by Nora Bateson
Who do we want to be in this transforming world? Who are we, now? … And what of Humanity?
History tells us it will be impossible to lay aside our habits of exploitation and warlike behavior. But history also tells us that humanity is capable of remarkable adaptive improvisation.
The question now is not whether we can handle rapid culture change as our ecology, economy, and national and international political structures transform.
The question is how to get better at it, together. But it’s clear that the first step is not to seek to standardize, average out, and assimilate, but to recognize complexity.
Starting with how I see my self and how I see others:
I will not make you into Kafka’s cockroach.
I will not limit you.
I will not presume.
It seems to me the ultimate act of love is to allow ourselves and others to be complex. In affection and respect, I try never to pin down, sum up, pigeon-hole, label, or otherwise reduce myself or any other living system to a singular tag.
You are a horizon of always re-shaping forms, falling in and out of the puzzle of your own cohesion. We are all as fragmented as a Picasso. And we are also as whole as life.
You have one name, one pair of eyes, but you are more than one identity—more than twenty identities. More than we can count. My description of you will be wall-less.
We don’t lose one part of us when we accept the other parts. We can be both local and global, individual and communal. We are like one another in that we are complex, though the stories of our lives may be in sharp contrast. Singularity of identity no longer serves us. Zoom in, zoom out. Both.
Cultural confusion is the healthy recognition that there is more than one way to think about something. Whereas cultural misunderstanding is the rigid certainty about ourselves and others that precludes the possibility of mutual learning. It is the idea that one of us must be right.
Sometimes it takes years to even begin to see for ourselves why we make the decisions we do. To make out the many elements and aspects that form us is like reading poetry.
It is emotion and intellect, language and culture, but the meaning is different for each reader, each day, in each context.
Who are we now?
Filmmaking in the Tide-Pools
Learning is an intimate process; a tender shuffle of shifting contexts within, rearranging the paths before and behind us. Learning is vulnerable; it is the open anemones at low tide, whose tentacles are surrendered to the current. Learning is sadness and a sudden alone moment holding a found key to an unknown house. Learning is relationship, exponentially.
The exponents repeat and interrupt in an edgeless orgy of combinations. I am somewhere in the process, but it is impossible to pinpoint where. Am I the student? The teacher? Am I learning this now, or did I learn this before? What was necessary to build a nest for this new learning? The preparation for this might have taken a lifetime. Did it come from books? From the pain of life? Or did it beam down and just slip between the notes of a moving piece of music?
And what are we taught? What can we teach? A sacred mastery cannot justify the hubris of insisting on the direction of another person’s internal landscape evolution. So what then is the relationship that learning itself seeks? What is the climate of attraction or the timing of a ripening thought? What is the alchemy of contact such that insight is a lightning bolt shooting upward that is met by the flash of inspiration on its way down?
How do we take part in the process that leads to that sentiment? We ask, as teachers or as students, what makes it happen?
During the years that I was making the documentary about my father, ‘An Ecology of Mind,’ I took these questions to heart, and into the editing room. What is an educational film anyway, if not a wandering into the learning of the filmmaker? Thank goodness I was innocent as to how hard it was going to be. As T.S. Eliot says, “A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, and all shall be well….” And that is about what it took, maybe more than everything—including all my savings, and excruciating self-reflections. But, in the end I was victorious; I learned what I already knew. I have learned about learning to learn, and to never stop.
I have been screening the film I made about my father around the world for countless audiences. What amazes me is that even after having seen the film hundreds of times, I still learn from it. Although I shot a good deal of it, wrote it, and edited it—something new still surfaces with each viewing. How is that possible? I wonder if maybe I am simply finding an hour of comfort in the minutes of the film that float by, minutes I know, dialogue I know, a loving familiarity perhaps? But why not excruciating boredom?
I notice things now. Five years of going over the footage second by second, arranging and rearranging it, was not enough. I also had to try it out, second by second against music, then retry it, in with another framing of shots, other rhythms. Somehow that still was not enough. I also worked with my dear editor David, who had never heard of Bateson, and he told me when things stopped making sense to him.
There is something in learning that requires discipline, comparison, and careful closeness. But, the zoom-in can become rigid. Tectonic shifts are part of this too.
I learned to see my father through the lens he taught me to look at the world with. In order to do that I went into a sort of Edgar Morin reflexive house of mirrors exercise.
I learned to see his way of seeing me,
through my thinking patterns,
through the edits,
and the compositions of ideas
I was forming.
Through my filmic descriptions, I saw my perception.
But that was also not enough, so I waited. I was elated, I was devastated. I was hopeful, I was mortified. I had to wait between sessions of editing because they are shockingly expensive and I had to find time and money between sessions to return to the project.
Stillness was mandatory.
At the time I was editing my film, my own children were small, 9 and 11. Exactly the age I am in the tide-pool footage in the film. The long hours spent in editing rooms watching old footage and listening to conversations that my father and I shared brought the cadence of our particular version of mutual learning into focus.
