Small Arcs of Larger Circles

by Nora Bateson

  We can pretend to remove those voices, but we can never actually do so. They are there in everything we say and do. In the way we listen, in the way we watch, in the way we touch, and the way we receive touch.

  Art informs knowledge

  Art lets us be subjective without asking us to commit medieval surgery on the vocabulary of our impressions. Art asks us to meet it with our particular-ness exposed and open. Art changes. It cannot be pinned down. It is un-located. Unreasoned. Unproven.

  Meanings change when we receive them through different lenses. Ask any room of people to describe what a Magritte painting means to them and each person will have a different take. Start back at the beginning and yet another set of meaningful observations will arise. We are allowed to move in art. The ecology of our ideas and epistemological limitations is permitted another sort of oxygen altogether when art is the subject.

  Art is free to move through culture and time, to reverberate the outlines of a particular moment in history against others that are unmentioned. Art pulls perception toward the differences between light, notes, color, subjects, framings, ideas, emotions, and stories. Art speaks in relationships. It is relationships. And we are in relationship to it and each other. All this relatedness is a mess of entangled, shifting impressions and associations. It is, in that sense, alive, much like a pond or a forest. Art is a system of systems, which we enter with our additional systems—our perceptions, our sense, our thoughts and histories, our personal injuries, our educations, our willingness, and maybe our sense of humor.

  Art is un-located, and it un-locates us. We are not exactly sure where the art is. Is the music in the notes? Or the rhythm? Or the musicians? Or the audience? Or the era? Is the painting in the colors, in the artist, in the subject, in the viewer? Is the poem in the words or between them? Is it in the poet’s head? Or is it in ours? Where is the art? It is in the relationships, and in our relationship to it. It is in the subjectivity of the observer, and the subjectivity of the artist, and the very capacity to explore all the levels of information that those realms unleash.

  Art is unreasoned. It does not apologize. My father, once said, “Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.136.)

  You may remember that Procrustes was a figure of Greek mythology who took it upon himself to make sure that passers-by would fit his iron bed. He did this by either trimming or stretching them to the right size. Art does not fit in this Procrustean way. But instead there is a constant shifting and fitting of a different kind, in the minds and hearts of the both the artists and the audience. Each space left free, each metaphor opened, is fitting to those who come in contact with it. It is there for the subjective perceptions of each individual to form ideas and memories around, to make sense of in their own way. Combined with skill, talent, imagination, and a whole collection of other lifelong practices, art digs below the surface of our conscious planning.

  But most importantly, in this moment, art can teach us the value of information that does not demand proof. Art serves as a complement to the realm of science in this capacity. Bravely, Gregory said,

  Not only can we not predict into the next instant of the future, but, more profoundly, we cannot predict into the next dimension of the microscopic, the astronomically distant, or the geologically ancient. As a method of perception—and that is all science can claim to be—science, like all other methods of perception, is limited in its ability to collect the outward and visible signs of whatever may be truth. Science probes, it does not prove.

  Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

  We live in a world of evidence. Our cities’ infrastructures and our environmental planning, our school curricula and our economic predictions, are all filtered through the funnel of data that compiles mechanisms of ‘science.’ Fair enough. We need to know what the new bridge will cost, or how many chemo treatments the patient can withstand; we need to calculate and measure the success of our work. But it is clear that we have made some serious miscalculations in the last 100 years. All the proof in the world has not provided the information that we need to see the complexity of the world we live in. We do not understand it. We make decisions that unfold into wild and unforeseen consequences. The proof was not enough. We needed the pattern.

  Art does not ask for proof; it directs us to look for pattern.

  Strung between the chords of a flamenco song is the empathy of a thousand years of love and pain. In the gestures of a contemporary dancer we can remember all that we have never imagined, and follow the form of the body into an unknown dictionary of emotions. In the strokes of color on a London wall, we find the humor and irony of our own mistakes. On a canvas, in a photo, on the screen, we see ourselves seeing the world. We see it, we see us, we take in the cock-eyed framing that tilts our heads and rests our status quo on its ear. The poetry is there, un-killable. Each of us is an artist, dabbing rhythms, colors, metaphors, and harmonies into our moments.

  While abstract concepts may rollercoaster through us in art we don’t understand, the metaphors still enter us, and one day, maybe years ahead, they will speak to us. In the gruesomeness of art we find we are vulnerable and that we bleed. I have a small poster of Picasso’s ‘Woman Weeping’ on my dresser to remind me that to be a student of life is to be willing to be shattered. The darkness in art gives us a visceral experience of being dug up, emptied of the seeds of trust, and carved into the anger or jealousy that has overtaken us. There are things to be angry about in life, and art lets us explore the community of that experience. Through the breaking, tingling, crackling, smoothing, and opening, we are in art, with unnamed resonances coursing through us. We are pulled from our illusion that we can watch life from our safe place at the window. We are participants in the process.

