by Nora Bateson
I have left this in letter form instead of turning it into an essay because I want the relationship to be visible. The communication of these questions is in itself a part of what the policy we make thirty to forty years from now will reveal—perhaps. Who knows? The meta-message I suppose is mostly about having pondered and poked around in the unsayable territories of rhetoric that do not yet exist. Or, maybe it’s just a game of imagining. That is ok too.
Dearest Anders,
I woke up thinking about your conundrum today. The future… how to know what we will need. 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?
I am sitting in the Aurora lounge at Arlanda Airport. 26 minutes till boarding for my plane to London. I am teaching for a few days… I have 26 minutes to avoid my kilometers of emails and think about your dilemmas instead of mine.
At the risk of wasting your time, I thought I would jot down some thoughts for you on what strikes me:
In the work that I am doing, I am afforded a unique opportunity to be an interloper, hopping between professions and disciplines, visiting the language and the details of many points of reference in our world. Some days I am with ecologists, or educators, or doctors, or psychologists, or architects, or artists, or…. What I have noticed is that I am faced continually with the same question, the same flavor of crisis, the same pattern. It does not seem to matter what ‘sector’ or subject or discipline I am working in.
The problems that are arising are the result(s) of the fragmented way that we assess the world. The subsequent actions and decisions we make are based on this limited view, and of course lead to trouble in the not very long run.
But the trouble seldom appears where it started. Such is the nature of complexity. So the child whose education system fails him ends up with psychological problems; the poverty that creates hunger statistics results in ecological mistakes like GMOs and water pollution; the ecological issues result in health issues, as drought moves populations, pesticides are connected to cancer, and so on.
You know all of this. I am just laying it out.
The issue is that the approach to our complex world is out of sync.
Is it possible to create policy for the future that uses another approach? Can we demand that any decision be researched through a process that articulates the integration of the matter in question through at least three sectors?
The policy we are contending with now is faulty, but not in the way we might imagine. The underlying metaphors of our culture hold true to the logic of industrial causation and mechanized interaction. Life is not like that. Can we change the policy of the future to adopt another way of thinking about the problems? Can we make some rules of engagement that expand the understanding within and between institutions so that they must consider the larger ecologies that they exist within?
I say ecologies because the multiplicity is so important. The ecology of the family, the ecology of culture, of integrating humanity, and of our interaction with the ecology we call nature.
An immune system is a political territory. Perhaps if politicians had to advocate for the immune systems of their people it would give a better perspective on what the linkages of survival and thriving survival actually account for.
The happiness, the intellectual and emotional realms of wellbeing, (as opposed to traumas), possibility of employment, cultural identity within the whole, and the parts of our globe, the diet, the bacterial communing within the larger ecology, the database of disease, the importance of diversity…. Such are the criteria of immune systems. Can politics hold those in view?
Perhaps this is all just old hat. But I want you to know that I am thinking of you and your very important task. 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.
What are the patterns of thinking that we have to address? They are really messing up everything… there are no shortcuts in an ecology. Each damaged linkage represents errors in our understanding of our world. How can we better prepare the political body to make decisions that are less destructive?
Of course, all of this is why I am creating the IBI… I see this need for information that is integral—and I hope to do what I can to provide a method for tending to this level of thinking…. Hopefully to influence in some small way the APPROACH to the situations we face.
All my love
Plane boarding….
Hugs, N
Nourishment
History is reframed by the future. Seeds to food to seeds to food; the generosity of nourishment recycles in overlapping timelines and blended eras.
What is ‘An Ecology of Food?’ When we ask more simply ‘What is food?’ the most complete answer includes a complex network of relationships that function interdependently to create a meal. This complex network can be seen as an ecology. Food illustrates a multi-faceted process of production alongside distribution that requires the input of energy, economics, environment, agriculture, and technology in relationship with the social interaction found in medicine, education, commerce, and media.
In Rome once, I had dinner at a friend’s house and each ingredient had a story. The table was spread wide with platters, hardly leaving room for our plates. Each cheese had a protocol including particular knives and specific crackers. The other guests declared their hometowns with accompanying descriptions of local meats and pastas. Vinegar from Modena, cheese from Palermo… But what floored me was that one of the guests knew the ancestry of the seeds in the breads. She was able to give me a complete account of where the seeds originated, and with which techniques they were customarily ground in which provinces.