The way we exchanged ideas included a color spectrum. The array of tones was of far greater measure in its value than the ideas. The hues made the ideas possible. The enfolding of the parent/child relationships, the language of the intergenerational inquiry, and the depth of the respect. Jumpy light was projected at 24 frames a second across walls of memory and the walls between life and death. 30 years after his death I am now both daughter and mother. Recollected moments and flickering footage snapped loose the resistance I had mustered. I began to dissolve. I found a voice. I was the filmmaker. I was learning. I also found the mother I wanted to be.
The film that would one day be, required that in the mid-70s we went poking around in tide-pools finding the form and process of life for the curious creatures we found. I still remember the freezing cold Pacific waves on my ankles.
I felt the child that I once was could now inform me in my tasks as a parent. The gentle push of my father to stand outside the expectations of our scripted idea of parenting and be a human being. Forget the nonsense of: “because I am older than you and you should treat me with respect.” Instead, remember the ecology of the relationship. What is the complex field of influences in which what you are about to say will take seed? What are the aspects of this interaction that are infinite? How does this drop of paint look on the canvas in 10 years’ time?
I needed time to integrate the remembering I was doing. I needed room to find the film in my memory, to remember how it would look.
I had forgotten so much.
I had to taste the textures of those interactions, and to hold them like a shield against the boxed communication patterns of our culture.
I knew it could be different, I just forgot the mus
ic of it for a decade or two.
Through my children I met with the membrane between the script of parenthood and the possibility of mutual learning: mutual respect.
If I had finished the film earlier I think it would have had an ending. The quietude I had between sessions gave abduction time to work. I had to remember what abduction was, not as a theory, but as a life-habit. Abduction is a tool for thinking that allows us to use our ability to compare patterns. With this tool we can look at the life-cycle of a tree in a forest and use our observations to inform our understanding of our own life-cycles.
I was remembering a future I had lost in the decades between the time my father died and the time I plunged into the film project. Small sleeping cells of knowing were slowly warming. It was a time of thawing the cold protection I had encased myself in, so that I could stand fiercely in the tsunami of bullshit the education system in the US dishes out. He was my ally, my island of sanity. When he was gone I did not have any backup. In the time after Gregory died, I had to find a little place where I could just pretend to be normal, and for a few years buy in to the idea that the teachers were right, that the program mattered, that there was a formula for success… and in fact that there was such a thing as success.
The goal is not a home and car and published book. Rather, to do good, as Blake said, “in minute particulars,” and cause as little damage as possible in the process. It sounds easier than it is. I have learned a bit now about my father’s loneliness. With no discipline to belong in, no club, no brand, no circle in which to identify, his work required courage—and a dog.
I was alone in the world of ideas we opened together. Instead of scholastic achievement, this idea world bred mischievous rebelliousness. If I did not shut it down, the punk rocker would surface. It was not until I found the lightness in my father’s tone, the devilish humor with which he carried his crucial blow to the status quo, that I was able to allow that part of me to ‘be’ again.
I watch him smirk a little in the archival footage, and then delight in the cracking edges between what he has just said and the formal institutional barriers to the thinking he is presenting… he is a prankster. A comedian, a magnet.
But this is play, and it is serious. It is play that is underscored by a fierce courage. Courage that is rooted, nested, and revealed only through a level of affection for life that I have never seen in another person the way I see it in my father. To play with the patterns that form in our perception is a gesture of trust. The playful rebellion is reckless, but not numb. There is only one motivation for such questioning, and that is the impulse to revel in the beauty of the impossible complexity of life. The alternative to trust is not doubt, but rigid control.
So when I watch the film for the umpteenth time, that is what I am studying. It is not the theory, not the vocabulary, not even the concepts… not the golden eggs. I am just seeing the goose.
The world as it is—is filled with errors. Errors in perception, errors in application. Errors of misjudged boundaries between mistaken parts, and unseen wholes. The fragments do not combine to form a whole that resembles unity—they merge into a mosaic of brokenness. We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together.
The lines we have drawn and the damage those lines have incited are there now. They are part of our context, part of the narrative we will coevolve in. They are the torn wounds of nature burning with pain and stinging with the same betrayal we know from our own accidents. Human injury, too, is ours. Compensatory limping in our movement, politically, economically, personally, ecologically. Balancing will now include the disruption we are within. We cannot erase it, or cure it, or fix it.
In the fissures where the sharp edges of our fragmentation have cut through the tissue of togetherness and left it to bleed, the patterns of our perception crave play. A jiggle of the boundaries in our descriptions is what eases the unseen, unwanted, and uncomfortable. Gregory said, if you are depressed, read the classics, read Shakespeare. The classics demand that you work a little bit to see through another lens.
This pain from these fissures is multi-causal and in the complexity, is it not? This pain is in the ecology of our learning. And if it is in an ecology of ideas, that means there is life, it is not static. We are not stuck, if we opt to be unstuck.
