by Nora Bateson
Prostitution offers the buyer a purchased distance from the context of emotion.
The reason we can sell off everything for money is that it allows us to NOT SEE the relationships.
Thinking of the many new economies that proliferate in the possibility realm—sharing economies, caring economies, green economies, circular economies, etc.—
I wonder if they are all potentially off-topic.
Perhaps the issue is not the shape and flow of economy, but the idea of currency.
Currency decontextualizes.
What if we need to rethink what money is?
Currency that holds relationality.
You cannot sell or buy relationships.
Perhaps currencies that could illustrate relation would help?
Labor currency?
Living currency (life forms from the land, oceans, air)?
Artisan currency?
Intellectual currency?
Technical currency?
Liminal
If you lie to me, my skin will know.
I won’t notice,
But the undercurrents will rearrange.
Minds, mouths and limbs all clamor for ungiven providence.
But each domain is somehow an empty house.
We are not there.
We are in the scent of a gaseous brew.
Forested with silence that is curating our signals,
Our aggregate is music-ing.
If something is broken—the fixing is in the alchemy of our breath.
If you are half here,
I am half there, finding you.
If your glance goes blank, and your hands don’t seek me in your sleep,
The breakfast we share might be photography.
We might be unfed.
Recultivating is a field of fingertips, returning curious—a bodysuit of taste buds.
Tending to the touch of our drifting thoughts,
Listening to the flavor of our gestures.
Meet me in our particular eternity.
An Ecology of Hurt
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
—St. Luke’s Gospel
Is forgiveness an intellectual thing?
Is it emotional?
Shall I find it in my heart to offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me?
How is it done? Do I make up my mind to leave my anger and hurt behind and extend myself in the name of peace and compassion?
Is forgiveness mine to give?
Or, is this instruction just a little pile of words, abstracted and disembodied from our personal evolution?
If I cannot find the operative functions in myself to ‘forgive,’ will my soul be tormented in gloomy negativity?
Will I be hostage to my bitterness and anger?
Will I be holding a grudge?
In this essay I take for granted that we have all experienced our inner world pounding with hurt and rage. I presume that we all know the pain of being misunderstood, insulted, humiliated, and damaged, betrayed, and slandered. In the heat of that rage some well-intending friend usually suggests that we simply “forgive and move on.” They will say, “you cannot live in this anger; it is not good for you, you need to let it go.”
Non-forgiveness is a horrible existence. In my experience I have found that resentment eats time, and pulls poison threads between the head and heart. It is no way to live.
By ‘let it go’—what we really mean is ‘let go of your current way of making sense of what has happened.’
Just as the events around the transgression were complex, just as I am complex, you are complex. The whole of the problem (whatever it may be) is complex, and requires a parallel complexity to meet it. We might hope for an easier way out, or wish we could offer a conceptual vanishing trick to the person or institution that has injured us.
I imagine uttering the magic words, “I forgive you”—and poof, pain and conflict are gone. But forgiveness is not actually something you give, or make, or force. Forgiveness is about something learned.
What I have found in the return from my darkest moments is that learning must take place. Not just any learning, but learning that bridges the emotional, intellectual, and physical realms. I am speaking now of learning that lets all of those faculties rest again in newly found knowing that whatever the nature of the injury, we can find our way back to safety.
In order to not live like titanium robots, we have to feel. So, it hurts when people are mean. Even some unknown person on the bus, or a grumpy salesclerk, can tear a hole in the day. We are more like jellyfish, squishy enough to hold the waters of life, but vulnerable. The fact that someone can hurt me means I care. Caring enables us to learn, perhaps because the resentment is too difficult to sustain. Learning means we can heal and evolve.
There are levels of betrayal and pain that I have experienced that I hesitate to share. We all carry our wounds; no one gets a free ride. There have been moments when I was so devastated that I thought I would never be whole again, that I would always be shattered. Being alive seems to require that we each take a few turns plumbing the depths of despair. I have always treated these times as an orienteering challenge for me to find my way back from the abyss, bruised and broken, but stronger for the journey.
Life seems to demand that we each find the fire of anger, and burn in it. Sorrow has enveloped me at times. But the pivot point is my frustration at my own inability to see a situation for the danger it holds. From that position I find that I am repeatedly trying to trust those who should not be trusted.
On an intellectual level, I understand that those who have betrayed me did not know the streams of harm they were unleashing. But that is not enough is it? The intellect can accept, while the heart and body still thrash in pain. In my heart I want to want to forgive. I want peace, but the tearing spreads across the body. Tears are not only sentimental, they are also physical and intellectual.
I have found it can take time to find the multiplicity within a particular injury we have encountered. Somehow history has to uncover a balance inside of this gash in one’s identity. As if it were a new limb, we have to re-ecologize this event into our world so that we can live in it.
