It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an ‘invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things’?

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, ecologist, and influential thinker of the twentieth century. He was an original advocate of systems thinking and cybernetics and inventor of the double-bind concept in psychiatry. He taught and wrote on subjects ranging from anthropology and epistemology to biology and evolution and was interested in how ideas can be approached in an interdisciplinary way.