Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

To value nature, or living systems within a monetary system, immediately trivializes them into something objectified and exploitable.

We would not have to list the many aspects of life that need to be ‘valued’ if our economic thinking were non-trivial.

We buy groceries to survive, we buy gas and shoes with money we earn through our employment.

The presumption is that that’s the way it is; how else can we live? But there is nothing normal, permanent, or natural about this state of affairs; it is our collective imagination that maintains it from one day to the next.

Cf the economy of the Ido

They are tireless in their work, and their schemes are lovely, fascinating, and complicated re-examinations of the abstraction of whatever ‘money’ is.

Instructions are interesting, but they are at another order than the one in which this shift into a valuation of the non-trivial will occur, if it occurs.

There is something more serious than economy preventing the interrelationships with each other and the biosphere from being tacitly nontrivial. Perhaps it is the notion of ownership within the idea of money.

What is a banana? Cultivated through a history of landscapes, agriculture, labor, A banana is a lot of relationships.

Bought and sold, the banana can be said to be owned.

Prostitution offers the buyer a purchased distance from the context of emotion.

Currency decontextualizes. What if we need to rethink what money is? Currency that holds relationality. You cannot sell or buy relationships.

If you lie to me, my skin will know. I won’t notice, But the undercurrents will rearrange.

But forgiveness is not actually something you give, or make, or force. Forgiveness is about something learned.

I am speaking now of learning that lets all of those faculties rest again in newly found knowing that whatever the nature of the injury, we can find our way back to safety.

The fact that someone can hurt me means I care.

Life seems to demand that we each find the fire of anger, and burn in it.

That afternoon in the living room we practiced saying the words “back off” in a voice that came from my son’s ‘I-mean-it’ place. It took a while, but finally after an hour or so he found what we called his ‘thunderous roar.’ The next day at school he was ready to use that voice. The boy with poop on a stick approached him to smear him with humiliation, and my son took a breath and was about to say his “back off,” when the boy changed his mind. Somehow they both knew the relationship had shifted.

Like Dev in Plenum

I am not talking about a pat life lesson or a clever quote from a wise celebrity, but the kind of learning that alters the way I perceive the situation.

Cf recovering from genocide as a survivor...

paradox of forgiveness.

Faking forgiveness, like faking orgasms, is not good for the overall ecology of the relationship.

Isolation is the inverse of ecology. Forgiveness as an applied principle of ‘moving on’ or ‘getting over it’ may in fact derail the ecological process of discovery within the ecology of the pain.

What happens when we zoom out and examine transgressions that are not personal, but are political, national, or religious?

The larger ecologies within which the transgressions of humiliation, exploitation, and vengeance are found require a response with far more capacity for complexity than surface-level forgiveness.

1. Allow complexity. 2. Pause the impulse to find cause. 3. Increase mutual learning within the situation. 4. Previously un-seeable possibilities appear 5. Repeat steps 1-5 indefinitely

Ie paradox approachj

mix-up

muddle

‘Context’ was the title of the family therapy conference in Singapore, in which a kind of trust between professionals occurred that I have rarely, if ever, encountered.

The wife, in her early thirties, did not want to have sex with her husband because he had forced her to do so early in the marriage. She no longer trusted him.

Watching this clip, I was shivering. The definitions of marriage, of sex, of rape, of culture, of communication, and of healing were tumbling.

Apparently, to get any new vista within cultural blindness one has to meet the edges, and go beyond them.

After the clip, I was raging. The way in which the video played into my sense-making process set my meter for gender injustice into the flaming red danger zone. Just when I was considering taking a bathroom break to escape the room, Maimunah (Mai), the conference chair leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Would you mind leading the discussion panel after this tape, and talk about patterns?” “I don’t think that is a very good idea.” I whispered back.

I live in a culture other than the one I was born into.

I am always curious about the way that each member of the audience watches film footage on the screen through the eyes of the other people in the theater.

On this day, the rest of the room was filled with a large audience of young family therapists, social workers, and their mentor practitioners. Many were Muslim, many were women, some were Malay, others Indian, others Chinese; we were a mixed gathering. But I was the only western white woman in the room.

Was there anyone in that theater who did not resonate with the clip on some level? Were there not many men who felt their needs were unmet? Were there not many women who felt they had been pushed, or manipulated into providing their bodies for their husband? Were there not people who had friends and family who joked and cried about these things?

“Well,” I said, trying to sidestep the possibility of offending anyone in the room, especially the therapists I was sharing the stage with, “there were a number of double-binds in this session.”

The double-binds were everywhere. Traps of what can and cannot be spoken, traps of staying in the marriage, traps of divorcing. Traps of threatening divorce, traps of imagining a future together.

Into my observations of this interaction on the videotape I could not help but place my own version of the story. This is what we do in human communication, we share stories.

In the video clip that was shown in Singapore, I was not the therapist. I was the wife who had been forced into having sex with her husband.

In real life, I was never forced into having sex with my husband. Let me be very clear about that. But, like so many women around the world, I have been raped. In my case it was no one who was familiar to me, but a taxi driver who pulled a gun on me in Hungary.

Wen Tao was last. Mai asked him if he could change anything about the session, what it would be? I was still mentally wandering around the minds of the audience, when I heard Wen Tao say that he thought the session went very well and that there was nothing he would change.

Something clicked. I realized our panel discussion was ending. We had not begun the real conversation yet.

I went on to say that from what I saw, it seemed like the wife was essentially raped and that it seemed to me there would be very little her husband could do or say to get her to return to a healthy sexual relationship with him.

This is the playback of the story in the clip through my filters. I knew I was speaking across cultural topographies. I took the risk that Wen Tao would be offended. I took the risk that the whole room would be offended. I tried to be as transparent as possible that the questions, the deductions I made public were only from my frame of reference. I put myself on trial. I was watching the room watch me watch the clip…

Me watching you watching me watching you.

yeah, tell me about it. The act of writing has become terrifying!

When we get to the topic of rape, the binary between right and wrong is a reduction of the real complexity.

Wen Tao was ready to look through my window. After I described my seeing of the clip he said, “Until this moment I never saw the situation in that way.”

He had been trying to protect the couple from divorce. In the clip he was trying to help the man stay in the marriage and not wander. He was doing everything he could to help the couple feel better about the life they were in. In the most honorable and dignified way, Wen Tao was helping the couple to heal.

I am fascinated by the paradoxes of identity within and between cultures.

To see something, which you are sure can only be interpreted one way, being interpreted in another is a phenomenon that all of us need practice in.

how many of them have felt pressured or manipulated into sex with their partners, at least a few times?