Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns

2016

If You Knew Me Well You Would Know That I Would Give You Everything

For you, a respite of uncontainability. Safe pages for words, to taste them as they find their rightness. Let them rest in their silky beds of lyrical dreams. Let them run like rivers down mountain-sides, arranging curves and switches where textures change along the way. Thoughts yet unmet arrive in cloaks of language, becoming bards to take you where you can see that you are wide inside.

Words are delicious, but cannot say much. They often lose the water of meaning before it is delivered. But they can be stirred to form descriptions of the breath, glances, gestures, and pulses between lives. Perhaps writing is finding a scrape in the skin of knowing, where the sting and dirt and blood of the day is let out, and music is let in.

There is no language to define the spiraling processes of the vast context we are participants in. We do not have names for the patterns of interdependency. To lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous. Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters.

An inside-out kaleidoscope—a de-fragmenter—might be useful for looking at a fractured order through a lens of unity. A superhero in a comic book might have such a tool at her belt. The way we see affects what we do, in both the broad strokes of global study, and the details of a day. Playing with the limits of our perception, our knowing, and tweaking the cultural script is like using a lemon juice wash to reveal the invisible ink and unspoken scaffolding we inhabit.

The ink of interrelationship bleeds across the boundaries between professionalism, academic research, and the banality of daily life. Theory and philosophy are stained with the mundane and both are vis-à-vis. What holds this collection of sightings together? What holds anything together? Glue is superficial, so not that. Thread is better, sewing, mending the torn-apart seams of perception—possibly. It is the right question—what is holding it together?—and the question alone might be the source of inquiry. Surely a search for the elegance in a mess of weighted compensations, and river-washed shapings of the context of life, is enough of a spine. Perhaps?

The thing I want to say in this book is not in any of the pieces, but is woven by you in the way you make linkings and meta-linkings.

In the wake of human history thus far, devastation and destruction point to a misconception about the ‘way of things’ or, as some might say, the ‘order of life.’ Whatever the errors are, they are brutal to our inner worlds and the larger ecology of which we are a part. It might be that we are navigating with the wrong map. The way in which sense is made of this smorgasbord of ideas today will differ from how that same sense-making fits tomorrow. Unwritten, uncondoned.

To break away from the bricklaying of evidence-based strategic solutions is a huge risk. The loose threads of golden flexibility are a pirate’s booty of unproven and mock-able guesses. This is not allowed, and I am not qualified. Interloping across disciplines and subjects, I am just here with two eyes to see the parallax, and to blindly feel for the hidden thinkings in the bottom of a black handbag. My father, Gregory Bateson, a scientist of many shades and a thinker, has given me a great deal to work with, and hopefully to give my own extension to. I cannot know where his thinking ends and mine begins, nor do I care to draw those lines. Both of us are here, along with 3,500 years of western civilization and the long history of human evolution, wondering how to change the course of this story. Conceptually I am walking the thin glass plank barefoot—chaos peppered with elusive still points on both sides.

The depths to plunge are the abyss of love at the end of the plank. In fact, in each glimpse of this collection is a love story. These pieces are naked flirtations within a landscape of longing, a melting point of meetings in a panorama. To be a participant in a complex system is to desire to be both lost and found in the interrelationships between people, nature, and ideas. It is an infinite expansion where a small bird’s nest is tucked into the twigs of a gnarled oak tree that stands patiently atop a hillside. A pond below reflects its branches against the clouds, and tall grass is led by the wind to dance like water. They are in conversation together with us. Are there edges? The tree is in the park, which is in the city, in the Pacific Northwest, in the northern hemisphere, on a spherical globe of vitality, orbiting a larger globe of fire. Anyone’s heart is liable to be broken open by the simple poetry of the many entanglements captured in a single blink.

Written in geological calligraphy, we are swirled and looped into each other in movement and pattern. We learn together, with the trees, and the trade winds, the living maps of cities, and the soup recipes of our ancestors. Cause and effect trade hats like a shell game, losing count on purpose. The limbs of history and the future’s lust are always synchronizing.