In this sense the mutual learning can appear one-sided. The calibrations I make to become more familiar with a particular danger in life are not easily shared. But surely the adjustments are sensed. I would not venture to say how. These calibrations are sometimes conscious, and largely not. We learn to know the situation and ourselves within it at many levels.
I am reminded of a time when my son was bullied by a boy in 5th grade who wiped dog-poop on him every day at school. It took him weeks to tell anyone because he was so ashamed. That afternoon in the living room we practiced saying the words “back off” in a voice that came from my son’s ‘I-mean-it’ place. It took a while, but finally after an hour or so he found what we called his ‘thunderous roar.’ The next day at school he was ready to use that voice. The boy with poop on a stick approached him to smear him with humiliation, and my son took a breath and was about to say his “back off,” when the boy changed his mind. Somehow they both knew the relationship had shifted. I cannot give what I learn to the person who has trespassed against me. In fact, usually the learning itself is a moment at which the pain is not healed so much as it becomes obsolete.
I have no idea where this learning takes place in me. I assume it is not locatable in a particular vein of thought, or aspect of being, but rather that it is distributed everywhere. I must have an insight into how this situation is to be avoided in the future, and even my body has to know that this violation has offered possible expansion (or contraction) to the whole system of my life. In that sense I do not offer my forgiveness. I set my sights on a time when I will have found a way to learn from what happened.
I am not talking about a pat life lesson or a clever quote from a wise celebrity, but the kind of learning that alters the way I perceive the situation. The landscape will chang
e, but I do not know how to change it, or the ways in which its contours will be redrawn. Learning to go to the abyss of despair and get back is like a multi-layovered flight through the terminals of all sorts of human-to-human error.
In the process of learning, rage and pain lose their charge. In that sense, forgiveness—if it exists—is a whole contextual renovation. The whole relationship with all its tentacles of connection shift tone, shift sentiment.
To accept that my wrongdoers “know not what they do” pales in comparison to the fact that I know not how to handle it. Handling hardship is a many faceted process. It is in our family, our finance, our bodies, our emotions, our idea of right and wrong.
The concept of forgiveness is shifty when it is an idea abstracted from the messy layers the pain winds through. Should I feel bad for being mad? Should I feel bad then for the original insult, and additionally harbor remorse for feeling insulted? Which should I try to un-feel first? Is un-feeling any way to gain sensitivity and deeper learning? I may be scorned for saying so, and people may ask, “what kind of a person does not promote forgiveness?” Who am I to suggest that the act of ‘forgiveness’ is fraudulent?
Have we misinterpreted the New Testament? Or were they really dealing in such abstract modes of thought? It seems we are inextricably wound and bound into the paradox of forgiveness.
First, one is angry or hurt, then on top of it, there is remorse for the experience of anger or hurt that should be relieved with this thing called forgiveness. Faking forgiveness, like faking orgasms, is not good for the overall ecology of the relationship. The wound, even in its purely emotional form, can be smoothed on the surface while the underlayers begin to detach. Falsified, they become bloodless, and lose circulation in the relationship. Detaching is the opposite of connecting. The drifting begins.
Isolation is the inverse of ecology. Forgiveness as an applied principle of ‘moving on’ or ‘getting over it’ may in fact derail the ecological process of discovery within the ecology of the pain. In this way forgiveness is a psychobabble-bully making the complexity of the relationship shrink down and be quiet.
I want to suggest that forgiveness as a token of high morality is not an effective strategy for achieving peace. The fact that it is packaged as a peacemaking tool of active compassion is even messier. I have a hard time figuring out what people mean when they suggest forgiveness as a solution. How do you do that? I cannot imagine that there is a way I can beam a kind of grace bubble, with my magic wand, around those that have betrayed my trust, or violated my world in some way. Seriously?
I can think in bold letters “I FORGIVE that person.”
I can write a card with those words in it.
I cannot actually give away forgiveness; it is not in my possession.
The most I can give is time.
The fact of “knowing not what they do” does nothing for the pain. Surely we never know what we are doing, or how others will interpret our deeds. You do not say to a child who touches a hot stove, “forgive the stove, it didn’t mean to burn you.” Or to someone who picks up a poisonous viper, “forgive the little snake, it did not mean to bite you.” We don’t say those things because obviously forgiveness is irrelevant to the child with the burned fingers. The child is merely expected to learn from the experience. There is no need to be angry at the stove, no need to hold a grudge, the need is to learn where and when to touch it.
Learning is the key. Once the child learns how to interact with the stove without getting hurt, the child is free—until a new learning arises. Caution may manifest as a process of learning to learn. With learning comes the capacity to learn again. To be alive is to accept the possibility of pain, and to know that one day another form of pain will manifest.
