by Nora Bateson
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Knowledge is a quest that has dominated our imaginations for thousands of years. It is how we come to understand our world. How we make sense. But 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. We have only just begun to experiment with how to gather such data.
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. There are no endpoints in complex systems, only tendrils that diffuse and reorganize situations… 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.
Ah, why do we do that? Look back. There are lots of reasons, of course; many threads. But here is one to play with. The story of the Gordian Knot is a myth that runs like a subterranean internet of crooked streams surfacing invisibly through the decisions and solutions of the last 3,000 years of history, steeped in policy and language, in heroism and in philosophy, technology, medicine, economics, architecture, agriculture….
Stories, poems, and myths are to be revisited and sometimes reinterpreted. Alexander the Great may have made a great big mess. Consider this. The story goes that Midas gave the Phrygians a chariot that was tied to a post. The knot that tied the chariot did not have an end to it. No one could untie it, and it grew in renown to be a puzzle which could be solved only by the next great ruler. In 333 BCE Alexander the Great came to try his hand at the puzzle (it would have been bad luck not to). He could not untie the knot. Finally, he asked if there were rules as to how he was to loosen it, and found that there were not, so… with a single swipe of his sword Alexander cut the knot, freed the chariot, and tangled our thinking. Short-term reward, long-term damage: greed over curiosity.
I wonder if the real gift was the poetic chariot—not the one tied to the post, but instead the vehicle of perception that could carry a vision of how nature works, how evolution happens, how things grow, how learning emerges…. It was the art itself of the paradox: the chariot is an obvious symbol of movement, and the knot, symbol of entwinement… linked forever. Loose and strict, chaos and order, knowledge lies in the paradox of these polarities, and the paradox should not be solved. The knowing is only possible in the aesthetic of uncertainty which will inform not just our findings, but the process of our searching. No cut pieces, no quick solutions—complexity demands a more engaged inquiry to explore the patterns that connect.
In short, the Gordian knot was an image of the pattern that connects. It was a map of life. The gift was a gift of metaphorical guidance. When the knot is hacked in two, a binary is born and the poem is lost—not solved, but truncated. The chariot becomes the chariot and the post is post, mono-cropped into separation. In the cleverness of this solution the poetry is broken.
This brings us back to the problem of authorizing uncertain, unacademic, unknowable, and unanswered knowledge. Being wrong and not knowing are assets. These traits are not dismissals of serious study, but instead offer an invitation to the diversity of perspectives within a diversity of contexts… a much wider pool to play in.
Crispy Dry Moods
Index fingers knot as we pass in the kitchen,
Touching your angles.
Crispy dry moods lose their snap
Too long saturated in time’s dampening
Deferred is metallic anger in a flash, a flame
That could have burned in earthen honesty
Say dammit,
Crack the crust off
Shatter the pattern
But then some routine fungus fuzzes in
Catches gravity in grooves
Lands all the fierce spears softly
The everyday spirit drenchers spread in even layers
Meanwhile, waves smash against the sides of the day
Judgments, impatience, creep through the promise of love
And enter the alchemy
Symmetry lifelessly tucks the corners, smooths the countertops
But that’s ok.
It’s ok.
I will see your crackle, and fan it,
I would rather rescue the crashing swell from its detour
Collide with boulders
And applaud the majesty of far flung droplets sprayed in triumph
Wildness in unfolded, unmeasured glory
The salve of the tiger unframed
Is the gentleness of your hands.
It Goes Without Saying
Within the great whirl of life there is culture; in culture there is language; in language there is conversation; in conversation there are two beings; in the beings there are frames of perception and, in their communication, a kaleidoscope of unpredictable repatterning. Impossibly, in that conversation, the world is simultaneously held together and blown apart. Communication is a precarious cliff climbing through theme and variation. Even when it seems like the same language is being spoken, there are a million possible interpretations of the words used. Alongside the verbal efforts, expression and tone are applied like traffic signals, pointing the listener towards the intended meaning. But it is the meaning-maker inside the listener who defines the relationship. What they hear, their connotations, the vocabulary of their experience is what filters the speaker’s careful attempts. Once spoken, words are free to land where they will. 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. What a remarkable event it is to sculpt and shape a smile around words, a frown into intonations, to paint history in pauses, and inscribe meanings in the melody of eye contact. Hands, warm and worn with the work of life, hold the gestures that heart and mind form through observation. A simple greeting, a drunken disclosure, a caffeinated philosophical rant, the tender confessions of lovers, are all portions of nourishment on the banquet table of belonging. Together, as speaker and listener, we are both lost and found in our contact, researching the edges of one another’s lives to reveal a portrait of our own outlines. Where am I in you? Where are we in the eons of history? How do we travel through this emotional and intellectual landscape? Are you kindred? Are you safe?