These are the dipping breadsticks, the stewing roots and the wild herbs of my unauthorized knowings. These are living things, barely interested in the page, but swarming into warmth. In the kitchen, in the street, in the forest, in the sea, in my cells and in the cache of breaths I cannot count—there is something holding all of this together, all of us together. There is an alive order that we are within and that is within us.

Breathable

In the looking, is what is seen.

The baskets to put ideas in

have open tops and holes in the sides

woven in sleepy stitchery,

loose loops cradle lightly.

‘It’ does not awake in form

but dreams willy-nilly

of the treetops reflecting the roots.

While light changes angles in water,

playing with geometry

seconds pass into songs for transport

because rain on dust is a beginning of mud

and life.

Mental Mono-Cropping

Boxes, labeled and stacked, ready for a move. The unpacking will be messy. So much of what I face now can be attributed to what I have come to call ‘Mental Mono-Cropping’: generating ideas in singular fields that are bred to be resistant to cross-pollination. Education, media, and social structures present overlapping patterns of compartmentalization. Why just one concept of birth, marriage, death, friendship, work, economy, right, or wrong? To generate swathes of homogenized perception is not only zombie-like, it is a crisis of metaphor. It is, in fact, just the sort of metaphor that leads to the practice of mono-cropping agriculturally. The snake eats its tail. Evolution prefers diversity.

Specialized and separated, the ideas that so badly want to twist and frolic around each other are captive. Held in hoarded holding patterns, the poor things are braced to fear thieves.

This language and culture favor singular focus, clear definitions, and linear narratives of causation. A plus B equals C. If you do not have enough data on A and B, then you should seek the authority of the experts of either A-ness or B-ness.

But the world is not made that way. Ideas live into the architecture of culture. They take up residence and make a home. Then they stain the carpets of our minds with spilt drinks. And then one decides to protect itself from outsiders and puts locks on the doors. Ideas are not tidy guests.

On a personal level, you and I together are much, much more than one plus one. We are as many as we are able to be, and less and more. A single conversation between a married couple is evidence of enough of the shortcomings of logic. Who speaks truth?

Mental mono-cropping is imprisonment. Emancipate the ideas and they will burst into co-evolutionary bloom in a nearly unreadable knot of spiraling influences. They will be untidy in another way. They will leak into each other.

Biology is history is communication. Anthropology is architecture is agriculture is what some old women have known all their lives.

But, if expertise is specialized, then strangled, profiled ideas become the currency, and I am broke and we are broken.

(inter)Facing an Ecology of Mind…

Ecology: …the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.

—The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

If you want to understand mental process, look at biological evolution and conversely if you want to understand biological evolution, go look at mental process.

—Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I like our garden best of all, it is bushy and happy and free… kind of in the style of 1970s’ pubic hair.

—My daughter, upon our return home, after a walk

through our neighborhood of very manicured gardens.

The idea that ideas are fixed or permanent is just an idea, and it’s one that can change. Being stuck is a bad idea made of other bad ideas. ‘Ecology’ is often relegated to meaning simply ‘nature’ and our use of the word ‘nature’ is haunted by the implication of a human world that is separated from the environment that we need if we are to survive. This is very strange. I am not sure how this happened. It would seem to me that ecology should have bubbled up inside all the other existing realms of study and provided a sort of grey matter between them. On a good day we understand ecology as a living pattern of relationships, a co-evolving set of relational dynamics between parts of a system. We are used to seeing ecologies within elements of a landscape, or pond, or even our own body’s balancing of the functions of different organs. My father took this pattern up a level. He took it into the realm of ideas. I like to think of Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a garden of thoughts growing, changing, dying, and even composting in relation to one another. It is a dirt-under-your-nails transference of biological patterns onto conceptual and epistemological habits. ‘An Ecology of Mind,’ as a term, is a thinking tool that allows ideas to be flexible and alive in relation to one another and the outside world.

