Bateson on Story

This is a very serious matter… that the way that human beings think, certainly the way that I think, is in terms of stories… Now what is a story? A story, if it so please you, is a metaphor… If you look at these two plants, you will see that they are essentially metaphors, one of the other, that metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive…

These are stories, a story being an aggragate of formal relations scattered in time… It has a certain sort of minuet or formal dance to it. It gets more complicated, because this is where we live. And the funny thing about living there is that we care about it intensely. And when the metaphors get jangled by unfortunate events… we get very upset. You see, the idea that there is any mental process going on that isn’t metaphoric is a very late, school-marmish idea. What they were killing each other over in the 14th Century was metaphor. Is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics said yes. The Protestants said no; it stands for body and blood. And they felt that this was worth burning for. No one would ever think that now.

The set of mental processes – aesthetics, feeling, poetry perhaps – is precisely where dream is made… And the Protestant view of the sacrament was a policy decision to exclude from the church that part of the mind which is concerned with poetry, feeling, fantasy, metaphor, stories

Gregory Bateson, quoted on http://www.trismegistos.com/ as being from an audio tape