Charlotte Birrell - 'Walnut'

Sympathies of a Walnut

Charlotte Birrell

When I was a little girl, the woman who looked after me while my father worked would often give me a handful of walnuts to snack on while I did my homework. ‘They’re good for your brain,’ she would say. Later, when I grew up and moved to Shanghai, my Mandarin teacher offered me a walnut during a long study session. Holding the walnut in my hand, and looking down at its squiggly flesh, I was suddenly struck with that memory. ‘Why are walnuts good for your brain?’ I asked. She explained to me that according to traditional Chinese medicine, things look like what they’re good for. In other words, the walnut is good for your brain because it looks like a brain. The same logic can be applied to mushrooms for ears, or ginseng roots for the entire body (they really do look like tiny humans).

But this idea of human-resemblance in nature, known as the Doctrine of Signatures, is not unique to the realm of traditional Chinese medicine, it is ubiquitous, found throughout almost every culture in the world.1 Since the end of the 16th century, however, Western culture has largely dismissed the theory as being “prescientific”.2 But it is not that The Doctrine of Signatures is untruthful – walnuts have in fact been scientifically proven as being great brain food3. According to Bennett, the value of the Doctrine of Signatures is as a mnemonic: a useful way of remembering and disseminating information4. I would like to argue that the power of similitude is much greater than that of a mnemonic, and that language and literature could allow humans to reassess their own position in the universe in relation to the rest of nature.

Using the walnut-brain throughout the essay as a vehicle to explore the power of resemblances, I will first look at the history of the Doctrine of Signatures in the context of European culture. I will then conduct an analysis of two key texts: Foucault’s The Order of Things5 and C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image6. Firstly, using Foucault’s definition of resemblance, I will explain the relationship between nature and literature prior to the 16th century, and how the Doctrine of Signatures fits into this definition. Then, using Lewis’s analysis of Medieval literature, I will attempt to describe the power of resemblance at that time, and how this power went into decline. Finally, through the poetic architecture of John Hejduk, I will demonstrate how the power of resemblance can be revived in order to reconnect the human-earth relationship.

1 Bradley C. Bennett, “Doctrine of Signatures: An Explanation of Medicinal Plant Discovery or Dissemination of Knowledge?,” Economic Botany 61, no. 3 (2007): https://doi.org/10.1663/0013-0001(2007)61[246:dosaeo]2.0.co;2, 246. 2 Ibid.

3 Ingrid Kiefer, “BRAIN FOOD.” Scientific American Mind 18, no. 5 (2007): http://www.jstor.org/stable/24939726, 4 Bennett, “ Doctrine of Signatures,” 246.

5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1966).

6 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (London: Cambridge University Press, 1964).

“walnut”

‘The nut is the fruit of the walnut tree, of rounded or ovoid shape, with a hard wrinkled shell of a reddish-brown colour. The edible part inside it has a particular sweet taste.

Juglans regia, the Persian walnut, English walnut, Carpathian walnut, Madeira walnut, or especially in Great Britain, common walnut, is an Old-World walnut tree species native to the region stretching from the Balkans eastward to the Himalayas and southwest China. It is widely cultivated across Europe.7’

The Signature of All Things

A contemporary analysis of the Doctrine of Signatures by Bennett leads to the following four conclusions8:

1. There is no proof that the identification of therapeutic characteristics was ever brought about by morphological plant markers. This approach to Doctrine of Signatures is counterproductive and essentially untestable.

2. Rather than providing prior information about a plant’s potential medical value, signatures are post-hoc attributions.

3. Redefining signatures to include organ-related features linked to therapeutic efficacy is beneficial. Pharmacopoeias frequently contain plants, for instance, that have overpowering aromas or harsh tastes.

4. Doctrine of Signatures should be viewed as the information-dissemination tool that it essentially is. Since it is essentially a mnemonic, it is extremely beneficial in traditional cultures.