Take, for example, the body. My life is more than the sum of my digestive cycles and heartbeats. The natural world does not end with the physical or visible parts of a system. What I ate for breakfast may have been, in part, nutritionally oriented, but it was also determined by the seasons and those with whom I ate it. While digestion is surely chemical and mechanical, it is also subject to emotional conditions. Those, in turn, are part of a large field of cultivated and volunteer ideas including those that inform personal history, our cultural models of success, emotional scar tissue, and so on. The determination of something as simple as the quality of breakfast cereal is a complex idea that carries along in its wake a long string of influences ranging from developments in agriculture to physical labor and politics, to social demographics and eventually to the place we call taste… but it is just an idea made of other ideas, in a living world of ideas all pushing and pulling each other. They don’t sit still.

The term ‘An Ecology of Mind’ challenges me to ask myself: which thoughts are flourishing, which are composting, which are just budding, which are ready for harvesting? Also, I might ask myself, is this idea a seedling for a future learning, or a weed? What are the stimuli that came together to produce this idea?

Seeing that the infrastructure of my ideas resembles a garden has its benefits: I may be able to get free from the concreteness in which I seclude myself. Even to be a bystander and watch the ecology of my thoughts evolve is a step toward a larger understanding of my motivations. Familiarity with the context of my own conceptual agriculture may not solve any problems, but it does give me a little leverage with which to make choices.

Ideas change; in fact, they never stop changing. Thought patterns I assume to be permanent and pervasive—like what is a circle, identity, god, money, language, dreams—are not perceived the same way from culture to culture, or even from generation to generation. Within the semantics and vocabularies of the world’s languages entirely different emotions exist. Ideas are living things. I am suspicious about separating the intellect and the emotions. I am more comfortable with them being entangled. Not that I am condoning overthinking or intellectualizing our emotional responses, but the way we feel emotionally tells us a great deal about the way we think. I believe that it is wrong to exploit people and nature, so I am angered and saddened when I perceive exploitation. The idea and emotion are indivisible. The reverie of beauty I might perceive in a forest is an integration of several impressions, which form a vision I am moved by. But to see it in this way is not to be cold and intellect-oriented; most ideas live in the body’s reading of its environment. I know, I feel, I believe, and so I frame my knowing, feeling, and believing into a sigh, or language, or artistic expression.

Conceptual concrete is optional. There are gobs of ideas out there to get stuck on and build castles upon. They are harder to change once they become foundations for other ideas. A lightness in the way we hold thoughts gives us room to learn, to shift perspective, and to keep a rigorous humility of confusion. It is not the norm to celebrate the changing of position on an idea. There are depths at which ideas of how the world is put together are so integrated into life that they have become invisible. Those are the ones to watch out for. They sustain other ideas, and ideas about ideas. They seem unchangeable. But, pull a single thread loose and the whole tapestry can be reorganized.

To begin to think differently at this level leads to rethinking everything. It is a shift in perspective, in the way I feel, in the way I define, in the way I see the world, and what I do in it. Inevitably this kind of change leads to the arrival of a new version of myself as part of an integrated context that includes moving interrelationships with the people I love and those I don’t even know, as well as the realm of communication and the natural environment of which I am a part.

Just keep going; don’t stop. Keep pulling the thread and mental process and biological structure will come to mirror one another. A moment ago I said that ideas are living things, now I’m going on to say that living things are ideas.

If I can begin to see an ecology of my ideas, thoughts, and cognition, then I can begin to see mind in ecology. This is a big shift. The interaction of each organism in its inward and outward relation to its ecology is boggling to hold in sight. The interrelationships of the biological world are functioning with an intimacy similar to that of my own thoughts—can I not see the leaves of a plant that turn themselves toward the sun, or the seduction of the colors and perfumes of a flower that lures the bees?

The world around us is far from inert. ‘Mind’ as we are speaking of it here, in Gregory’s usage of the term, is a way of noticing the intelligence of the world under our feet. Our co-evolution with the flora and fauna is so often seen from just one perspective, but, as Michael Pollan discusses in The Botany of Desire, the plant world is not so innocent that it did not notice the dominance of the species that humanity favors. Some plants, in making themselves attractive to us have secured their evolutionary position. Biological adornment is as shameless as the adornment of the fashion world. Bees and butterflies, insects, birds, and people have color attractions that appear in plants. Did we grow to love the colors because of the plants, or did the plants increase their color because it helped their survival? Co-evolution is always biological communication.

