Hypothesis: all forms of writing are based on natural forms — they are a transcription of our landscapes: mountains, trees predators, prey, caves, clouds, rivers. The Greek alphabet, the Roman alphabet, Sanskrit, Chinese ideograms are all sketches of nature.
This is the claim made by Mark Changizi and his colleagues at Caltech, as referenced in the recent New Yorker story by Oliver Sacks “A Man of Letters.”
Sacks quoting Changizi: the shapes of letters “have been selected to resemble conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms.”
You navigate a text. You get lost in a book. You follow a trail of words. You forge a path through prose. All of these metaphors may be quite literal.
Even our literature is a “natural” process. Our literary mazes so many gopher holes and rabbit burrows.