by Nora Bateson
All manner of thing shall be well.
—Julian of Norwich
~ ~ ~
This essay was first published in Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Volume 19, no. 1-2, 2012.
River’s Muscle
Rivers coursing over landscapes meet and fold their molecules in muscles of current,
Without yield, without stacking one sandbag against the surge.
I ask you to be strong, strong enough to release your hold against turbulence.
A forest of trees, each leaf a receptor for the caress of the wind, is wealthy in sensations.
I ask you to be rich, banking each whisper of affection against the poverty of numbness.
I am a pool of water, cupped in your palms, your reflection flickers on my surface, wobbly in the movement of light.
I ask you to have courage to see yourself there, transparent, clean, as I see you.
For one second, for a million years. A city skyline of jagged grace is held against the same clouds the dinosaurs pondered,
I ask you to be loyal to your own transformations, while I shift and twist in mine.
Old Growth Redwoods
We have been lost to each other for so long.
—Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
Lineage is not linear.
At first, I thought I was just me. Wild and wicked and alone. 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. Then I discovered through my children that my father was influenced greatly by his father—in a Möbius strip of generational contexts.
I began to think that intergenerational learning goes backward and forward as well as following diagonal trajectories. It is difficult to be sure whether what we know has reframed what we used to know, or if what we used to know has led us to what we know now. Our children teach us about our parents.
The assumption is that evolution is a line. But evolution is in the context, in what we learn together, mutually. Strangely this was a central idea in my grandfather’s work. My father is given credit for the words “The evolution is in the context,” but he got them from his father, William.
Looping through eras, our intergenerational conversation is reflecting in what sometimes feels like an infinite mirror. The image defies family trees, it gets watery.
Together the generations, including those not here yet, have come to this point. Perhaps it is a midpoint, halfway through the human race. It is impossible to measure where the center is when the endpoint is infinite, so halfway is where we have always been. The point in time only matters when we ask, “how did we get here?” Which here?
Some elders teach children who not to become, how not to communicate, how not to live. Those influences are just as important as the ones who provide the inspiring contrast. Some children give their parents the incentive to live better. The day comes when most parents hear themselves say horrid things to their children and then think, “Did I actually say that?”
Survival of the fittest, in a world that worships development and ‘forward-moving progress,’ makes us all lost and small. Forgetting what we are part of, we cut it up into bite-size pieces and then place a range of values on the bits. Incredible. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon, a thousand pieces spread out on a table, and ask, which are the most precious? Assess, discriminate, leverage, and then objectify…
…and exploit.
The future is as small or as lost as it is seen to be. It is the civil rights movement, and it is the ecology movement. It is the misuse of authority in the classroom, and the tyranny of endless economic growth. This story starts and ends drunk on half-assed justice and partial democracy. What world are we creating?
In the mirror, any man or woman might recognize the flickering beginnings of identity in a young girl just now realizing that she will be objectified by her culture. All of nature is that girl. She must begin to prepare herself… What kind of object shall I be? A precious object? A useful object? A dangerous object? A desirable object?
I do not want to be a broken object. But all objects are broken. Broken from their system, from the nest of relationships that form their evolving identities. This brokenness is contagious, and seeps out, breaking everybody.
This is the point where we stare off into space, the din fades into a timeline that never existed, and we can exhale into the pause knowing that there is no halfway.
Hope is in the other mirror. Reflecting upon another vision, the possibility boxes open.
See, we can see the looping flow across the timescapes; perceiving our present through rapid zoom-out, and simultaneous zoom-in. In a dizzying collapse of timelines something simple happens. A reveal is given frame. The minutiae take their place on something like a spiraled horizon.
The evolution will not be commodified. The value is intrinsic, and there is no zero-sum game. But there is implicit cost everywhere. Currency is in units of curiosity, empathy, unity, and sentiment.
Standing down from the need to claim my own ground I am reforesting the generations, as they are reforesting me.
Daphne and Apollo
I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase,
as water finds its own level.
Or I would not love you at all.
—Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
In the Galleria Borghese in Rome I wandered into a room with a Bernini statue that rewrote me.
Bernini’s ‘Daphne and Apollo’ is a heartbreakingly beautiful sculpture of an unflinching adoration. It is the depiction of an ancient but suddenly viable map back to the trees, through an eternity of yearning. In an impossible balance of weight-defying marble, Bernini has set even the wind against Daphne and Apollo’s final union. They are carved into a perfection of endless almost-ness…
I did not know the myth well enough to recall the storyline. Greek myths these days are wholly half forgotten, at least. The symbols remain, holding time’s revisions in erasable pencil. Who was Daphne again? What was her story? I remembered who Apollo was.
The statue questioned:
How do you wish to be loved?
And what of the earth?
We will never be out of relationship with the ecologies we live within, so what is the relationship?
