Metaphors of ‘nature as books’ are not only inaccurate, they are pernicious.
— Gary Snyder (1990, 69)
True enough; but there is common ground between reading the Word and reading the world, for both are read by the one bodymind.
Snyder’s main objection to the ‘book’ metaphor is that nature affords no static text. Yet in the living culture, as in the living body, something needs to persist as a constant, even if only the name of a variable. Pattee’s ‘semiotic closure’ guarantees that some kind of relatively static text must be involved in life, learning and evolution.
Snyder himself recognizes the value of the ‘Classic’:
The Classic provides a kind of norm. Not the statistical norm of behaviorism but a norm that is proved by staying power and informed consensus. Staying power through history is related to the degree of intentionality, intensity, mindfulness, playfulness, and incorporation of previous strategies and standards within the medium – plus creative reuse or reinterpretation of the received forms, plus intellectual coherence, time-transcending long-term human relevance, plus resonances with the deep images of the unconscious. To achieve this status a text or tale must be enacted across many nations and a few millennia and must have received multiple translations.
— Snyder (1990, 72-3)
So if ‘nature as book’ is a pernicious metaphor, it is not because books have no value. The real problem for Snyder is the arrogance of ‘book’ people: ‘Those with writing have taken themselves to be superior to people without it, and people with a Sacred Book have put themselves above those with vernacular religion, regardless of how rich the myth and ceremony’ (1990, 69).
Arrogance like that is a long way from resurrection, or apocalypse, words we use to name the experience evoked by a Classic, or scripture, or any turning sign, whatever we call it.
Husserl has used the fine word Stiftung – foundation or establishment – to designate first of all the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus being universally; but above all to designate that fecundity of the products of a culture which continue to have value after their appearance and which open a field of investigations in which they perpetually come to life again.
— Merleau-Ponty (1960, 59)