======================================================================== Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) -- Volume 4 Number 1, Jan. 2005 Alan B. Scrivener --- www.well.com/~abs --- mailto:abs@well.com ======================================================================== (If you haven't read parts one and two, see the archives, listed below.) * * * * * * * * Life, so they say, is but a game and we let it slip away. Love, like the Autumn sun, should be dyin' but it's only just begun. Like the twilight in the road up ahead, they don't see just where we're goin'. And all the secrets in the Universe, whisper in our ears And all the years will come and go, take us up, always up. We may never pass this way again... -- James Seals (1973) "We May Never Pass This Way (Again)" Seals and Crofts ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002KHQ/hip-20 ) On October first we set out on bicycles fully loaded with ponchos, tent, sleeping bags, axe, wok, canteens, mess kits and ukulele -- and made it half-way out of the driveway of "the farm" before we both fell over in the gravel. We weren't used to riding bikes that weighed more than we did. Yet we had gone through a major purge of material possessions before departing for this trip. We had sold, given away or burned a mountain of stuff and everything that remained was on these two bikes or crammed into four footlockers in the farmhouse attic where we'd spent the summer. What proved to be one of the most valuable possessions we took along was a letter of introduction from Gregory Bateson. Typed by Judith Van Slooten on Kresge stationery while Bateson dictated and we watched, it read: 16 September 1975 To Whom It May Concern: Alan Scrivener and Dixie Barnum are both of them very intelligent people and my friends. They are interested in the sorts of things that I am interested in. Be nice to them, please. Gregory Bateson Fellow, Kresge College GB:jvs It turned out to be good for two interesting and educational exclusive facilities tours, as well as two free lunches. I had written in my senior thesis, part one, before our departure: ...just as there are some sorts of knowledge that are unobtainable in the context of classroom experience, so I feel there is some knowledge unobtainable in the context of a university. The system of greatest interest to me right now is the North American social-political-industrial network, and its present state of flux. I was leaving the door open to return to Kresge and have the bike trip be a kind of field work or sabbatical, bookended by my academic experience. But I was also preparing emotionally for the possibility that we mignt never return. The trip could be open-ended. I sang to myself as I crossed the railroad trestle in Santa Cruz over the San Lorenzo River for the last time, as we rode east out of town, "We may never pass this way again." In addition to the social-political-industrial system of America, I was surprised how -- especially in the west -- we spent a lot of time aware of the geological-ecological-meteorological system as well. Being outdoors almost all the time, living without phone or TV, I had plenty of time to read, and think. I finally got around to reading "An Introduction to Cybernetics" (1964) by Ross Ashby, ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0416683002/hip-20 ) and "Our Own Metaphor" (1975) by Mary Catherine Bateson. ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572736011/hip-20 ) In Albuquerque, New Mexico, we looked up solar researcher Steve Baer, founder of "Zomeworks," ( www.zomeworks.com ) and showed him the letter from Bateson. (They'd both been published in the "Co-Evolution Quarterly," so I figure they knew of each other at least.) He was kind enough to give us an insightful insider's tour of his workshop (including some very clever passive solar designs), and also for contrast show us some new construction with poor solar design in downtown Albuquerque, before buying us lunch. In Gainesville, Florida we looked up ecology researcher Howard T. Odum, who'd also been published in CQ, and showed him Bateson's letter, and he was kind enough to buy us lunch and have a grad student show us around his cypress swamp, where he was monitoring the metabolism of the trees with instruments in the crowns, and also experimenting with using the swamp to naturally treat sewage. ( palmm.fcla.edu/feol/Odumpathfinder.htm ) During lunch I told him I was on this journey to learn and he asked how I was going to give knowledge back, feeding it back into the world. Well, thirty years later I finally am. In Orlando we visited my cousin Beth and met one of her college professors who had studied under Rene DuBoise and was openly envious of my study with Bateson. On the eve of the Bicentennial, 4th of July 1976, in Washington, DC, we saw a special on TV that summarized the conclusions of the "Limits to Growth" (1972). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451136950/hip-20 ) Four years later it looked like we were four years closer to apocalypse with no solution in sight. The next day , while taking a tour of the Brumidi Corridor in the U.S. Capitol building, ( xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/BRUMIDI/bruhome.html ) I had this sudden realization that Grinder and Bandler, creators of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), were very much like the legendary Hassan I Saba (supposedly namesake of hashish and assassins), ( www.geocities.com/baalzephon999/HassanISabbah.html ) who taught that "nothing is true and everything is permitted." Contrast this with Grinder and Bandler, who insist that there is no magic but there are magicians. On a tour of the historic Wren Building at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, we were show a room where students had classics read to them in Latin and Greek from ages 12 to 16. ( www.wm.edu/about/wren/wrenchapel/index.html ) The room was illuminated by high windows, but if a student was caught looking out a window twice in four years he was expelled. I thought of Bateson's classical education at Cambridge, and how different it was from student-directed seminars at Kresge. Perhaps the most informative thing about this journey, "knowledge unobtainable in the context of a university," was the news that there were very many people in America not in the middle class. Some were in poverty. Some were trapped in cycles of generational poverty. This could happen to me, too. Success in life was not guaranteed, not a birthright. I guess I sort of knew this before, but now I really did. * * * * * * * * "I have taught various branches of behavioral biology and cultural anthropology to American students, ranging from college freshmen to psychiatric residents in various schools and teaching hospitals. At all levels I have encountered a very strange gap in their thinking which springs from a lack of certain sorts of tools of thought. This lack is rather equally distributed at all levels of education, among students of both sexes, and among humanists as well as scientists." -- "Number and Quantity" (1978) Bateson in "Co-Evolution Quarterly" #17: Spring 1978 ( www.oikos.org/batesnumber.htm ) During the approximate time frame of our bicycle journey, Stewart Brand was making occasional forays down from Marin County (where he published the Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth catalogs from Gate Five Road, Sausalito) to Santa Cruz, to see what he could get from Gregory to publish. When Gregory wasn't in, he would talk to Judith, and sometimes come away with scraps: aphorisms pinned to his door, reading lists, letters. This was nice for me because, if I could track down CQ on the road (sometimes natural food stores and "hip" bookstores had it) I could read about Bateson's latest writings, formal and informal. I remember in the fall 1975 issue an article called "Caring and Clarity: Conversation With Gregory Bateson and Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Governor