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Robert Oppenheimer, put him off, on the grounds that the institute was not
interdisciplinary enough, to which Bateson replied, “I sometimes think that
the ideal sparring partners died off like the dinosaurs at the end of the eigh-
teenth century.” In the absence of a stable group of sparring partners, Bateson
tried several times to assemble temporary groups in the form of intense con-
ferences (echoing the Macy conferences), the best known of which were two
long meetings in 1968 and 1969 sponsored by the Wenner-Grenn Foundation,
organized around Bateson's ecological concerns (Gordon Pask was one of the
invitees).
14
Again we return to the improvised basis of cybernetics.
Having said all that, we can now note that there was one social location that
offered Bateson a home. Though Bateson's biographers show little interest in
this, one can easily make a case for a close association between him and the
West Coast counterculture, especially in the later years of his life. The connec-
tion Bateson made between madness and enlightenment became a standard
trope of the sixties, of course, but Bateson's interests in strange performances
and altered states ranged far beyond that. In 1974, for example, he returned
to a topic of his prewar anthropological research: the states of trance he had
studied in Bali (Lipset 1980, 282-84). Lipset (281) records a conversation
about LSD at around the same between Bateson and Carter Wilson: Wilson
“finally asked him if he thought there was something truly different about the
kind
of experience LSD provides. Long pause. Then Gregory said slowly that
yes, he did think you could say that the experience under LSD was different in
kind from other experiences. And that once you had had it then you knew—a
very long pause—that it was an experience you could have again for a dollar.”
One can deduce that Bateson was no stranger to the acid culture of the time,
even if this entailed a degree of distance.
15
Along much the same lines, on 28
October 1973 Bateson wrote a brief account of his experience of floating for
an hour in John Lilly's sensory deprivation tank: “Mostly away—no—just no
words? Briefly a dream—switching to and fro between the others (?Lilly. J.)
is a boy; I am a man. And vice versa he is a man, I a boy—mostly just float-
ing. . . . Relaxing from all that—very definite process, interrupted by Lilly call-
ing to me 'Are you all right?' Opened lid which for two of us sort of joke” (Lilly
1977, 189).
16
Bateson scholars refer to Lilly as a man who did research on dolphins and
gave Bateson a job. But he was also a leading figure in the U.S. countercul-
ture and the New Age movement, one of the great explorers of consciousness,
finding his spiritual guides while spending long hours in his tanks under the
influence of LSD (Lilly 1972). Another friend of Bateson's was Stewart Brand,
the founder of
The Whole Earth Catalog
, another key figure in the psychedelic
