Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

In this letter I can see the passion, and the loneliness, of science as a path alongside an esteem for the arts that is nearly untouchable.

Gregory’s father William used to say that genius can only be found in two places: in art and in nature.

this pursuit of structure and order in the natural world has everything to do with context.

‘Structure’ and ‘order’ in Batesonian vernacular are meta-terms. We will get further in our understanding if we think about them like this: the structure of structure, and the order of order.

“Evolution,” they both said, “is in the context.”

Organisms learn and develop in an environment that influences their genotypic evolution, as well as their somatic evolution.

complexity theory.

Collectively, this work has pushed the need for interdisciplinary thinking to the fore, and generated entire schools of thinking around psychotherapy, ecology, information technology, management, personal development, and more.

art allows us to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously.

In order for science to really work with complexity we need art to help inform science about forming an approach to perceiving.

For Gregory, the process through which art might expand and integrate the many parts of the mind was an explicit element of his thinking.

task of doing that which science cannot, namely, to pervade our knowledge with what he calls “grace.”

On one side the high priest is ready to save souls and on the other is the eager engineer. Without this tension the field is numb.

Rather, the starting place is to find the edges of our epistemological window frame, and play with them.

Since our culture has a penchant for mechanistic thinking, it will seek mechanistic versions of systems thinking.

unrigorous forms of systems thinking will offer explanation through mystery.

In fact, if you Google the word systems, and select images, you will see only a rather bizarre collection of abstract models and diagrams, with boxes and arrows in varying layouts and primary colors. In the first pages of results, not a single living thing is returned by Google to represent the input of systems. I think that is frightening.

“Every feather is, as it were, a flag whose shape and coloring denote the values of determining variables at the point and time of its growth.”

The understanding of how living systems learn is not mappable. Some will disagree with that, but the processes are taking place at multiple levels and between multiple parts of a system, and within those parts of systems there are more systems with parts—and all the parts are in communication, and communication is not the same thing as a script.

In scientific circles, the systems sciences have become a haven for a modeling and explanatory language for how to deal with complex problems.

The result is that we get strategic methodologies and defined models for fixing isolated issues within complex living interactions that have a living context.

This is rigor and imagination, yet it is all out of balance and distributed weirdly across our epistemological horizon.

The concept of interconnectivity has become a sloppy way of addressing the vast tangle of interactions in a living system.

Take out the vast variables and replace them with oneness, and you lose the differences, the information, the aesthetics of interaction, the evolution, the complexity, the life.

Unity is not about oneness, it requires the process of uniting, which requires relationality.

“the difference that makes a difference” requires that the relationships inside a system be ...

There soon exist in that epistemology just two categories: that which we know and that which we do not.

simply deepen our understanding.

“to find out something, even a little bit, of the structure and order of the natural world….”

So, where is the art? Where is the pond? In the relationships.

We have an unspoken agreement that we will not blur the interactions of specific issues that in fact desperately need to be blurred to see their integration.

Professionalism and authority demand a tone and an approach that is unswayable.

yeah, this is my problem with the professional world!

There is no room for racism, or religious discrimination, or professional insult, if we can begin to see each other and ourselves as multifaceted in our complexity.

“Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic.”

Science probes, it does not prove.

We live in a world of evidence. Our cities’ infrastructures and our environmental planning, our school curricula and our economic predictions, are all filtered through the funnel of data that compiles mechanisms of ‘science.’ Fair enough.

Art does not ask for proof; it directs us to look for pattern.

I have a small poster of Picasso’s ‘Woman Weeping’ on my dresser to remind me that to be a student of life is to be willing to be shattered.

In order for science to really work with complexity, we need art to help give scientists a more developed capacity to perceive context, one that includes all the disciplines, emotions, cultural symbols, and personal memories.

“A tear is an intellectual thing.”

honeying history.

the courage to shun a toxic normalcy;

the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I remember a passage my dad once wrote that cautioned against “trivializing” our understanding of ecology into commerce and politics.

Over time I realized that while nature is swarming with co-evolution with or without humanity on board, “commerce and politics” are constructs, ideas, premised upon the errors of the Cartesian split—and must not be given the keys to the bus.

Like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail, we live in our thoughts and think in our life patterns.

We cannot depend upon our economic system or the political system to get us out of the horse race with collapse that we sense coming.

But the hitch is that it is also a mistake to think we can do it without traction in those...

without commerce and politics we cannot adjust the ecology of our thinking—ideas of life, ideas of each other, ideas of survival, ideas of success, ideas of love.

In what circumstances can a ‘something’ be of economic value without being commodified, objectified, exploited?