Fascinated by the preoccupations with pattern, I here prick out an interesting design in the quilting. Mary Catherine Bateson almost in the centre of the memoir stitches her own discourse through considerations of etiquette through thoughts on language to the cultural dimensions of food & nutrition. Everything is worth noticing. Look how the word "meat" picks up its old resonnance beyond the flesh of animals as that which is fit to eat. Observe the rustle of the rural in the urban setting. Notice the exquiste balancing of the event of prayer with the condition of grace.

Nor was religion only a system of fundamental doctrines or metaphysical orientation; it was finery with which to clothe the expression of feelings, a prayer before meat, a way for city people to move through the seasons of the year with grace.

The evocative charm is still there even when making a forceful point.

It is preceisely because the biological characteristics of human beings make learning possible that we are able, cumulatively to develop rich and complex cultures and, finally, to make choices for the future.

In my transcription of this passage, I originally had to cross out the phrase "to communicate" which of course was my mental and physical completion of the "we are able" trigger. The word is not there. But the constellation of learning, culture and the future orients attention to communication: the charm of evoking, the magic of processing pattern.

There is an invitation here to participate. The call to engage in learning is also a reminder to move in and out of transcription. Mary Catherine Bateson points to a publication in which Margaret Mead

also talks about the means of transmission of new ideas in visual symbols or even with toys that can be held and handled, as well as with words, protected from caricature and oversimplification on the one hand and from sectarianism on the other

It is a trail offered as a gift to those who could not and will not be able to attend to the live presence of the record keeper and scrap collector and skilled quilter. The gesture to imitate is not an exact replication of the anthropologist at work in the field. Few readers will find themselves in a situation where

The best informants would be people who, illiterate perhaps, were in some sense intellectuals and would enjoy the process of reflection on and articulating their culture with the rhythm of her pencil to encourage them.

By this point in the wonderful quiet offered by this pieced counterpoint pattern, one can imagine Gregory Bateson pulling the great abstract pattern from the details accumulated here. He might write of the word as bridge and as obstacle. Each transmission realigns the arrangements of objects and people. Each transmission affects the possibilities of evolution.

Mary Catherine Bateson writes of both of her subjects, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, that "Each, in his or her chosen fashion, was available to others, creating a community of expectation." The creation of such communities of expectation is rooted in a belief consonant with experience that meaningful cross-cultural communication is possible. It is not just a belief. It is a moral imperative. Missed by some ... "Almost every other Westerner who has passed that way has dealt with the contrast not by failing to be sensitive to nuances of cultural difference but by completely refusing to regard the natives as fellow human beings, and so not establishing any but the most minimum conventions of translatability." ... and expected of every other.