While it is true to say that the Doctrine of Signatures is a mnemonic, to understand the true gravity of resemblance and it’s relevance to Western culture, it is important to go back to Ancient Greece. The Doctrine of Signatures was first recorded in Western literature by the physician and biologist Pedanius Dioscorides in 40-90 AD9. Both ‘Doctrine’ and ‘Signature’ can be traced back to their original Latin meanings:

Doctrine10

From Middle English, from Old French, from Latin doctrina (“teaching, instruction, learning, knowledge”), from doctor (“a teacher”), from docere (“to teach”)

A doctrine is a principle or belief that is often religious in nature. It is a set of beliefs that guides the actions of a person or group of people.

Signature11

Borrowed from Middle French signature, or from Medieval Latin signātūra, future active periphrastic of verb signāre (“to sign”) from signum (“sign”)

A signature is a distinctive mark that is used to identify someone or something.

By the time writers such as Paracelsus and Böhme picked it up over a thousand years later12, a theological justification had been overlaid onto the original meaning of ‘Doctrine’ (to teach). Based on the belief that God has created a universe that is orderly and rational, both Paracelsus and Böhme believed that God had hidden messages in the natural world so that they could be deciphered by humans13. This is significant because it provides us with a perspective on the world at that time, which that assumes that there is a hidden order to be discovered.

8 Bennett, “ Doctrine of Signatures,” 246.

9 Ibid, 248.

10 “Doctrine,” in The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2021).

11 “Signature,” in The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2021).

12 Bennett, “ Doctrine of Signatures,”

13 Ibid, 248.

‘There exists a sympathy between walnuts and the human head: what cures ‘wounds of the pericranium’ is the thick green rind covering the bones – the shell – of the fruit; but internal ailments may be prevented by use of the nut itself ‘which is exactly like the brain in appearance.14’

The definition of resemblance relies deeply on the understanding of three main periods of history. Categorised by Foucault, each ‘episteme’ has a different mode of acquiring of knowledge15:

1. The Renaissance episteme, marked by similarity and similitude,

2. The classical episteme, which was defined by classification and taxonomy as well as representation and ordering, identity, and difference,

3. The episteme of the Modern era, characterized by physical reductionism.

It is important here to know that through the archaeological investigation of these three epistemes, he concludes that ‘Man’ only emerges during the Classical era. This is best explained by his analysis of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas16 as evidence, in which there is a never-before-seen representation of a ceaseless exchange between the artist (observer, subject) and the models whom he paints (observed, object). This is key because it symbolises a major shift in culture when compared to the episteme prior, where he suggests that humans had not yet become conscious enough to represent such exchanges in art or literature.

the four Similitudes

In the first episteme, which extends right up until the end of the 16th century ‘to search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance.’17 According to Foucault, the knowledge of resemblance is composed of four kinds of similitudes18:

1. Convenientia: principle of likeness due to proximity (e.g., the body and the soul)

2. Aemulatio: principle of likeness with freedom from proximity (e.g. Orion – a constellation in which the stars emulate a man)

3. Analogies: convenientia and aemulatio superimposed to describe relationships between things, (e.g. the rock and the diamond it forms inside)

4. Sympathies: principle of likeness with freedom from space and time, alters the identity of the of the object compared (e.g. a sunflower following the curving path of the sun)

In order for objects to resemble one another, the four similitudes of likeness ‘explain to us how the universe must fold in upon itself, duplicate itself, mirror itself, or create a chain with itself.’19 They describe the routes of similarities and their orientations, but they do not describe their location, how they are seen, or how they might be identified. Without signatures, there are no similarities. Only a world of signs could be the world of similarities20

Thus, the understanding of similitudes is built upon the discovery and interpretation of signals. There must, of course, be some mark that informs us of these things in order for us to know that crushed walnut combined with spirits of wine would relieve a headache; otherwise, the secret will remain perpetually dormant. If there were no indications, would we ever discover the links between Man and plant?21