For me, I would want conquest to be put aside. Unkind measurements of physical or financial worth should be simply abandoned. We are not here to win one another, nor to be won. Winning has a flawed polarity within it that suggests the possibility of defeat, and presumes the impossibility of being equals. Win a prize, or win a race: I am neither. Whatever the math is of our giving and receiving, it is not to be counted, or compared like taxes, nor contaminated with doubt and manipulation.
One of Apollo’s hands is wound around Daphne’s waist. The statue captures the last minute, when his fingers hover just above her navel, excruciatingly soft, holding her. She is beginning to transform into the laurel tree, Apollo’s touch returns her to her body. In the same moment she is bound to the forest. Bernini delicately sculpts this cold marble into the mythology of the potential of humanity’s engagement to the natural world in verse between beloveds.
Photographer: DEA / A. De Gregorio / Collection: De Agostini / Getty Images
We are water. We are air. We grow, we bloom, we seed, we wilt, we die. There is a false separation between humanity and nature. Of course we are nature. But, while the one-ness is enticing, unity is not so useful if it obscures our perception of the aesthetic of our relationship with the world around us. The paradox is good for us; it is medicine against the habit of binaries. We are nature, and we can also be besotted by nature.
Apollo was too late—Daphne’s fingertips had already become leaves. She would not belong to him. She joined the forest just in time. Bernini’s statue is a story of everything alive, and everything lost—a love story of the highest caliber. A signal, written in stone, to remind us always of
the never-ending ways we are bound to nature itself.
Slipping from longing to greed is a tiny shift in aperture. The marble remains in the same form that Bernini left it, but the story that is read into it changes.
I entered the room in the Galleria where the statue is kept, and in a flash of recognition of another metaphor of what an impassioned closeness to nature might be, I realized I never wanted to hear the terms ‘resources,’ ‘stewardship,’ or ‘sustainable’ ever again. For all the good intentions those endeavors have on their side, they do not describe any relationship I would want to be in. In those words we see control, possession, objectification, and manipulation. Ache and tenderness are another approach altogether. The story of Daphne and Apollo is an old story, ready for new telling, and perhaps for the reclamation of an original imagining.
A good story has many meanings, and a surprising number of the old ones warn us of the dangers of hubris. Bernini’s retelling pushes past that old trope into the uncertain complexity of consequences that describe life.
Still, hubris is catalyst. Apollo, in a show of arrogance about his own hunting skills, chided Cupid for playing with arrows “like a child.” That was a mistake. Never mess with Cupid. Never chide love. It followed that Cupid set out to teach Apollo a lesson, which thousands of years later we are apparently still learning.
Prior to that day, the gnats buzzed in the fields alongside the swimming holes where Apollo and the lovely Daphne were flirting. She was doing her best to give him an opportunity to pursue her by not seeming overly interested. (But really, he was Apollo forgodsakes, how disinterested could she be?) And he was willing and eager to flatter her, showing off and boasting about his gloriousness. Delicate beginnings were in play; the filigree of invitation was being woven.
Cupid was small and mischievous, wise and difficult. He was not to be one-upped. He shot a golden arrow into Apollo’s heart. As it pierced Apollo a poison of desire was released into his blood, making him lovesick and obsessed with Daphne. Then Cupid shot Daphne in the heart with a leaden arrow, rendering her incapable of loving again. The evolution of their courtship was contaminated by two unecological corrosives; greed and cynicism. Daphne was unjustly written into Apollo’s punishment, you might think. But ask anyone, such is the nature of relationship. We carry each other’s pain. We learn together, or we do not learn.
Wedding rings should not be made of gold. Gold is a symbol for material desire, for ownership, and wealth, for hoarding and possessing. Gold is not lovable. It is the opposite of love. Gold is a stand-in for the sun, but the sun offers itself freely. Gold is money, collecting, stockpiling, claiming, Gold is counting beans with hunched and caved-in chest, it is hoarding the stockpile; it’s a shadowy corner.
Hearts are broken open, but in the time that has passed since the tale was told, this myth of Apollo and Daphne has been gathering dust. In this era, where importance is measured through property and position, the embarrassing breaking open of hearts is irrelevant and unnecessary. Gold won.
Longing is lost in having. It is an art to ache. It requires stoic strength and unshakeable trust matched by equivalent portions of impatience and naked vulnerability. Stretching into the delirious pull of just-out-of-reach love, lights every cell. Apollo is reaching with body and soul in an unresolvable tension. In doing so he engages wholly in the intense effortlessness of the living world. Daphne is alive without measure, without time. The poetry of creation is necessarily incomplete—always unobtainable. It is emerging, dying, defining boundaries, and breaking them, contracting and expanding in controlled chaos, or chaotic control. This is the uncrackable code of evolution.
Gratification is an intruder on this lust; it is a bucket of water on the smoldering coals that bring the laws of attraction to their boiling point. Lust and greed can be easily confused, but when it comes to love and ecology, they stand in dire opposition. Lust, with greenery wound around it in a festival of fecundity, is spirited with a desire of unions, while greed rots rank, desiring only to possess.
