Spuren erkennen

Man lerne. Winterbäume.
Wie sie im Raureif stehen.

Man lerne. Sommerwolken.
Wie Himmelswälder glühen.

Man lerne Honig, Walnuss,
Raumschiff und Pappelbaum,

Wörter wie Montag, Hétfö,
Kedd und Freitag auch,

Ungarisch, alle Sprachen,
man lerne, was auftaucht.

Was leuchtet, Zeichen gibt:
Man lerne, was man liebt.

– Ágnes Nemes Nagy

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⊕„I just feel very curious about the differences between you know, looking at it through a colonial & computational lens of seeing information as static, versus seeing the tracks on the ground as part of dynamic, living and breathing relationships that include me or whoever is also apprehending them.” – Pınar Sinopoulos-LloydKann man die Landschaft lesen? Sind die Spuren von Tieren und Pflanzen darin, die wir entziffern lernen können, sind das Geschichten, die für uns geschrieben wurde? Oder ist das Entziffern und Erkennen eher ein Bezeugen der Beziehungen, die sich in der Landschaft abspielen?

⊕„For me, so much of tracking is about the aesthetic beauty of traces of animacy. It’s not just about answers. It’s not about this = equals = this, because I think that can really obscure the process of getting there, which is so often a humbling process of getting to know a place, and non-human persons within it. Often it takes me weeks or even months to figure out why or how a track or sign was made, or by whom. Sharing it here is about the experience of seeing. It’s easy to get caught up in identifying before we’re ready to, in some of the worlds we walk in. (…) Tracks, and bodies, are always iterations, never copies: there are always new stories being told.“ – Queer Nature in diesem PostIst der Prozess des Hinschauens vielleicht wichtiger als die gelungene Identifikation, die „richtige Antwort“?

Hat die Notwendigkeit, Spuren „lesen“ zu können, trotzdem auf lange Sicht dazu geführt, dass Menschen überhaupt die Fähigkeit entwickelt haben, geschriebene Sprache zu verwenden – die im Vergleich zu natürlichen Spuren in der Welt deutlich weniger komplex zu erkennen sind, da die gedruckten Zeichen eines Alphabets eben nicht individuell, dynamisch und kontextbezogen sind?

⊕aus dem Essay Tracking as a Way of Knowing von Sophia Sinopoulos-Lloyd

David Abram suggested in The Spell of the Sensuous that the skill of tracking, a necessity for ancient hunters, could have put critical selective pressure on the human mind to expand its semiotic capacity. In other words, our ability for symbolic and abstract thought, culminating in written language, owes much to the fact that human survival used to depend on our ability to decipher marks left by unseen phenomena. As Abram points out, unlike modern letters, numbers, and other glyphs, these marks were rarely identical—in fact each one was unique, not just because of the uniqueness of the individual who made it, but also because of the circumstances of its creation, like what the weather or the substrate was like. Thus, recognizing how and why a certain imprint was made on the ground (or on some other surface) is more complex from a cognitive standpoint than recognizing a letter or word printed on a page.

Eine Art von Gegenargument, gefunden in einem Artikel über Afantasie, also über die fehlende Fähigkeit, sich Bilder im Kopf vorzustellen:

⊕hier zitiert Austin Kleon Jacob Bronowski in seinem Essay The Reach of Imagination

„To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one’s head in new arrangements.” But, “I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind’s eye as a visual organ.” In his usage, “image” includes signs, and, oh hey, words: “the most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols.”

siehe auch die Stadt orten