Small Arcs of Larger Circles

by Nora Bateson

  Daphne was only getting heavier, sinking with sorrow, lost in loss, she began to realize she could not do this alone. But with the cynicism in her now she trusted no one. The metal in her blood oxidized every molecule of belief, as bacteria in a petri dish devour sugar. How could she even cry out? The plea in her voice would carry her delicacy to the outside world.

  ‘Resistant to corrosion’—that was what she was supposed to be, that was the point of lead, last-forever-lead. Lasting forever in cold isolation without a lingering string of connective warmth.

  The grief was too much to drag behind her, in her, through her. She had done the math badly and would face the grade. Better to be something else. Perhaps she could be a door to another realm, she thought to herself: “If you cannot handle the connections, avoid the endpoints and be connectivity itself. Merge.”

  To go into a bond, and form linkage with another, is to dangle in the ravaging sea. She could not hold her end of the thread, could not see it, it was not hers. Apollo’s beckonings across the forest were like ice shards stabbing at her bones. The idea of their merging was to her a disaster. It was a cliff to fall off, a non-existent bridge across an immeasurable crevasse for her to fall through. In self-protection her instinct was to reject instead of being rejected.

  Her concern for him was minimal. Surely another damsel would catch his eye. Surely it was all a game to him. The alchemy of distrust and self-doubt scared all sweetness away. She ran now, alongside her empty-handed future. She offered no options, even to herself. There were to be no deals, and no way out. Nothing was too much.

  With the momentum of a boulder on its way to the bottom-feeders of the Red Sea, she sank. A smooth plummet headed directly to the abyss. Was she standing still, screaming silently? She looked down. No, she was running, she was still running. Her leaded footsteps embossed her despair into the forest floor.

  Cynicism, measurement, failure, rejection brought on by pounding poison. She could never have loved. She was emotional lead, melted to form but not to forge a bond. It was not written. Another nymph in another myth could maybe enjoy such mush. For Daphne, it would be better to transform into something that was already woven into the pattern. That way she could be un-partnered and still never be alone, like a tree in the forest.

  “Change me,” she called to Peneus, “I cannot be. These limbs will carry only vulnerability, this womb will carry only the seeds of worthlessness, nothing will grow in me, nothing can absorb the nutrients of creation. I cannot be a vessel, let me out, change me… change me. If I cannot be creative, let me rest in the lap of creation, and be of some assistance there.”

  The weight of cold lead seared and stripped her veins. She could not run further. Apollo was catching up.

  The cold became cool, and the grey in her blood began to feel green. Fingertips first opening into leaves branching into stems. Her toes began rooting into the earth searching the moistness and gritty ground, finding bracing and balancing her against the winds. Her lungs filled for the last time with the breath that passed her lips. From this moment onward she would make oxygen, not inhale it. Her exhale was the flash of heat and the brush of ecstasy that trailed from where his fingertips whispered over her skin…

  Apollo, was late. I wondered, as I stood in the corner of the Galleria, why are men always a second too late?

  When their bodies touched, the antidote to Cupid’s poisons was scheduled to release them from the cursed arrows. Cupid knew better than to disrupt love. He was just a prankster. Apollo’s fingerprint on her belly sent affection flushing through Daphne’s veins with the scorching of a young woman whose body has just woken to love. But by then other influences were at work—her father’s magic was already in play; bark wrapped itself around her torso, leaves sprang from her hair, but her circulation was storming with the essence of her femininity met in full by Apollo’s love. Those were the last seconds of her life as a woman. Some still say she was one of the lucky ones.

  Daphne reaches, marble arms like branches, lifting into the sunlight while I almost merge with her. Her tragedy and her triumph are tightly strung in the harmonizing chord so recklessly rung. This is life itself, it is love, it is yes & no, order & chaos. And it is ringing us all into existence. Invite life as it is—as much grace as disaster. There will be shredded emotional tissue and there will be the floating wisps of infatuated cloud dance. Or, without invitation, it’s just another statue; it’s nothing at all.

  There in carved marble in the far western hall of the Galleria Borghese a study of who we are as ecologists is carved into our mythology. But which mythology? Whose version? I had the benefit of blurred vision, a half screwed up understanding of the piece. I read my own story. I know, with heavier stone now, the game of gold and lead and love and humanity and the earth. Longing now, to long again and to touch the belly of my natural nature. Is there a mythology that can release us from the grip of havingness? To adore the world around me as I would be adored, and never find the end of the strings that pull? I will remember Apollo in his reach for Daphne, and retell the story of the trees. Unsolved, unfinished.

  And they lived stretched taught in desperate yearning ever after…

  Phoebus (Apollo) admired and loved the graceful tree, (For still, though changed, her slender form remained) and with his right hand lingering on the trunk he felt her bosom throbbing in the bark. He clung to trunk and branch as though to twine.

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses (A.D. Melville translation)

  Configuring

  We long long long

  To claim forever together.

