Nature is a language

Abstract

Discerning alphabetic letters in nature brings a frisson, a thrill that nature is seeking to communicate. Sparks fly when there is correspondence (letters) through correspondence (resemblance). And, oddly, it is the recognition of resemblance that can make things strange. This ecological pareidolia excavates text from plants, animals, and landforms. Rudyard Kipling told the story of ‘How the Alphabet was Made’ from the rivers and fish, snakes and shells (image 1). Ovid saw a sky full of birds scribing O’s and Hermes witnessed cranes flying in an arrow formation to make the letter V. Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym explored a series of chasms, finding that they bore some “resemblance to alphabetical characters,” but that his team “could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it altogether the work of nature” (image 2). In Australia, Marcus Clarke found the “strange scribblings of nature learning how to write” and in New Zealand Charles Brasch saw the Remarkables mountain range as “huge initial letters of an alphabet of countless signs.” But if nature can speak, what would it say? Gary Dwyer’s hypothetical project Mea Culpa – My Fault imagined using the ancient Ogham script across the San Andreas Fault, where movements would generate new letters (image 3). Dwyer called it a “fantasy of geological esperanto.” This abstract proposes a richly illustrated exploration of correspondences, in both senses of the word, between nature and text, and speculates and what this might mean… if anything.