Navigating the topography of agreement and disagreement is as dizzying as a foreign metro station. Which level are we really looking for a home in? At the level of detail we cannot help but make entropy of meanings and intents. Between what was said and how it was heard there is a chaotic fluttering and bouncing of variables. The vast distances between our perceptions cast us into places we did not mean to go; into puddles of muck and confusion. Like a skateboard ridden by a stiff and brittle adult, the words slip from underneath us. Being misunderstood is painful, and sometimes amusing, depending on whether it feels like betrayal or befuddlement. Either way, the likelihood of someone else understanding us is slim, especially given that we hardly understand ourselves as we change from one minute to the next. In this storm of unpredictable possibilities, it is hard to be sure that we even know what we are agreeing or disagreeing upon. William Shakespeare made it his business to study tragic and comedic human misunderstandings.
Is it possible to be entirely certain of uncertainty? At the level in which we are participants in a larger context, there is a kind of symmetry and grace that we are drawn toward. It is an ex
quisite harmony unfolding over long narratives that we cannot see. There are moments of union, where we sync up and meet with the indisputable force of a car crash. There will be no cynical diminishing of our birthright to connection. Recognition is a warm relief found in a flash of communion within ourselves, with babies, animals, those we love, strangers, a piece of music, or the chill of the wind. We know when it happens, with or without words. In that instant we are speaking, and we are spoken to. We can be heard. We can see and be seen. Inextricably, we are part of something both enormous and tiny; a unity that our cells, our bellies, and our aesthetic senses know without need of any authorization. If our conversation is a kaleidoscope, the silence between us is rich dark chocolate and we can eat our words. Be quiet and say something. It is a feeling so real that it defines the reality we create.
Touching the unity we are part of is a profoundly beautiful aspect of being alive. So, of course we want more. We want to catch all the agreement butterflies everyday, all year long. Can the potential isolation of living on an island of our own frame of reference be banished by simple concurrences that become the currency of our conversation? There is tension in the balance of navigating individual frames of perception in a world made of interdependent relationships. We are separate but remain un-separated. The carrot dangled by the ancient tradition of winning someone over with rhetorical persuasion may or may not be proof that we can identify with one another. At the end of our discussion we take stock. Do we agree, or disagree? Are we understood? As though agreement were an indicator of our capacity to share the lost continents of our souls.
In between the slippery details and breathtaking beauty of a larger context, there are rules about how the conversation itself is organized. What are the tacit cultural, linguistic, religious, and educational guidelines for conversing? Where are the limits of our script? The thing said, and the style of saying it, give indications as to what the communication will be. The ‘what’ in what we are talking about is underlined in the personality of the way it is said. Is it a formal discussion with the parameters of that discourse? A poem? Or giggly girl-talk punctuated with the zing of joking pokes? The restrictions of the conversation are a contract mutually chosen, usually nonverbally. Much like picking a mode of travel, the rules by which we choose to engage direct the variables of rhythm. Formal academic style, for example, has a whole world of rules of engagement, which underpins not only the content of what is said but where and with whom the communication is offered. The overtones of colonialism inherent in academic style preclude other voices of knowledge. There will be no footnotes in the lyrics of a folksong, the healing touch of a mother, or the wry wit of a storyteller. Stone walls of jargon are raised to keep trespassers from mixing metaphors. To get to new ideas, new forms of conversation are necessary.
These walls function as a cartography of the conversation. We use them to gain a sense of place and expectation within the dialogue. Once the borders have been accepted they can be played with. But, like table manners, you have to know the rules before you can break them. My father often spoke about play, using the example of the puppies tussling in a game of play biting. The meaning of the bite, while it referred to a real act of aggression, was understood to be just that, a playful reference. “The playful nip,” he said, “denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite.” The room for play exists in a given relationship precisely because of an agreement on what the mood of the communication is, and what it is not.
‘Is’ and ‘is not,’ ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ ‘agree’ and ‘disagree,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘creation’ and ‘destruction,’ these are polarities that have the wiles of seduction on their side. The skin of words contains the body politic, and the dogma of our categories is easy to dress up as profound. Suddenly our agreements become signifiers of who we are and what we represent in a static analysis of how the world is put together. There is much to invest there. Banking on agreement we double down, collude, and create normalcy. We passionately align with subsets of culture, belief, and values. These are the things we fight for, the things worth dying for. But how can we be so sure we are seeing the same thing? My teenage daughter once offered a response for me in a discussion where I was asked if my father believed in God. “Yes or no? Yes or no?” the questioner insisted, as though agreement and disagreement were a binary option. My daughter reminded the questioner that there are billions of people on this planet, each with their own epistemological frame, and their own personal understanding of god—each of them unlike any other. “Which one are you referring to?” she asked. The ‘right or wrong’ answer, the ‘yes or no,’ the ‘with me or against me’ is, at this level, a vulgar displacement of what could have been exchanged. It costs dearly to taste the exhilaration of belonging at that level; to trade agreement for possibility is an expensive exchange.
