The Backstory to “Body and Soul”: A Double-Header
Nora Bateson, her father Gregory Bateson, and her grandfather, William Bateson, who coined the term “genetics.”
When I first met Nora Bateson, the situation was awkward. But I didn’t realize it. Here I was barreling ahead with customary earnest enthusiasm, yet I was putting Nora in an uncomfortable position. But I didn’t know it.
I had reached out to her privately on Facebook in 2015 after seeing her documentary tribute to her father, Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), a man of fertile mind and imagination whose experience had touched and influenced all from anthropology and cybernetics and systems theory to psychiatry and cognitive science. The movie, An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Tribute to Gregory Bateson, was beautifully directed and filmed by Nora, interweaving her dad’s history, their relationship, his ideas and his flowing impact in wider and wider circles beyond academic specialties.
The point I’m getting at, you see, is that the division of things into parts tends to be a device of convenience. And that’s all.
—Gregory Bateson
I was particularly struck mid-way through the film, when she described one of her father’s best-known ideas: the double-bind—where a person is given demands that can’t be reconciled, or confronted with a choice between two courses of action that are both jacked up. A double-bind, as Nora describes in the film, is “a pattern that’s like a Catch-22, a situation where there seems to be no solution or escape.”
On the other side, through that double, twisted, what we called a Double-Bind some years ago, there is another stage of wisdom.
—Gregory Bateson
When Nora made the following statement in her movie, it stopped me in my tracks: “The double-bind is a creative imperative. It’s the moment when because this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work, something else is going to have to be improvised. A creative impulse is necessary at that moment to get out of the situation, to take it up a level.”
Oh my God, I thought. She’s pointing to the very process central to jazz!
But perhaps above all else the blues-oriented hero image represents the American embodiment of the man whose concept of being able to live happily ever afterwards is most consistent with the moral of all dragon-encounters: Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e., heroic) endowment.
—Albert Murray, from the closing paragraph of The Hero and the Blues
So far, so good. But I had seen the film on YouTube. When I wrote and introduced myself to Nora, saying that I was moved by the film and that I was speaking about it in a long Facebook thread, she asked for the link to it. She wrote back saying that the Youtube link was illegal but that it was available for rental or purchase via Vimeo.
What I didn’t realize is that she thought I had put it up on Youtube. I explained that I hadn’t put it up but would share the correct link and make the purchase. Then, thinking of how I likely would have responded had the tables been turned, with me voicing some very choice French terms, if you dig what I mean, I wrote this: “I appreciate your compassion and equanimity in light of the fact that you thought that I put it up on Youtube. You’re an advanced human being!”
Double-Header: Today @ 12 noon and 5:30 ET
Nora Bateson and Diane Musho Hamilton
The above is part of the backstory of the series, “Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture,” which today at 12 noon features Nora Bateson and Diane Musho Hamilton, two master communicators. Jewel’s post last Friday mentioned Diane and her most recent book, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart. Last year Diane—a dear friend of ours who helped us develop our facilitation skills for the Jazz Leadership Project—was central to a Rebel Wisdom platform event I reviewed here.
Register for today’s 12 noon session, “An Ecology of Communication.”
Daniel Schmachtenberger and Zak Stein
The second event features polymath Daniel Schmachtenberger and the brilliant educational philosopher and meta-psychologist, Zak Stein, at 5:30 ET. Both are cutting-edge thought-leaders on ways to confront and overcome the many threats to human life and civilization that we currently face. Co-hosting and co-facilitating both events will be my series partner, Gregg Henriques, who, in his own right, has devised an ingenious system that integrates multiple fields of knowledge, from the hard sciences to the soft sciences, endeavoring solutions to decades-long problems in psychology and to fill what he calls the “enlightenment gap”—no small task.
For a taste of what’s in store at 5:30, check out this short video featuring Daniel—If We Don’t Fix Sensemaking, We Won’t Survive.
Register for today’s 5:30 ET session, “Where Do We Go From Here?: The We, the I, and It.”
We hope to see you at one or both events in today’s double-header. For those who missed the first two sessions of the series, here’s the first, and here’s the second.