Optional hope. Learning. In our ever-evolving understanding of our world, which frame will we take up? Which language? Blake asked, “what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” How shall we find what we don’t know we are looking for? We have never seen it before, never said it before. How shall we remember?
Like choosing clips in the editing room to describe my father, there are so many entangled directions of the story. Each choice is one among many. There are so many harmonies to listen for.
Is the pain avoidable? Or are we better off now to ask if perhaps the pain was worth it? How high will the price be for a shift in the imagination we use to perceive our world? How many editing sessions did it take before I stopped trying to make a ‘biography’ of my father?
At what point did I stop trying to make a film about an important scientist in the language of television, and begin to include the wide swaths of what I do not know about my father.
At what point did I learn to describe a living system and notice that in this case the living system in question was my father? I do not know. I did not want to make a film that would effectively sum him up and kill him. I wanted to open doors, not close them. That requires opting for another kind of description.
I learned, when I began to remember what lay ahead, that it is in the space behind the details that the interaction takes on its aesthetic. That, for example, when Gregory asks things like, “what is the pattern that connects?”—he is inviting us to make another order of comparisons, to reach though the trivial and arbitrary into the underbelly of the system and grope. If we try to arrange things and to apply the laws of physics to the world of living systems, we will make more errors.
But to go about life with a step-by-step plan, a strategy, a formula for change, or an action agenda—is a recipe for disaster. These patterns we face now are inside us. There is no ‘out there.’
There is not a place to point at that does not point back to us. Us, not me, not you. Us.
To bash and scream in anger, whether or not it involves logical analysis, is useless. Now we find riddles, now we play, now with all the love we can muster, we seek the behind layers. Without a sense of humor our findings will be hideous. Without release of the affection we hoard from each other, we lose our rhythm in the dance. That is what I learned, among other things….
But I am still learning.
(I would like to say a special thankyou to Matthias Varga.)
~ ~ ~
A version of this essay was first published in SyStemischer. Die Zeitschrift für systemische Strukturaufstellungen, Vol. 5, 2014 by Ferrari Media, Aachen.
Christmas is a Time Pivot
Christmas this year feels to me like a clock. The months seem to circle round through the icy puddles to the shameless blooms of spring, up and over into the tall dry grass in warm summer, and tilting back lands us in the rustle of earth-toned leaves and returns us to the itchy comfort of a wool scarf pulled tight against the chill. Christmas in Bruges.
The past is so present in Bruges. Buildings dating from the 12th to the 18th century are stacked up. Long necked swans glide in the canals. Arched bridges make reflections of luminous ellipses and tall clock towers mark the centuries—one Christmas at a time. I think it might always be Christmas here. The chocolates never stop and the beer always flows. Time here jingles like change in the pocket of history—I hope the future will spend it wisely. The contrast of our moment against this backdrop is a reminder of a kind of thinking, an aesthetic, a way of organizing that kept a loose enough humor, in a tight enough weave of time… it lasts that way.
Ink
Window shopping through the endless array of symbolic, humorous images in my mind’s library, I
enjoy imagining possible choices for my own tattoo, if I were to get one. The rebellious artistic scream of tattoos is attractive to me. Even so, I cannot figure out how I could ever choose one and remain committed to it. I am afraid there is no symbol that I could stand behind for the rest of my days in this skin.
Of course there have been times of surety throughout my life, when I really knew who I was. Hindsight renders those times embarrassing now. Looking back, I see that the moments of certainty reek of head-held-high foolishness. Perhaps in my old age I will know more, but thus far those bolts of existential clarity are ephemeral at best. Perhaps on those illusory days I could have inked a tattoo of my certainty. Such times of certainty have passed: I learn in new ways, my vision expands. What would that tattoo symbolize now, had I claimed it? Perhaps it would serve not so much as a mascot, but as a reminder of how the horizon of self moves.
I cannot imagine now that I will ever stop stretching the outlines of learning. I do not want to stop. Aesthetic, emotional, and conceptual centerpieces are eclipsed by seeing broader contexts. I suppose I have a commitment to the momentum of that learning. Can that be tattooed?
This book contains my words in the architecture of the written page. Ink is eager to draw language around findings and hold them still. Some words will still fit a decade or two from now, others may grow tight. Either way I do not share the desire to define myself in the stain of the written word.
I would like to protect all living, growing, evolving processes from the violence of being freeze-framed. I stand by the dignity of living complexity. Yet complexity is delicate and dangerous to defend. The many variables of life are always in interaction, producing unpredictable changes and co-evolutions. Changing our opinions and epistemological baseline within this learning matrix makes us look like capricious, shallow flip-floppers.
I like to change my mind. It shows me I have learned something. Bumper stickers don’t last as long as tattoos, they are not as intimate. I once saw a bumper sticker on the back of a car in Berkeley, CA that said, “If you can’t change your mind, are you sure you still have one?”