I’ve been meaning to read ecologist and philosopher David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World for quite a while, but when I learned that he is the originator of the term “more-than-human,” I decided to tackle his book sooner rather than later. The fact that Robin Wall Kimmerer mentions him in Braiding Sweetgrass also encouraged me to turn to this book. It’s become something of a classic, and if (as I suspect) it relies on phenomenology as a theoretical basis, it could turn out to be very useful for my research. And even if it doesn’t, because it’s a classic, I still should read it.
The book’s preface begins with relationships. “Humans are tuned for relationship,” Abram writes. “They eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of others. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate” (ix). Abram echoes what I understand to be Indigenous ways of thinking about kinship with other species here in poetic prose:
For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied—whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. (ix)
I’m surprised to find Abram echoing Jon Young’s book about bird language, or perhaps the reverse is true—or perhaps Young is studying one concrete aspect of Abram’s general point. “Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly,” he continues. “And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished” (ix).
But things have changed. “Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our human-made technologies,” Abram continues. “It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations” (ix). This book’s “simple premise” is “that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (ix). That doesn’t mean we must renounce our technologies, but “it does imply that we must renew our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques and technologies are all rooted” (ix-x). We need forests and gravity and rivers to give us “distance from our technologies,” so that we can assess their limitations and “keep ourselves from turning into them” (x). “We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention,” Abram writes. “Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sold solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us” (x).
Abram had two goals in writing the book. The first was “to provide a set of powerful conceptual tools for my colleagues in the broad world of environmental activism” who are “already struggling to make sense of, and to alleviate, our current estrangement from the animate earth” (x). But he also wants “to provoke some new thinking within the institutional realm of scholars, scientists, and educators—many of whom have been strangely silent in response to the rapid deterioration of wild nature, the steady vanishing of other species, and the consequent flattening of our human relationships” (x). Because of these two goals, he has “tried to maintain a high standard of theoretical and scholarly precision, without, however, masking the passion, the puzzlement, and the pleasure that flow from my own engagement with the living land” (x). So there are two introductions to the book, one personal and one technical (x). The technical chapter is about phenomenology—“the study of direct experience”—which suggests “that the human mind was thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our forgotten relation with the encompassing earth” (xi). Perhaps this book, among other things, will function as a kind of introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, some of which I think I’m obligated to read for this project.
The book’s first chapter, “The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry,” begins with Abram standing in the middle of rice paddies late at night in eastern Bali. The stars were reflected in the water:
I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it—the immediate impression was one of weightlessness. I might have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness: the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sustained trance. (4)
This experience was his introduction to the world of insects, and “the great influence that insects—such diminutive entities—could have on the human senses” (4). He was in Indonesia studying the relation between magic and medicine, and he was there not as an anthropologist or academic researcher, but as a magician in his own right; he had paid for college by performing as a magician throughout New England (4). He had studied the use of sleight-of-hand magic in psychotherapy, and had learned that magic might “lend itself well to the curative arts,” and for the first time had become interested in the relation between folk medicine and magic (4-5).
But the focus of Abram’s research shifted “from questions regarding the application of magical techniques in medicine and ritual curing toward a deeper pondering of the relation between traditional magic and the animate natural world” (5). Villagers in Indonesia and Nepal believed that sorcerers could cause the very maladies they were curing, although Abram never say any evidence of that happening (5-6). Still, the magicians and healers did nothing to contradict those rumours, which enabled them to maintain a basic level of privacy: “the sorcerer ensured that only those who were in real and profound need of his skills would dare to approach him for help” (6). “This privacy, in turn, left the magician free to attend to what he acknowledged to be his primary craft and function,” Abram continues: “For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance” (6). That community includes “the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals—birds, mammals fish, reptiles, insects—that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms—forests, rivers, caves, mountains—that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth” (6-7).
Abram realizes that the shaman “acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth” (7). Through ritual and ceremony, the shaman “ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it—not just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise” (7). To some extent this is the responsibility of every adult in the community, but “the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others” (7). It is through this engagement “with the animate powers that dwell beyond the human community” that the traditional magician can “alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community” (7). The ability to cure these ailments comes from this “more continuous practice of ‘healing’ or balancing the community’s relation to the surrounding land” (7). Disease in these cultures is usually thought of as an imbalance within the body of the sick person, but “such destructive influences within the human community are commonly traceable to a disequilibrium between that community and the larger field of forces in which it is embedded” (7). “Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and maintaining the relations between the human village and the animate landscape are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village,” Abrams writes (7-8). Thus the traditional magician or medicine person is primarily an intermediary between human and more-than-human worlds, and only secondarily a healer (8). “The medicine person’s primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded—it is from this that his or her power to alleviate human illness derives—and this sets the local magician apart from other persons,” Abrams contends (8).
This point is often missed by Western anthropologists who assume that the natural world is determinate and mechanical, and who therefore see the sorcerer as dealing with supernatural entities (8). But, Abram argues,
that which is regarded with the greatest awe and wonder by indigenous, oral cultures is . . . none other than what we view as nature itself. The deeply mysterious powers and entities with whom the shaman enters into a rapport are ultimately the same forces—the same plants, animals, forests, and winds—that to literate, “civilized” Europeans are just so much scenery, the pleasant backdrop of our more pressing human concerns. (9)
In such cultures, people “experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others” (9). “Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape,” Abram continues (9). That ability defines the shaman’s powers: he or she must be able “to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture” and “make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations—songs, cries, gestures—of the larger, more-than-human field” (9).
“Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own,” Abram writes (9-10). That ecological function isn’t always obvious, but we shouldn’t dismiss the dimensions into which the shaman sends his or her awareness as “supernatural” or “internal” to his or her psyche—“For it is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth” (10). “When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings,” Abram explains, “then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself—the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable” (10). I wonder if that’s completely accurate—surely one can have individual psychology without losing a sense of the infinite complexity of the natural world.
But perhaps Abram is going beyond infinite complexity: “in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life” (10). The shaman propels his awareness laterally, “outward into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface” (10). We need to pay attention the the shaman’s prayers and rituals, “the daily propitiations and praise that flow from her toward the land and its many voices” (11).
All of this came to Abram slowly during his stay in Bali. In one home, his hosts left food for the spirits of the family compound (11). The food was eaten by ants (12). Were these insects “the very ‘household spirits’ to whom the offerings were being made?” (12). He realized the logic of the practice: it kept the ants from infesting the rest of the compound, establishing “certain boundaries between the human and ant communities,” and “by honoring this boundary with gifts, the humans apparently hoped to persuade the insects to respect the boundary and not enter the buildings” (13). But Abram was puzzled by his hosts’ assertion that the offerings were for spirits: “my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the ‘spirits’ of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form,” rather than a Western, anthropomorphic or human version of spirit (13).
“As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body—we live in our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form,” Abrams continues. “We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight” (13-14). While our experience may “be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity,” we cannot “precisely experience the living sensations of another form” (14). “We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations; we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know,” he states (14). To us, other species “are purveyors of secrets, carries of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes, who show us, when foraging, where we might find the ripest berries or the best route to follow back home” (14). We learn from these other species, and we receive from them gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing, and yet “they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and displaying their own rituals, never wholly fathomable” (14). In addition, in Indigenous cultures “it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as ‘alive,’” but also the rivers, the rains, the stones, the mountains (14).
The worship of ancestors in oral cultures is related to more-than-human species and the “enveloping landscape” (15). Our bodies—“whether human or otherwise”—are not mechanical objects, but rather they are magical entities, “the mind’s own sensuous aspect,” and at death their “decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born” (15). “Each indigenous culture elaborates this recognition of metamorphosis in its own fashion, taking its clues from the particular terrain in which it is situated,” Abram continues (15). “‘Ancestor worship,’ in its myriad forms, then, is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to nonhuman nature; it signifies not so much an awe or reverence of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms that awareness takes when it is not in human form, when the familiar human embodiment dies and decays to become part of the encompassing cosmos,” he states (16). Thus other species or “forms of experience” are “never absolutely alien to ourselves. Despite the obvious differences in shape, and ability, and style of being, they remain at least distantly familiar, even familial. It is, paradoxically, this received kinship or consanguinity that renders the difference or otherness, so eerily potent” (16).
In a cave on Bali, Abram watches multiple spiders making webs, entranced by the “ever-complexifying expanse of living patterns upon patterns” (19). He writes that since then, he has never encountered a spider “without feeling a great strangeness and awe” (19). Those spiders were his introduction to the spirits, “the the magic afoot in the land” (19). “It was from them that I first learned of the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature, the ability that an alien form of sentience has to echo one’s own, to instill a reverberation in oneself that temporarily shatters habitual ways of seeing and feeling, leaving one open to a world all alive, awake, and aware,” he writes. “It was from such small beings that my senses first learned of the countless worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that we commonly inhabit, and from them that I first learned that my body could, with practice, enter sensorially into these dimensions” (19). He notes that insects brought him the “long and cyclical trance that we call malaria” as well (20).
“I had rarely before paid much attention to the natural world,” Abram writes. “But my exposure to traditional magicians and seers was shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things” (20). He began seeing and hearing differently: “When a magician spoke of a power or ‘presence’ lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the roof, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that the column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room” (20). He began to listen to bird song as a form of speech, “responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding earth” (20). He became a student of subtle differences: “Walking along the dirt paths, I learned to slow my pace in order to feel the difference between one nearby hill and the next, or to taste the presence of a particular field at a certain time of day when, as I had been told by a local dukun, the place had a special power and proffered unique gifts” (20). That power was communicated to his senses by shadows and smells and other things he “could only isolate after many days of stopping and listening” (20). He began encountering animals—monkeys and lizards—and his body seemed able to communicate with them, as if “motivated by a wisdom older than my thinking mind, as though it was held and moved by a logos, deeper than words, spoken by the Other’s body, the trees, and the stony ground on which we stood” (21).
Abram suggests that our inability to discern the shaman’s allegiance to the more-than-human world is a fundamental misunderstanding (21). Our society, with its massive scale and economic centralization, “can hardly be seen in relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem; the more-than-human ecology with which it is directly engaged is the biosphere itself” (21-22). Our relationship with that biosphere is hardly reciprocal or balanced; we are destroying the biosphere (22). From an animistic perspective, that destruction is the cause of our culture’s physical and psychological distress (22). “Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities,” Abram writes. “Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese” (22). Shutting ourselves off from these voices “is to rob our own sense of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (22).
