Book recommedation: Topophilia by Yi-Fu Tuan. A book on landscape psychology, or something like it. It took me forever to read. It's unscientific, poetic, and an incredibly under-explored subject. Not sentimental or an exploration of mere emotional attachment to place.

Nieztsche says that you can feel the Will as somatic, a rising in the chest, a sort of internal force overcoming other modular parts of self. That the sensation is vertical and implies sublimation of lesser parts. The Will co-occurs physically not just psycho-spiritually.

Topohilia is a niche exploration of this phenomena where sensations in the body, caused by the physical world, become filtered through our subjective perceptions then projected back out creating the tapestry of our symbolic order.

~humans have eyes in the front of their heads and are made to walk forward, thus moving forward takes on a different symbolic meaning than moving backwards. Red is the color of blood and is almost always one of the oldest words in any given language, with blue being the last.

Black and White are the most primitive symbols and almost all peoples have at least 4 main directions but sometimes as many as 6, excepting jungle peoples which Tuan describes as existing less in a place and more in an element, as do the eskimos in snow.

The environment shapes culture - the best hunters are desert people, they have almost super human sight and senses of direction, see: The kalahari and indigenous australians. in rainforests they hunt by sound, and the stars play no role in their cosmology..

Does the ability to think in terms of distance inform our ability to think across time? Perhaps. "The clearest idea that the Pygmies have concerning the supernatural, as a state beyond death, beyond men and animals...is the beautiful song of a bird."

This phenomena is described by Mishima as being his obsession, a mystery he had to solve.

One way to think of it is: Animals play a role in many myths. Their roles and personalities are determined by their observed behaviors e.g. Coyote. This is one step removed: The symbolic ordering you get from snowy places, desert places, forests, seas, and even another level down

the symbolic ordering you get from your own bodily sensations. This is touched on but maybe better by Mishima. Maybe best of all by Mishima.