Wild Signs and Star Paths: Key #2, The Tick and the Hunter

[kylec]

This series is an exploration of the works of Tristan Gooley. I’ll document my efforts to learn to read nature’s signs. If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to support the author by purchasing a copy of Wild Sings and Star Paths (UK) or The Nature Instinct (US). I’m in no way affiliated with the author, nor do I profit from sales of the book.

Last Week’s Work

To notice what I notice. What do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I feel? What do I taste? Notice how these pieces interact to tell me where I am and what’s going on, especially in the most obvious circumstances.

New World

If being aware of what I notice and how it works to construct my map of the world is the skeleton key to reading signs in nature, then mine is rusty and cobwebbed. It raises serious questions as to whether this key has ever opened anything before. Noticing what I notice is hard! For starters, it’s one order of magnitude harder than simply “noticing,” which is the primary skill I’ll be trying to acquire in my study of Wild Signs and Star Paths, so maybe it’s OK that the master key needs a little polishing.

Synchronicity came to my rescue. I’m already a fan of Alfred Korzybski’s work with general semantics—the study of how our perceptions and our language abstracts our experience of the world from raw data. I just assumed it was a dead field, as I never heard anything about it coming up in the hinterlands of Louisiana. That inference was wrong. Just this week, I stumbled on a recent online course in general semantics that remains up for free. It does a great job of summarizing Korzybski’s arguments in an understandable way, as well shading in the details with more recent developments in the field. Anyone interested can find it here.

Going through the early modules gave a nice boost to my practice. I spent quite a bit of time noticing the constructions of my senses, both of the outer world and of my body. My first takeaway is that it’s easy for me notice sight and sound, fair enough for touch, and more difficult with smell and taste, probably because there aren’t always strong stimuli available for the latter two. The next thing that occurs to me is that noticing a sensation is pretty far-removed from making sense of it. It’s possible, though we tend to be out of the habit, of sensing anything without the mind immediately giving it a name, describing it, and making inferences or judgments. Training myself to start with experience of the bare sensations was the first exercise, and it only happens when I devote a lot of attention to the task. I want to name a likely source for every sound as soon as I hear it, or cobble together colorful swatches into a picture that is immediately assigned a meaning. Those moving, shaded brown blurs beneath me are the stairs I’m climbing. And that’s a weedeater running outside.

Charles Sanders Peirce pointed out that meaning isn’t received, it’s constructed. None of the data carries meaning with it. The observer is required, and then the observer has to compare that sight, sound, etc. to their own library to come up with a likely story. It’s an act of creative association that differs with every single person. I may know a weedeater from my shin-stung experience of cleaning up fence lines, but someone else may know the kind of motor or even the model, while a third person may think “lawnmower,” all from the same sound. And my opinion of what the tool running at this hour in that place means is yet another level of abstraction. But to read nature’s signs, we do indeed have to go well beyond the sensory, devoid of meaning. We have to make that meaning ourselves, from our limited references, if we hope to appreciate any of what we sense.

So one of the things we must always notice is the self. For better or worse, me and my experiences are a huge factor in *creating meaning. (I almost said *determining, as if it were something objective, “out there,” to be read like a road sign with no possibility of variable interpretation.) What role does my current state play in what I can sense? How I will interpret it? What role does my past and my memory play? Tristan Gooley will come up with far more meaning from a quarter acre of woodland than I will, because he has more previous experiences to call upon, and the skill is finely honed.

How about that memory, anyway? One exercise I gave myself was to become vaguely aware of a nearby and utterly familiar object in my home (a doorknob I use daily, a piece of art on the wall, the bowl I eat out of, the coffee table, etc.) without actually looking at it. Then I closed my eyes and tried to build an image of the object as completely and accurately as possible, before opening them to compare to the real one. Go ahead and try it with something just outside your field of vision that you should know well.

I’ll use the bowl as an example. I conjured up a white ceramic object of about the right size and shape. But when I tried to imagine the decorative relief on the side, it was some kind of zigzag Southwest style pattern around the bottom. When I opened my eyes, the bowl had, as I presume it often does, a curved rope with dotted flowers around the TOP. Nothing remotely like my picture. Had I described it to a friend to pick out of a line-up for me at the local crockery shop, there’s no hope they would have found it. Now I swear, I know my bowl when I see it. I use it to great effect. But how did I know it?