These grains were whole. Intact in their biological form, and organic of course, in their history—they had never been touched by the laboratories of engineered agriculture. The host, a doctor, said they were easier to digest. With each bite we joined a continuum of generations of farmers who cultivated those seeds—generations of mamas and mamas of mamas who ground the grain, baked it, and passed down an evolution of recipes improved along the way. The seeds, the bread, the stories, the gatherings of loud laughter across time all nourishing the strong bones of their children… and their children’s children. Such was this meal in the Eternal City.
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. The bread we ate was rich with the continuum of tables that the seeds brought bread to. The seeds are the interface, the lateral lineage, the present that is part of a past and a future. I had never thought about seeds in that way before. I never noticed that they are travelers. Seeds are not only beginnings, they are witnesses and referees to evolution. They are immigrants, hitchhiking with the cultural fusions that migrations of animals and peoples make. Taking their bread with them. Taking grandma’s recipes. Seeds get caught in your fur if you are a wolf, and take a whole winter to run though the digestion of a bear.
All of that is to say nothing of the spectrums of flavors in that meal. I left feeling I had eaten enough for a week. But I woke with a deep ache in my belly. Not from the food, but from the sadness of knowing what I had not known. I had never imagined a history of seeds in bread. I had forgotten that history entirely—skipped over it, lost it. I had been robbed of the stories that the seeds carry. My bread at home comes in a plastic bag from a shelf, or at best is made from bulk food section organic flour from the health-food store. I had never tasted legacy. Sideswiped by the epiphany that the ingredients of our lives have tales to tell, the parallels began to open.
Telescoping in on the details of ordinary ‘stuff’ that following day I caught a few threads of the distant past as it has come to be. One threa
d was at the hem of my skirt, leading to the dark warehouse of a sweatshop somewhere in China. At one time I am sure my ancestors knew how to spin that thread, and a simple dress was a tapestry of skills that I know almost nothing of. I have a sewing machine I never use.
What am I made of?
Politically of course, the level of nourishment I experienced in Rome that night is leagues away from the rally against GMOs. Nourishment beyond the chop-wood-carry-water, co-op spirit. Depleted of stories, our deep hunger is insatiable. No wonder everyone is stuffing themselves to gluttonous sizes. In the obscene wealth of the modern western world, impoverishment stalks the cupboards and haunts the table. Still, I have a cheesecake recipe that came from my mother’s mother. We have traditions we carry and supply to the next generations. Bereft as it is, the dinner table is still the place where the natural world meets the realm of ideas; it is the watering hole of the body, mind and heart. It’s the oasis and the place of healing for the family and the step-family.
Food is not just food; it is also conversations. The sustenance of voices is its own nutrition. Children are watching, listening, interrupting, and learning the art of jumping in and out of a moving stream of verbal and nonverbal communications.
The children are learning what we hold to be good about life, as well as where the de-railings are. All of this while we are simultaneously registering the weather outside, the change of seasons, the socio-demographics and cultural aesthetics of the family, and the changes in one another’s moods.
At dinner the patterns of our communication come unfurled, table setting, company present, and the warmth of togetherness. My daughter dances with me in the kitchen while we chop veggies and stir sizzling garlic. My son likes to light the candles as his contribution to the table, a budding pyromaniac. Mutual learning is rich at dinner. Stories unfold, perhaps not of the seeds in the bread, but of the day. Plans for the following day are made. We may be dangling in a cultural free-fall, but we eat together every night, and that alone feels like a revolutionary act at times.
Food is agriculture, economy, culture, and conversation, ancestral recipes, weavers of tablecloths, traditions of seasons, the perfect onion, a child’s berry-stained chin… Food is poetry, medicine, friendship, time, poison, economy. Ask the question ‘What is food?’—and the answer is not ‘the stuff on my plate.’ The answer is that food is about relationships. These relationships are formed between generations that plant together, between man and nature, between the family members who eat together; it is in the conversation, in the heritage of the weaver who makes the baskets used to take food to market in neighboring villages. It is in the relationship between towns economically. Seeds used in ceremony represent longterm linkages between people, nature, cycles, and attitudes toward the future.
Nothing will ever match the chocolate gelato I had that night in Rome, made with 84% cacao imported from the Amazon. It was dark chocolate artistry that accidentally slipped though the infinite perfection of cultural, geographical, and inspirational fusion: frozen deliciousness melting time and memory.
