With a Daughter's Eye

...Margaret, whose psyche was more of the order of time than space, taught her how to make things happen...

...Left to find her way in the extended family of social scientist Larry Frank, she compensated by being very, very good, and more than a little precocious, keeping her private torments to herself, so that the parents would delight in the time spent with her...

...She knew how things work and taught Mary Catherine accordingly...

...The parents died in characteristic 5 April 1985: 221 manner...

...Consider Margaret...

...Early in this profound and astonishing work Mary Catherine remarks, "In my family, we never simply live, we are always reflecting on our lives, and yet, against this background, as I write about my experience, I repossess it...

...Huge jungle-jim body made for a child to climb about in, lost in an abstract languor in which years would go by with nothing much apparently happening, cynical about civilization, passionate about a single point of high patterning, ending his days as guru to the intellectual counter-culture...

...He would ask questions like, "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me...

...It is quite possible that both of Mary Catherine's parents were of this company, a situation virtually unique in the history of childhood...

...In some curious sense you have made us also the children of Margaret and Gregory...

...The author is pastoral about people...

...Whenever major or minor issues were ripe for renovation there was Margaret, calling the conferences, networking the thinkers, innovating, challenging, scolding, juicing the process...

...would be her plaintive call to catch her father's involuted attention...

...Jean Houston WHEN Mary Catherine was three years old she asked her parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson for the world and they gave her a globe...

...And me to you...

...Years later Mary Catherine was to use these skills remarkably well as dean of a graduate school in revolution-torn Iran...

...I am the only person in this room wearing blue" she observed graciously, displaying her training from the cradle in accepting difference and valuing individuality...

...Rarely wilJ you find such precision of thought matched with such poetry of language, or, for that matter, such precision of language joined to such poetry of thought...

...As she watched the intellectual fireworks that always sparked between Gregory and Margaret she found that "the play of intellect was a carrier of emotion, the conversation a form of lovemaking...

...I would say, you have rendered us diaphanous to your experience, Mary Catherine, and we can never again look back on our own lives without appreciably more reflection and repossession...

...Gregory's intellectual narcissism would allow for no other considerations than his own...

...Whereas Margaret may have prepared the ground for the coming planetary culture, Gregory prepared the theory and the mind-set...

...And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the backyard schizophrenic in another...

...Quite early she learned her family's predisposition to mix mind and eros...

...Consider Mary Catherine...

...The long hoped for event, born in 1939 to thirty-eight-year-old Margaret after many miscarriages, she early became the colleague of both her parents...

...Both parents clearly valued her highly, involving her in their very different styles of being and doing in the world...

...What with her parents' coinings and goings and their separation in 1946 she didn't get much attention from either of them, but what she got and what she observed was choice...

...A poignant vignette shows her behaving like a model little lady serving tea to her English father on his occasional visits and then holding on to his raincoat and screaming when he had to leave...

...Her mother had one of the broadest and most global minds of the twentieth century...

...Be it questions of global pollution, inter-generational learning, or the benefits of breast-feeding, she was one of the great experts of the follow-through, without which civilization would quickly lapse into entropy...

...And yet this classical work deals with two of the makers of the modern mind...

...Not only did she have ' 'the most studied childhood'' on record, she was regularly interviewed by her mother as the representative of childhood culture, and became her father's amanuensis, his Charlie McCarthy as it were, as he strove to explore the patterns of mind and nature through the tabula rasa of his young daughter's perception...

...As an intensive observer of culture and social process she studied the forms of any political or social order and used them, often effecting change and growth in even the most recalcitrant of institutions...

...This is reflected perhaps in the delicious father-daughter metalogues in Bateson's book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind...

...He would shake his head like a horse getting rid of flies when his daughter would try to tell him of her interests and concerns...

...Another incident has her bursting into the living room, jump-rope in hand, to find her mother sitting in a very formal planning meeting with three very formally dressed black men...

...Mary Catherine speaks with candor of her regret over her mother's failing to trust her with this information...

...And Mary Catherine herself in this masterpiece of biography is revealed to be every bit as interesting as her parents...

...One would have to look to the old Greek and Latin authors for comparable usage...

...Margaret, truculent to the end, her sense of ethics offended that she would be removed from time when there was so much more work for her to do...

...Hegel once wrote about world-historical individuals, those richly endowed persons whose personal interests, sensibilities, and passions correspond to the needs and turnings of the time...

...Between her mother's high ethics, and her father's high aesthetics there were shadows, of course...

...Out in front or behind the scenes they become the impressarios of change, the orches-trators of culture and consciousness...

...Gregory, passing aesthetically in a Zen ashram, his best beloveds holding him, reading to him, breathing in rhythm with him...

...During her childhood it stood next to an aquarium she had set up with her father, witness to the metaphors that both shaped her and governed the lives of her parents...

...her father in his absorption with the pattern that connects the ecologies of all living systems had one of the deepest...

...Gregory, more spatial than temporal, absorbed in his studies of communication among octopuses, dolphins, and schizophrenics has left a legacy which among other things may have lifted the epistemological fog of the last 700 years...

...Small but sturdy, working round the clock, she became a Commonweal: 220 rare positive fixture in the global mindscape — the happy warrior who brooks no whiny nay say ing, the child-grandma who knows perfectly well that the emperor has no clothes, but then goes about finding him some, the priestess of pragmatic occasions...

...At once exquisite and elegaic, ironic, and carefully honest, she shows a capaciousness of mind married to a depth of sensibility and an ability to reflect at both depth and distance, to render meanings and metaphors as profound as they are perfectly put...

...Margaret, on the other hand, presented her daughter with a mythic view of herself — mother to the world, devoted senior wife to Gregory, with no hint of the bisexuality and relationship to Ruth Benedict mat formed such an important dimension of her life...

...Consider Gregory...

...Chances are, he could not have done it half as well without Mary Catherine to whom he had taught natural history and logic, and whose questions stirred his speculations into greater concreteness, and who in his last years helped him to organize and write his master work, Mind and Nature...

...To begin with, there is something of an eighteenth-century quality about this book...

...Chere colleague" she would address her mother after she too had joined the family business as anthropologist and linguist, and "Daddy, teach me something...