature of rhythm, the sound of footsteps and so on.

The nexus of relationships that is providing knowing to a single minute gesture is ecological. It is intricate and intimate.

The pattern that connects, as my dad called it, requires both process and form; it is part rigid and part imaginative. To study it, our first step is to remember that we are in fact part of the pattern, inside the ecology, and allow our inquiry to take another shape.

as I look around I see a great deal of misunderstanding—a great deal of information floating around, and even more being generated in the form of big data, little data, medium data. But not much in the forms of the warm data of interrelationality.

Warm data is a term we use in the International Bateson Institute to describe information about relationships rather than numbers.

The promise of increased knowledge is that it might help us to solve the problems we face. But the problem with problem-solving is the idea that a solution is an endpoint.

compensations come in crooked streams and don’t end up where you thought they would.

DDT stopped insects briefly, then became problematic in countless other ways. Increasing the water resources of a city meets the needs of the people, but increases the population potential. Treating symptoms, teaching to the test, gathering statistics… all of these forms of engagement have something in common… blindness to the complexity of the issue being addressed.

No cut pieces, no quick solutions—complexity demands a more engaged inquiry to explore the patterns that connect.

This brings us back to the problem of authorizing uncertain, unacademic, unknowable, and unanswered knowledge.

frames of perception

Communication is a precarious cliff climbing through theme and variation.

The plotted configurations of language patterns are like train tracks guiding the illusion of a script, while really both speaker and listener are sliding, flailing—sometimes into separate dreams, sometimes into stochastic grace, hopefully into learning.

The vast distances between

our perceptions cast us into places we did not mean to go; into puddles of muck and confusion.

there are rules about how the conversation itself is organized. What are the tacit cultural, linguistic, religious, and educational guidelines for conversing?

My father often spoke about play, using the example of the puppies tussling in a game of play biting.

Our perceived agreement with one group tears us asunder from another.

In the example of the question about god, there is ample room for offense and defense, or alternatively the option to step back and see a broad spectrum of versions of what another person holds sacred.

If the terms of the communication are redrawn to seek consensus, not at the level of detail, but at the level of the rewards of the conversation itself, a shift can happen.

we established a kind of invisible bucket to put those experiences in, where we could simply label them ‘impossible to untangle’ and move on.

seeking agreement at the level of detail suffocates the ecological possibilities of the conversation.

In the space between the instrument, the musician, the notes, the audience, and silence, the song arrives. It is not in the instrument, nor is it in the musician, nor in the silence.

Minds, great or otherwise, do not think alike; they echo back and forth, in responses to responses.

I ask you to be loyal to your own transformations, while I shift and twist in mine.

Then I recognized MY ideas in my father’s work, and had to succumb to the probability that through osmosis or teaching—or something—there had been a transmission.

Yeah, i getcha!