To escape the old split between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities that I had experienced at MIT, and to escape the countercultural split between spirituality and intellectuality that I had experienced at Findhorn, I decided to work to build a bridge between the university and the ashram or spiritual community. Basically, I pulled the two DNA strands of the humanities apart by energizing meditation and mysticism in place of scriptual hermeneutics, and energizing Pythagorean science instead of scientific and technological materialism. (Clearly, my old love for Whitehead during my high school days resurfaced.) I had used Gregory Bateson’s Naven in my Pomona College Honors Thesis as a way of trying to support my efforts to articulate systems of mutual causality, and so when I met Gregory Bateson at an Esalen meeting in New York, it was a small step to invite him to become our first Scholar-in-Residence at Lindisfarne in Southampton. Gregory came to live with us and wrote his book, Mind in Nature in one of our small cabins on the shore of Fishcove in Peconic Bay. Together, Gregory and I organized a small conference of the same title and invited Francisco Varela, who then became our next Scholar-in-Residence. And then “the pattern that connects” was in place, and a self-organizing dynamic emerged that was far beyond any “conscious purpose” I had in mind when I founded Lindisfarne in 1972. In 1981, I invited James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Heinz von Forster, and on, and on for twenty years, from the Chaos Dynamics of Ralph Abraham’s work of the middle ’80s to Complex Dynamical Systems and Stuart Kauffman’s work in the ’90s. Like Bauhaus or the Macy Conferences before it, Lindisfarne became a gathering in which a new world view was being articulated. We became one of the institutions that was performing the shift from the linear Galilean Dynamics of European modernism to Complex Dynamical Systems and a new planetary culture. Tibetan Buddhism and Cognitive Science were brought together, and the work of Francisco Varela in Paris and Evan Thompson in Toronto was supported by Lindisfarne.⁸ My point in reviewing all this personal cultural history is to show that when my work slipped beneath the horizon of notice of English departments, this is what I was working on at the same time that my colleague from Cornell, Gayatri Spivak, was deconstructing “English” in particular and literature in general in a new kind of textual sociology. “English,” as I knew it as an undergraduate at Pomona has disappeared, with deconstruction pulling in one direction, and media studies pulling in the other. For teachers intimidated by Derrida, Foucault, and Spivak, pop culture and media studies have provided a way for them to be popular with students by lecturing on myth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or moral conflict in The Sopranos. Lindisfarne has also disappeared, for the general movement of complex dynamical systems is now world wide, and the Dalai Lama himself is continuing to direct and support conferences on meditation and neuroscience. It is not the calling of an intellectual or artistic movement to become a permanent institution; it is more like a crocus of spring signalling a change of season than a permanent and enduring institution. So Lindisfarne is gone, but York is still here, and in my beginning is my end. But let me end by giving you another way of looking at literature that is also not “English.”