of California," which offered the idea that if don't either care about people or offer them clarity then you can't help them; both is best, but you need at least one. Also in the spring of 1976 issue there was a transcript of another convergence of Bateson and Jerry Brown: the governor invited Bateson to give a "prayer" at event which was usually presided over by a member of the clergy. Gregory spoke as an anthropologist. Near the bottom of this e-Zine is a list I've compiled of Articles By and About Gregory Bateson in the "Co-Evolution Quarterly." * * * * * * * * "...any two patterns may, if appropriately combined, generate a third." -- "Mind and Nature -- A Necessary Unity" (1979) by Gregory Bateson ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572734345/hip-20 ) ( www.oikos.org/mind&nature.htm ) We did, in fact, return to Santa Cruz. In fact, seeing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts before declaring the trip "over" I gained a new appreciation of California. We ended up without the wok, axe or ukulele. We moved back onto the cooperative dairy farm and went back to work at the amusement park. I was pretty much convinced that civilization was about to collapse, and had this naive idea that being in a place where we could grow our own food would be good. (Never mind that my neighbors could not grow their own food, and would surely overrun our farm in a crisis.) But I was still able to take the bus up to campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays for Bateson's "Ecology of Mind" lectures. I wasn't enrolled in the university, but I was able to audit his class with no problem. Supposedly this was a repeat for me, and he did cover some of the same introductory material, but of course, due to his interactive style, it was different every time. I must say I got quite a lot more out of it this time, too. While we were on our bike trip, governor Jerry Brown had made Bateson a Regent of the University of California. ( www.capolicycenter.org/ct_1095/ctssb1_1095.html ) He was suddenly moved from the bottom of the UC totem pole to the top. One time I walked with him after class to where he'd parked his car. It had a parking ticket on it. He laughed as he tore it up, and explained to me that he had a Regents parking sticker now and could park anywhere but a fire lane; the campus police just hadn't gotten used to it yet. He later told me that the parking sticker was the best thing that came out of being a Regent. I didn't do so well as a farmer. (I did learn how to compost, which I still do.) We had a bed of leeks that "went to seed" and as an experiment I kept track of my hours as I prepped a bed with compost, planted them, watered them, harvested them and sold them to the Kresge food co-op for $0.17 per pound, which was the going rate for organically grown leeks. I earned about a penny an hour. (I did make borsch with the leeks, along with beets and potatoes and some other stuff we grew, and it was very, very good.) Things began to unravel at "the farm." Without going into detail, I was caught in the crossfire of a power struggle and unceremoniously thrown out. I got angry. I decided to go back to school and study computers, make a lot of money and buy my own farm that nobody could throw me out of. And if civilization collapsed in the mean time, too bad. I vividly recall the night before Bateson's lecture of Thursday 11/11/76, Armistice Day. I was preparing to move out and to return to school, and I was doing some thinking about it all. I decided that a Whole Systems major might not get me a job in computers, and changed my plan to go for an Information Science degree instead. I was up very late talking to my girlfriend about it. She was staying on the farm as I moved on campus. The next morning I slept late and missed Bateson's lecture, even though I'd personally asked him to talk about the significance of Armistice Day. (He did, too. In one of his papers, "From Versailles to Cybernetics" he describes how at after "end" of World War One, on 11/11/1918, England blockaded Germany for several more years until they signed an unfavorable peace treaty, breaking the allied promises in US President Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points," and this screwed up international diplomacy and led to evil things like the Nazis and the CIA. He elaborated in the 11/11 lecture. My friend August told me about it later.) A few weeks later I proposed marriage to my girlfriend, in the big arcade in the 1906 Casino building at the Boardwalk where we both worked. ( www.santacruzpl.org/history/tourism/bdwkpho2.shtml ) * * * * * * * * "You must ask two questions: First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: What is the real nature of control?" -- Thomas Pynchon, 1973 "Gravity's Rainbow" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140188592/hip-20 ) By winter quarter 1977 I was back in school, living and working on campus, engaged with a wedding planned in June, and still working weekends at the Boardwalk. I was learning to program 3D graphics for the first time, drawing vectors on an oscilloscope screen (!?), and still auditing Bateson's class. Due to increased demand, he had moved his seminar class on-campus and was admitting more students, and I was able to drop in easily. I also still hung out in his office. I just wasn't working on an individual major with him as sponsor. While writing this account I realized I may have been grappling with the paradox that if I did the Whole Systems major I could probably graduate right away, while if I did Info. Sci. it would take longer, and I'd be able to spend more time with Bateson. This "double bind" may have helped motivate me to change course. In the last year I'd read the novel "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) by Thomas Pynchon, which had been called "Joycean" by many, "epic and encyclopedic" by Timothy Leary (who read it in solitary confinement at Folsom Prison), and "overwritten and obscene" by the Pulitzer Prize governing board, after vetoing the recommendation of their selection committee. ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140188592/hip-20 ) I ended up calling it "the greatest novel of the 20th century" myself. It concerns the struggle to control V-2 rocket technology at the end of World War Two. (The title refers to the parabolic path of the rocket.) I kept talking to Bateson about it, but he didn't seem very interested. I sam similarities in his ideas and Pynchon's. They both seemed to think that the ideas of "power" and "control" were flawed and dangerous. For example, Bateson had told his students about how warped he found psychiatry to be in the 1950s. There was this notion that you had to control the patients in order to cure them. He elaborated in the article "A Formal Approach to Explicit, Implicit, and Embodied Ideas and to Their Forms of Interaction" (1976), reprinted posthumously in "Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1991) edited by Rodney E. Donaldson, ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062501003/hip-20 ) in which he explained that around 1960: I withdrew from the field of hospital psychiatry into wider fields . . . . I must also confess that I was bored and disgusted by the Augean muddle of conventional psychiatric thinking, by my colleagues' obsession with power, by the dumb cruelty of the families which . . . . "contained" schizophrenia . . . . In the 1950s . . . . the behaviorists were even more power hungry than the curers. One of them put the matter clearly: I had asked him why he . . . . was performing learning experiments on fishes. He said, "Because I want to CONTROL a goldfish." I saw parallels with this passage from "Gravity's Rainbow" about an amoral businessman named Lyle Bland in the 1930s: Psychological studies became, in fact, a Bland specialty. His probe into the subconscious of early-Depression America is considered a classic, and widely credited with improving