Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns
Nora Bateson Updates Our Thinking about Systems, Ecosystems, and Complexity
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. —Gregory Bateson
Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters. —Nora Bateson
I met author and filmmaker Nora Bateson ten years ago at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where, as part of the Lindisfarne Association Fellows annual meeting, she was previewing her then work-in-progress, the film An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, and systems theorist.
I liked her immediately, the deliberate way she organized her thoughts, her clear way of speaking, and, after her presentation, her willingness to engage fully in the work of her peers.
Bateson’s background is a lofty one. Her grandfather, biologist William Bateson, coined the term “genetics” in 1906 to describe the study of heredity. Her father, Gregory, named after Gregor Mendel (the founder of modern genetics), extended the fields of systems theory and cybernetics; and with his colleagues developed the double-bind theory, which in everyday language has come to be known as “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
Into this mix, Bateson brings her gifts of language and storytelling to fruition in her new book of essays and poems, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns, as she explores her father’s and grandfather’s work in the context of her life as a writer and researcher, as well as the world each of us navigates as part of a larger whole.
Wild River Review: The first and last chapters of Small Arcs beautifully underscore one of your themes: how we perceive and live our lives depends on the kind of map we imagine for ourselves.
In fact, early in the book, you say, “it might be that we are navigating with the wrong map.” If so, how do we determine the “right” map? And further, how do we create it?
Nora Bateson: What a dangerous and beautiful question.
Ecological, economic, cultural upheaval is as big as the globe, and as small as each of the 7 billion humans walking upon it. The mapping I am curious about in Small Arcs is around the complexity of the issues the globe is facing that are untenable with our current protocols of sense-making. Is there another kind of information that might serve us better, beyond data points, beyond decontextualized silos of details, beyond prosaic, logical, and rational expertise?
The way in which we perceive the world matters. The actions we take and the decisions we make are informed by our perception, and vice versa. When we are in crisis and we ask, “What is the problem and how do we fix it?”, we are calibrating our perception of the situation and gathering up possible actions based on what seems possible. But what if we have only perceived a small fragment of the situation? Are we really prepared to make decisions and take action?
We are facing complex times. In my book, I have taken for granted as a starting point that it will require complexity to perceive and respond to complexity.
The way I see it, the opposite of complexity is not simplicity, it is reductionism. The romance of emergence as a source of possibility tends to vanish in emergencies. Likewise no one is interested in complexity during an acute situation. Ironically, it is in those moments, when we need perspective most, that it is so easy for our big, beautiful, compassionate, loving ideas to shrink down into immediate survival binaries.
I have no formula. This is not one of those books that offers “Five Easy Steps.” There is no methodology here. To propose such a thing would be hypocrisy to the approach I am describing. Instead, the collection of vignettes in this book is a portrait of my own processes of generating a kind of stance from which and through which to meet the world. It is about being open and prepared to move with flexibility as life delivers its blows, and its beauty. It is about replacing linear goals with possibility.
What does it say about our world that our cultural appetite for solutions is so great that we are willing to step over the complexity of life, unleashing untold consequences (and consequences of consequences) in favor of instructions, which are likely bogus on what to do next? Maps can be dangerous. I am not sure that anyone can say what the “right” map is for themselves, let alone for anyone else. Life is complex, responding to the complexity is by definition personal and unscriptable, probably unmappable too.
“Maps,” as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “are not the territory.” Maps are strange metaphors; they are illustrations of plotted points on a flat surface as representation of things that are not flat at all. Maps may be elegant, but they can’t hold things like culture, ideas, evolution, communication, or love. How can we go forward without those things?
I am both fascinated and a little terrified by the human habit of modeling and map-making. As a filmmaker I am a supporter of the vocabulary of “zoom in and zoom out.” I see the linear thinking lens, which gives us the details and the specialization as fine and necessary, but so is context. Both are good; however, contextual study is not as developed or mandated, let alone funded.
