It is not hard to understand the superficial meaning of the technology of language. We sustain a specialized cognitive context in which certain sequences of sound or images of characters represent tokens that link to or elicit meanings from a kind of inner lexicon. These meanings are at least partly comprised of referential chains of connotation and denotation that relationally inflect each other in relatively orderly ways. Language is a sophisticated game played with abstract ‘handles’ for things, beings, ideas, relationships and situations.

So I think it might be confused to call what happens in nature language in the ordinary senses; it is not an abstract representation. Yet nature is a symphonic continuum of what our linguistic signs are reductions of, and her communiqués are the living sources of meaning. The relational character and activity of plants, animals and places (in and as living time) are an pluripotent signal that transports enacted intelligence, rather than narratives or models. A ‘signalling’ context this dependable and ancient, unabstracted, is infinitely deep and is effectively the root lexicon of meaning and identity. The basis of meaning, prior to representational analogs.

The polyphanously liquid flow of the relational activity of living places is the fundamental birthplace of meaning, and these signals do not refer to abstractions. They are the actual expressions of living reality, nakedly aspecfic; including direct nonverbal demonstrations of identity.

To see and understand this metalanguage, to participate with it actively is an experience that must be as peculiarly personal as it is universally accessible. Yet somehow, our long association with descriptions and representational culture has confused us. We no longer clearly sense or participate in the polyphanous living metalanguages of nature. We hear only the relatively monotonous decrees of culture’s rectangular echoes. We cannot read ‘the living books’; our minds no longer evince the necessary perspectives with which to apprehend them. Trapped in our boxes, we are isolated from the living temporality of organismal relation and trained to obey little objects with numbers on them.

We are getting the substitute. The replacement. Our representational prostheses are remaking us in their images, perhaps language most of all, and the result is not an improvement, but a series of covert amputations.

Yet in every case, in the same way that television can be understood to replace or represent dreaming, and clocks represent our relationship with the sky, calenders the seasons, etc. each of the substitutes may lead us back to what was being replaced, in us, in our sensorium, in our experience, world, and cultures. By following these threads back to the scene of the crime, where our transentient nature was co-opted, tokenized, distorted, hidden, or replaced — we have the opportunity to re-acquire experiential contact with the transports of living intelligence inherent in dreaming, in living beings and places, in the sky.

This will not eliminate our relationship with representation, but will transform it, in part by resurrecting a crucial living context within which to more clearly understand and intelligently enact it. And, perhaps more importantly, we will be reunited with aspects of our relational intelligence whose ongoing sacrifice has become a long and invisible tradition. We have lost the living context of meaning in our haste to acquire representational and technological prowess. Since our collectives no longer understand the role of living beings and places in our own lives and intelligence, we destroy them and convert them to representations.

Nature is the basis and future our own intelligence; we are eviscerating it as rapidly and myopically as possible. The framings of language may make it seem remote, but the living planet is the source of the nature, identity, character and meaning of our humanity. And we are not machines. We are organisms. We become the likeness of our world.