  Division into one

  In obscure fractions of timelines

  Laid out in love

  My promise is measurement of how much of me I want to give you,

  Drawn from the molten core that warms the soul

  It adds up to an apex of surrender.

  It’s the most precious alignment

  A perfect solution

  A spiraling symmetry

  Promises have their own dimensions

  Not broken by the x axis of time

  They don’t wear out.

  They are graced by unexpected evolutionary trajectories

  But you might end up somewhere that you need to be

  Enfolded with my promise

  To a Somewhere this instant declares yours

  A promise is an infinity in a moment

  If you then me—

  means stay.

  What’s the Opposite of Opposites?

  Is it possible to blur the brackets a bit, perhaps feature the mushy infinitum of possibilities?

  Seems like all these global negotiations at present are populated with far too many ‘this’s and ‘that’s and not enough ‘whatchamacallit’s. Niels Bohr said that “the opposite of a great truth is also true,” and that was good, but what about the not-quite-opposite-that-was-sorta-true-at-one-point-and-now-feels-suddenly-relevant… that is the one that needs another go around.

  I would love to see the authenticity of a negotiation rhetoric that does not beget rigid binary positions, without a winner and a loser, something wider please….

  Tears at the Bus Stop

  Stories breathe life into the abstractions of philosophical pursuit.

  The machine that seems to swallow up children at the age of 5 and spit them out again at 18 ready for the world (or at least ready for university), patterns deeply into the social system. Avoiding it, altering it, fighting it, and changing it are not easy mandates. But, surviving it intact is not easy either. The crisis we face now in education is not really about what is or is not provided in the curriculum; it is not about test scores, nor is it about which universities are the most prestigious. It is, in fact, not even about knowledge. The issue is more diffused. Simultaneously, it is more acute. Though nearly invisible to most eyes, the problem lies at the level of thought patterns. The prescribed mode of thinking that is generated by our educational systems is not conducive to the sort of thinking that new ge
nerations should have access to. It’s a matter of delivering an obsolete form of inquiry that fails to engage with the dynamics of living complexity. The stakes are high, the survival of the human species, as well countless others, is in question. And yet the lethargy around turning the Titanic of what we call school is apparent in every curriculum. The conversation about education that is needed starts with the relationship between the generations: a sacred territory between present, future, and past.

  My memories of school are largely haunted by a sucking sound, a giant vacuum that pulled the oxygen out of the room, out of me, out of science, out of art, out of everything it could reach… leaving a lifeless shell of multiple choice, right and wrong answers, shame, and the small thrill of counting the minutes until lunch. Stories were relegated to fluff. The fractured, dominant paradigm ruled the school. I watched as an outsider, noticing that some people were good at pleasing what I later came to know as the ideological superstructure. Those students had learned the game, they could take in exactly the right bits of information and present them back to the establishment in keeping with the cultural savvy. Others would not be tamed; they fought, they ignored, they hid themselves in the folds of labels like ‘bad-boy,’ or ‘learning challenged,’ or ‘athlete.’ All too familiar is the bright child who after exhibiting original thinking in school and being chastised for it, has chosen not to try to succeed at the game. Many find that dignity can only be preserved if they don’t try to please the system—a skill they probably do not have. There is, in fact, a certain nobility in keeping some form of dented self-respect. These students are punished accordingly, not only with poor grades and distraught parent-teacher conferencing, but also by the shadow cast across their lives by the university they did not attend, the job they did not get, the wealth they will never have because they refused to drink the Kool-Aid when they were 14 years old. Most rebels are eventually broken.

  I was somewhere in-between. Not willing to comply, not willing to fail. My education was marching me toward an indoctrinated, acclimated adulthood, but I was headed elsewhere. I had a secret weapon. I was lucky. Only now am I beginning to know how lucky. I had protection. I had the tears of my father.

  My memory of those tears is vivid. In the mornings, my father would walk me to the bus stop and stand with me there until the yellow school bus came. At home he was not hesitant to be vocal about his suspicions of how I might be contaminated by the school system. On this particular day his gloom deepened as we waited for the bus together.

  With a little British irony he joshed as he helped me climb aboard, “Use the brains you were born with.” As the school bus rolled away I could see from my seat out the window that my father was weeping. He would say to my mother, “They are going to ruin her mind.” But they never did.

  For me, the contrast between home and school was extreme. To begin with, the dinner conversation protocol was premised on the notion that anyone, children included, was perfectly capable of making (and even expected to make) valuable contributions to the discussion. A sloppy thought was a sloppy thought, no matter the age or notoriety of its purveyor. All of us were of the understanding that the objective of our interactions was not to prove anything, or to be stroked for being knowledgeable in a particular subject, but rather to learn something, perhaps even stumble together into a new understanding.