In writing Small Arcs, I played with the framing of my own version of “systems thinking.” I took a huge risk, parted with the company of our cultural need for singular voice and applied a lens that embodies intellect and knowledge, but shares the stage with emotion, aesthetic, and physical ways of knowing. I used this lens to describe many aspects of life: ecology, parenting, food, global politics, economy, sex, forgiveness, fascism, and so on. Small Arcs is my naked attempt to offer up both professional and personal voices to the endless project of approaching each struggle, each situation, each person with a little more dignity and grace than yesterday.
WRR: Small Arcs builds upon the work of your father, anthropologist, social scientist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, and also on the work of your grandfather, the biologist William Bateson, who gave the world the term “genetics.” Here you introduce two terms, which you have created to add to the vocabulary of systems thinking: symmathesy and transcontexuality.
Would you define those two words?
Bateson: Symmathesy is a word that I coined to provide language to the processes of contextual mutual learning in complex systems. Systems, especially living systems, do not stay the same; they are not frozen in time. They are defined by constant interaction, and relational response to that interaction. I see that as contextual mutual learning, or symmathesy. But, keep in mind that in this work, learning is not necessarily a “good” or a “progressive” development. Organisms learn to be destructive, people learn to lie, or distrust.
When we see a tree in a forest that is craggy, crooked, and gnarled, and then we see another tree of the same species elsewhere in the forest that is straight and tall, we might ask the question of how these trees are learning to be in their contexts. Where does the water run in the forest, how does the wind blow there, what is the history of its seed, are the populations of bacteria in the soil nourishing the tree, are there birds, humans, other interactions that it is calibrating to? Symmathesy assumes that the crooked tree is making sense of and learning to be in its context(s) exactly as it can. So, if we want to “fix” that tree, what should we do? Where is its crookedness? Am I a little bit like a crooked tree? Aren’t we all?
The great benefit of symmathesy as a way to describe context is that it places our notion of pathology on another horizon entirely. If a system—like a person, an organization, an organism, a society or a forest—is growing crooked, we can see that “pathology” as a form of contextual mutual learning. If the pathology is resulting from learning, then so is the healing. I find this to be a useful shift in perspective on how systems change, get unstuck, and learn.
Here is a quote from the chapter in Small Arcs on symmathesy that I think gives a good intro.
Biology, culture, and society are dependent at all levels upon the vitality of interaction they produce both internally and externally. A body, a family, a forest or a city can each be described as a buzzing hive of communication between and within its living, interacting “parts.” Together the organs of your body allow you to make sense of the world around you. A jungle can be understood best as a conversation among its flora and fauna, including the insects, the fungi of decay, and contact with humanity. Interaction is what creates and vitalizes the integrity of the living world. Over time, the ongoing survival of the organisms in their environments requires that there be learning, and learning to learn, together. Gregory Bateson said, “The evolution is in the context.” So why don’t we have a word for those bodies, families, forests and other buzzing hives of communication—and for the mutual learning that takes place within those living contexts?
Symmathesy (noun): (Pronounced: sym-math-a-see)
- an entity formed over time by contextual mutual learning through interaction. For example, an ecosystem at any scale, like a body, family or forest is a symmathesy.
- the process of contextual mutual learning through interaction.
Symmathesize (verb, intrans.):
to generate contextual mutual learning through the process of interaction between multiple variables in a living entity.
The exploration of these ideas in my work on symmathesy led me to recognize the importance of transcontextual processes.
Transcontextual is a term that I found in my father’s book Steps to An Ecology of Mind. My father does not speak much about the idea, just a few paragraphs actually. But he does coin the term and in his own fashion lays down an illustration of what he means by it. I overlooked that page for years. I suppose I sort of brushed over it. As I was working on the characteristics of symmathesy, it became clear that transcontextual process is the matrix within which mutual learning thrives. In that moment, it also became the absolute center of everything I am interested in. I know that sounds dramatic, but it really has been that life-altering for me to notice and study the way in which multiple contexts form, and inform, situations, systems, and me.
The idea that the world is transcontextual is relatively simple to explain, and mind blowing to live into. No complex system exists in just one context. To increase our understanding of a system is to begin to examine multiple contexts. For example, I am a woman, and I can be described in that context, but that is not the only context in which I exist. I am also 40 trillion micro bacteria in interaction with the ecology, I am a filmmaker, a writer, a friend, a sister, an American, a chef—each of those contexts is important to the study of my identity. If we extract just one context and attempt to understand “me” through that singular set of relationships and communications, errors will be made.
