Beyond the Garden of What Matters lay a country in perpetual motion.
Nothing there remained entirely still.
Light moved across the ground.
The wind passed through the trees.
Warmth rose and fell with the sun.
Water gathered, disappeared and returned.
Creatures crossed the grass.
Leaves opened and closed.
The traveller stood at the gate and watched.
At first, he saw only change.
Then the Keeper who had led him from the garden said:
“Look more carefully.”
He did.
A stone lay in the sunlight.
As the morning advanced, it grew warm.
A leaf beside it trembled in the wind.
A pool reflected the changing sky.
Everything was affected.
“The sun changes the stone,” said the traveller.
“Yes.”
“The wind changes the leaf.”
“Yes.”
“The sky changes the water.”
“Yes.”
The Keeper nodded.
“And are they all sensitive?”
The traveller hesitated.
He had assumed that being affected and being sensitive were almost the same thing.
But now he was no longer sure.
“What is the difference?”
The Keeper led him along a path.
Soon they came to a field filled with flowers.
As clouds passed overhead, some of the flowers slowly turned towards the returning light.
Others remained closed.
The traveller watched them.
“Here,” said the Keeper.
“What am I looking for?”
“A difference that makes a difference.”
The traveller looked again.
The light had changed.
But the flowers had not merely changed because something had happened to them.
Their activity changed differently because the light was different.
When the light returned, they opened.
When it disappeared, they closed.
The character of the change entered into the character of their response.
“Ah,” said the traveller.
The Keeper smiled.
“You are beginning to distinguish.”
They continued through the field.
Beyond it lay a shallow stream.
Within the water moved countless tiny creatures.
The traveller could not see them clearly, but he could see their movement.
Some drifted.
Some changed direction.
Some gathered where the water carried something invisible to him.
“What guides them?” he asked.
“Differences,” said the Keeper.
“In what?”
“Perhaps in what surrounds them.”
She pointed towards the water.
“Perhaps one concentration rather than another. Perhaps one condition rather than another.”
The traveller watched the tiny movements.
“They are not simply being carried.”
“No.”
“They move differently because the world around them is different.”
“Yes.”
“Then sensitivity is not merely being changed.”
“No.”
The Keeper stooped and picked up two stones.
She placed one in the sun and one beneath the shade of a tree.
“Both will change.”
The traveller waited.
“But neither,” said the Keeper, “will alter its own activity according to the character of the difference.”
The traveller understood.
A stone could become warmer.
It could become colder.
It could be struck by rain or buried in sand.
But the difference did not enter into a differentiated pattern of response.
The stone changed.
But it did not change because this difference was this difference rather than another.
The flowers were different.
The creatures in the stream were different.
Their organisation allowed differences in the world to become differences in what they did.
“This,” said the Keeper, “is sensitivity.”
The traveller looked back towards the field.
“A difference must make a difference within the system.”
“Yes.”
“But not merely any difference.”
“No.”
“The system must respond differently because the difference is different.”
The Keeper nodded.
“Now you are standing in the country of those who can tell the difference.”
They walked on.
The country became stranger.
In one valley grew plants that turned towards the light.
In another, roots moved through the soil, changing their paths around stones and towards water.
Further on, small creatures altered their movements as the ground changed beneath them.
Everywhere the traveller looked, the same pattern appeared.
The world changed.
But the inhabitants did not simply receive its changes.
Their own organisation selected among them.
A difference in light could alter one activity.
A difference in temperature another.
A disturbance in the ground another still.
The traveller began to see that the country was not merely full of things.
It was full of unequal differences.
“What makes one difference enter and another remain outside?” he asked.
The Keeper shook her head.
“Do not imagine a gatekeeper inside each organism.”
The traveller laughed.
“I was about to.”
“Everyone is.”
She pointed towards a bird passing overhead.
“Nothing inside the bird needs to sit at a table and decide which differences are important.”
The bird turned sharply.
Its wings altered their angle.
It disappeared beyond the trees.
“Its history is already present in its organisation,” said the Keeper.
The traveller thought of the phrase.
History is already present.
“The world offers differences,” she continued. “But the organism is not equally open to all of them.”
“Because of what it is?”
“Because of what it has become.”
They came then to a high place from which the traveller could see the whole country.
Below them were forests, streams, open fields and distant hills.
The Keeper pointed first towards the sky.
“What does the bird's world contain?”
The traveller thought.
“Currents of air. Places to land. Movements. Heights.”