the plausibility of Roosevelt's "election" in 1932. Though many of his colleagues found a posture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through the motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail . . . . an American synthesis which had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities -- all grouped under the term "control," which seemed to a private code-word -- more in line with the aspirations of Bland and others. I was prattling on in a similar vein one evening in Bateson's office when he interrupted me. "You want a real war story?" he asked. I said I did. "It's been a bad day," he said. "Do you know where a man might get a drink?" Later I realized I should've have taken him someplace like the old-world Oak Room in the historic Cooper House, which was very pub-like. ( www.sch3.net/ht_0060.htm ) But instead I got in his car and directed him to a little dive called "the Jury Room" across the street from the county courthouse. There over Scotch and soda he told me the tale of his final days in the South Pacific in World War Two. As a recent American immigrant from England he wanted to show his patriotism and so he volunteered to help with the war effort. He and other anthropologists were eventually sent to the Pacific Theater to help with writing propaganda to be distributed to natives on Japanese-occupied islands and things of that sort. Though they didn't know it at the time, they also were helping with an elaborate ruse precipitated by the Allies cracking the Japanese code. As with Germany, once the code was broken they high command couldn't just use what they read, for the Japanese would quickly figure out the code was broken and replace it. So they created fake information sources. All Bateson and his colleagues knew was they recruited natives to be dropped on Japanese-controlled islands with radios, to hide in the jungle and "live off the land" and send daily radio reports of weather and ship sightings, all encoded with a true code book (not a cipher) that was effectively unbreakable as long as it was used correctly and the code book wasn't compromised. But the problem was that the natives got restless. One of them tired of hiding in the jungle and asked for more missions. They gave him a drop-off of propaganda brochures to leave at the village barber shops. But he wanted more action. One day they got a radio message (they were all in Morse code) saying he had captured the local mayor and wanted them to send a speedboat for him. Now, it had occurred to the mission planners that a radio might be captured, and the native might be forced to send a message "under duress," so a special code was devised that looked like an "end of text" marker but really meant "don't believe anything in this message." But because the people at HQ knew that these missions were just diversions, nobody paid much attention to them, and they missed the special marker in the last message. Luckily they didn't have a speedboat and so sent a destroyer -- right into a Japanese machine gun nest. Well, the destroyer "won" this encounter, but they didn't get the operative out. Now the folks at HQ, having botched things so far, felt guilty and launched a desperate attempt to get this man out. The only thing they could think of was to have a ship steam up and down the coast of the island firing flares, on the off chance he had escaped back into the jungle. The ship that pulled this duty was the one Bateson was on. While embarked on this ill-advised mission (off the coast of a Japanese-occupied island, remember), they were spotted by a Japanese zero, fitted out to carry bombs but without any at the time. It took a good look at them and then left. They knew about how long it would take for it to reach its base, refuel, reload its bombs and return -- I forget how long this was, say five hours. They sent a coded message to HQ asking for permission to break off their search and leave. They waited well over five hours for a reply, continuing to steam along the coast firing flares, but no one appeared and no message came. Finally, many more hours later, they got a reply: the Japanese had surrendered, following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and hostilities had ceased. "And so," he explained, "the atomic bomb saved my life." We drank up and parted ways. A few days before this magical afternoon I'd had a bad experience with a Burroughs 5700 computer in which lost a program I'd typed in and then forgot to SAVE before telling it to RUN. It crashed and forgot my program. I was so discouraged I decided to drop the 3D graphics class. In a letter to my friend John (from April 9 1977) I talked about the afternoon with Bateson: A few days later I began to write down the episode in my journal. I was about twenty pages into it when I lost my pack. Actually it was stolen. Poof! went my journal, my computer graphics text, and a bottle of taco sauce. Pondering this turn of fate, in Freudian context of "there ain't no such thing as a freak accident," I decided it was an omen from myself. I ... realized I really wanted to forget about writing about Bateson and catch up in computer graphics, and proceeded to return to face the Burroughs. That night I got my first 3D graphics program working. * * * * * * * * Spring 1977 brought my last class taken from Bateson, Kresge 189 "The Epistemology of Molecules, Cells and Organisms" co-taught with biologist Robert Edgar. I discussed it in "C3M" Volume 2 Number 2, Feb. 2003 (see the archives, link below); I misidentified the name as "The Evolutionary Idea." In June my fiance and I got married, in a ceremony on the UCSC campus followed by a reception on the dairy farm. The we packed all we owned in in a rented truck (it didn't fit in 4 footlockers anymore) and drove to Massachusetts, where I'd taken a job at Data General, a minicomputer company on the Boston "Brain Belt." * * * * * * * * "The educated brain is the wreckage left after the experiences of training." -- W. Ross Ashby quoted at "Homepage of William Ross Ashby" ( www2.gwu.edu/~asc/biographies/ashby/ashby.html ) Later that year, coping with the culture shock of moving from an experimental college in the redwoods with a "touchie-feelie" reputation to a high-tech company in a New England village in a state (excuse me, "commonwealth") founded by puritans, I wrote in my journal: 8:08 PM, MONDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 1977 / AT MY DESK It's happened before... I have a particularly frightening dream, and I feel an aversion -- sometimes unconscious -- to writing it down. I postpone and delay. Nights pass, and I dream other, safer dreams, but I write none down. That one scary dream has blocked my dream journal. My dream journal sits blocked now; blocked by a nightmare weeks ago: the dream of the man who harnessed people, and his "hideous clockwork dog..." In a similar way, my waking journal became blocked perhaps seven months ago, when I lost a notebook. My pack was stolen from the Boardwalk, on a planter where I absent-mindedly left it when Dixie and I rode out on the wharf to look at the lights... In that pack were: a bottle of taco sauce, some fruit, a textbook entitled "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics", and a journal. In the journal, unfinished, was a narrative of an afternoon when Gregory Bateson had asked me to have a drink with him. I made much of that loss. I was inspired to [stay up all] that night, and to attempt to reprogram the Burroughs 5700 computer ... to display a rotating cube; I was replacing a program it had erased a week earlier, during a system crash, after which I'd decided to drop the course. But now, having lost the notebook (and, oddly, the textbook for the course) I was inspired to continue the course but drop the project of writing the narrative of an afternoon spend with Bateson in the Jury Room on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz. It may be possible that if I hadn't lost that notebook I wouldn't be here now; here in Northboro, Mass, at a just-cleaned desk, now having moved to the east after our wedding -- Dixie and I -- to write technical manuals for Data General Corporation. Yes, perhaps losing that journal led me to be a technical writer here so far from Santa Cruz, but now -- feeling so lost and such a sense of loss -- paid to write not from my center but from my left hemisphere -- I need a journal once again, to ground myself in my joys and sorrows, my needs and, yes, my dreams. In late autumn we went to see a movie in Boston, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (1977). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6300216853/hip-20 ) We mostly went to see the star, Diane Keaton, who we'd loved in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (1977). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6304907729/hip-20 ) But partway through the movie I began to remember that the true story it was based on ended with the murder of Keaton's character. I didn't want to watch her murder. I left the theater, telling my wife I'd meet her later, and walked out into a brick courtyard feeling very sad. I was sad about the murder I wasn't witnessing, and I was sad about feeling lonely and like a "fish out of water" in Massachusetts. Then the first season's snow began to fall. I watched the flakes drifting out of the sky. Somehow it made me feel better. I was reminded of Bateson's discussions of "grace," that quality which the animals share with the angels but man lacks. He often described the scene in Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1796) in which the sole survivor on a cursed ship, wearing an albatross around his neck placed there by the crew as a punishment for shooting the beautiful creature, is dying of thirst and gazing overboard at luminescent water snakes: Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. Also, at that moment it began to rain, and the fresh water saved his life. Bateson said that when the sailor "blessed them unaware," acknowledging their beauty without thought for his own well-being, he entered a state of grace, and in that state he was saved. I had turned away from Bateson in my search for a career, and now engulfed by the career I turned back to his teachings to find things that were missing from my life. A few days later I got ahold of the book the movie was based on, Judith Rossner's novel "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (1976). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517248468/hip-20 ) I read it through in one sitting over a long evening. The next morning I went into my office at work and sat at a typewriter for several hours writing a nine-page essay on what Bateson had taught me about grace. I ended up quoting from a lecture of his I'd attended eleven months earlier, on October 14, 1977, and then later had the opportunity to listen to again on audio tape and take notes. We came in late, and didn't know he was answering questions about a term-paper assignment he'd given. He was talking about why people buy bicycles, and how statisticians throw that information away. "The statistician says, 'It doesn't matter,' and it doesn't to them..." He takes another question from the floor. "CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE COMPARABLE CYBERNETIC THOUGHT PROCESS?" He starts almost inaudibly, introspectively. "...various pathways you could follow. If you have statisticians and economists as part of your circuit, and you have -- you can see how that one's going to run. The holistic approach is break 'em down, and don't ever forget you broke 'em down. Always have one sort of third eye on the larger unit." He looks for another question to answer. He waves aside a questioner, "You've had your turn today." I am beginning to take notes. A question: "WOULD YOU SAY THAT WHATEVER LOGICAL SKILLS OR KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE IS GOING TO CORRUPT THE NEXT FIELD?" Bateson looks pleased, as if he he has heard a familiar idea expressed succinctly in fresh words. "Yes," he replies, "I've said that from time to time. All knowledge at time one will be the nucleus, the crystalizing point for pathology at time two. This is more true of ignorance than knowledge." He begins to quote: Thought changed the universe into a serpent and that which pitieth into a consuming flame He looks as if it isn't quite right. He asks for a "yellow book" and somebody hands him the book almost every student has, the "ketchup and mustard" edition of "Steps to an Ecology of Mind." ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226039056/hip-20 ) While he takes the book and flips through looking for the poem he continues talking. "If you forget that it is THOUGHT, if you let in the sort of notions I've been teasing at, like the notion that YOU CAN SEE ME... you know you see your image of me, which is a thought... if you think YOU SEE ME then this can be the nucleus for the next tragedy." Tragedy? Or pathology? "I think simply monstrous things have been happening for the last 150 years, which seems to prove the truth of the... idea..." He finds the quote from William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" (in the metalogue "What Is an Instinct?") and reads: Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth: To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid In forests of night; then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rush'd And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh. Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel; Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd. Wow. Thought did all that? Bateson looks up at his rapt audience. Pause. "That's your question, isn't it? Absolutely monstrous things have happened in the last 150 years, in which everything except narrow, lineal thinking has been devalued, because..." He ponders now. "It may be true that all thought has this characteristic. It is certainly true of all lousy thought." He looks around and sets his lip in a pout. "In this I'm sort of being a little old fashioned. There are enough people in this room who are -- you know -- enough anti-intellectual to think that all thought is pathogenic. I don't know what that opinion is if it's not a thought." Laughter. I have been thinking now of how he used 'pathology' and 'tragedy' interchangeably. Something about the word tragedy seems connected to, say, Hubris, Why Rome Fell and Why lake Eerie is Going Crazy. I want to make a long comment on this, look good before him and the class. I want him to know I'm here. My hand shoots up. He sees me, nods, says, "Alan." I have my chance now. Quite by surprise, I slowly ask a short question instead, a question I didn't know I'd formed: "DO YOU THINK THE GREEK PLAYWRIGHTS AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE KNEW SOMETHING WE DON'T WHEN THEY TALKED ABOUT 'TRAGEDY'?" A long, long pause. "There is a notion which is becoming unfashionable, which is still around in the Eastern Oriental religions, and that notion is called 'compassion.' It's not the same as pity." Pause. "Compassion is something a little different. To begin with, the word 'passion' has lost its passivity with the increase of individualism, greed for sensation, and things of this sort. The notion of passion, when we speak of Christ's passion on the Mount of Olives and so forth, is the notion that -- for lack of a better word -- the 'ego' is passive to emotion. That emotion sweeps in, it comes and goes, it has tides. And you, Gregory Bateson, you, John Smith, don't make it. This goes for joy and for sorrow, for suffering and for pain, and everything else. Now compassion is the notion, you see, of shared empathy, if you like... in the receptivity, shall we say..." Groping now. "...in the feelings of joy, sorrow, et cetera, of others. Now that sharing becomes... even when that which is shared is painful, the ACT OF SHARING is enormously enriching. It is at that point that