I am not just using the idea of transcontextual process in my professional work, it is also helping me personally. Our family has been faced with multiple deaths and illnesses this autumn, which compounded and became heartbreaking for me. Normally I would have described the experience of heartbreak as sad. I would have scoped my emotional experience into a singular texture, a mono-context. But I noticed that the sadness was informed by other contexts of experience. That same sadness was a response to joy, love, friendship, gratitude … also fear, resentment, anger, and judgment. I noticed that by keeping the multiplicity of the contexts of my emotion open, I was able to carry the weight. The spectrum of contexts that I was feeling made it possible. The sorrow was not singular, but accompanied by a host of other contexts, which were equally relevant. All I had to do was authorize myself to the multiple emotions, and multiple descriptions of the feelings. I found oxygen there.
WRR: Your chapter “Tears at the Bus Stop” takes the educational system head on saying what many educators already know: the current educational system is outmoded and, in fact, is not preparing children for the complexities of today’s world. It also gives a window into your relationship with your father as well as his work. You do all this with a personal story as illustration. Why do certain stories stay with us and shape us?
Bateson: I love that you pose this question following the discussion on symmathesy and transcontextuality. Stories are living descriptions, open messages, and encourage sense-making at multiple levels. Stories mean different things at different times, to different people, in different moments of history. Stories can be told and heard from many perspectives. Unlike the mechanistic world, stories are not identical, repeatable, or replaceable. Even when they are printed in a book, they shift and dance in our imaginations. The contextual mutual learning or symmathesy of stories is one of change.
The story you mention, “Tears at the Bus Stop,” is a story about the education system’s shortcomings, and at the same time it is a story about intergenerational relationships. In fact, I see Small Arcs as a collection of vignettes that are all about intergenerational stories. The question of how the past is going to play out into the future is a story that runs backwards too. How will the future reshape our understanding of the past? These stories are not still, and to force them into prose that is concrete is a disservice to the possibility of mutual learning.
Writing this story about my father and me was a way for me to better undertake the gorgeous task of being a mom. My father’s tears at the bus stop were tears of love and protection. He did not want the education system to ruin my mind by dividing the world into decontextualized bits. It would be decades before I would truly grasp the depth of that parental concern, but from my seat on the bus that day I knew that there was something to be sad about. I saw that my father considered some things worth crying over. I knew there was story about those tears; it just took me forthy more years to pen it. So where was the story? Was it in me as a nine year old? In my father? In my experience as a mother or a teacher?
WRR: The arc of Small Arcs is rich with your poetry—pauses, if you will, that enlarge the narrative. Would you share a bit of background about your poem, “Whole Peace,”and its creation and context within the book?
Bateson: There are things that need saying that cannot be said in prose. There are sensations and reflections that are unholdable in direct language. Since Small Arcs is an inquiry into the in-between, into the interrelationships, into the music of communication across time—since I am writing a book about that realm—I need poetry and story. I have a favorite quote of my dad’s that I keep close by for the moments when I get tempted to form language that will cage in ideas that need to be free: “’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.’” (G. Bateson, Steps to An Ecology of Mind, pp 136)
“Whole Peace” is about the struggle to be true to oneself within the process of peace-making. As a person who does not want to cause more hurt or anger in the world I have had to defer, to smooth over, to be the one who offers the olive branch too many times. As a woman, that attempt at peace-making is part of a larger narrative of difficult deference and capitulation. This poem is about every betrayal and fury in my life, and about finding my way to the core of an authentic route through the pain. In this poem and in my life, I am looking for a larger version of peace, larger than the choice of being right or being wrong, larger than anger and forgiveness. Life is too short to fake peace, too short to stay mad, and too short to live in the illusion that the past can be cast away or erased. Time and space are part of the pain of betrayal, and also part of the process of growth. I want to grow, and repeating the refrain in this piece that says, “I will not forsake myself,” is a mantra to keep learning to learn.