In Nepal, Abram learned about birds. In the Himalayas, “those who dwell and soar in the sky are the primary powers. They alone move easily in such a zone, swooping downward to become a speck near the valley floor, or spiraling into the heights on invisible currents” (23). When he returned to the United States, he writes, “I was excited by the new sensibilities that had stirred in me—my newfound awareness of a more-than-human world, of the great potency of the land, and particularly of the keen intelligence of other animals, large and small, whose lives and cultures interpenetrate our own” (24). He surprised his neighbours by chattering with squirrels or watching herons fishing for hours (24-25). But gradually he began to lose his sense of the animals’ awareness, observing the animals from outside their worlds, not feeling the heron’s “tensed yet poised alertness” with his own muscles (25). “As the expressive and sentient landscape slowly faded behind my more exclusively human concerns, threatening to become little more than illusion or fantasy, I began to feel—particularly in my chest and abdomen—as though I were being cut off from vital sources of nourishment,” he writes. “I was indeed reacclimating to my own culture, becoming more attuned to its styles of discourse and interaction, yet my bodily senses seemed to be losing their acuteness, becoming less awake to subtle changes and patterns” (25-26). His senses were dimming, and “the air seemed thin and void of substance of influence. It was not, here, a sensuous medium—the felt matrix of our breath and the breath of the other animals and plants and soils—but was merely an absence, and indeed was constantly referred to in everyday discourse as mere empty space” (26).
Abram started to find other ways “of tapping the very different sensations and perceptions” that he had grown used to in Asia (27). “Intermittently, I began to wonder if my culture’s assumptions regarding the lack of awareness in other animals and in the land itself was less a product of careful and judicious reasoning than of a strange inability to clearly perceive other animals—a real inability to clearly see, or focus upon, anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech,” he writes:
The sad results of our interactions with the rest of nature were being reported in every newspaper—from the depletion of topsoil due to industrial farming techniques to the fouling of groundwater by industrial wastes, from the rapid destruction of ancient forests to, worst of all, the ever-accelerating extinction of our fellow species—and these remarkable and disturbing occurrences, all readily traceable to the ongoing activity of “civilized” humankind, did indeed suggest the possibility that there was a perceptual problem in my culture, that modern, “civilized” humanity simply did not perceive surrounding nature in a clear manner, if we have even been perceiving it at all. (27)
However, his experiences in Indonesia and Nepal had shown him “that nonhuman nature can be perceived and experienced with far more intensity and nuance than is generally acknowledged in the West” (27). “What was it that made possible the heightened sensitivity to extrahuman reality, the profound attentiveness to other species and to the Earth that is evidenced in so many of these cultures, and that had so altered my awareness that my senses now felt stifled and starved by the patterns of my own culture?” he asks (27). Why is the modern West so inattentive (27)? How had we “come to be so exempt from this sensory reciprocity,” “so deaf and blind to the vital existence of other species, and to the animate landscapes they inhabit, that we now so casually bring about their destruction?” (27-28).
For Abram, “our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and to nature in general” (28). “We consciously encounter nonhuman nature only as it has been circumscribed by our civilization and its technologies: through our domesticated pets, on the television, or at the zoo (or, at best, in carefully managed ‘nature preserves’),” he writes:
The plants and animals we consume are neither gathered nor hunted—they are bred and harvested in huge, mechanized farms. “Nature,” it would seem, has become simply a stock of “resources” for human civilization, and so we can hardly be surprised that our civilized eyes and ears are somewhat oblivious to the existence of perspectives that are not human at all, or that a person entering into or returning to the West from a nonindustrial culture would feel startled and confused by the felt absence of nonhuman powers. (28)
But the commodification doesn’t explain the perceptual shift that made it possible to reduce the more-than-human world to an object, “little of the power of the process whereby our senses first relinquished the power of the Other, the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rituals, our dances, and our prayers,” Abram continues (28). He asks how we might “catch a glimpse of this process, which has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that now structure our very thinking?” (28). Perhaps, if one were to stand on the edge of our civilization, “like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own,” it might be possible to become open “to the shifting voices and flapping forms that crawl and hover beyond the mirrored walls of the city,” and perhaps that person might “find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely—only, that is, if the margin he frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else” (29).
The second chapter, “Philosophy on the Way to Ecology,” is subtitled “A Technical Introduction to the Inquiry,” and it begins with a discussion of Edmund Husserl and phenomenology (31). Abrams says that it’s natural to turn to phenomenology “to understand the strange difference between the experienced world, or worlds, of indigenous, vernacular cultures and the world of modern European and North American civilization,” because “phenomenology is the Western philosophical tradition that has most forcefully called into question the modern assumption of a single, wholly determinable, objective reality” (31). That notion comes from René Descartes’s separation of the thinking mind, or subject, from the material world of things, or objects—although Galileo had already made a distinction between objective and subjective properties of matter (31-32). Still, it was only after Descartes “that material reality came to be commonly spoken of as a strictly mechanical realm, as a determinate structure whose laws of operation could be discerned only via mathematical analysis” (32). “By apparently purging material reality of subjective experience,” Descartes “laid the foundation for the construction of the objective or ‘disinterested’ sciences, which by their feverish and forceful investigations have yielded so much of the knowledge and many of the technologies that have today become commonplace in the West” (32). But the objective sciences “overlook our ordinary, everyday experience of the world around us,” which is “necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns” (32). The world in which we find ourselves “is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses” (32).