tragedy becomes a natural domain for art, for playwrights, for whatnot. Do I begin to answer your question, Alan?" You could hear a pin drop. Gregory was speaking from his heart. He laughs. "That wasn't on the paper." Oh yeah, the term paper. He continues introspectively. "Now it's very strange how... I don't know, I don't go for all that ESP stuff, but I was as a matter of fact thinking of this very point, I think, lying in bed thinking about today's talk. Some time yesterday." Was I reading his mind when I asked the question? It seemed like it. He begins another story. "There are, in the south of France and the Pyrenees, in the caves, a lot of strange works of art. These are very much alive, of -- they're mainly of animals: reindeer, rhinoceroses, bison, mountain lions maybe, various things. They are incredibly realistic drawings, sometimes in colors, done in clays, ochres. They're in the extreme backs of the caves. To get there is a major ... for most of 'em. And what the hell were the late Paleolithic men who made these things, what were they at? The conventional answer to that is that these things were some sort of magical device whereby men felt they would be better hunters of the animals. AS the rain ceremonies are to make rain, so these pictures of beasts were to make dead beasts. This is extremely hard for me to believe. There are more degenerate ones that come later, which would seem to be so perhaps. But those very alive drawings don't fit for me with the idea that their purpose is to kill the animals. Of course, you've got to kill the animals. Got to eat 'em." He changes gears, or seems to. "The only man I know at the present time who is seemingly a totemite, that is a person who identifies with animals in this sort of way, is Konrad Lorenz, whose 'King Solomon's Ring' I recommend to you. It's not on the list is it?" A voice says, "yes it is." "We have it on the list sometimes," Bateson says absentmindedly. "Beautiful book anyway." The voice adds "It's on the big list." [Note: the "big list" appears at the end of this e-Zine; see item 43.] "Konrad will go up to the blackboard, and he's talking about..." Bateson picks up a piece of chalk, and pantomimes drawing on the board. "He's an ethologist, a student of animal behavior, and he draws on the blackboard as fast as THAT," scribble, scribble, "a wolf, we will say, or a dog, and that wolf he will point out is hesitating whether to attack or run away. He takes the wipe," wipe, wipe, "wipes its tail off, raises it 50 degrees, alters the stance of the shoulders a bit," Bateson hunches his own shoulders forward, "and that's the dog that's going to attack." Wipe, scribble. "And that's the dog that's going to run away." Bateson shifts his weight -- considerable -- back as he stands. "All the time he's talking about the dog, he IS the dog." Now we begin to notice, Bateson does himself begin to resemble a wolf/dog. "And when he switches to talk about geese, he becomes a goose in his body movements." Now Gregory is doing a hilarious imitation of Konrad Lorenz imitating a goose. "In his final lecture in Hawaii he wanted to talk about the Einsteinian Universe..." he sways slightly, "...and how it was a little..." now he definitely has his body in a peculiar, elongated S shape, "bent." Laughter and applause. "Alright. This is totemism, you see. Zoologists are very angry about this. They say it's quite unscientific. But it does of course give Konrad a lot of insight that he otherwise would not have, and this is an unfair advantage over his colleagues. (They gave him a Nobel the other day, and all the zoologists said that the man's an ass. Science is wonderful.)" He begins to draw it together. "To get back to the cave paintings, and the nature of tragedy. And to the nature of compassion, which is in there too. My inclination is to suspect that those paintings were really atonement for killing them. 'Atonement' is a curious word. It looks like a Latin-derived word, but it isn't. It is AT hyphen ONE hyphen MENT. It's at-one-ment. And totemism is of course at-one-ment between man and beast. Compassion you see is a a sort of at-one-ment ... in shared feeling." A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice. "These things are all quite unfashionable. They don't go into lineal thinking at all. And yet, Christianity AND Buddhism have worked very much on these problems. This exchange was awesome to me, like the ultimate metalogue, in which he demonstrated to me at-one-ment as he explained it, sort of like a "Vulcan mind meld" across the lecture hall. There was nothing like it in my experience of Massachusetts (except in my marriage, which you could say I brought with me), and it was what I found missing. From the hindsight of 30 years later I can see that this is why many people choose to have children, for this intense experience of at-one-ment. * * * * * * * * "In 1975 we don't know all the things we might know in 1990." -- "Caring and Clarity: Conversation With Gregory Bateson and Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Governor of California" CQ Fall 1975 Winter quarter 1978 was my last at UCSC. I came back from Massachusetts -- missing the worst blizzard in a decade -- to finish my Information Science degree. Bateson wasn't around much. His health was failing, and he seldom showed up to teach his classes. I caught in his office one day. I showed him the essay I'd written on my finding grace in the snowflakes, and then remembering his lecture on atonement. He seemed perplexed by it. He called me "Scribbler." (He did that a lot.) I was rather disrespectful back. I asked him if he would mumble something about the movie "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" which he'd told me he'd seen. He ignored me, waiting for me to treat him respectfully, like a teacher. Finally I asked him politely to tell me what he thought of the movie. "She's a very clever girl," he said of Diane Keaton. "It was a surprise to me," he said, "that some people have sex for the some reason that other people ride roller coasters." I think that may well have been the last time I ever saw him. * * * * * * * * All of Bateson's previous writing -- Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Naven, Communications: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, Balinese Character -- has been addressed to various audiences of specialists. Though this book has compelling news for his loyal audiences, it is addressed to a general readership. It is new thought in an old virtue -- the use of fine original writing to express ideas whose excellence is embedded in the clarity of their expression. -- Stewart Brand reviewing "Mind and Nature -- A Necessary Unity" (1979) by Gregory Bateson in the "Co-Evolution Quarterly" #21: Spring 1979 ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572734345/hip-20 ) ( www.oikos.org/mind&nature.htm ) We spent another year in Massachusetts before calling it quits and moving back to California, this time to my home town of San Diego to be near relatives and friends, in August of 1979. Shortly afterwards Bateson published "Mind and Nature -- A Necessary Unity." Finally, a book by Bateson I could give to my mom. I wrote in "A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory" ( www.well.com/~abs/curriculum.html#Bateson ) that: If Spinoza was right when he said in De Emendatione that "the greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature," then this is a great book indeed. Thinking he had a year to live (incorrectly as it turned out) Bateson condensed all the non-trivial things he knew into a book for laypersons. The bottom line: minds in organisms and ecologies are similarly organized, using digital internal reshuffling followed by analog natural selection involving an interface to an environment to achieve "mental" effects. I called him after I read the book to tell him how much I liked it. I had to leave a message and he called back later. He told me how redwood trees need more