While it is a personal exploration of the landscape of being hurt, this piece is also about larger social issues, like war, hatred, and bullies. Vengeance has been condoned and frothed by reckless world leaders who have led their societies into destructive binaries and deadly double-binds. Standing up for what is just, or in protection of your family, is a kind of strength that is conflated with violence. Sometimes it seems to me that the world has taken up television’s door-slamming, cold-shouldering, melodramatic provocations as normal, acceptable communication patterns. Every other action film these days is about revenge. Meanwhile the peacemakers are sourcing “forgiveness” seemingly out of thin air. They appear to toss their self-respect aside, and take the high ground, because it is the “right” thing to do.
But the larger truth is that history is shared, and so is the future. From a systems perspective, peace has to do with seeing a larger context of the pain within a wider frame that encompasses all parties. In this larger context forsaking any part is a forsaking of the whole. To get out of the binary is take a stand, not for me, or for you, but for the path of growth, and learning together across time and space.
WRR: Your chapter, “Parts & Wholes, Hope & Horror,” introduces us to “systems thinking” through correspondence you found in the Library of Congress within the files of your father and his then-wife, anthropologist Margaret Mead. Their correspondence was enlightening and is equally fresh today. This is a wonderful and complex piece of writing. How long did it take you to compose it?
Bateson: The time I spent tapping on the keyboard writing and rewriting was probably about a week. But, the time it took to cook up the courage to write this? I would say five years.
This chapter deals with two sides of systems thinking. One is hopeful, and the other is horrifying.
Here, I chart the beautiful and passionate history of how the early pioneers of this “systems” work were fueled by their altruism and longing for a new science to study the way in which the world is interdependent. There are lovely inspiring letters calling for this new science they hoped would be the antidote to the kind of thinking that creates fascism. These letters, which you can find in the Library of Congress, are written in the early 1930s among a group of brave young intellects, such as my father, Margaret Mead, and others who would later be part of the historic Macy Conferences in which cybernetics was born.
The other side is of the story is about the long, dark shadows of mechanistic metaphors that run through culture, language, science, and yes, even systems thinking. There was a moment of shock for me five years ago when I found my film and my father’s work on a racist, right-wing, fascist website. There it was, ecological and anthropological systems theory paired up with and underscoring quotes by Adolf Hitler. I was embarrassed, horrified, and stunned. Up to that moment I thought that perhaps systems thinking was the way humanity could get out of its destructive patterns. I thought this school of thinking was the light in the tunnel. I was wrong; there is a weak link in the body of thought around complexity and systems that must be confronted. But in that moment, in 2011, I had no idea what to do with this information. It took time to consider the implications, and the patterns. How could it happen that systems thinking could be used to justify racism?
I won’t spoil the chapter for our readers. It is not an easy piece. Nor should it be. The work to be done is at an epistemological level. It is the same work to overcome the habit of objectification and consequent exploitation in all realms. The cuts of separation between me and you, between us and nature, these cuts are bleeding out.
In 2006, Joy E. Stocke founded Wild River Review with Kimberly Nagy, an outgrowth of the literary magazine, The Bucks County Writer, of which Stocke was Editor in Chief. In 2009, as their editorial practice grew, Stocke and Nagy founded Wild River Consulting & Publishing, LLC.
With more than twenty-five years experience as a writer and journalist, Stocke works with many of the writers who appear in the pages of Wild River Review, as well as clients from around the world.
In addition, Stocke has shepherded numerous writers into print. She has interviewed Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk and Muhammud Yunus, Pulitzer Prizewinner Paul Muldoon, Paul Holdengraber, host of LIVE from the NYPL; Roshi Joan Halifax, founder of Upaya Zen Center; anthropologist and expert on end of life care, Mary Catherine Bateson; Ivonne Baki, President of the Andean Parliament; and Templeton Prizewinner Freeman Dyson among others.
In 2006, along with Nagy, Stocke interviewed scientists and artists including former Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman and Dean of Faculty, David P. Dobkin for the documentary Quark Park, chronicling the creation of an award-winning park built on a vacant lot in the heart of Princeton, New Jersey; a park that united art, science and community.
