Nora Bateson - Small Arcs of Larger Circles

Published in this first edition in September 2016.

Triarchy Press

Station Offices, Axminster, England

www.triarchypress.net

Copyright Nora Bateson, 2016

The right of Nora Bateson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Karl Blossfeldt, Cosmos bipinnatus , 1898-1932

Reproduced with the permission of Karl Blossfeldt Archiv / Stiftung Ann und Jrgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Mnchen

Block prints by Mats Qwarfordt

Cover design by Sara Lundstrm

Print ISBN: 978-1-909470-96-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-909470-97-2

For the children, mine and yours.

For the parents, mine and yours.

For the generations who have not yet arrived, mine and yours.

For the generations who came before, mine and yours.

You were once wild here. Dont let them tame you.

Isadora Duncan

There would be no book without the ideas. They have been born into language through the kneading of my heart, the bending of my mind, an undying itch to communicate. They are made presentable through the care of many eyes.

The blind spots in these pages are my own, but the sensitized areas are alive in their interplay with those people who have loved me, hurt me, inspired me, bored me, infuriated me and those who have engaged me to join them in their thinking. In my travels between institutions, disciplines, jargons and contexts I have the opportunity to find patterns that enmesh them into what we call society; and in their differences, to compare my observations. They are all here.

But the mountainsides of Big Sur, California, the scent of sage in the warm sun, the salty fog of the Pacific Ocean, and the ancient redwoods are the bible upon which I swear my truth.

While I am uncertain who to thank for this odd brew I am mixed up in, there are some people I would never have been able to complete this book without.

Of course my father was the one who opened this world up for me, but my mother, Lois Bateson, gave me the spirit of adventure to step into it. My children, Sahra and Trevor Brubeck, have taught me to relearn endlessly. They have shown me that in giving more than I ever thought I had to give I have begun to sense the raw grace of life. My grandfather, William, whom I never met in person, is here toocasting long shadows across the centuries. My cherished colleagues in the International Bateson Institute have been a fellowship of intellectual rigor, and courageous exploration into untold, unfound idea-scapes. I am grateful for these people.

There have been countless moments when I wanted to hide this manuscript under the bed and never reveal the nakedness in these pages. Money was tight, time was scant, and running around the world gathering a bouquet of impressions might not have appeared the most sensible way to proceed. In moments of distraction I repeatedly attempted to duck out of this project, but my husband, Mats Qwarfordt, softly repeated, Where is your book? The pages began to gather.

Then, Andrew Carey, my mirror, publisher and editor turned up. In the few pages I gave him to read one afternoon in London he saw me. Andrew made the book happen. Others began to pitch in, reading pieces and offering their efforts to help refine it. I thank Phillip Guddemi, Gail Kara, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Tomas Bjrkman, and Bo Ekman.

Every word of this book has been weighed and tended by Sahra Brubeck, my daughter, and Cary Long who spent the dark hours of a winter in Stockholm buried in these pages.

To Torbjrn Jiredal, Imelda McCarthy, Gail Simon, Rex Weyler, Paul King, Mark McKergow, Jenny Clarke, The Vancouver Bateson Salon and so many more: thank you.

Nora Bateson, July 2016

As Noras daughter I may approach her writing from a different angle than most. Having grown up in a household in which her ideas flowed seamlessly through intellectual conversations, work, play, artistic depiction and description, etc., I have had the incredible honor of watching her ideas grow and shift with time. At no point in the years that I have known her has she ever claimed that the ideas she works with are static. In all respects she remains humble and open, certain of her uncertainty. Although it is difficult to put words to the experience of being raised in a family that never placed a premium on rightness, I can say that the way my mother raised me allowed for a larger internal questioning of the notion of authority to take place throughout my childhood and adolescence. If we disagreed about a given issue at any given time, my mother was always willing to at least attempt to see the argument from my side. My opinions and contributions were not only accepted, but valued. Moreover, just as I did not expect her ideas to exist in a state of inflexibility and unchangeability, she constantly gave my ideas room to fluctuate. My mother did so without teaching me to label and categorize each thought I had into any specific discipline that might limit my ability to further understand the multitude of contexts that those ideas belonged to.

In Small Arcs of Larger Circles , I see my mother approaching topics that would often be relegated to a solely academic sphere with a form of exposure and vulnerability that is specific to her lived experiences. She actively chooses not to separate the aspects of her character that are personal from those that are political. There are moments in the text when her voice could carry the cold tone of academic contemplation, but those moments are immediately countered by her willingness to allow emotion to bleed into her words. In doing so she reminds the reader to never exclude their emotional, physical, and mental responses from the process of critical thinking. To form walls around these various aspects of the self is to deny the possibility of feeling and perceiving in more than one way at a time.

Without undermining the fact that her work comes from her own set of interpretations, she gracefully incorporates the influence of her fathers and grandfathers work. My mother refrains from placing borders between the ideas that are hers and those of her family, shedding light on the truth of mutual learning that is embedded in cross-generational conversation. In doing so, she places herself into the framework of Gregory and William Batesons writings without claiming it as her own - or as something other than her.

After working with my mother on her film, An Ecology of Mind, I found that she and my grandfather, Gregory Bateson, shared a similar pattern of reflective thinking. Despite the distinctness of my mothers presence in the film - the cinematography that could exist only through her lens, the stories of relationship drawn from her memories - the film was often received as though it was simply about Gregory. The profundity of their thoughts as both individual and collective was often lost, their likeness mistaken for sameness.

The relevance of my mothers reflections on cross-generational similarities and differences is clear to me, because I now occupy the confusing space of likeness that she addresses in her work. If you were to meet me in person, it is likely that you would notice the striking resemblance that I bear to my mother. You might be able to see traces of her in my eyes, or hear some resonance of her character in my laugh, or even mistake me for her from a distance. And though I am not ashamed in the slightest to be so similar to a woman that I admire greatly, I am wary of the possibility that people will mistake me for her entirely. I imagine my thoughts hanging in the air for mere seconds before they become entangled in her legacy, and in that moment when my words become neither mine nor hers, I am reminded of how dangerous likeness can be.