“My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined,” Abram argues (33). “The world and I reciprocate each other,” he continues (33). That world “is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn. Even the most detached scientist must begin and end her study in this indeterminate field of experience” (33). Indeed, that scientist is “drawn to a particular field by a complex of subjective experiences and encounters, many of which unfold far from the laboratory and its rarefied atmosphere,” and he or she “never completely succeeds in making himself into a pure spectator of the world, for he cannot cease to live in the world as a human among other humans, or as a creature among other creatures, and his scientific concepts and theories necessarily borrow aspects of their character and texture from his untheorized, spontaneously lived experience” (33). The results of science’s “value-free” investigations “come to display themselves in the open and uncertain field of everyday life, whether embedded in social policies with which we must come to terms or embodied in new technologies with which we must grapple” (33-34). Our spontaneous, emotional, subjective experience of the world “remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity” (34).
That ground is not acknowledged by scientific culture, however, and “[t]he fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the ‘realer’ world of quantifiable and measurable scientific ‘facts,’” as merely subjective, rather than objective (34). For Abram, “[t]he living, feeling, and thinking organism is assumed to derive, somehow, from the mechanical body whose reflexes and ‘systems’ have been measured and mapped, the living person now an epiphenomenon of the anatomized corpse” (34). “That it takes living, sensing subjects, complete with their enigmatic emotions and unpredictable passions, to conceive of those subatomic fields, or to dissect and anatomize the body, is readily overlooked, or brushed aside as inconsequential,” he states (34). This argument is a thorough debunking of positivism, of scientism, but I wonder if science is really that bloodless. Maybe it is—I’m not a scientist and have no first-hand knowledge.
“Nevertheless, the ambiguity of experience is already a part of any phenomenon that draws our attention,” Abram continues. “For whatever we perceive is necessarily entwined with our own subjectivity, already blended with the dynamism of life and experience” (34). That’s particularly true of psychology, he argues, even though that discipline models itself on the positivism of the “hard” sciences (34-35). “Here as elsewhere,” he states, “the everyday world—the world of our direct, spontaneous experience—is still assumed to derive from an impersonal, objective dimension of pure ‘facts’ that we glimpse only through our instruments and equations” (35).
Edmund Husserl inaugurated the philosophical discipline of phenomenology because he was frustrated with such assumptions, particularly in the early discipline of psychology (35). Phenomenology “would turn toward ‘the things themselves,’ toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy” (35). It would “describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience,” and by doing so, it “would articulate the ground of the other sciences” and establish them at last “upon a firm footing—not, perhaps, as solid as the fixed and finished ‘object’ upon which those sciences pretend to stand, but the only basis possible for a knowledge that necessarily emerges from our lived experience of the things around us” (35-36). Abram gives us a long quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception here: it runs, in part, “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is” (qtd. 36).
For Husserl, the world of experience, or the “phenomenal” world, is “a thoroughly subjective realm,” a “wholly mental dimension, an immaterial field of appearances” which is experienced by a self or subject that is “a pure consciousness, a ‘transcendental’ mind or ego” (36). That characterization led critics to attack his method as being solipsistic, locking philosophers inside their own solitary experiences, their own minds (37). Husserl struggled to answer this criticism: “How does our subjective experience enable us to recognize the reality of other selves, other experiencing beings?” (37). According to Abram, the solution implicated the body—both one’s own and that of others—“as a singularly important structure within the phenomenal field” (37). One’s own body is experienced from within, but those of others are experienced from the outside; nevertheless, “[t]he gestures and expressions of these other bodies, viewed from without, echo and resonate one’s own bodily movements and gestures, experienced from within. By an associative ‘empathy,’ the embodied subject comes to recognize these other bodies as other centers of experience, other subjects” (37). In this way, “[t]he field of appearances, while still a thoroughly subjective realm, was now seen to be inhabited by multiple subjectivities; the phenomenal field was no longer the isolate haunt of a solitary ego, but a collective landscape, constituted by other experiencing subjects as well as by oneself” (37). There are two regions of the experiential or phenomenal field: images that arise within the body—dreams and fantasies—but also phenomena that are “responded to and experienced by other embodied subjects as well as by myself” (38). Those phenomena are still subjective, since they appear through experience—but they cannot be altered or dissipated at will (like dreams or fantasies), “for they seem to be buttressed by many involvements besides my own” (38). In this way, “they are intersubjective phenomena—phenomena experienced by a multitude of sensing subjects” (38).
“Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity suggested a remarkable new interpretation of the so-called ‘objective world,’” Abram writes. “For the conventional contrast between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ realities could now be framed as a contrast between the subjective field of experience itself—as the felt contrast between subjective and intersubjective phenomena” (38). For Husserl, the scientific method was about intersubjectivity, not objectivity—about reaching a consensus among a group of subjects, rather than avoiding subjectivity altogether (38). Objectivity was merely a theoretical construction, “an unwarranted idealization of intersubjective experience” (38). The world is “an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles” (39). We might experience the phenomenal world as stable and solid, but that “experienced solidity is precisely sustained by the continual encounter with others, with other embodied subjects, other centers of experience” (39). We intuit that things are more than what we directly see of them, that they existed before we looked at them and will not disappear when we stop looking at them, “since it remains an experience for others—not just for other persons, but . . . for other sentient organisms,” for the birds that nest in a tree’s branches and the insects that climb its bark and even the tissues of the tree itself (39). “It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world,” Abram writes (39).