water for regrowth than the old growth took, lowering the water table after logging. It was our last conversation. * * * * * * * * "Immortality has this problem: if you live forever, then you get an infinite number of bugs." -- Marvin Minsky, quoted in "The Media Lab; Inventing the Future at MIT" (1987) by Stewart Brand ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140097015/hip-20 ) Like presidents Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, Bateson died on the 4th of July. In his case it was the 4th of July 1980. He was 76. An account of his dying was written by his daughter Mary Catherine. (See "Co-Evolution Quarterly" #28 listed below.) * * * * * * * * "It is not I who seek the young fool; The young fool seeks me. At the first oracle I inform him. If he asks two or three times, it is importunity. If he importunes, I give him no information." -- Hexagram 4 "Youthful Folly" Richard Wilhelm's and Cary F. Baynes translation "I Ching: Or, Book of Changes" (1950) ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069109750X/hip-20 ) Fresh out of the est training, with 16 cents and an American Express Card in my pocket, I set out hitchhiking, then flying, to the San Francisco area for Bateson's wake. Along the way I hooked up with my friend Bruce from Kresge, who gave me a ride to the Buddhist retreat where the wake was held. (After signing their guest book I was on their mailing list for many years.) After showing up there I was pleased to see Werner Erhrdt, Judith Van Slooten and Stewart Brand. "What have you been up to?" Brand asked me, having not seen me since he guest-lectured at my Understanding Whole System class. I told him about my tech writing job at Data General. "Now I create whole systems," I bragged. He admonished me, "You can never create a whole system, you can only participate in them." Then he asked Bruce and me why we'd come to the wake. "To see who's here," I said. "To pay my respects," Bruce said. I was beginning to feel like a shallow fool. I chalk it up to the arrogance of youth. I was in denial about how important Bateson was to me, and how much I would miss him. Now, 25 years later, I understand that I never quite realized how special I was to him. I was the only student that I know of that he ever sponsored for a student-directed seminar. Goodness knows how many asked him. I'm sure his very disappointed when I decided not to pursue the Whole Systems major. I wish now I'd been a better student to him. He was my Wizard of Oz, only he wasn't as fake. In fact, he was more like the anti-Oz, a fake fake. It was very fitting in a mythological way that I went to him looking for a diploma and he gave me a brain instead. * * * * * * * * In 1996 I made an extensive set of notes for a book called "Going Native -- Gregory Bateson at Kresge College" about the last seven years of Bateson's life. I may still write it someday. It would be fun to interview everyone I could find who was there. But I found in comparing those notes with this 3-part 'zine that I covered almost all the points I listed then. (An interesting coincidence: last month I said I couldn't remember the faculty member who left Kresge College in the planning year. One of the few people who knows, Michael Kahn, bumped into my friend John who reads this e-Zine, and John was able to ask him. He was Leo Laporte.) ( library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/laporte.html ) * * * * * * * * "The best thing, though, in that [natural history] museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times and the [stuffed birds & eskimos & everything would still be doing the same things]. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be YOU... You'd have an overcoat on this time... Or you'd just passed one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in the them. I mean you'd be DIFFERENT in some way -- I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it." -- J. D. Salinger, 1945 "The Catcher in the Rye" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316769487/hip-20 ) I have to ask myself, what legacy did Gregory Bateson leave me? It was hard for me to make sense of Bateson at first because he actually meant what he said. I grew up with a generation of Dadaists. We had pop groups with names like Strawberry Alarm Clock, which is Dada gibberish. So when I ran into a title like "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" I just assumed it was more Dada. Tom Robbins once started a novel with the words "The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami." ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553349481/hip-20 ) That seemed pretty Dada too, but by the end of the book it made perfect sense. Bateson was the same way. He could say that EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, MIND/BODY PROBLEMS and EPISTEMOLOGY were all really the same thing, it might sound like new-age babble, but by the time he was done, if I followed his argument, I'd see that he was right. Here are a few of the things I learned from him: * COURAGE is a vital part of academic inquiry * the METALOGUE -- which Bateson named -- is a vital medium for meta-communication; recent examples include "Godel, Escher, Bach" which recursively explored recursion, and "Gravity's Rainbow" which explored dissolution as it dissolved * MULTIPLE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WORLD are necessary; Bateson used to tell of Hamlet's father's ghost, who made Hamlet swear "Hic et ubique" -- Latin for "Here and everywhere" -- by swearing twice in two different spots. * MINDS CAN GO CRAZY -- just as Kurt Godel proved that any system of thought complex enough to represent the integers was either inconsistent or incomplete, Bateson and others learned from experience that minds sufficiently developed to have consciousness can become psychotic; Bateson added the explanatory principle of the "double bind" exemplified by the King of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland" who says "Give your evidence and don't be nervous, or I'll have you executed on the spot!" ( web.ionsys.com/~remedy/Bateson,%20Gregory.htm ) * THERE TWO REALMS OF CAUSE AND EFFECT: THE PHYSICAL AND THE BIOLOGICAL, which Bateson liked to call the PLEROMA and the CREATURA (after Jung), which he likened to the world of the physical: billiard balls and their collisions, versus the world of the mental: logic and illogic, cybernetics and consciousness and unconsciousness and ecology and evolution. I used to tell him that I thought that it's ALL creatura, based on the mind-like effects in quantum physics. This same debate pops up in Neal Stephenson's third volume of the Baroque Cycle, "The System of the World" (2004). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060523875/hip-20 ) A philosophical debate between Newton and Leibniz is mediated by the fictional Daniel Waterhouse, all of them Natural Philosophers. They are guests of Princess Caroline. Newton says: "In Nature I perceive two categories of actions: mechanical and vegetable. By mechanical I mean, of course, just the sort of thing that Drs. Waterhouse and Leibniz discoursed of earlier: in a word, clock-work. By vegetable I do not mean turnips. That is a new and vulgar meaning of the world. I use it in its ancient sense of something animate, living, growing. It describes generative and creative processes. Clocks, even good ones, run down and wear out. The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed -- the Subtile Spirit. An unimaginably tiny quantity of this, acting upon a vastly larger bulk of insipid, dead, inactive matter, wreaks immense, even miraculous transformations, to which I give the general name vegetation. Just as the general principle of Gravity manifests itself in diverse specific ways, such as tides, the orbits of comets, and the trajectories of bullets, so the vegetative principle may be perceived, by those who know how to look for it, in diverse places. Just to mention one example, which we