The traveller left the village at dawn.
He carried no map.
The old man had offered him one.
He had declined.
“I think I have enough maps,” he said.
The old man smiled.
“Then you have learned something.”
The traveller took the road towards the forest.
He knew the road now.
Or thought he did.
It passed the field that belonged to someone.
It crossed the stream where the stones made a crossing.
It ran beneath the old tree.
The traveller stopped there.
The tree was still the same tree.
The birds still landed on its branches.
The villagers still sat beneath it.
The sign still hung from its trunk.
HERITAGE TREE.
The traveller touched the bark.
Once, he would have asked:
What is this?
Now he found himself asking:
What can happen here?
A bird landed above him.
The traveller looked up.
The branch was a branch.
It was also a place to land.
A place to rest.
A place from which to fly.
A place from which to watch.
A place from which another possibility might begin.
None of these possibilities was hidden inside the branch.
None had been invented by the bird.
They belonged to the relation.
The traveller smiled.
Then he continued towards the forest.
At the edge of the trees he stopped.
The forest seemed familiar.
Yet he remembered standing there before, thinking there was only one forest.
Now he knew better.
The birds had their country.
The squirrels had theirs.
The insects had theirs.
The plants had theirs.
He had his.
And these countries overlapped.
None existed entirely apart from the others.
The traveller entered the trees.
He came upon the garden where he had once watched the vine.
The vine was still there.
It had climbed higher now.
Its tendrils had found new supports.
The traveller looked at it.
He remembered wondering whether the plant knew what it was doing.
He no longer felt the need to ask.
The vine did not need to know what the post was for the post to matter to its growth.
The light did not need to mean anything for the plant to turn towards it.
The stone did not need to announce itself as an obstacle for the root to grow around it.
The traveller stood quietly among the plants.
The garden had taught him something that the village had almost made him forget.
A difference could matter without being a message.
He walked on.
A bird cried somewhere above him.
The flock vanished into the trees.
The traveller looked towards the sky.
He could not see the predator.
But he knew what the cry had done.
Something absent had entered the possibilities of those who heard it.
The traveller listened to the forest.
A sound.
A movement.
A shadow.
A trace in the mud.
The world seemed full of differences.
But now he no longer wanted to turn every difference into a sign.
Some things indicated.
Some things signalled.
Some things meant.
Some things simply made a difference.
He walked deeper into the forest.
Eventually he reached the place where he had first found the old woman's chair.
It was still there.
The traveller laughed.
He sat down.
The chair held him.
He looked at it for a long time.
“A chair,” he said.
Then he shook his head.
Not merely a chair.
It had a structure.
A weight.
A height.
A history.
It could support him.
It could be climbed.
Carried.
Broken.
Burned.
It could become something else.
But none of these possibilities existed in isolation.
They appeared in relation to beings capable of entering into them.
The traveller stood.
He walked to the cliff.
He did not go too close.
The cliff did not warn him.
It did not ask him to stop.
It simply had a structure.
Gravity did the rest.
The traveller smiled.
He had once thought that removing meaning from the world would make the world empty.
Now he saw that the opposite was true.
The world was crowded with possibilities.
Meaning had not been everywhere.
It had not needed to be.
There had been something before it.
Something quieter.
Something more fundamental.
The capacity of things to enter into relations in which what could happen next was changed.
The traveller sat beside the cliff.
Below him, the river moved through the valley.
Above him, birds crossed the sky.
Behind him, the forest continued into the distance.
Beyond the forest lay the village.
Beyond the village, roads he had never travelled.
He thought of the old man's furrows.
A furrow made one direction easier.
But it did not determine the next step.
A road made one journey easier.
But it did not determine the destination.
A word made one distinction available.
But it did not determine what would be said next.
A concept made some possibilities easier to see.
But it could also be changed by what happened afterwards.
Everything seemed to lead somewhere.
But nowhere seemed inevitable.
The traveller looked back towards the village.
He could now see its roads from the hill.
They crossed one another.
Some ended.
Some divided.
Some disappeared into the fields.
Others continued towards places he had never seen.
The landscape was full of paths.
Some had been made by rivers.
Some by animals.
Some by people.
Some by generations of people whose names were forgotten.
And some were only beginning to appear.
The traveller looked down at his feet.
There was no path there.
Yet there was nothing preventing him from taking a step.
He did.
Then another.
He walked away from the road.
The ground was uneven.
No sign told him where to go.
No map instructed him.
The country did not speak.
Yet with every step, new possibilities appeared.
He could turn left.
He could turn right.
He could climb.
He could descend.
He could return.
He could continue.
The traveller stopped.
For a moment, he felt the old temptation to ask which way the country wanted him to go.
Then he laughed.
The country wanted nothing.
It afforded.
And he participated.
He looked across the valley.
The village.
The forest.
The river.
The fields.
The mountains.
All were there.
But now he could see something else.
Not hidden meanings.
Not invitations.
Not messages waiting to be decoded.
Relations.
Structures.
Capacities.
Histories.
Possibilities.
And possibilities that had grown from earlier possibilities.
The country was not finished.
Nor was it waiting to be finished.
The traveller realised that even the word country was too small.
For there was no single landscape of possibility.
There were overlapping worlds.
Biological worlds.
Perceptual worlds.
Social worlds.
Linguistic worlds.
Conceptual worlds.
Each emerging from relations already in motion.
Each altering what could happen next.
He thought of the plant.
The bird.
The village.
The furrow.
The word.
The concept.
None had created possibility from nothing.
Each had entered into a world already full of structure.
Each had changed that world.
And each had become part of the conditions for what came after.
The traveller looked towards the horizon.
He had begun his journey by asking:
What does the world afford?
He now understood why the question had never had a simple answer.
The world did not contain a list.
It contained no inventory of invitations.
There was no catalogue hidden beneath the stones.
There were only relations continually forming between a structured world and beings capable of entering into it.
And those relations changed the world.
The traveller smiled.
Perhaps the question was not:
What does the world afford?
Perhaps it was:
What can become possible between us and the world?
He stood.
The sun was lowering.
The traveller could return to the road.
He could follow the furrow.
He could cross the stream.
He could go back to the village.
Or he could walk into the open country.
Nothing told him which possibility was the right one.
But possibilities were there.
He took another step.
Then another.
Behind him, his footprints appeared in the earth.
Ahead of him, there were none.
Not yet.
And somewhere beyond the horizon, the country was already becoming possible.
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