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Introduction
As I write this, a white blur that I’m sure is the wall surrounds my computer screen like a halo. I can hear the low hum of cars on the freeway through the open window to my right, and nearer, the quick chirp of birds. The light brown color near the bottom of my field is the floor, and in the center, a number of objects are clear. My laptop. The darker stain of the desk. A book with a white cover of a tree, a deer, a bird, a constellation. I can’t read the letters but I imagine I know what they say. In my other ear, a TV yaps tirelessly from the next room. There are things I don’t notice. The temperature, because it is perfect. My body, as nothing hurts.
I knew all along I was in my bedroom at my desk. Nothing that I saw was more than a few swatches of color or detail, yet I was able to fill it in and name the probably objects, know their state and purpose, and relate their positions. The sounds made sense in the context of memories. I’m sure all five of my senses were working hard to take in data, but only a small fraction reached my consciousness. None of the things I mentioned above occurred to me until I made it my mission to notice and describe them. Yet I knew where I was, even before that.
What we think of as the most literal reality—the place we are and the things going on—are assembled from a mote of data that catches out attention among a mountain that we ignore. It’s a hastily drawn map of a rich territory that could yield infinite detail, if we cared to look. And look. And look again. If I take this book, for instance, I can examine it and notice the small brown stain at the lower right corner of the front dust jacket—what the hell was I eating when that happened? A closer examination shows the texture of that same jacket. The weight of the book, the crinkle of the top edge. The title, the author. Maybe it has a smell if I get close enough. I could go on endlessly, but I didn’t need to. I knew it in a heartbeat, from the sketchiest details.
The same is true of everything around us. We don’t take in everything. There are entire sections of the electromagnetic spectrum we can’t see at all. And of those that we can, we use as few clues as possible to assemble a meaningful picture in a short period of time. Every moment, we map a territory so vast it can never be known in its entirety, though it may be the most familiar place in the world. I’m glad it works that way. How tiresome would it be to need a thousand points of sensory experience to recognize my hardcover copy of Wild Signs and Star Paths: They Keys to Our Lost Sixth Sense by Tristan Gooley?
Navigating the New World and the Old
Most of what we sense, we ignore. Only the most rewarding, most dangerous, and strangest anomalies reach our conscious mind, like a child tugging on our pantleg to say, “Hey, I think you should check this out.” If we had to devote full attention to everything equally, we would be paralyzed with analysis. Mundane details would occupy most of our time, while tigers crunched through the leaves behind us. Our minds work the way they do because the ones that worked otherwise didn’t make the evolutionary varsity squad. Humans grew up in a world where every sound and smell on the breeze, every bright flicker, or passing shadow, every soft patch of earth or sharp edge of rock was critical to our survival. We are masters of assembling meaning from chaos.
Yes, even you and I, who are staring at a screen.
Pacific Island navigators can find their way across hundreds of miles of featureless ocean. Australian Aboriginals can find water in a remote desert. Inuit know where the seal will show up. We check Google Maps to get to a restaurant across town. You might say that modern man has lost the art of reading his environment to even the most basic degree. I’d say that’s wrong. Those folks at the beginning of this paragraph are also modern men. We may tend to see their technology and culture as primitive, or maybe as noble and admirable. I see it as neither. They have adapted their attention to survive in their environment, just as we have. Nothing superfluous. Everything has meaning.
This essay series will be an exploration of the works of Tristan Gooley. He’s a British author who writes about the art of reading signs in nature, from the land to the sea to the skies. It will not be a book review. Here is my book review: I’ve read four of his works, and I think they are some of the most interesting, practical, and beautiful nonfiction books I’ve ever read. At times, they border on poetry, and few books have gone on to be so rewarding, again and again, every time I step outside my house. I could fawn for days. All this despite having already forgotten most of everything he taught me.
How can you tell which way is north from the shape of a tree? What does that cloud have to say about the weather in the next 12 hours? Why does the color of the water change? All of these can be explained to satisfaction in text, but as a rational abstraction, they mean no more than anything else we memorize. Jenny’s number is 867-5309, but that won’t get you a date. I only remember the ones I’ve seen time and again. These are practical skills that grow with use, and wither in neglect. It’s time I made a slower pass, and paid more attention to the real reading: the one I’m supposed to do after I close the book.
The Map
Wild Signs and Star Paths is the British title, the better title, and the prettier cover. The Nature Instinct is the American version, but the content is identical. Gooley lays out 51 “keys” (if we count this introduction it makes a neat year of 52) that unlock the doors to a forgotten world. They work with the fast, intuitive part of our brain, as opposed to the slow, rational side. From easy to advanced, as we master each in turn, we not only open the insights of that particular sign, but they begin to connect to one another like constellations that allow us to make sense of a vast sky that must be experienced in more than the sum of its parts. I’ll take them one at a time, maybe one per week but maybe I’ll get lazy or busy and drag it out. I’ll spend that week observing the sign as often as I can in nature, and reporting back with my findings. Then it’s on to the other works.
