Perhaps unrelated, but I'm reminded here of a passage from Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing -- "The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again" (387).

I like this quote because it makes explicit the real/symbolic distinction that we apply to nature, similar to Siegert's music example. The world simply exists, but we interact with it symbolically, assigning names and numbers to denote physical locations or geographic/geological features.