Small Arcs of Larger Circles
Page 23
As time and context continue on, words, like artifacts, just sit there. Print is difficult to evolve, but writing is another thing. It is a process that reveals and forms discoveries through new discoveries. I like words, as I like images. Words are the carriers of formed droplets of discovery. They are paint, they are ingredients, a palette to brush images into ideas and melt intellect into emotion. There is nothing wrong with words.
I am worried that these printed words will render themselves obsolete. In years to come they will still be smattered around on pages, refusing to stand down when they are too small for the next larger knowing that inevitably arises. I would keep editing them along the way if the words were still mine to tweak. But, by then they will not be in my care. They go out and find trouble in the world, and I do not want to be liable for their behavior.
Ironically, what I write will speak of who I am. I know I cannot stop the stamp my printed words will make on my identity. I resent that. Authors often hide full manuscripts under the bed and never publish them, for good reason. I am afraid of the words in these pages; afraid they will tattoo me. I am not sure I want to lay them down. I am not sure I can stand behind them in times to come.
Working and playing with the complex living world requires multiple languages, multiple ways of knowing, and multiple emotions. To find a voice in this territory is to claim the use of more than one voice—to pull poetry across science and tell stories with research. If I publish poetry, will I never have a voice in the annals of theory or science? If I write in the voice of science and psychology, will I be less of an artist? I cannot risk the loss that will come with a monotonous, mono-cropped engagement with discoveries in complexity. Instead, I have endeavored to risk everything else, including my credibility and professional identity, in the interest of discovering my own complexity. Having done so, the next task is to risk it all again.
References
Bateson, B. (1928/2009) William Bateson, Naturalist: His Essays and
Addresses together with a Short Account of his Life, Cambridge University Press
Bateson, G. (1967) Unpublished Q&A section of a partially published talk, ‘Conscious Purpose versus Nature,’ Gregory Bateson Papers Box 27, doc. 1096-27, folder title ‘Congress on Phenomenology.’ Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, London, England, July 1967.
—— (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books
—— (1979) Mind and Nature, Hampton Press
—— (1991) A Sacred Unity, ed. Donaldson R. E., Estate of Gregory Bateson
Bateson, G. and Bateson, M.C. (1987) Angels Fear, Estate of Gregory Bateson
Bateson, W. (1905) ‘Heredity in the Physiology of Nations,’ A Review of Archdall Reid’s The Principles of Heredity, The Speaker, Oct. 14
—— (1918) ‘Science and Nationality’: Inaugural Address to the Yorkshire Natural Science Association, Edinburgh Review, Jan 1919
Forsdyke, Donald R. and Cock, Alan G. (2008) Treasure Your Exceptions: The Science and Life of William Bateson, Springer
Pollan M. (2001) The Botany of Desire: A plant’s-eye view of the world, Random House
Von Uexküll, Jakob (1926), Theoretical Biology, Harcourt, Brace
Afterword: Allegory
Somewhere in between stillness and movement there is a flickering, almost imperceptible flashpoint. That slippery, timeless moment suggests a memory of what is to come.
Gregory wrote this story while on retreat at The Hermitage in Big Sur in 1979. It was first published in Co-Evolution Quarterly. I have included it here to let it speak to opposing approaches to describing the world. Let them flirt shamelessly with each other. Some are in long-term relationships. For example:
Religion and science
Technology and art
Measurement and intuition.
Alfred North Whitehead talked about the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Claim any one of these ways of describing the world as alone able to offer true understanding and the flicker is lost, the rope is slack, and meaning escapes like a clever prisoner.
In this story my father makes a case for the tension, and the frustration in the love story of the push/pull between:
Body and mind
Ancient and contemporary
Wild and tamed
Certainty and uncertainty.
But these are couples, not binaries. They bicker. They long. They are in conversations that relentlessly lead us up and down paths that map into double helixes. In relationships, boundaries are interfaces of interaction that offer paradoxes for breakfast. Beautiful and boggling co-existence requires resting in inquiry: It is both necessary and impossible to point to details and to rest in the foundations of life. With each perspective responding to responses in infinite iterations, the alchemy of influences is saturating and expressing continuously. Interdependence is communicational, mutual learning (symmathesy). And as the observer here, my own framing is an offering of my own mythology. I see a love story—everywhere.