Husserl’s “growing recognition of intersubjective experience, and of the body’s importance for such experience, ultimately led him to recognize a more primary, corporeal dimension midway between the transcendental ‘consciousness’ of his earlier analyses and the utterly subjective ‘matter’ assumed by the natural sciences,” Abram continues. “This was the intersubjective world of life, the Lebenswelt, or ‘life-world’” (40). According to Abram, the life-world “is the world of our immediately lived experience as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it” (40). It is not private, but collective—“the common field of our lives and the other lives with which we are entwined”—but it is also “profoundly ambiguous and indeterminate, since our experience of this field is always relative to our situation within it” (40). “The life-world is thus the world as we organically experience it in its enigmatic multiplicity and open-endedness, prior to conceptually freezing it into a static space of ‘facts’”—or even prior to any kind of complete conceptualizing (40). The life-world is “peripherally present in any thought or activity we undertake,” but when we attempt to explain that world conceptually, “we seem to forget our active participation within it” (40). “Striving to represent the world, we inevitably forfeit its direct presence,” Abram writes. “It was Husserl’s genius to realize that the assumption of objectivity had led to an almost total eclipse of the life-world in the modern era, to a nearly complete forgetting of this living dimension in which all our endeavors are rooted” (40-41). This separation between science and technical discourses and “the sensuous world of our ordinary engagements” led, for Husserl, “to a clear crisis in European civilization,” because science and technical discourses “were beginning to blindly overrun the experiential world—even, in their errancy, threatening to obliterate the world-of-life entirely” (41).
Abram believes that it ought to be evident that the life-world may be different for different cultures—that it is deeply influenced by the way members of other cultures live and engage the life-world (41). “Even the scientifically disclosed ‘objective universe’ of contemporary Western civilization cannot genuinely be separated from the particular institutions, technologies, and ways of life endemic to this society since the seventeenth century,” he writes (41). If human life-worlds are diverse, how much more diverse must be the life-worlds of wolves, or owls, or bees in a hive, he suggests, although he acknowledges that “there are basic structures of the life-world that are shared, elements that are common to different cultures and even, we may suggest, to different species” (41). Husserl suggests that “underneath the layer of the diverse cultural life-worlds there reposes a deeper, more unitary life-world,” which “supports and sustains all our diverse and discontinuous worldviews” (41-42). The earth, which for Husserl is space itself, or at least our perception of space, is that unitary life-world (42). He even suggests that the Copernican revolution was incorrect, because we perceive the earth as stable and the sun as rotating around it (42-43). Husserl also contends that the earth is at the heart of our notions of time and space (43). The earth is thus “the secret depth of the life-world,” “the most unfathomable region of experience, and enigma that exceeds the structurations of any particular culture or language,” the “art of the world,” “the common ‘root basis’ of all relative life-worlds” (43). According to Abram, these insights “into the importance of the earth for all human cognition” had “profound implications for the subsequent unfolding of phenomenological philosophy” (43). Husserl wasn’t rejecting science; instead, he was asking science to “acknowledge that it is rooted in the same world that we all engage in our everyday lives and with our unaided senses,” and that “quantitative science remains an expression of, and hence must be guided by, the qualitative world of our common experience” (43). Phenomenology’s task is to demonstrate how “every theoretical and scientific practice grows out of and remains supported by the forgotten ground of our directly felt and lived experience, and has value and meaning only in reference to this primordial and open realm” (43).
Here, Abram says that the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows “how Husserl’s legacy was taken up and transformed in a manner that endowed this philosophy with a particular power and relevance for the ecological questions that now confront us” (44). Merleau-Ponty “set out to radicalize Husserl’s phenomenology” by clarifying its inconsistencies and “by disclosing a more eloquent way of speaking” that “might itself draw us into the sensuous depths of the life-world” (44). First, while the body was central to Husserl’s attempt at avoiding solipsism, and our insertion into “the common, or intersubjective, field of experience,” it remained a mere appearance in Husserl’s thinking (44-45). It was still “a transcendental ego, ultimately separable for the phenomena (including the body) that it posits and ponders,” Abram writes. “It is precisely this lingering assumption of a self-subsistent, disembodied, transcendental ego that Merleau-Ponty rejects” (45). Instead, the subject, for Merleau-Ponty, the “experiencing ‘self,’” is “the bodily organism” (45). This, Abram says, is “a radical move,” since most of us are used to thinking about the self, “our innermost essence,” as something incorporeal (45). But our selves are situated in, and dependent on, our bodies, our sense organs (45). “The living body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but with oneself—the very possibility of reflection, of thought, of knowledge,” Abram contends. “The common notion of the experiencing self, or mind, as an immaterial phantom ultimately independent of the body can only be a mirage: Merleau-Ponty invites us to recognize, at the heart of even our most abstract cogitations, the sensuous and sentient life of the body itself” (45). The living, animate, attentive body, which Merleau-Ponty called the “bodily subject,” is the power we have to look at something, or to turn and look at something else, to walk on the ground and breathe in the air (46).
