Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns

A web of poetry, essays, lectures, and remembrances that comprise a life? A difficult book to describe, perhaps because it is collectively a diary Ms. Bateson has intrepidly made public. This is a book not to be read but experienced, but as one experiences it, one is lead to contemplate how we ourselves experience and how one’s own experience is wound up in how others experience and how culture colors perceptions that allows our peep into the unity of life. We are led to ask if life itself is a conversation between systems that dialogue and change perpetually such that we never are able to find the eye of the needle nor even the end of the thread. Ms. Bateson shows herself to be an agile gymnast of thinking who winks playfully and seductively as she and audience are stopped in time, upside down, wide-eyed, splayed and askew.We are led from the life of a twelve year old peering into a tidal pool with her father, Gregory Bateson, one of the founders of cybernetics, to that of a woman who reveals her search for this father lost to her so young. We journey into her maturation as a daughter, then mother confronting education systems, and personal difficulties brought home to be faced not as dilemmas but as learning opportunities. All difficulties are to be faced not in their polarity, but in their complexity and that is how we learn and grow.This book calls to mind the diary of Anais Ninn who so openly showed herself in the world. When an author is this intimate, it begins construct of intimateness between the reader and his or her own world, the creation of vulnerability that must occur as we face our future at this most precarious time. Nora doesn’t flinch as she contemplates what we want the world to look like after the failure of its current construct. Ecology is not simply the interconnectiveness of all of nature, humankind included. Where does perception and Mind fit?I cherish this collection. It is infused with integrity and grit and demands the same of us as we experience it. I am called to mind a song of Leonard Cohen and the lines: “you know that you can trust her for she’s touched your perfect body with her mind”.By Steve Glass, former attorney, environmentalist, disenfranchised Democrat, sometimes activist, and wannabe poet.

Can't say enough about this one or its author. Absolutely wonderful. Absolute must for anyone wanting to open up their minds to new ideas, system-based thought, and ways of thinking and living. Grand and poetic in scope. So inspirational. Highly, highly recommend!

On reading “Old Growth Redwoods” from Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger CirclesShe pulls me, divinely masculine, into her divine feminine Self with her words, each one dripping from the emerging flow like maple syrup, distilled from All. From all that is Maple: sunlight through springtime fragrant blossoms by sticky leaves peeking out into warmth from a sheath not now needed, fed by that same flow that rose in the alternating vibration around the 32 or the 0 but where these maples live and breathe, it is often a 32. These shoots are the memory regenerated of a summer of sunlight and rain, of a forest letting go, in profuse color, of the warmside spin of our whirling fecund rock spiraling beyond our sense of day and night and year and century, a memory of nova-orgasmic transmissions of star stuff made earth stuff. A memory of my grandfather’s “Ma, this sugar is SOUR” as he sat in the snow of a lengthening by as yet quite short Vermont February day. Of my brother and I recreating in miniature the process of capturing and boiling to indescribable sweetness.A life of collecting sweet waters of wholeness, now shared as intense and continuous viscosity. It fills me so directly I will not taste it, in my maturity, to the point of exhausted taste buds and soured sensibility. This syrup has DNA in it. It comes at me as divinely masculine as well, fountaining into my receptive heartmind and seeding fields of new growth.

This book may not be anything you are expecting. Even if you've seen An Ecology of Mind, Nora's movie about her dad, this is so much more of her and her search for new ways of talking with one another about what matters to us and how we are learning together, both as individuals and as representatives of the questing collective intelligence of this young species. Instead of more answers, Nora Bateson does as ee cummings advised and "asks the more beautiful question" in none of the usual ways. She reaches out through dramatically different ways of connecting in each "small arc" of a chapter or a poem for those whispers of possibility which can stimulate more meaningful participation in the "larger circle." Makes you wonder what else she might have up her beautifully worded sleeve.

Sometimes the author dances in poetic reverie; other times she demonstrates the folly of analytical pursuit. Sometimes (as on page 43) the poetry is so obscure as to waste a page of paper. At least that's followed by an apologetic essay (written years before).By the time I had read to page 55, the author had shown, by the insights that impress her, a naivete that had undermined my trust.From page 55 I skipped to page 168 to familiarize myself with "symmathesy" and the "vitae" of which it is composed, or which contribute to the process ... and my interest was restored.I appreciate Nora Bateson for taking her father's work another step forward, and for restoring the spirit to the concept of systems: the idea that wholeness is greater than the sum of its parts -- even when the parts are recognized to be systems! Synergy and feedback and interdependence are at the core of Nature itself, and the evolution of our own learning must take that into account.

I found this information bridging my awareness from one reference frame into an expanded and much more engaged reference frame. I thought it was a most engaging and transparent mapping of Nora Bateson's proximity to engaging complexity.Bryan W

I sometimes hold a notion that an anthology of poems might be the way to map the universe in its diversity. Each small piece would capture aspects, yet the anthology holds together the myriad ways the poems explore things in a unity that is sometimes clear, sometimes less so. This book might be considered that anthology.Nora Bateson writes with the intention of carrying on a family tradition. Her father was the anthropologist and cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson who sometimes talked about the "path which connects. Her work includes a film about him. In the book she talks about this and her grandfather William Beteson who was a Professor of Biology at Cambridge with achievements of his own, and how she is continuing to expand this legacy. But of course she is aiming for more.The essays and poems in this book look at a range of matters from ecology, philosophy, economics as well as experience of body, attitudes to nature, the complexities of human nature, bringing up children, rape and science. Many of the poems and prose poems capture moments, feelings and dillemas. In short this is a stunning survey of the contemporary existence written with a stunning brevity and precision. Each one is an arc of the larger circle which each piece is a fragment of.Such diversity perhaps has a problem that read as a whole it risks becoming too diffuse. But this is no more than any other anthology of verse or articles. The book it self could either be read as a whole or dipped in at random, like such volumes. There is scarcely a dud. This is a book to keep at one's side for a lifetime of wealth. There is much to enjoy here as well as a large sum of enlightenment.

Where to begin? Nora Bateson delicately weaves between poetry, autobiography, the influence of her father Gregory Bateson and grandfather William Bateson and other thinkers, ecology, gender, and other topics to create a version of what she describes as symmathesy; contextual mutual learning through interaction, which as readers, we are invited to participate in.Buy this book; dip in and out, enjoy the touches of beauty, the challenges and at times, the raw honesty.

Where can the lineage of Bateson thinking go after William Bateson's foundational contributions and after Gregory Bateson's books? To read this book is to be part of that adventure. At one level it is a garden of very diverse delights. At the next level the reader has no option but to work on what connects them. There is no authorial grandstanding here, the tone is consistently invitational and playful. The book is not about information you need to know it is an exploration of ways of thinking and feeling that are both deeply necessary and fun. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

I would give this 7 stars if I could. A totally outstanding book in so many ways. Brilliant, connected, heartful, wise.

I'm a Bateson follower and Feel Nora is taking the path laid out by Gregory Bateson further