Signal.

There is the additional, often shattering notion gotten from reading a great deal in anthropology, that in poetry our motives are utterly similar to those who made cave paintings or petroglyphs, so that studying your own work of the past is to ruminate over artifacts, each one a signal, a remnant of a knot of perceptions that brings back to life who and what you were at the time, the past texture of what has to be termed as your "soul life."

Jim Harrison