“And the plant's?”
“Light. Water. Gravity. Soil.”
“And the creature in the stream?”
“Differences in whatever surrounds it.”
The Keeper nodded.
“The same country.”
“But not the same world.”
The traveller looked down.
The phrase troubled him.
“How can that be?”
“The physical world is shared,” said the Keeper. “But what can enter into the organisation of each form of life is not identical.”
The bird passed through a landscape of possible flight.
The plant through a landscape of possible growth.
The small creature through a landscape of gradients and disturbances.
Their worlds overlapped.
But they did not coincide.
The traveller remembered the Garden of What Matters.
“There are differences that matter to each form of life.”
“Yes.”
“And now some of those differences can produce different responses.”
“Yes.”
“So the world becomes differentiated through the organism's activity.”
The Keeper smiled.
“Careful. You are approaching another dangerous word.”
“Perception?”
“Exactly.”
They descended from the hill.
At the bottom stood a house with many windows.
Each window was different.
One admitted only a narrow band of light.
Another opened towards the ground.
Another reflected almost everything outside.
The traveller approached.
“Whose house is this?”
“No one's,” said the Keeper. “It is only a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That sensitivity is not yet necessarily perception.”
The traveller looked through one of the windows.
The world outside appeared strangely altered.
A tree was visible, but not as he ordinarily saw it.
“Can something distinguish differences without representing them?”
“Yes.”
“Can it respond differently without possessing a picture of what it responds to?”
“Yes.”
“Can it be sensitive without knowing what it is sensitive to?”
The Keeper looked at him.
“You are still using knowing too generously.”
The traveller laughed.
“Then can it be sensitive without having to know anything?”
“That will do.”
They left the house and continued along the road.
The country around them was now alive with distinctions.
A change in light.
A change in warmth.
A vibration in the ground.
A chemical trace in the air.
A movement at the edge of the trees.
Each could enter into a different relation with a different form of life.
The traveller began to understand that sensitivity was not a window through which an organism looked upon the whole world.
It was a way in which an organism's own organisation allowed some worldly differences to enter into the pattern of its activity.
The environment supplied differences.
The organism supplied capacities for differential response.
Neither was sufficient alone.
The relation between them was where sensitivity appeared.
And with sensitivity, something new became possible.
The traveller stopped beside a narrow path.
“What is it?”
asked the Keeper.
“If an organism can respond differently according to which difference has occurred...”
“Yes?”
“Then perhaps a difference can matter before what it leads to has happened.”
The Keeper said nothing.
The traveller continued.
“A change in the water might lead the creature somewhere else.”
“Yes.”
“A scent might alter the path of an animal.”
“Yes.”
“A sound might cause it to flee.”
“Yes.”
“Then the difference need not merely alter what is happening now.”
He looked down the path.
“It might become consequential because of its relation to something else.”
The Keeper smiled.
“And now you are approaching the next threshold.”
They walked until they came to a place where the road divided.
At the centre stood a single stone.
Nothing about it seemed remarkable.
But on its surface were carved two arrows.
One pointed east.
The other west.
The traveller examined them.
“What does this mean?”
The Keeper looked at the arrows.
“Perhaps nothing.”
He looked puzzled.
“But they point.”
“Yes.”
“And pointing tells us something.”
“Does it?”
The traveller frowned.
The arrows had made one direction relevant to another.
But the stone itself had not changed the landscape.
It had introduced a relation.
Something here could alter what happened elsewhere.
A difference could participate in another difference.
The traveller looked beyond the crossroads.
Perhaps this was a new kind of possibility.
Not merely that an organism could respond differently to different conditions.
But that one difference could become consequential because it bore a relation to something else.
The Keeper began walking down the eastern road.
Above it stood an old archway.
Carved into the stone were the words:
ONE THING TELLS OF ANOTHER
The traveller followed.
Behind him lay the Garden of What Matters.
Beyond it lay the Country of Those Who Could Tell the Difference.
And ahead was a stranger territory still.
For once a living system could become sensitive to differences, the world could begin to reveal relations beyond immediate encounter.
A trace could lead towards what had left it.
A sound could alter behaviour because of what might follow.
A movement could make another movement relevant.
A difference could begin to tell of another difference.
The traveller paused beneath the archway.
“Is this meaning?” he asked.
The Keeper shook her head.
“Not yet.”
“Then what is it?”
She looked down the road.
“Indication.”
And together they entered the country beyond.
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