Rain
I am outlining you in my reflection,
Breathing on the window pane of your lens
And with my finger
Drawing.
The choice I make is you.
My furnace warms the air into a message.
On you it makes the specks of chill on your chest smooth,
Receiving my transmission.
You dawn on me like something I have always known
Under a sudden spot light
I forget that I ever forgot you.
Because I chose you then.
When we were unwound threads,
Spun in colors we could not yet see.
Wayward – as the riotous weave bore story,
Distracted in dust storms of denouement,
We were shaken off into nearly lost.
But not unchosen.
Now, a windshield wiper on the glass of odyssey,
Reveals the rain
Sweeping decades into sparkly droplets.
Putting the light to music as it traces us in our return.
Knowledge and Complexity
From a talk I gave at Università Roma Tre in December 2013
The problem of how to find a voice that has credibility on the topic of uncertainty is enough to keep a person up at night.
I cannot very well stand here, amongst all of you esteemed and learned people and announce that I am most likely wrong about everything I say. But if I am not wrong today, I probably will be in six months. No one is qualified to talk about uncertainty. You cannot get a degree in it yet, to the best of my knowledge. This is an unsanctioned discussion: outside the limits, under the radar, over the top, and you probably should not listen. How, after all, can I pretend to offer you any kind of lesson on what I do not know?
At least I can say there is no one else who is more suited to the job. In this territory we are all equal. No hierarchy holds water in this discussion. No one has to take notes. No one has to be right, no one has to remember what is said. There will not be a test.
When raccoons go searching in the mud for little edible things, they reach down into the dark holes of roots in a creek-bed, and feel around for something. They hold whatever they find and rub their fingers around the outside of it to get an idea of the shape, to feel the textures, and to gather information. I hope that today we can be a little like those raccoons, and that our findings will be treasures from the edges of our topic.
We are here to talk about the noble and important realm of knowledge. We are not the first to set our sights on this horizon, nor will we be the last. I would like to ask you to pause and examine what comes to mind. What is your initial sense of knowledge? Don’t get tricky, just glance inward and take a quick look at the ambience of your sense of knowledge.
Today’s task is not specific, but it is also not unspecified. We are talking about knowledge in complexity. Not particularly about any discipline of the academy, nor any professional know-how, nor even a human hunch. But perhaps something in-between, something inclusive of all of those faculties. And while there will not be a test, it is probably true that 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. In that sense there is a test, and it is measured by our capacity for getting from one day to the next. It should be noted however that much of that knowledge—and the knowing processes needed—lie beneath our conscious states of awareness.
That may not have been the knowledge that you reflected upon a few moments ago. But for the sake of looking at ‘how nature thinks’ let’s look at how knowledge functions at that level as an example of how an ecology knows. The body is an ecology.
To walk across a room is quite a feat. It requires measurement in our muscles and alignments in our perception that merge with memory and movement to navigate a process of balancing into and between steps. It requires relaxation of parts of our bodies and engagement of others. We must want to cross the room! It requires a bit of chaos, and it requires organizing our bodies, minds, and emotions in the environment—as well as all our perceptions and a hundred details of cognition. It requires them all to come together to do this simple task—and some of you will do it in high heels. Amazing.
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. As an ecology, the body is comprised of parts and processes that function together and it knows that, in order to know, it must take in a relational understanding of every kind of information, sanctioned and unsanctioned, to get across the room. 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.
And it’s learning as it goes. That part is difficult to chart on paper and it’s impossible to successfully walk across the room without it.
To gasp at the unspeakable beauty of this process is perhaps the only appropriate response. The nexus of relationships that is providing knowing to a single minute gesture is ecological. It is intricate and intimate. It is the totality of patterns and relationships that any organism lives within. The combined contributions of all of the parts of an ecology, each in mutual response to the others, provide a masterpiece of living art. Alive. And to be alive is to be part of this ecology of relations, ideas, and communications with the surrounding world.
Knowledge in complexity is in itself an ecological process. Knowledge, when given this field of ecological characteristics to grow in, is alive; it requires and learns from the ideas that are brought forth from other ideas. The conversation of ideas in an ecological context gives rise to new ideas, and so on. The knowing is multi-directional.
But what are the dynamics of the integrity of such a system? How do all the pieces come together? Chaos and order. Structure and openness. 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. My dad offered:
I want to emphasize that whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon ‘operationalism’ or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tram-lines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of a formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.