She is president of the Board of Directors at the Cabo Pulmo Learning Center, Cabo Pulmo, Baja Sur, Mexico; and is a member of the Turkish Women’s International Network.
In addition, Stocke has written extensively about her travels in Greece and Turkey. Her memoir, Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses & Saints, based on more than ten years of travel through Turkey, co-written with Angie Brenner was published in March 2012. Her cookbook, Tree of Life: Turkish Home Cooking will be published in March, 2017 by Quarto Books under the Burgess Lea Press imprint . Stocke and Brenner are currently testing recipes for a companion book, which will feature Anatolian-inspired mezes from around the world.
Stocke’s essay “Turkish American Food” appears in the 2nd edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (OUP, 2013). The volume won both International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) for Beverage/Reference/Technical category, 2014; and the Gourmand Award for the Best Food Book of the Year, 2014.
She is the author of a bi-lingual book of poems, Cave of the Bear, translated into Greek by Lili Bita based on her travels in Western Crete, and is currently researching a book about the only hard-finger coral reef in Mexico on the Baja Sur Peninsula. She has been writing about environmental issues there since 2011.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a Bachelor of Science in Broadcast Journalism from the Agriculture Journalism School where she also received a minor of Food Science, she participated in the Lindisfarne Symposium on The Evolution of Consciousness with cultural philosopher, poet and historian, William Irwin Thompson. In 2009, she became a Lindisfarne Fellow.
Works by Joy E. Stocke in this Edition
AIRMAIL – LETTERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
AIRMAIL – VOICE FROM SYRIA
ARTS – ART
COLUMNS – THE MYSTIC PEN
FOOD & DRINK – ANATOLIAN KITCHEN
FREYMAN & PETERSON- Your Life is a Book: How to Craft and Publish Your Memoir
LITERATURE – BOOK REVIEWS
LITERATURE – ESSAYS
LITERATURE – MEMOIR
LITERATURE – POETRY
LIVE FROM THE NYPL
The Euphoria of Ignorance: Being Jewish, Becoming Jewish, The Paradox of Being Carlo Ginzburg
Fountain of Curiosity: Paul Holdengraber on Attention, Tension and Stretching the Limits of Conversation at the New York Public Library
Paul Holdengraber – The Afterlife of Conversation
2013 – Three Questions: Festival Director Jakab Orsos talks about Art, Bravery, and Sonia Sotomayor
Critical Minds, Social Revolution: Egyptian Activist Nawal El Saadawi
INTERVIEW – Laszlo Jakab Orsos: Written on Water
Tonight We Rest Here: An Interview with Poet Saadi Youssef
Georgian Writer David Dephy’s Second Skin
On the High Line: Diamonds on the Soles of Our Shoes
Car Bombs on the West Side, Journalists Uptown
New York City – Parade of Illuminations: Behind the Scenes with Festival Director Jakab Orsos
The Pen Cabaret 2008: Bowery Ballroom — Featuring..
Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses and Saints
Daring Collaborations: Rolex and LIVE from the NYPL at the New York Public Library Composing a Further Life: with Mary Catherine Bateson
WRR@LARGE: From the Editors – UP THE CREEK
Up the Creek: Volume 1, Number 1
Up the Creek: Volume 1, Number 2.5
Up the Creek: Volume 1, Number 3.3
Up the Creek: Number 4.4
Up the Creek: Beautiful Solutions
Up the Creek: Blind Faith, July 2009
Up the Creek: Create Dangerously
Up the Creek: What Price Choice?
Up the Creek: Before and After: September 11, 2001
Up the Creek: Candle in a Long Street
Up the Creek: Crossing Cultures: Transcending History
Up the Creek: Man in the Mirror; A Map of the World
Up the Creek: Stories and the Shape of Time
Up the Creek: The Divine Road To Istanbul
Up the Creek: What It Means to Yearn
WRR@LARGE – WILD COVERAGE
UNESCO World Heritage Site Under Threat of Mega-Devlopment Sparks International Protests
The Other Side Of Abu Ghraib — Part One: The Detainees’ Quest For Justice
The Other Side of Abu Ghraib – Part Two: The Yoga Teacher Goes to Istanbul