  In all forms, art can offer an experience of integration that calls upon our cultural language of symbols, our imagination, our history, our intellect, and our emotions. While we often stress the importance of ‘creative expression,’ it is perhaps more vital at this moment in our history to explore what art has to say about the possibility that our perception itself can be brought into larger circuits of cognition through metaphor. Appreciation of a piece of art can be seen as recognition of the pattern that connects. As I see it, art allows us to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously. In order for science to really work with complexity, we need art to help give scientists a more developed capacity to perceive context, one that includes all the disciplines, emotions, cultural symbols, and personal memories. As Blake said in ‘The Grey Monk’: “A tear is an intellectual thing.”

  ~ ~ ~

  This essay was published in Italian in Riflessioni sistemiche, Vol. 11, 2014 by AIEMS and in English in Systemic Therapy as Transformative Practice (2016) eds. Gail Simon & Imelda McCarthy, Everything is Connected Press.

  Almost

  Your fingers cover my eyes before you leave, so I won’t see you go.

  I will see only

  The tiny circle of your lips—just there. Whispering to my thigh.

  and my lips on you—just there. My hair spilled across your belly.

  Moving in our special private elsewhere melodies.

  And entwined we are lost at long last in versions of found

  like a new botanical to be sketched

  unknown, unbelieved.

  I will never be able to resist you, my back will arch and my skin will blush.

  Soft thoughts go smoldering southward into your body’s invitation,

  tongue traveling across your landscape.

  My mind knows that you are gone, but my body is going to keep searching for you

  Your outlines signal through the windows of my days.

  Can you come sleep inside my secrets? There is stillness for you there.

  Ringing electric spits of flashing clarity in symphonic intuition scream: “Grab this, and unleash it. Give
it form.”

  We are almost possible.

  We have been renaming the waters,

  Your hands around my waist unwrapped the most delicate trust

  They have been honeying history.

  And your voice tumbles into the foundations of my being dropping locks and holding my ocean in warm webs when you sing,

  sing,

  for me.

  Reckless

  The ecology of recklessness is alive with the courage to shun a toxic normalcy; to recognize a misalignment as success and success as misalignment. What does it mean to be healthy in an unhealthy system? Does sanity not require the madness to live otherwise? Another wise.

  The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

  Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  At a recent session on Big Data I got a super-sized tummy ache. It appears to be the beanstalk sprouted from quantitative magic beans and binary rain. Huge scoops of numbers get formed into patterns that are totally decontextualized, and then, good heavens, and then we call it information. At the session they referred to Big Data as the new oil. It is not noble. It is for sale. The thing about numbers is that they pretend to be ‘objective,’ they carry a tone of ‘facts & figures,’ when in fact they are objectifying and are much more slippery in the stories they carry than poetry.

  Non-Trivial Economy

  I am not an economist. Consequently, this is maybe the shortest analysis of our global economic conundrum you will read today.

  I remember a passage my dad once wrote that cautioned against “trivializing” our understanding of ecology into commerce and politics. It has taken me years to understand what he meant. Today that admonition seems to hold more resonance than ever. Over time I realized that while nature is swarming with co-evolution with or without humanity on board, “commerce and politics” are constructs, ideas, premised upon the errors of the Cartesian split—and must not be given the keys to the bus.

  It would be a mistake to think that we can change our way of thinking about the larger ecology we live within by changing commerce or politics. Our ways of living and thinking trace over each other so that we can hardly say which is reaffirming which. Like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail, we live in our thoughts and think in our life patterns. At present, commerce seems to darken the ink on both.

  We cannot depend upon our economic system or the political system to get us out of the horse race with collapse that we sense coming. For that we need something else. But the hitch is that it is also a mistake to think we can do it without traction in those realms. Like sticky honey, the enchantment of the political and economic patterning has touched everything from education to medicine, from the arts to the charities. In that sense the place to start is, ironically perhaps, with the economy.

  And here we come in. Can we generate a non-trivial narrative?

  What is the difference between non-trivial and trivial? For me: the trivial has been cut from its context, isolated and fragmented. The nontrivial is intact. Commerce and politics may not be able to provide a way to this intactness, that much is clear. But, without commerce and politics we cannot adjust the ecology of our thinking—ideas of life, ideas of each other, ideas of survival, ideas of success, ideas of love. These are all inextricably in interaction. Our human evolution, in collaboration with the natural world, is dependent upon the evolution of our ideas of what commerce and politics are.