People used to write love-letters, and have long courtships with parlor visits. There was a practice of longing, and escapees dashed off to the gardens for a tryst here and there. Do we, can we, yearn in this way for that which we now refer to as ‘resources’?
Daphne’s blood was poisoned by Cupid’s lead. Perhaps in this postindustrial era we have all tasted that poison. The beginning of the end was always in the lead—and then the steel. The first use of the stuff was a cut to the umbilical cord. Cold and hard, immune to the viral bloom of love’s warmth, it sent grey alloy into Daphne’s veins.
The math of love is not good math. The sums have never added up. But we are built to adopt another equation, one in which the shameless vitality of life is given a parallax of its own. Even though fall comes, even though death exists, even though the nature of nature is to change, we set aside eternity for love. Until we are broken. Then we either soften or harden.
With lead in her heart, Daphne was greying inside. Doubt takes desire and mocks it, folding suspicion into attraction until it does a U-turn and becomes repulsion. He said he needed her. She could see now that his attraction to her was for all the wrong reasons, in all the wrong ways. Doubt makes a case for the fact that it is better to run away than toward. What is in the balance? A choice that is not really a choice. A decision made in the undergrowth and overtones. A vision of self in isolation cannot imagine the materials of mending. No healing is conceivable when the heart is faced with a wheel of whirling blades, insincere promises, fickle emotions, and obsessive flattery. So Daphne ran. Possession is not love; it is exploitation waiting to happen. There is nothing but an abyss of pain there. “He is covetous, not ready to love, and incapable of balancing what he is driven by,” she thought. His vision of ownership of her did not allow for either of them to have dignity. His version of her as his own, erased her history, her future, her complexity. So, “He is unsafe. Run, don’t walk.”
Apollo was hopeless. He knew better, but he could not stop himself. The golden arrow he was cursed by was too dazzling, and set alight a craving he could not tame, nor satisfy. He could not leave her alone, he wanted her, wanted her, wanted her. Wanted her for his own. Love? Of course he thought it was love, he was bedazzled. So lovely; bare feet skipping over the roots on the forest floor as she escaped his grasp, how could he not need her? Why could she not just settle her lovely self into his arms where she belonged? Pretty and fair, her limbs would have folded around his arms perfectly. Alone in the forest he found he had stopped chasing her and had his arms outstretched in an imaginary embrace which held nothing but air. Find her, make her his. Explain to her, tell her, convince her, win her, have her. Earn her. Catch her…
Apollo was the world’s original charisma maven. The primary golden boy. Actually, before the Cupid mishap, Daphne liked Apollo. What’s not to like? He made her laugh, he was beautiful and strong. He may have been a bit boastful, but then he had reason to be. She was warming to his affection, letting him in. She could assign him the familiar roles from her tales of love and marriage, giving him the male lead, the part of the lover. She daydreamed. He was highly daydream-able, and they were well suited. She never let on though. Of course not. That would spoil the fun, take away the chase. Now the chase was going to take her.
The lead had woken her up to the hypocrisy of jettisoning self-respect for adoration. Women do that. Maybe men do too. But for Daphne, now that she could see the pattern—never again.
That they were the playthings in Cupid’s mischievous chemistry experiment was not cloaked from them. Both of them understood mentally what was happening. Knowing does not matter. Once the arrows struck there was no way to reason with the runaway emotions and talk sense to them. It never matters with love, or greed, or addiction, or vengefulness, or envy. Understand all you want, the structures and the causations are totally irrelevant next to the dragons that lurk below what we think of as rational.
Cupid only triggered what was already t
here. He merely turned up the volume on the weaknesses of the heart that Apollo and Daphne each previously harbored. Everyone has a weakness: too stoic, too gushy, too beautiful, too strong, too dependent, too independent, too needy…. It could happen to any of us, at any second. The holes in our armor are the possibilities either for growth or destruction. We know this and, since the risk is horrid, we wear masks over masks to disguise ourselves. Cupid played the symphony that was already there. He just cranked it up to rock concert levels and sat back to enjoy the performance.
Daphne’s feet sought refuge in the contact they made with the forest floor. If they could just hold her up, keep her moving away from him. One eye seemed to make more tears than the other. Half despair. Half destiny. Half of history and she was only half the story. But the tears were coming fast. The heated weight of lead tearing against its own metallic nature made her fragile. The pulled and torn gauze veil of her heart was thin. Transparent, surely it could not withstand the touch of even his breath. She was betrayed by false armor. She wondered, “How can you be filled with lead and still be breaking?”
She turned her head backwards to see how far behind he was. Not very. He was a glow of gold and strength, a beam of determination, ambition, focused on her. Tree trunks seemed to lean out of his path. Unimpeded, he leapt the tangled shrubs, catching the sunlight like fuel. Stunning luck, he was as confident: a gambler with a no-lose bet, he rolled the dice of the irreverent wind to carry him forward.