Like the plants, and our interactions with them, forest animals are custodians of the species that serve them. We can extend to all of biology the presence of mind, and the rightful claim to an evolutionary narrative. The multiple perspectives of an ecology are the web of interaction we call biodiversity. The giant conversation that is nature will be made sense of differently by all of those present, including the protozoa. 7 billion humans, 8 billion other species, they all have another version of the relationship. Each has a perspective, each has a changing narrative, each in relation—umwelt.

An ecology of mind, and a mind of ecology—it cuts both ways. Their story, that of the other species, is my story. But ours is their story… finally a larger OUR story. Ideas are co-evolving within our epistemology and our environment, and the biological structures of our world respond in a communication pattern I am just barely able to recognize consciously. Listen carefully to the change in the patterns of the wind, to the smile of a dog, to the song of the whale, and to the microscopic organisms that hold the ocean’s species in harmony. What I am calling ‘mind’ within the body is easily visible in the intelligent compensatory behaviors of temperature regulation and metabolic equilibrium. But an extension of that compensatory communication to the question ‘do trees think?’ reveals a sticking point in our thought garden that we would do well to weed out.

The eye altering alters all

—William Blake, ‘The Mental Traveller’

I am an ecology within ecologies. Who are you? And what thoughts are we fertilizing together? How is thinking being reflected back through relationships with others, including the other species? We might have an ecology of culture, ecology of linguistics, ecology of economics, and so on. The notion that nature (not us) has the burden of ecology to contend with, while we ‘thinking’ humans insist that we’re the only species capable of making meaning—this is an argument about cognition that will point most people to the brain. The mind and the brain are not the same thing. One is in the head, and the other is spread everywhere.

Identity with an I

Who am I? Grammar incorrectly suggests that I am singular. A verb conjugation for plural first person is missing—not for we, but for I.

That singularity is a semantic, ideological, epistemological, cultural, biological, ecological, evolutionary, epigenetic, gender specific, nationalistic error.

That singularity is a great violence, and silence to all that I am in plurals. The pronouns are misleading. ‘I’ carries the suggestion that I am somehow individual, independent, when interdependence is the law.

‘We’ seems to be a more inclusive choice, but it erases the multiplicity of perspectives. Which ‘we’? ‘We’ as in western civilization, (whatever that is), or humanity, or the entirety of life? What does ‘we’ mean? As a white girl I better be damned careful with ‘We’—assuming the right to speak to experiences I do not, cannot know. ‘We’ is less independent, but not conducive to multiple mutual learning.

‘You’ separates us, points a finger, sets us up for confusion.

‘They’ is an illusion. ‘Us’ is somehow not ‘them.’

When I lived in Thailand I learned to use pronouns to reveal relationship, but it was so complicated I finally just began to use my name. Nora is hungry, Nora is your friend. Third person, first person, second person, all at once.

Perhaps using all the pronouns will generate a healthy confusion. I am we are you includes they. My childhood English teachers are rolling their eyes.

Let them. The world is burning. We are not seeing the integrity of life. Grammar needs to evolve.

What there are no words for is often un-seeable. Can you see the plurals that I am? I presume you have some of the same plurals. That presumption makes you hard to define.

Here are mine: Me, I, Nora. You, am, are…

Over 10 trillion organisms make their community in and on my body. I cannot live without them.

They are in my eyelashes and brows, they are on my skin, they are in my mouth, in my organs.

My gut is home to billions of living things without whom I could not digest my food. I would not have energy for my metabolism; I would be suffering great enzymatic and other imbalances. I would die.

Nine out of ten cells in my body are inhuman and belong to the larger ecology.

All of those creatures live in and on me.

My health is their health; their health is my health.

When they are hungry I am hungry, when I eat too much sugar they overproduce in particular populations.

My mood, my urges, my instincts are enfolded with them.

I am not only what is in my body, I am also my personality, my