  Our narrative, like nature, will need to be non-trivial because it is broad, because the commerce we speak of is that which is inclusive of a field of contextual crossovers, linkages, and sticky-zones (remember the honey everywhere).

  I am thinking about how to make commerce non-trivial. In what circumstances can a ‘something’ be of economic value without being commodified, objectified, exploited? Can we imagine an economy that does not commodify life? People trafficking is perhaps the most disgusting example of this. But it should come as no surprise to the society that has made a luxury market of natural foods, safety, education and so on that the monetary value of our world would overtake all else.

  The recent discussion of limiting water usage or carbon emissions as ecological measures contains a suspicious message of ‘value.’ Is it not a probability that, by mandating limits with penalty fees on water and carbon emissions, access to excess will come to be considered a luxury? Increasing the price of water is liable to encourage golf courses to show off their green lawns and leave poor families bathing their children in third generation grey water. To value nature, or living systems within a monetary system, immediately trivializes them into something objectified and exploitable. The basic notion of ownership undermines the non-trivial. Can the intactness of the non-trivial replace the current idea of wealth?

  A new narrative would be one in which the collusion of the planet’s ecologies, both cultural and biological, is a given. We would not have to list the many aspects of life that need to be ‘valued’ if our economic thinking were non-trivial. As a mother I have never had to make a list in the morning of all the things I need to do for the survival of my children. I would even suggest that the making of these lists might be an indicator of a commercial culture that has fragmented the world into disposable, replaceable products.

  What will this new narrative look like? Perhaps it is a reverence for that which it has become clear cannot be bought or sold. Relationships between people and within the biosphere are alive. They cannot be traded.

  It is difficult to imagine what the model of this new narrative would look like. The existing epistemology of trade and commerce flows through the landscape of all of life at present. 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. A choice that now we cannot imagine survival without.

  The words that we have to describe an alternative form of economics are perverted by the frame they are bound in. ‘Sharing,’ ‘membership,’ ‘circular economy,’ all of these emerging models smell funny from this juncture. Each of these alternatives is characterized by a new set of operating instructions. There are teams of great people trying desperately to draw up these rule books with diagrams of the new economy. They are tireless in their work, and their schemes are lovely, fascinating, and complicated re-examinations of the abstraction of whatever ‘money’ is. We humans need money to live, like we need air and water, but no other creature has currency.

  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. The deeper imprinted notions of the non–trivial are not created, maintained, or substantiated with instructions, models, or policy. To return to the metaphor of the parent and child, the child’s breakfast happens without external structures describing how it should take place. Parenting books might suggest recipes, time schedules, manners, and nutritional values, but breakfast is a presupposition whose absence denotes more serious problems. Parents’ delivery of breakfast for their children is written into the relationship.

  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.

  As my father said in my film, “You can’t possess relationships. I do not know how many relationships go into making this rather beautiful thing [his hand], and relationships between relationships and relationships of relationships of relationships.”

  I am in the business of helping people to see the interrelationality of life. I believe that money is in the way of that process.<
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  What is a banana?

  Cultivated through a history of landscapes, agriculture, labor,

  A banana is a lot of relationships.

  A banana in the context of my household is a relatively bland yellow fruit that my husband uses to make his morning smoothie thicker.

  But I was born in Hawaii and hid under banana leaves when the sudden tropical rain came.

  A banana is future banana trees, baby food, potassium.

  A banana is contextual.

  At a banana plantation the individual banana is not so precious, but the health of banana-ability is crucial.

  If I offered you my sofa, and you offered me a banana, I would feel unappreciated. (FEEL!!!)

  A banana is not just a banana. It is a collection of contextual relationships and its value is too.

  But… sell that banana for a dollar, and the banana ceases to be relational or contextual, and becomes an object of trade.

  It is objectified. Bought and sold, the banana can be said to be owned. Commodification of the banana is a by-product of its having been stripped of its contextual relationships. The valuation does not matter, once the relationality has been deleted. How we see a banana is what matters. The idea of its being purchased is an idea that carries a privilege of blindness to its ecology.

  And what about an hour of work?

  My hours, your hours.

  Hours prepared for, hours away from sick children.

  Hours that have pulled us from writing and thinking and put our hands in the dirt of our gardens.

  Hours of labor on banana plantations,

  Lawyers’ hours serving labor law,

  Boycott bananas to speak for the conditions under which the labor is stolen from plantation workers.

  Hours are not hours, they are contextual relations.

  Time, bought and sold.

  Money is the permission for one set of relations to be erased and replaced by monetary contexts.