* * *
There was once a beautiful lady, whose habit it was to sleep on disused railroad tracks.
In that same country there lived also a brutal surveyor who ran the trains up and down the tracks. He was at heart an explorer and therefore was particularly attracted by those branches of the railroad system where no trains had passed within living memory. These were precisely those tracks where the lady delighted to slumber.
So it happened over and over again that she would be disturbed in her sleep and compelled to retreat hastily while a powerful and smelly engine dashed over the very place she had been happily resting.
Every time this happened there was a falling out between the lady and the gentleman. He maintained that she was an old- fashioned, trivial, and superstitious thing. She, in return, would spit out insults in a quite unladylike manner saying that he was indeed a thing, subhuman, and nothing but a small boy interested only in silly noisy toys.
And so it went on. For about two thousand years she would always be finding new and unexplored parts of the railroad system upon which to sleep and he always choosing those very branches of the tracks for the exercise of his monstrous vehicles.
He asserted that it was his right - and even duty - to map the railroad system and that the whole system was entirely his - especially the unexplored parts of it. He argued that the system was a single, entirely logical-causal network of tracks.
She averred that the tracks were designed for the rest and peace of the human soul and cared nothing for his dreams of causality and logic.
He mapped every detail of the tracks along which he ran his engines. She continually found other parts of the system not yet mapped.
One day the engineer carelessly left one of his maps beside the track and the lady found it. Gingerly, holding it only with the tips of her fingers, she picked it up. She handled it as if it had been left there by the devil.
It was curiosity that led her to open the map, unwilling to see what it might contain and therefore not really looking at its details. Looking at this from a distance through half-shut eyes, she was surprised to find that thus half-seen, the document was in itself beautiful.
At the next confrontation between herself and the engineer she said without thinking, “And you don’t even know that your own maps are beautiful.”
At this the surveyor was amazed. He gruffly replied that he was not interested in that.
She said to herself, “Ah, then there is something in the universe in which he is not interested. That something belongs to me.”
“For ever,” she said.
After they parted, each considered what had been said. The surveyor was forced to agree that indeed the beauty of his maps and correspondingly the beauty of the railroad tracks were not within his province. She, on the other hand, was delighted and hugged to herself the secret knowledge that he would never invade what she most valued—the elegance and symmetry of the total system. Not its details but its foundations.
At their next
meeting he asked whether she was still interested in the so-called beauty of the maps. When she rather defensively replied in the affirmative, he said in an offhand manner that he had perhaps something to show her.
He then confessed that while she slept upon the railroad tracks he had come quietly and had made a careful drawing of her body. It was this drawing that he wanted to show her.
He unfolded and placed side by side before her his map of the railroad tracks and his drawing. He said it was “scientifically interesting” that the map and the drawing appeared to resemble each other in many “formal” characteristics. He specially wanted her to see this strange resemblance between the two documents.
She briefly dismissed the matter. She said she had always known that. But, saying this, she looked away and smiled.
* * *
About the Publisher
Triarchy Press is an independent publisher of alternative thinking (altThink) about government, finance, organizations, society, movement, performance and the creative life. And now symmathesy. Other titles covering the art and science of navigating in troubled waters, with worse storms to come, include:
Dancing at the Edge: Competence, culture and organization in the 21st century ~
Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester
Designing Regenerative Cultures ~ Daniel Christian Wahl
Ecolonomy: Doing business and manufacturing differently ~ Emmanuel Druon
Ecovillage: 1001 ways to heal the planet ~ Kosha Joubert and Leila Dregger
Humanising Healthcare: Patterns of hope for a system under strain ~ Margaret Hannah
Strategic Foresight: Learning from the future ~ Patricia Lustig
The Search for Leadership: An organisational perspective ~ William Tate
Three Horizons: The patterning of hope ~ Bill Sharpe
Thrivability: Breaking through to a world that works ~ Jean M. Russell
Transformative Innovation: A guide to practice and policy ~ Graham Leicester
www.triarchypress.net