It fair to ask why. If I pointed out that we, like a hunter-gatherer, are perfectly adapted to our environment, what do we need to worry about all this nature stuff for? My limited foray has shown me that it makes every walk, even to the mailbox, more beautiful. There is almost no good or bad scenery. Nothing is random. Everything has meaning. But I can do better than that. It’s true that I know what I need to survive in my world. That is, the very specific circumstances in which I currently find myself. But that world is rather small. It depends mightily on others. And it’s bound to change. Every sign tells us something of what came before it, and what will follow. It’s a snapshot of an unfolding process, and the deeper our sense of that process, the easier it is to spot those rewards, dangers, and wonderful oddities.
What world is my world, anyway? Did I choose it, or did I happen into it guided by impulses of pleasure and pain, honed to habit? I’ve noticed in the most casual observations that the simple act of noticing can dramatically change my experience of the very same moment. These signs tell us about the world—that’s one way to look at it. They are the world—that’s just as accurate. By paying attention, I not only become more aware of where I am, but I literally change it. My experience is always a map, never the territory. By developing the ability to read more, I discover a new world, and with it new possibilities.
Comprehensible Input
I’m learning Spanish with a method called “comprehensible input.” The theory is that we don’t need to study grammar, memorize vocabulary, etc. Our brains learn a new language the same way as they did when we were children. We simply take in the language, and little by little, the rules unconsciously fall into the place, a word makes sense, then another. It’s not quite immersion, not entirely. You’re supposed to take in material of which you understand the vast majority—let’s say, 95 percent of the words. Too little, and the input isn’t comprehensible. Like a garden that slowly blooms each time you visit it, the language simply emerges. No speaking, or other forms of output are required. You may never be able to explain the grammatical rules, but you’ll come to use them perfectly. Each word is experienced in the context of the sentence, and in the context of the story. Nothing in isolation.
Of course at the beginning, we understand zero words, so it’s a bit of a slog, but as the pieces fall into place, the process unfolds with greater ease. We learn things from context clues. Relate them to real world memories. A picture slowly comes clear. No one speaks Spanish by referencing their pocket dictionary, or even by translating what they hear into English, formulating a response, and translating it back into Spanish. This is slow thinking. You aren’t fluent (and trust me, I ain’t yet fluent) until you can think in that second language. Each word is tied directly to the experience, and the whole framework of the language is intuitive, without having to ask yourself where the direct object belongs.
In a sense, all learning occurs through comprehensible input. That’s how babies piece together lifting up their head, sitting up, standing, walking. It isn’t memorized. It emerges organically from an experiential process. I believe what Gooley teaches is the same thing, by another name. We don’t memorize the world and call it up, it just happens and we understand it once we have enough references that relate to other references, always in context. This series will be my slow process of listening to a bizarre tongue and letting the meaning unfold. It isn’t so much deciphering, as learning to think in cipher, as thoughtlessly as I now think and speak in English.
I’m a big fan of Alfred Korzybski’s work. In his structural differential training—his process of teaching you to separate the unknowable event (territory) from the object of perception (map) from the name we call it, the definition we give the name, and the inferences and judgments we make upon the definition—he demands that we observe the object and let no thought pass through our head. The thought is an abstraction connected after the fact. It’s a different entity, and we can call that same thing “dog” or “perro”. We can say he’s a four-legged biter, and that he’s good or bad. None of these are the object we experience, and we always miss a huge number of potential data points in every experience.
We are often guilty of craving literal explanation. But we don’t need a dictionary that says, “an isolated tree will grow branches more horizontally on the south side.” What’s needed is to observe in silence. Let the meaning defy words and spring from intuition, built over time from a thousand such encounters. That means to turn off the brain. Without naming. Without describing. Without making judgments. And the phenomenon must be experienced as a whole, in relation to everything else around it, before it, and after it.
Key #1: The Skeleton Key
Gregory Bateson says that information is a difference that makes a difference. Where the white edges of the book meet the brown of the desk I get a sense image, but I actually don’t see any of the white itself, unless I look closely enough to notice the texture and stains, which themselves are differences against a background. Where we turn our attention, we find information. This will be the basic process of the entire course I’ve set for myself. Gooley describes each sign as a key. If that’s the case, then the key that opens all the doors is the direction of that attention: the act of noticing.
My first assignment will be to notice what I notice, as I did in the first paragraph. This can be done outside, inside, on any side. At intervals, I simply have to notice what sensory data is significant enough to reach conscious attention. This is my world. Truly, it’s the only world I’ll ever know. If I’m going to explore new worlds, it would help to know where I’m starting from.
What do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I feel? What do I taste? I’ll notice, and try to also notice how these pieces interact to tell me where I am and what’s going on, especially in the most obvious circumstances.
This assignment isn’t in the book, but it follows from the text and was inspired by Gooley’s description of what he actually noticed of the hedges, trees, etc., while driving down the road. And I needed one more key to make it an even calendar year. Future entries will be mercifully shorter. Next week, I’ll report back with what I noticed, and my assignment for the following week.
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Date: 2021-08-17 08:32 pm (UTC)https://learn.canvas.net/courses/191/modules
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Date: 2021-08-17 09:14 pm (UTC)Edited to add: Reading more about Korzybski, and found he reportedly had some influence on Alan Watts, who is himself an interesting guy (and also had some incursions into Neoplatonic territory with a commentary on pseudo-Dionysus). Seems like there's some way of this fitting in there, as well (how things emerge from the realm of Forms, and how we then go on to frame those things in the material world), but it's something I'd have to ruminate on...
Good stuff.