Foucault supposes that during this period, that there is no difference between ‘marks’ and ‘words.’22 Language was a certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them23. Nature and the word can intertwine with one another into one vast single text24. The transparency relationship between nature and word was destroyed at Babel, as a form of punishment for men, by God. Languages became separated and incompatible with one another: they lost this original resemblance to the things that had been the prime reason for the existence of languages. All the languages that we are aware of are only spoken today against the backdrop of this lost analogy and in the void that it left behind25. However, since the similarities persist, this does not imply that languages are disconnected from the rest of the world. Conversely, it is the diversity of literature in world languages that the unity of the nature expresses itself.

15 Foucault, The Order of Things.

16 Ibid,14-16.

17 Ibid, 29.

18 Ibid, 17-24.

19 Ibid, 25-26

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid, 34.

23 Ibid, 36.

24 Ibid, 41.

25 Ibid, 44.

To truly grasp the Medieval perspective on the power of resemblance, we must adopt their way of thinking and seeing. In his analysis of Medieval literature, The Discarded Image, Lewis urges us to take a stroll on a clear, starry night and gaze up at the stars, not merely out at them. This was the dominant image in the minds of people during that era: the belief that the earth was flat, and that the sun orbited around it. Nightfall was like the closing of an eyelid or the passing of a finger over the sun, causing its shadow to fall upon the earth. As we look out into the darkness and beyond, we can begin to imagine how the Medieval person perceived the darkness itself - as the earth’s shadow, just beyond which lay the universe and the heavens, eternally illuminated. Only by embracing this worldview can we truly appreciate the significance of resemblance in the eyes of the Medieval people.

To understand this significance, Lewis, upon looking through all of the stories characteristic of this time, notices repetition to a point of banality. He remarks that scarcity of original thought in literature would have been impossible for them to conceive, due to the lack of the concept of literary property: there was no such thing as plagiarism. This, however, becomes the main evidence that the aim of writing at that time was not one self-expression or creation, but to hand on information and understand the world in earnest26. The power of resemblence was so strong because there was no formulated human experience of the object being written about, and this was only strengthened by the theological justification. The Medieval experience of the walnut is not that a walnut looks like a human head, but that it is a human head because God had expressed it so.

However, after the 16th century the world was no longer seen as a depository of language and meaning. What was to disappear from Western knowledge was the Medieval arrangement and together with the interplay it

The Power of Resemblence

authorises. As language advanced, the foundations of the written word disappeared along with the uniform layer in which the observable and expressible were constantly in question. From this point forward, words and things were to remain distinct for all time27. The walnut was no longer a human head but a piece in the Linnean system: juglans regia. The Medieval question of how it was possible to know what marks designated, or what was signified by similitude, disappeared. It was more economical to replace a system of resemblances with the question of how a meaning could be connected to a sign, and to define a proper mode of representation - a mechanisation of objects and language.

Of course, there is still a power of resemblance in classical representation, but they are novel versions of the former power that discourse granted them. Both Lewis and Foucault point out that the new approach succeeded not because the old way split apart, but because the new way was more effective. A new phenomenon emerges to support a new model when changes in human thinking create a sufficient demand for it. This is not to suggest that these new discoveries and occurrences are elusive. Rather, nature provides a diverse range of phenomena that can fulfill a wide range of preferences28. Lewis likens nature to a witness giving her testimony to a court. She is able provide the majority of the evidence to support her claims. Humans are skilled as cross-examiners, and the strength of the evidence depends on the format of the examination. An honest witness will not elicit lies, but the format of an interrogation is more like a stencil in connection to the witness’s perception of the whole truth. It decides the degree to which that truth will surface and what pattern it reveals29. Both Lewis and Foucault prove to us how resemblances, a force now restricted to literature, provides us only with the remanence of a discarded image.