discoursed of earlier: a flying-machine, constructed of artificial muscles, would be a mechanical device, whose fate, I believe, would be to crash to the ground, like the corpse of a bird that has died on the wing. If that machine were to take flight -- which would mean sensing every fluctuation of the air, and responding in the correct way -- I should ascribe that, ultimately, to the workings of some sort of vegetative principle. But Daniel is correct in thinking that it is also related to such matters as souls, miracles, and certain of the more profound and astonishing chymical transformations." "But do you think that there is ultimately some physical substance at work -- something you could touch and observe?" "Yes, I do, and have been searching for it..." "Baron von Leibniz," said [the princess], "can your view be reconciled with Sir Isaac's?" Liebnitz sighed. "It is... awkward," he said. "To my ears, all of this sounds like a rear-guard action fought by a good Christian retreating before the onslaught of Mechanical Philosophy." "That could not be more wrong!" snapped Newton. "There is a Mechanical, and there is a Vegetable. I study both." "But you have already ceded half the battlefield to Mechanical!" "There is no ceding, sir. Have you not read my Principia? The Mechanical world exists, the Mechanical Philosophy describes it." "Dr. Waterhouse would say that Mechanism describes not just half, but all of it," Liebniz said. "I take the opposite view, which is that Vegetable is all, and what we think of as mechanical is only the superficies of underlying processes that are not mechanical at all." "We await a coherent explanation," said Isaac. "Philosophers of a Mechanick frame of mind break all things down into atoms, to which they ascribe properties that, to them, seem reasonable -- which means Mechanical properties. Mass, extension, and the ability to collide with and stick to one another. Then from this they try to explain Gravity and Souls and Miracles. It leads them into difficulties. Instead, I break all things down into monads, to which I ascribe what some would call soul-like properties: they can perceive, think about their perceptions, decide, and act. From this it is no great difficulty to explain those things that are so troublesome, in a mechanical-minded Atomic philosophy -- everything that you put under the rubric of Vegetation, including our own ability to think, decide, and act. However, it is difficult to explain the things that are in an Atomic philosophy, idiotically simple and obvious. Such as space and time." * lastly, he taught me we are either TOO CLEVER, or NOT CLEVER ENOUGH -- if the latter is true we'll probably make it, but if the former is true we are SURELY DOOMED * * * * * * * * "The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you. May they survive -- if true." -- "Form, Substance and Difference" by Gregory Bateson ( www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html ) While writing this e-Zine I had a dream, that Bateson came back reincarnated as other beings -- like an owl or an eagle -- and then as inanimate objects -- like in the awful American TV sit-com "My Mother the Car" -- and I found myself thinking that he would've hated this, because he believed "mind" was immanent, not transcendent. * * * * * * * * "He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer." -- William Blake (posted on Bateson's office door at Kresge, 1975)Bateson and Me
(Part Three of Three)
Bateson bibliographies
his writing: ( www.interculturalstudies.org/IIS/Bateson/bibliography.html ) writing about him: ( www.crazytigerinstitute.com/batesonarch.htm ) an obituary: ( www.interculturalstudies.org/IIS/Bateson/biography.html ) "The Mindful Wizard" ( www.dragonflymedia.com/cg/cg3111/gregorybateson3111.html ) biography and bibliography by Alexandru Anton-Luca: ( www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/bateson.htm ) Anton-Luca said: I have not been able to find out much about real-life impressions of Gregory Bateson. Hopefully this e-Zine has redressed this omission. * * * * * * * * "What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?" -- "Seven Gothic Tales" (posted on the door of Dan Padgett, one of my first roommates at Kresge, 1971)Bateson's recommended reading
This is the list 74 books that Bateson handed out in his "Ecology of Mind" class at Kresge, which was later reprinted by Stewart Brand. * = I have read (14) + = I have read part (5) 1) Ashby, W. Ross "Introduction to Cybernetics" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0416683002/hip-20 ) 2) Ashby, W. Ross "Design for a Brain" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0412200902/hip-20 ) 3) Attneave, Fred "Applications of Information Theory to Psychology" ( s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y01Y2412234Y2762087/102-7433529-4084950 ) 4) Bateson, Mary Catherine "Our Own Metaphor" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572736011/hip-20 ) 5) Bateson, Gregory "Naven" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804705208/hip-20 ) 6) Bateson, Gregory and Mead, Margaret "Balinese Character" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0890727805/hip-20 ) 7) Bateson, Gregory "Perceval's Narrative" (ed.) ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804700524/hip-20 ) 8) Bateson, Gregory "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226039056/hip-20 ) 9) Belo, Jane "Traditional Balinese Culture" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231030843/hip-20 ) 10) Belo, Jane "Trance in Bali" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0837196523/hip-20 ) 11) Benedict, Ruth "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395500753/hip-20 ) 12) Benedict, Ruth "An Anthropologist at Work" (ed. Margaret Mead) ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005VETF/hip-20 ) 13) Blake, William "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" + ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486290867/hip-20 ) 14) Butler, Samuel "Notebooks of Samuel Butler" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1414263716/hip-20 ) 15) Butler, Samuel "Erewhon" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140430571/hip-20 ) 16) Butler, Samuel "Life and Habit" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1419130161/hip-20 ) 17) Carroll, Lewis "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass " * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393048470/hip-20 ) 18) Castaneda, Carlos "Journey to Ixtland" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671732463/hip-20 ) 19) Collingwood, R. G. "An Autobiography" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192812475/hip-20 ) 20) Collingwood, R. G. "Principles of Art" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195002091/hip-20 ) 21) Collingwood, R. G. "The Idea of Nature" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00071RPGY/hip-20 ) 22) Collingwood, R. G. "The Idea of History" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192853066/hip-20 ) 23) Courant "Introduction to Mathematics" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/354065058X/hip-20 ) 24) Craik "The Nature of Explanation" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521047552/hip-20 ) 25) Darling, Fraser "A Herd of Red Deer" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006AO4OC/hip-20 ) 26) Dinesen, Isak "Seven Gothic Tales" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679736417/hip-20 ) 27) Dinesen, Isak "Last Tales" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679736409/hip-20 ) 28) Dinesen, Isak "Out of Africa" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679600213/hip-20 ) 29) Eliot, Thomas Stearns "Four Quartets" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156332256/hip-20 ) 30) Erickson, Milton H. "Advanced Techniques for Hypnosis and Therapy" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0808901699/hip-20 ) 31) Erikson, Eric H. "Childhood and