I repeated this exercise with a few dozen objects, and realized that despite being a very visual person with an active imagination and an ability to create vivid images in my head, I have no idea what anything in my life actually looks like. Whatever sense data I took in to abstract “my bowl,” it was far less than I assumed I needed. Probably not much more than the general color and shape, and crucially, the context in which I expected to find it. Most of my world is made of surprisingly few fragments that I reassemble, mostly as abstract meaning, with a minimum of sensory input. That makes sense, because whichever ape can assemble a useful picture the fastest survives to pass on his genes. I knew it wasn’t a snake, or a collander.

That tells me that when I try to read signs in nature, I’m going to tend to rush to place things in categories I know and assign them a definition and a personal utility. Most of these things will be categories I’ve made up of very few data points, even if I’ve seen that one tree thousands of times. Any given object has a near-infinite amount of data we can take in if we’re willing to explore the nooks and crannies, and a near-infinite number of meanings we can abstract, to varying degrees of accuracy. My initial task is to experience all that I encounter, especially the familiar, first on a sense level. That means no inner monologue, no rush to judgments. Just take it in as a whole, then notice what I notice. Try to notice more layers of things I didn’t initially notice. Maybe go back to the whole, and see how that’s changed.

Doing so will give me another reference point for future comparisons, but it will also inhibit my dogmas. Then I can evaluate the impressions and make a tentative inference. General semantics asks that we use the scientific method to ask questions, observe, evaluate, and then to hold all deductions tentatively, as an incomplete model, and be ready to reevaluate and change our assessments as new data becomes available. My understanding of the meaning of these signs will change as I observe more of them, more completely. To memorize a definition and repeat it will do me no good.

When I see the signs Gooley describes, or anything at all, my task is to: 1) experience silently, 2) take in new layers, 3) re-experience silently, 4) form tentative meanings, but 5) be prepared to reevaluate and change them as often as needed.

Key #2: The Tick and the Hunter

The first chapter of Wild Signs and Star Paths seems to me to cover direction. Tristan Gooley states that he can “see” direction. It isn’t a matter of looking at the lush side of a tree, thinking, “That’s south,” then assigning the other three directions. It’s just something he feels without having to think much about it, based on many hours of practice.

Direction is orientation relative to some other point. It is not “east” or “northwest”. Having that object to orient to means I can imagine the rest of the world relative to it, and move in any number of vectors without getting lost. If I also know where I started, then I can triangulate my position pretty well, not with compass points or GPS, but well-enough to find my way back, or expand my map with more points. That said, as long as we’re on earth, compass directions are a useful starting place, because they orient us to the North Pole, and all other places can be described in relation.

There are two signs this week:

1) The Tick. This isn’t a cartoon superhero who carries lyme disease, but rather a British word for a shape that is slightly more horizontal on one side, and vertical on the other. In the States, we call it a “checkmark,” or just “check.” Think of getting the answers right, or “ticking all the boxes.”

Trees love sunshine. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun is usually if not always south of the trees (vice-versa in the Southern). A tree growing free of the shadows of other trees and buildings, for example in an open field, will extend its branches more horizontally on the southern side, while the northern ones will grow more vertically. If they grew as horizontally as the southern side, the tree would shade its own leaves from the sun, and that’s a waste of energy. When viewed from profile, the shape of the tree looks like a tick, or check. We can use it to find our compass directions.

This is most accurate when the tree is deciduous, and alone. Any shade will make it change its preference to the sunniest side, regardless of direction.

2) The Hunter. Orion rises in the East and sets in the West. Well, I guess it’s us who turn round and around. But the hunter appears over the eastern horizon at sunset, and disappears over the west near dawn. The middle can be a muddle depending on location. His belt is an especially fine indicator. It points to the horizon at both ends of the night, with the star Mintaka rising and setting first within one degree of true east and west.

My assignment is to observe these two signs as often as I can this week. In case I can’t find them, I’ll give myself the additional challenge to spot anything, natural or manmade, that betrays direction in the way it orients to its preference, or in its movement.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Interesting on the trees.

I tend to use the shadows of trees and buildings as an immediate sense of orientation and time, but that's mostly just paying attention to the sun's position. Once nightfall comes, it's a whole 'nother ballgame.

Axé

[kylec]

Coincidentally, your method is very similar to what we'll be seeing in the next post. :)

The advantage of the tick, as you said, is that it works as well when it's night, or overcast.

[boccaderlupo]

Well, that's about the extent of my knowledge of the outdoors. Except maybe (no more spoilers) the trick with where moss grows on trees...

The tick is indeed nifty. Will have to look for it.