Protected by a hard shell, the fight just to continue sleeping. Not only for those pitiful drupes, but also the bold army of snails who spiral single-file down the escape well of a skyscraper – single-mindedly, dragging along the breath of their sleep.30

30* The Japanese term for walnut is kurumi, and the suffix shi, which can imply either “poetry” or “death,” is added to get the phrase kurushimi, which means “suffering”: the walnut suffers in poetry. Through this poem, Hiraide casts us at the scale of a walnut, allowing us to feel a level of otherwise unfelt compassion toward it.

Takashi Hiraide, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. (Tokyo: New Directions Book, 2008),

3.

While Lewis and Foucault argued that the full power of resemblance has been lost to time, I would like to show an example of how this power can be revived outside of literature. In several of his works, the architect John Hejduk draws inspiration from mythology and spirituality. He explored the relationship between shape/objects and their surroundings – or sympathies as Foucault would put them. The human experience is not discounted, as it was according to Lewis in the Medieval times, but becomes central to the creation. Hejduk achieves this through portrayal of different ‘characters’ of the building, each built object becomes something or someone: the gardener, the musician, a painter, a suicide.31 Resemblance, this time through poetic imagination as a dimension of human life, is used as a means of addressing our social political lives, manifesting in the morphology of the building. It is a radical visualisation of architecture: a vision grounded in individual creativity as a profound social act. His posthumous project, House of Suicide, is a direct translation of poetry into space. A deep sorrow and pain becomes visible to the viewer, not through words, but it is something more intuitive, drawing us in. Though sympathies, he shows us that it is in the capacity of architecture to situate us in space, decipher our relationship to Mother nature, to construct shelter and sanctuary for our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical lives32

Poetics in Space

In an era where all knowledge is reduced to physics, where capitalism has taken root in the earth and is causing mass destruction, we are in dire need of a shift in culture. It’s easy to look back and ridicule the Medieval experience, but perhaps there is something to learn from it. I’m not suggesting that we go back to believing that the earth is flat. Instead, we should try and use the lens of resemblance to bring about an effectual change in the way we think, to understand that there is a value in the narrative. We should, like in the work of John Hejduk, see the magic in the world for what it is. In Medieval times, the earth was the centre of our universe, but now we have arrived at a point in which we are the centre of the universe. We should not forget about our own experiences if this relationship is to be revaluated, but instead perhaps utilise the power of resemblance as an instrument of empathy. We need not believe that all of nature is an expression of God, but perhaps a similar allegorical device adapted in our literature would serve as a way of fostering a culture where nature comes before economic-led destruction.

By seeing ourselves in those creatures that surround us, by shrinking ourselves to the scale of a walnut, we can acknowledge the stories of their lives, learn their lessons, and heed their warnings. By looking deeper, we can awaken in ourselves something that has been lying dormant for so long. Perhaps, in finding resemblances we might liberate a compassion from inside of us, in a reality where, paradoxically, humans perceive themselves at the centre of everything.

31 David Gersten, “ John Hejduk: The Poetic Imagination as a Social Political Act,” (Lecture, Power Station of Art Shanghai, November 2021). 32 Ibid.

Bibliography

“Doctrine.” In The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2021.

“Signature.” In The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2021.

“Walnut” In Britannica Encyclopaedia. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/plant/walnut-tree-and-nut

Bennett, B.C. Doctrine of Signatures: An explanation of medicinal plant discovery or Dissemination of knowledge?. Economic Botany. 61, 246–255 (2007). https://doi. org/10.1663/0013-0001(2007)61[246:DOSAEO]2.0.CO;2

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1966.

Gersten, David. “John Hejduk: The Poetic Imagination as a Social Political Act,” Lecture, Power Station of Art Shanghai, November 2021.

Hejduk, John. Victims. United Kingdom: Architectural Association, 1986.

Hiraide, Takashi. For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. Tokyo: New Directions Book, 2008. Kiefer, Ingrid. “BRAIN FOOD.” Scientific American Mind 18, no. 5 (2007): 58–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24939726

Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image. London: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Signature’. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2014.