  What was a sloppy thought in this case? One that was riddled with the traps of split thinking, captured in the net of mechanistic logic. Our household was a place where breakfast was fried eggs and fresh thoughts, a piece of music was a starting place for a day’s inquiry, the Encyclopedia Britannica took up most of the table, and the fish tank was a source of poetic counterpoint to the Balinese art on the wall. The world for me was delivered un-separated. So, clearly, school was Hell. I could not make sense of it. The tasks and the language, the tests and the social structures were not within my realm of comprehension. They were asking the wrong questions.

  Good questions do not have answers at all, let alone right or wrong ones. It is bad math. The world as it is, bubbling and swirling, unreasonable and uncertain, is a story fountain. The world as it was taught to me was starved of its harmony; it was a study in single notes. My father was writing a letter to a colleague when he wrote the phrase, “Break the pattern that connects and you necessarily destroy all unity.”

  This became what is now a well-known quote from the introduction to his book, Mind and Nature:

  “What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, and all the four of them to you and you to me?” It’s a good question.

  That question alone is grounds for an entire education. It calls for the formal details of living ecosystems to be seen in the larger context of pattern. It requires the differences to be described through specific study in order to examine the minutiae and the structures of living things, while simultaneously it pulls into focus a larger vision of the patterns and rhythms of life. How do the many details learn? How do they interact? How are they organized? Or rather, ‘how are they self-organizing?’ since the adjusting is incessant.

  Research is process, and the study of process is the research. How does the context of our study shift when we imagine the stories of all living things? Can we begin to place our story inside that ever-unfolding epic of evolutionary development in nature? This is a question that interlaces empathy and the recognition of the patterns that we share with life itself.

  The slightest recognition between ourselves and the sea creatures, between each other, between our family communication systems and the way a rainforest’s flora and fauna are interwoven is a peek into the possibility that we share a story. It’s a gateway to another kind of ethics that carefully tends to the aesthetic. This was why my father cried. He was mourning the loss of that precious capacity to integrate and function within the uncertainty of interdependency. What my father did not know was that the tears he cried for me formed a shield. Those tears carried a meta message that took up residence below my conscious understanding. In the clarity there was something important that could be lost. My mind was in danger, and I knew that I should not trust the institutional authority I would spend the next decades in communion with. I cannot say that his shield made it easier for me; in fact, it kept me alert to the need to stretch across a paradox—to ride on a pair of mustangs, one foot on the hypocrisy of the education system and the other on the pursuit of wisdom.

  I am not sure exactly how to alter the educational system to incorporate a study of the overlapping patterns in life. Education is, of course, part of a larger context of culture, including economy, language, politics, science, and so on. We are normalized into an unworkable imbalance, forever tearing the world into pieces and reifying the need to grasp each answer, each ‘solution,’ and freeze it. This is wildly out of keeping with the dance of life, as Heraclitus reminds us with his observation that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Never rest in certainty.

  The ambiguity we need is unacceptable to the requirements of notions such as ‘authority,’ ‘credibility,’ and ‘expertise.’ A politician cannot build a campaign on the premise of acknowledging that the problems the country faces right now are so big that it is not possible to actually ‘know’ how to fix them. Likewise, a teacher can hardly begin a class by recognizing their lack of knowledge on the subject being taught. As a parent, I have found that the best we can do is model for our children a kind of communication that is open, vulnerable, and learning… but also we have to teach them that this relationship is not to be taken for granted. Kids have to know that most adults will expect them to be respectful without any inclination to reciprocate that respect. Adults often abuse their authority by presuming their right to be right, and believe they should not be questioned, doubted or proven wrong under any circumstances. It is unfortunate to have to teach children to feign respect. But they have to know how to deal with their world. Their touchstone will be the adults who were willing to learn.


  The education system that reaches around the globe is a mess. My father was not so far off when he suggested that young minds were being ruined by it. The violence of breaking the world into bits and never putting it back together again substantiates the kind of blindness in which we have separated ecology from economy, and psychology from politics.

  What is the restorative? Is there a prototype or a structure for another concept of education? Can we fix this? From my perspective I see that the coming generations will be faced with a translation task. They will carry two narratives simultaneously that are seemingly at odds. One is the story of a world that is broken and binary. The other is the wider focus of a world of stories, woven and tangled in ever-changing response to one another. Somehow these coming generations will tightrope through the transactions that fill their days.

  In our relationships between generations we will move through this misalignment with nature, to another sort of interaction—together. The weight of authority that exists now, allocated unequally between age groups and levels of expertise is setting a discordant toxicity loose into our way of living, our way of learning, our way of seeing, our way of knowing.

  There is much that we cannot teach these coming generations. They need skills we do not have to offer—advice we cannot give. They need elders they will not find. They need elders who have met the source of the earth but also know the coda of the Wall Street machine. They need a sci-fi grandmother—wise with humanity and rich with intuition, but a warrior of the digital, and adept in urban professionalism. They need elders who are willing and able to think in new ways, and admit when they are wrong.