“Yet ‘I’ do not deploy these powers like a commander piloting a ship, for I am, in my depths, indistinguishable from them,” Abram writes (46). Acknowledging that I am a body doesn’t “reduce the mystery of my yearnings and fluid thoughts to a set of mechanisms, or my ‘self’ to a determinate robot,” but rather “it is to affirm the uncanniness of this physical form” (46). Nor does it lock our awareness within a closed and bounded object, because the boundaries of a living body “are open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange” (46). It is difficult to define where our bodies begin and where they end; considered phenomenologically—“that is, as we actually experience and live it—the body is a creative, shape-shifting entity” (46-47). Our “finite bodily presence” is our “very means of entering into relation with all things” (47). Because the body is “the very subject of awareness,” Merleau-Ponty suggests that philosophy can’t provide a complete picture of reality (which would require a perspective outside of existence, which is impossible), but this move does open “the possibility of a truly authentic phenomenology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-and-now, rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things, events and powers that surround us on every hand” (47).
“Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with this physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earth’s animals, and so to remember and rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence,” Abram writes (47). This runs against the central current of the Western philosophical tradition, which separates mind from body (47). Descartes even denied other organisms the ability to feel pleasure or pain (48). These arguments for human uniqueness “have regularly been utilized by human groups to justify the exploitation not just of other organisms, but of other humans as well (other nations, other races, or simply the ‘other’ sex); armed with such arguments, one had only to demonstrate that these others were not fully human, or were ‘closer to the animals,’ in order to establish one’s right of dominion” (48). But those hierarchies are undone “by any phenomenology that takes seriously our immediate sensory experience. For our senses disclose to use a wild-flowering proliferation of entities and elements, in which humans are thoroughly immersed,” since “we find ourselves in the midst of, rather than on top of, this order” (48-49). “Does the human intellect, or ‘reason,’ really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms?” Abram asks. “Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us?” (49).
“For Merleau-Ponty, all of the creativity and free-ranging mobility that we have come to associate with the human intellect is, in truth, an elaboration, or recapitulation, of a profound creativity already underway at the most immediate level of sensory perception,” Abram continues. “The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world. The body’s actions and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting” (49). One sign of the body’s indeterminacy is our ability to be surprised or startled—they show that not everything has been anticipated by our programming (49). Even our experiences, or perception, is “the constant thwarting of such closure” (49). A spider’s ability to make a web might be genetically programmed, but those instructions “can hardly predict the specifics of the microterrain within which the spider may find itself at any particular moment” (50). For that reason, “the genome could not explicitly have commanded the order of every flexion and extension of her various limbs as she weaves this web into its place” (50). Her genetic programming still needs to “be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those contours” (50). For Abram, and Merleau-Ponty, “this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself) is what is meant by “perception” (50).
Like the spider, we have bodies, with a genetic inheritance and an evolutionary history, but the human body “is also our insertion in a world that exceeds our grasp in every direction, our means of contact with things and lives that are still unfolding, open and indeterminate, all around us” (50). Nothing we perceive is determinate, because “each entity that my body sees, presents some face or facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view” (50). Abram’s example is a clay bowl: we can only see one side at a time, and if we look at the outside, we will miss the inside, but we still know that these other dimensions exist, even if they are not immediately accessible (51). In addition, “the bowl is a temporal being, an entity shifting and changing in time, although the rhythm of its changes may be far slower than my own,” and as temporal entities, we change every time we return to that bowl (51). Every other object is the same (52). And all of those objects reciprocate our attention:
When my body thus responds to the mute solicitation of another being, that being responds in turn, disclosing to my senses some new aspect or dimension that in turn invites further exploration. By this process my sensing body gradually attunes itself to the style of this other presence—to the way of this stone, or tree, or table—as the other seems to adjust itself to my own style and sensitivity. In this manner the simplest thing may become a world for me, as, conversely, the thing or being comes to take its place more deeply in my world. (52)
“Perception, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, is precisely this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that surround it,” a “silent conversation” that we carry on with things, “a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my verbal awareness” and indeed independent of that awareness, as when “my legs, hiking, continually attune and adjust themselves to the varying steepness of the mountain slopes . . . without my verbal consciousness needing to direct those adjustments” (52-53). “Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent or wordless dance always already going on,” Abram continues—“this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits” (53).
“Where does perception originate?” Abram asks (53). Not in the thing perceived, which will be perceived differently by other beings (a bee sees a flower differently than a human does), or in our own heads, since “without the actual existence of this other entity,” of a flower, for instance, there would be nothing to perceive (53). For Merleau-Ponty, neither the perceiver nor the perceived “is wholly passive in the event of perception” (53). The sensible solicits our bodies, and our bodies question the sensible, “a reciprocal encroachment” (54). In the act of perception, Abram explains,
I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures. (54)
Merleau-Ponty consistently writes of “the sensible thing, commonly considered by our philosophical tradition to be passive and inert,” in “the active voice,” giving it, grammatically, agency and action, treating it as an animate thing, “and, in some curious manner, alive” (55). “Are such animistic turns of phrase to be attributed simply to some sort of poetic license that Merleau-Ponty has introduced into his philosophy?” Abram asks (55-56). No, he replies:
Merleau-Ponty writes of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers, and of the sensible itself as a field of animate presences, in order to acknowledge and underscore their active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience. To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to our conceptualizations and definitions. (56)
For Merleau-Ponty, or “most immediate experience of things” is “necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter—of tension, communication, and commingling” (56). In the depths of that encounter, we experience the sensible thing as an interlocutor, “as a dynamic presence that confronts us and draws us into relation” (56). “To define the other being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being,” Abram writes, and “we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies” (56). We cannot “avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged” if “we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience” (56). That’s why Merleau-Ponty uses the active voice: “To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world” (56).