Society" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039331068X/hip-20 ) 32) Frye, Northrop "Fearful Symmetry" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691012911/hip-20 ) 33) Gosse, Edmund "Father and Son" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192840665/hip-20 ) 34) Green, Hannah "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451160312/hip-20 ) 35) Greenberg, Joanne "In This Sign" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805007229/hip-20 ) 36) Greenberg, Joanne "The King's Persons" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0030056233/hip-20 ) 37) Harrison, Jane "Themis" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0850362296/hip-20 ) 38) Herrigel, Eugen "Zen in the Art of Archery" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722971/hip-20 ) 39) Hilbert, D. and Cohn-Vossen, S. "Geometry and the Imagination" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0821819984/hip-20 ) 40) Kesey, Ken "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451163966/hip-20 ) 41) Keys, James "Only Two Can Play This Game" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517527782/hip-20 ) 42 Lamarck "Philosophie Zoologique" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2080707078/hip-20 ) 43) Lorenz, Konrad "King Solomon's Ring" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452011752/hip-20 ) 44) Lorenz, Konrad "On Aggression" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156687410/hip-20 ) 45) Lovejoy, Arthur O. "The Great Chain of Being" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674361504/hip-20 ) 46) Macy Foundation "Conference on Cybernetics" (5 volumes, Sixth to Tenth Conferences) ( www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm ) ( dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=229505280 ) 47) Macy Foundation "Conference on Group Processes" (ed. Schaffner) ( s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y01Y3889119Y6363524/ref=a_ob_xs_usr/ref=a_ob_xs_b/102-7433529-4084950 ) 48) Madariaga "Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards" (1921. Published by the League of Nations.) ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0809042630/hip-20 ) 49) McCulloch, Warren "Embodiments of Mind" + ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262631148/hip-20 ) 50) McKay, Donald M. "Information, Mechanism and Meaning" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262130556/hip-20 ) 51) Mead and Metraux "Study of Culture at a Distance" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1571812164/hip-20 ) 52) Merrell-Wolff, Franklin "Pathways Through to Space" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006C9MFQ/hip-20 ) 53) Merrell-Wolff, Franklin "Consciousness Without an Object" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006C9WQ0/hip-20 ) 54) Miller, Galanter and Pribram "Plans and the Structure of Behavior" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0937431001/hip-20 ) 55) Newman, J. R. "The World of Mathematics" (articles on Group Theory, Godel's Proof, and others) ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671829408/hip-20 ) 56) Pribram, Karl "Languages of the Brain" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0913412228/hip-20 ) 57) Ruesch, Jurgen and Bateson, Gregory "Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039302377X/hip-20 ) 58) Schroedinger "What Is Life?" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521427088/hip-20 ) 59) Shannon and Weaver "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252725484/hip-20 ) 60) Slater, Philip "Earthwalk" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385032862/hip-20 ) 61) Spencer-Brown, G. "Laws of Form" * ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963989901/hip-20 ) 62) Von Neumann and Morgenstern "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" + ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691003629/hip-20 ) 63) West, Rebecca "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140188479/hip-20 ) 64) West, Rebecca "The Birds Fall Down" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670167924/hip-20 ) 65) Weyl, Hermann "Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0689702078/hip-20 ) 66) Whitehead and Russell "Principia Mathematica" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052106791X/hip-20 ) 67) Whorf, Benjamin "Four Articles on Metalinguistics" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006ATNSE/hip-20 ) 68) Wiener, Norbert "Cybernetics" + ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026273009X/hip-20 ) 69) Wittghenstein, Ludwig "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415254086/hip-20 ) 70) Wittghenstein, Ludwig "Philosophical Investigations" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0024288101/hip-20 ) 71) Anonymous, 14th Century "The Cloud of Unknowing" + ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0809123320/hip-20 ) 72) Barnes, Djuna "Nightwood" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811200051/hip-20 ) 73) Gregory, R. L. "Eye and Brain" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691048371/hip-20 ) 74) Townsend Warner, Sylvia "Lolly Willowes" ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0940322161/hip-20 ) * * * * * * * *Articles By and About Gregory Bateson in the Co-Evolution Quarterly
Co-Evolution Quarterly #4: Winter Solstice 1974 * "The Creature and Its Creations" * Notes for a Conference on "Broken Power" * Reading Suggested By Gregory Bateson Co-Evolution Quarterly #7: Fall 1975 * Caring and Clarity: Conversation With Gregory Bateson and Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Governor of California" Co-Evolution Quarterly #9: Spring 1976 * Prayer Breakfast Co-Evolution Quarterly #11: Fall 1976 * Mind/Body Dualism Conference + "Inside & Outside" Richard Baker-Roshi + "Position Paper for the Mind/Body Dualism Conference" Ramon Margalef + "Not One, Not Two" Francisco J. Valera * "The Case For Mind/Body Dualism" Charles Tart Co-Evolution Quarterly #12: Winter 1976/77 * "The Case Against the Case For Mind/Body Dualism" Charles Tart Co-Evolution Quarterly #17: Spring 1978 * "Number is Different from Quantity" ( www.oikos.org/batesnumber.htm ) Co-Evolution Quarterly #18: Summer 1978 * cover * "The Pattern Which Connects" [excerpt from "Mind and Nature"] Co-Evolution Quarterly #21: Spring 1979 * "Mind and Nature -- A Necessary Unity" [review] ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572734345/hip-20 ) ( www.oikos.org/mind&nature.htm ) Co-Evolution Quarterly #28: Winter 1980 * "Six Days of Dying" Mary Catherine Bateson [an account of his death] ( www.oikos.org/batdeath.htm ) Co-Evolution Quarterly #30: Summer 1981 * Gregory Bateson live [how to order audio tapes of him] Co-Evolution Quarterly #35: Fall 1982 * "Gregory Bateson: Old Men Should Be Explorers" by Stephen Nachmanovitch Co-Evolution Quarterly #36: Winter 1982 * "They Threw God Out of the Garden: Letters from Gregory Bateson to Philip Wylie and Warren McCulloch" ( www.oikos.org/batesleten.htm ) ======================================================================== newsletter archives: www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047 ======================================================================== Privacy Promise: Your email address will never be sold or given to others. You will receive only the e-Zine C3M unless you opt-in to receive occasional commercial offers directly from me, Alan Scrivener, by sending email to abs@well.com with the subject line "opt in" -- you can always opt out again with the subject line "opt out" -- by default you are opted out. To cancel the e-Zine entirely send the subject line "unsubscribe" to me. I receive a commission on everything you purchase during your session with Amazon.com after following one of my links, which helps to support my research. ======================================================================== Copyright 2005 by Alan B. Scrivener