What happens when we zoom out and examine transgressions that are not personal, but are political, national, or religious? What sort of reaction and interaction can expand our capacity to respond in ways that create less trauma over time? The larger ecologies within which the transgressions of humiliation, exploitation, and vengeance are found require a response with far more capacity for complexity than surface-level forgiveness. Global volatility is not decreasing as the boundaries of economy, ecology, and socio-political governance blur. Multinational corporate business, climate change, and war/terror are manifesting large-scale people movement, poverty, and trauma. The approach to these painful situations is of paramount importance. We will all live in the stories as they play out in decades to come, just as we are now living in the aftermath and with the consequences of decisions made in the early and mid-20th century.
One approach:
1. Define a polarity.
2. Add trauma and drama.
3. Panic in search of a solution while the situation blooms into cascading and overlapping destruction.
4. Define a solution within another polarity
5. Repeat steps 2-5 indefinitely.
When that gets too painful and repetitive we might try this approach:
1. Allow complexity.
2. Pause the impulse to find cause.
3. Increase mutual learning within the situation.
4. Previously un-seeable possibilities appear
5. Repeat steps 1-5 indefinitely
There are infinite ways to approach approaching.
Quo Vadis? (for Tobbe)
I see you.
Pausing between fast forward and tumbling back
Winding into snarls of shiny ribbon
coming undone.
Chaos is composing you in impressionistic looseness,
Colors washed in an unexpected retreat of your plan
Broadcasting lostness in squeaky harmonies.
With Doppler effect.
Dear one—travel like the back-packers we once were!
Mock the control!
Right knob. Wrong button. Stop. Pause.
Time to play.
You know the rhythm in the hum of your bones
as natural as the resonance of bees, below the frequency of the dull din.
The script you are memorizing is unwritten.
Erase any ink you think
Ride friend. Like a saggy pants skateboarder.
Like a five-year-old with frozen nose water on a sled.
Like the day we climbed across the moonlight painting paths on the water.
Wisdom is breath. The inhale of effort
and release of that which you have been given
To give.
It’s a letter to yourself that pleads, “don’t go.”
You were formed from the irresistible ripening of summer fruit
In the sweetness dripping messy impossibleness
Restored in contact.
You are safe in the crooked gesture of a branch reaching across a meadow
Pointing to the other horizon
Where angels spin stories in dizzying mazes across uncertainty
drawn in birds
…in flight.
Wings on capricious winds,
Drop occasional feathers that float and balance in song
On the tips of grass blades.
They are afraid in the delicate intimacy they convey
Just like us.
Me Watching You Watching Me Watching You
How does one write about questioning the way we define sexual inequality to a grouping of people from around the globe? I have been given this task by a group of colleagues with whom I attended a conference. I am daunted. As I write this piece I keep in mind a readership of many professions, cultures, and ages. I have no idea how to speak on this difficult topic across these oceans of cultural ideological absolutes, but I do know that it is vital to try. It is messy to jumble perspectives; cultural and personal frames triangulate against a maze of media, religion, language, and professional know-how. I would like to believe that the mix-up of our world visions will allow a depth of understanding that is desperately needed, and perhaps it would lead to questions that would otherwise remain unsp
oken. I cannot speak for women, or the west, or the young or the old; I cannot speak for the ecologists or the anthropologists. I can only rummage around in my own set of experiences that give vocabulary to my lens. Nor can anyone else speak for these groups. This is a personal account.
‘Context’ was the title of the family therapy conference in Singapore, in which a kind of trust between professionals occurred that I have rarely, if ever, encountered. Through this trust a dangerous conversation about sex took place across multiple cultures. I was reminded of ‘Rashomon,’ the famous film in which Akira Kurosawa told the tale of many witnesses to a murder and rape who each gave contradictory accounts of what they saw. Our session was an ad hoc, meta communicating, cross-cultural pilot program for those who no longer want to wait around for the real conversation to begin. To be fair, this was not part of the conference plan. The conversation that took place was not on the agenda. It is likely it could not happen again. The mirrors of cultural communication we entered moved me, and in doing so also rearranged some ideas I thought were immovable. I would like, in this chapter, to try to describe the shift in my own thinking without falling down a tunnel of culture-centric assumptions.
I was already squirming in my seat in the freezing cold air-conditioned theater when the afternoon presentation began with a five minute video clip of a husband and wife in Taiwan who were no longer having sex. The wife, in her early thirties, did not want to have sex with her husband because he had forced her to do so early in the marriage. She no longer trusted him. In the clip, the therapist was sensitive to the fact that the husband’s needs were not being met. The wife said she could not accept her husband in a sexual way again until he apologized. But when he did, she sensed it was a shallow apology. I thought it sounded as though it was given not from the recognition of having done something wrong, but more like a negotiation to trade what he needed in order to get the result desired (sex with his wife). The wife demanded another apology. The therapist encouraged both of them to pursue a more sincere apology, and after some time she was satisfied with the sentiment she received.