Abram borrows the term “participation” from the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl “to characterize the event of perception” (57). Lévy-Bruhl used participation to characterize the way Indigenous peoples thought stones or mountains were alive, and the way that “particular places and persons and powers may all be felt to participate in one another’s existence, influencing each other and being influenced in turn” (57). For Merleau-Ponty, “participation is a defining attribute of perception itself”: “perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives” (57). Abram contends that “at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists” (57).
Abram uses the analogy of sleight-of-hand magic to explain this claim. The magician “uses his sleights to enhance the animation of the object,” creating “ambiguous gaps and lacunae” in its visible trajectory, which are filled by spectators with impossible events, “and it is this spontaneous involvement of the spectators’ own senses” that allows the object to appear and reappear or pass through the magician’s hand (57-58). The spectators’ imagination “is not a separate mental faculty,” but instead is “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible” (58). “In truth, since the act of perception is always open-ended and unfinished, we are never wholly locked into any particular instance of participation,” Abram continues (59). We can turn our attention elsewhere, for instance, but we are only substituting one participation for another, rather than suspending “the flux of participation itself” (59).
Perception is “the concerted activity of all the body’s senses as they function and flourish together” (59). For Abram, the various senses are blended together in the act of participation: Merleau-Ponty argues that “our primordial, preconceptual experience . . . is inherently synaesthetic,” and that only seems surprising because “we have become estranged from our direct experience (and hence from our primordial contact with the entities and elements that surround us” (60). That doesn’t mean that the senses are not “distinct modalities,” but rather “[i]t is to assert that they are divergent modalities of a single and unitary living body, that they are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these divergent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap” (61). Our senses, “diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge . . . in the perceived thing,” in the same way that our eyes converge upon the object they perceive “and convene there into a single focus” (62). “My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent way, and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other,” Abram suggests (62). Thus the act of perception involves “a participation between the various sensory systems of the body itself,” which are not separable, “for the intertwining of my body with the things it perceives is effected only through the interweaving of my senses, and vice versa” (62). Our bodies are open circuits that complete themselves “only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth” (62).
Abram suggests that “[w]hen we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations,” human artifacts “begin to exhibit a common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness,” while “organic entities” start “to display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique dance” (63). Rocks themselves “seem to speak their own uncanny languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into silent communication” (63). “In contact with the native forms of the earth, one’s senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in ever-shifting patterns,” Abram continues (63). Those organic forms are defined by variation, whereas mass-produced artifacts of our industrial civilization reiterate themselves without variation, without surprise (64). However, “our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness,” an unknowability from the materials of which they are made, even though that “dynamism is stifled within mass-produced structures closed off from the rest of the earth, imprisoned within technologies that plunder the living land,” and without that dynamism, “our animal senses wither even as they support the abstract intellect” (64). “Whenever we assume the position and poise of the human animal—Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject—then the entire material world itself seems to come awake and to speak, yet organic, earth-born entities speak far more eloquently than the rest,” and “we find ourselves alive in a living field of powers far more expressive and diverse than the strictly human sphere to which we are accustomed” (65). I’m not sure I agree with Abram here: I’ve been surprised by things made by humans.
“So the recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded,” Abram continues. “As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part in a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations born by countless other bodies” (65). This is the biosphere “as it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body,” rather than the biosphere as a “complex assemblage of planetary mechanisms” (65). It is the biosphere as experienced by “the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences” (65).
In his last, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of the collective “Flesh,” meaning “both our flesh and ‘the flesh of the world’” (66). “The Flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity,” Abram explains. “It is the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient, a mystery of which we have always, at least tacitly, been aware, since we have never been able to affirm one of these phenomena, the perceivable world or the perceiving self, without implicitly affirming the existence of the other” (66). Abram distinguishes this notion from conventional scientific discourse, which “commonly maintains that subjective experience is ‘caused’ by an objectifiable set of processes in the mechanically determined field of the sensible,” and from New Age spiritualism, which “privileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter, and often maintains that material reality is itself an illusory effect caused by an immaterial mind or spirit” (66). By prioritizing either the sentient or the sensed, these views “perpetuated the distinction between human ‘subjects’ and natural ‘objects,’” and so “neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use” (66-67). Both views avoid considering “the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive” (67). “Once I acknowledge that my own sentience, or subjectivity, does not preclude my visible, tactile, objective existence for others, I find myself forced to acknowledge that any visible, tangible form that meets my gaze may also be an experiencing subject, sensitive and responsive to the beings around it, and to me,” Abram states (67).
