Mostly I tell stories...
Mostly, I tell stories. But as I collect stories and weave them together, a few underlying themes keep surfacing. For a number of years, pursuing different specific projects, I have been trying to find my way to an ethics that is based in empathy and characterized by an integration of objectivity and subjectivity. My concern is to look at persons in context, moving through the changing stages of the life cycle, so that action can be seen as participation and knowledge as identification.
In 1968, I coined the phrase, "each person is his own central metaphor." The pronoun dates it, but the idea is still central to my thinking about empathy. Now, however, I think of persons as much less separate, in spite of experience of limited understanding. "More and more it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error...we create each other, bring each other into being by being part of the matrix in which the other exists." (Eye, 117) The metaphor unfolds beyond the immediate context into a sense of the life of this planet, not only as the mother that bears us, but also as the future life to which we give birth, and which we must care for in ever closer patterns of interrelationship, as earth and air, flora and fauna, our kind and others play their complementary sustaining roles in the whole.
One of the questions I have come back to repeatedly over the last twenty years is the question of how it is possible, even among human beings, to interact with others who do not share the same codes. This is the universal situation once you recognize it – code sharing, whether of language or of values, is always incomplete. In addition to the possibility of learning the codes of the other, there is the possibility of developing rules of coordination. This is the question that underlies my work on mother‑infant communication – two persons with very different kinds of competence, developing harmonious and delightful patterns of interaction, playing without a shared set of rules of the game, and of course changing and learning in the process. This interest led me into work on ritual and the process whereby rituals are invented, and into work on problems of culture contact. In a larger sense the question of communication across disparate codes resonates with the questions of adaptation or coevolution or learning, is in fact the same as all questions of the coupling of systems which are unlike each other. I find myself exploring metaphors that liken the human relationship with the natural world to the continually tentative and changing relationships within marriage or between parent and child, relationships which always include a degree of uncertainty and strangeness, which thrive on complementarity.
I also find myself often exploring the nature of the attention that makes such relationships possible. I often start from the image of a mother with a month old infant, gazing engrossed into each other's eyes. I think that the best hope for our species lies in learning new patterns of attention that grow out of curiosity and respect and allow for wonder and learning. "Passionate attention to a lake, with its respiration, its maturation and aging, its dependence on interlocked forms of balance, its reflection of the self, is equally puzzling, equally revealing, equally the beginning of love." (Eye, 186). So this is another theme that runs through my work, and connects to the relationship between attention and commitment.
It seems to me that in trying to develop an understanding of matters of this sort, one has to move back and forth between very abstract and very specific levels of focus, and indeed between types of discourse varying from poetry to formal analysis. I use examples from my own experience as a way of moving from the general to the specific, and also as a way of bridging, even confounding, different types of discourse, "a motion through concentric metaphors." As I said in "Eye," the work I do "...expresses a belief that multiple small spheres of personal experience both echo and enable events shared more widely, expressions of moment in a world in which we now recognize that no microcosm is completely separate, no tide pool, no forest, no family, no nation (16)." As I write about the lives of individuals, I hope to show how they both adapt to and create their environments so that they in turn are able to grow within them. Ultimately, I see this as related to the question of how humankind is to make a home on this planet without soiling or incinerating its nest.
In 1968, I coined the phrase, "each person is his own central metaphor." The pronoun dates it, but the idea is still central to my thinking about empathy. Now, however, I think of persons as much less separate, in spite of experience of limited understanding. "More and more it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error...we create each other, bring each other into being by being part of the matrix in which the other exists." (Eye, 117) The metaphor unfolds beyond the immediate context into a sense of the life of this planet, not only as the mother that bears us, but also as the future life to which we give birth, and which we must care for in ever closer patterns of interrelationship, as earth and air, flora and fauna, our kind and others play their complementary sustaining roles in the whole.
One of the questions I have come back to repeatedly over the last twenty years is the question of how it is possible, even among human beings, to interact with others who do not share the same codes. This is the universal situation once you recognize it – code sharing, whether of language or of values, is always incomplete. In addition to the possibility of learning the codes of the other, there is the possibility of developing rules of coordination. This is the question that underlies my work on mother‑infant communication – two persons with very different kinds of competence, developing harmonious and delightful patterns of interaction, playing without a shared set of rules of the game, and of course changing and learning in the process. This interest led me into work on ritual and the process whereby rituals are invented, and into work on problems of culture contact. In a larger sense the question of communication across disparate codes resonates with the questions of adaptation or coevolution or learning, is in fact the same as all questions of the coupling of systems which are unlike each other. I find myself exploring metaphors that liken the human relationship with the natural world to the continually tentative and changing relationships within marriage or between parent and child, relationships which always include a degree of uncertainty and strangeness, which thrive on complementarity.
I also find myself often exploring the nature of the attention that makes such relationships possible. I often start from the image of a mother with a month old infant, gazing engrossed into each other's eyes. I think that the best hope for our species lies in learning new patterns of attention that grow out of curiosity and respect and allow for wonder and learning. "Passionate attention to a lake, with its respiration, its maturation and aging, its dependence on interlocked forms of balance, its reflection of the self, is equally puzzling, equally revealing, equally the beginning of love." (Eye, 186). So this is another theme that runs through my work, and connects to the relationship between attention and commitment.
It seems to me that in trying to develop an understanding of matters of this sort, one has to move back and forth between very abstract and very specific levels of focus, and indeed between types of discourse varying from poetry to formal analysis. I use examples from my own experience as a way of moving from the general to the specific, and also as a way of bridging, even confounding, different types of discourse, "a motion through concentric metaphors." As I said in "Eye," the work I do "...expresses a belief that multiple small spheres of personal experience both echo and enable events shared more widely, expressions of moment in a world in which we now recognize that no microcosm is completely separate, no tide pool, no forest, no family, no nation (16)." As I write about the lives of individuals, I hope to show how they both adapt to and create their environments so that they in turn are able to grow within them. Ultimately, I see this as related to the question of how humankind is to make a home on this planet without soiling or incinerating its nest.
posted by Mary Catherine Bateson at 2:28 PM
1 Comments:
If the majority of us would "mostly tell stories" like Mary Catherine Bateson does, we would have best tools to deal with any kind of difficulties. Her metapfor is not antibiotic, it is probiotic. I mean it literaly. Gregory Bateson offered view on mind and body and nature as one necessary unity and so does her work. It activated my interest in all kind of events, relations and "facts" and possibilities how to understand them. I would recomend her writing as the work of most important living leaders in the world.
Post a Comment
<< Home