Letter to a Younger Colleague

Dear Colleague (merely adunctive, but colleague
never-the-less, and across the curriculum from me )

Your interest and proposal to form a faculty/student
reading group on Gregory Bateson in the spring sounds
exciting to me--a somewhat revival of the Basement
Writers Group of the late 80's where 7-8 of us met in
downstairs Spidel, palmed off 1-pg conversational
papers to each other and then BS'sed for an hour or so.
Bully Stochasticizing, Blue Sky-ing, Brain Storming.

Fred Solomon (mathematician) & I would practice
the converse-action summer mornings sitting on the
Spidel wall, while workers walked by with weed
eaters or sped round the bend in Golf Carts full of
tools and paraphernalia.

"Don't worry about us," Fred would call out to their
suspicious stare--us, motionless in full view for several
hours in the sunshine. "We're just bullshitting here."
Theorizing.

Bateson's been a hero-guru-model-thinker for me since
the 70's when a friendly Biologist from Harvard gave
me something out of Steps To An Ecology of Mind.

You may know: Gregory was married to
Margaret Mead briefly.

Their daughter, Mary Catherine, is a prominent
writer and anthropologist. Her Our Own Metaphor
is an exquisite description of a big-brain cross-
disciplinary conference (Burg Wartenstein) of the
"The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaption."

(Where they collectively--under Bateson's
insistence maybe-- realized that "consciousness"
is as much liability as asset-- maybe more so if not
realized)

The beauty of that book: all the participants
(again, Bateson's leadership) were aware that
HOW they talked about the subject was as much
a part of their study as the explicit content.

Can you imagine? Imagine Caucus or Forum
sharing that sense--that HOW we are talking
about whatever we are talking about is as
significant as whatever-it-is we are
talking about.

It would be a difference that would make
a DIFFERENCE, true?

Bateson calls this media/message awareness.
"metalogue" (really: a literal version of
"dia-lectic": cross-talk) and the opening of
Steps is a series of these kinds of (staged)
conversation about conversation with his
daughter MC at an early age.

This is a beautiful book (Our Own Metaphor),
and I'd be happy to lend my copy if you are
interested and can't find one.

Steps...
Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity:
Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred.

That's his canon.
Steps is a series of wide-ranging articles in disciplines
across the curriculum. The other two are thesis-driven
biology/anthro/systems/information-theory descriptions
of the mind & nature relationship (learning and evolution).

Brilliant, in my opinion. Don't know any thinker who makes
me feel smart and stupid simultaneously--with no injustice
done to either. Unpostponed joy. .

Bateson's father, William (a British biologist) coined
the term "genetics." Bateson's known for coining the
term (and using/abusing it in his study of schizophrenic
communication) "double-bind." You know: "damned if
you do/damned if you don't." We all know.

Thanks for your interest in Gregory.
Yrs in theory & theorizing. .

Best, Sam