With her cheeky reply, my daughter mapped another island in which agreement and the community of like minds stopped being a respite of comfort and company, and became a line, a sharp knife to cut us apart. Our perceived agreement with one group tears us asunder from another. Interestingly, in that feedback loop, agreement and disagreement define each other. To choose one of the two is to truncate the time to explore the beauty in our differences. We have agreed either to agree or disagree, smearing a toxic glue whose fumes are caustic to compassion. A more agile suspension of the quick-dry cement we apply to meaning might be an invitation to open the box of interpretations. What is in there? 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. The latter is a much more interesting approach.
Is it not ironic? Disagreement is what we are trying to avoid, and the cause to which we attribute conflict. Recursively, the distinction between agreement and disagreement begins to reveal that they are the same thing. Disagreement is the product of agreement in another Venn diagram. Agreement forms boundaries of inclusiveness, the flip side of which is exclusivity. Agreement without its smokescreen of optimism starts to look like the cause of disagreement, and disagreement is the root of another agreement.
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. The weight of the conversation changes when we are not at risk of eviction from the temple of togetherness.
I had a dear friend once who was from Thailand and, due to language challenges and cultural differences, we often found ourselves in dire disagreement. But we established a kind of invisible bucket to put those experiences in, where we could simply label them ‘impossible to untangle’ and move on. What was interesting is that we did not expect to understand one another. Later, back home, I realized that in fact I have little more understanding of my English-speaking close friends and kin than I did of my Thai friend. More importantly, I was in the habit of believing otherwise. I thought that since we came from the same culture and spoke the same language we would and should have less confusion about one another’s intentions. On closer inspection, this was not the case at all. What I learned was that freedom of perspective removes the torture of mismatched expectations and this lessens the disappointment of non-linking, in friendships, marriage, and work.
While it’s hard to resist, seeking agreement at the level of detail suffocates the ecological possibilities of the conversation. My father used to say, “The new comes out of the random.” Mutual learning happens in the entropy; we need the confusion to release the new. This dance exists everywhere in nature. It is the swarm of confusion that becomes the grace of the way things come together. The individual paradoxically is both erased and brought to another kind of existence in noticing her participation in a larger context. 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.
The notes on the page are a map, not a territory. New meanings, new levels of understanding, come pouring into combinations born of our eagerness for contact.
Minds, great or otherwise, do not think alike; they echo back and forth, in responses to responses. In biology, codes and signs exist in living organisms as means by which to transmit relational information. But they are nothing until they are interpreted, and the interpretation sets in motion the next round of signaling. These signals are widespread, and may start at the minute level of a simple enzyme. Zoom out, and the enzyme can be seen in relation to the diet, season, and wellbeing of the creature and its environment. There is no agreement or disagreement, only a mind-boggling algebra of possible actions and reactions in messages. The stories are ever-changing.
Where does the change come from? To accommodate the possibility for change, the intellect must grow two sizes. But it is also a matter of the heart. There is no potential for a formula of communication. There is no script or vocabulary that will unlock the doors of understanding. Ultimately, the measure of the exchange lies in caring. Not just between individuals, although that is certainly important, but caring about the process of how learning together happens through interrelationships. It is about gentleness toward the delicate interdependencies of the entire context of life. A jungle of ideas, teeming with life, lies in-between what I thought I meant and what you heard. Attending to the intricate relationships that weave the context together requires a kind of perception that is formed in tenderness. Meaning morphs right out of the mud like protozoa. Unknown creatures of our creativity crawl onto the soil of the wisdom we make together. This is an exercise in both aesthetics and ethics. Infinite learning and expansion of our understanding bubbles in the mutations of our meanings. But the entrance into the great whirl will not be drawn into blueprints, because it is written into the empathy we have for the nature of life itself. Our delight in the accidental evolution of our discussion in itself denotes a ‘value system.’ Relationships between meanings pop into entirely unforeseen contexts, and little shifts and big discoveries lie in waiting. The sun that warms the seeds of misunderstanding so that they may bloom into mutual learning—that sun is courageous affection.