Our hands, according to Merleau-Ponty, can only touch things because they are touchable: “we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive” (68). Abram goes as far as to say that “the world is perceiving itself through us” (68). That idea comes from Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh” (qtd. 69). All of this brings Merleau-Ponty’s ideas “into startling consonance with the worldviews of many indigenous, oral cultures” (69). For Abram, a new “environmental ethic” may come into being “through a renewed attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that sustains us” (69).
Abram suggests that in Indigenous, oral cultures, “language seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses, while in Western civilization language seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances” (71-72). For that reason, the next chapter, “The Flesh of Language,” examines what is meant by the word “language.” He intends to pay attention to the mystery of language in order to “develop a conscious familiarity with it, a sense of its texture, its habits, its sources of sustenance” (73). While the exchange of perception is open and indeterminate, it is nevertheless “highly articulate”: it has a coherent structure, embodying “an open-ended logos that we enact from within rather than the abstract logic we deploy from without” (73-74). Merleau-Ponty saw language as “a profoundly carnal phenomenon, rooted in our sensorial experience of each other and of the world” (74). He believed language came out of gesture, and that rather than embodying an arbitrary sign for an emotion or feeling, gesture “is the bodying-forth of that emotion into the world, it is that feeling of delight or of anguish in its tangible, visible aspect” (74). Gestures speak directly to our bodies, are are understood “without any interior reflection,” according to Merleau-Ponty, and speech is “a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the worlds” (74). We acquire our first language through mimicry and by making sounds—through our bodies, according to Abram, not our minds—and so language “cannot be genuinely studied or understood in isolation from the sensuous reverberation and resonance of active speech” (75). Linguistic meaning, for Merleau-Ponty, “is rooted in the felt experience induced by specific sounds and sound-shapes as they echo and contrast with one another, each language a kind of song, a particular way of ‘singing the world’” (76).
This view of language is a stark contrast to the prevalent view, which “considers any language to be a set of arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon words, or ‘signs,’ linked by a purely formal system of syntactic and grammatical rules,” which make language something like a code that represents things in the world without any “internal, nonarbitrary connections to the world, and hence is readily separable from it” (77). That’s what I was taught, years ago, and it makes sense, given the very different ways different languages represent the same objects. “If we agree with Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that active speech is the generative core of all language, how can we possibly account for the overwhelming prevalence of a view that considers language to be an ideal or formal system readily detachable from the material act of speaking?” Abram asks. “Merleau-Ponty suggests that such a view of language could arise only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways” (77). Of course, languages change and evolve continuously, so I’m not sure this argument holds water. Abram suggests another reason for the dominance of the notion that language is an arbitrary “or strictly conventional” sign system: the philosophical occupation with ideas of human uniqueness (77). Even after Darwin’s theory of evolution became widely accepted, most scientists “were reluctant to relinquish the assumption of human specialness,” and language became a marker of that specialness, considered as “an exclusively human property, that is most often used to demonstrate the excellence of humankind relative to all other species,” something humans alone possess (78). Other animals communicate with each other, but their sounds, gestures, dances, and chemical cues “may be said to remain within the sphere of felt, bodily expression,” their meanings “tied to the expressive nature of the gestures themselves, and to the direct sensations induced by these movements—to the immediacy of instinct and bodily urge” (79).
“In everyday human discourse, on the other hand, we readily locate a dimension of significance beyond the merely expressive power of the words, a layer of abstract meanings fixed solely, it would seem, by convention,” Abram writes (79). That secondary layer of abstract or conventional meanings, isolated “from the felt significance carried by the tone, rhythm, and resonance of spoken expressions,” is what is understood as a code, “a determinate and mappable structure composed of arbitrary signs linked by purely formal rules” (79). “And only thus, by conceiving language as a purely abstract phenomenon, can we claim it as an exclusively human attribute,” Abram continues. “Only by overlooking the sensuous, evocative dimension of human discourse, and attending solely to the denotative and conventional aspect of verbal communication, can we hold ourselves apart from, and outside of, the rest of animate nature” (79). But, if Merleau-Ponty is right, “then the denotative, conventional dimension of language can never be truly severed from the sensorial dimension of direct, affective meaning,” since it’s “the sensuous, gestural significance of spoken sounds—their direct bodily resonances—that makes verbal communication possible at all” (79). That “expressive potency” lies beneath “all the more abstract and conventional meanings that we assign to those words” (79-80). The “gestural, somatic dimension of language” is still “subtly operative in all our speaking and writing—if, that is, our words have any significance whatsoever” (80). Meaning “remains rooted in the sensory life of the body—it cannot be completely cut off from the soil of direct, perceptual experience without withering and dying” (80).
This argument renounces the idea that language is exclusively a human property: “If language is always, in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitively separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night” (80). Animal calls “reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated” (80). For Abram, “[l]anguage as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies, not just to the human,” and our own speech “does not set us outside of the animate landscape but—whether or now we are aware of it—inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths” (80). Perhaps this argument is true, but aren’t human languages, more complex? Is there a difference in degree, perhaps, rather than kind? And doesn’t this argument skip over the differences between spoken and written language? I’ve heard that most spoken communication is actually nonverbal, though, which would support Abram’s argument, and Jon Young’s work shows that the calls and songs of birds are definitely communicative. As Abram notes, “two birds singing to each other across the field” are “attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly different angle and perspective” (81).
“Moreover, if we allow that spoken meaning remains rooted in gestural and bodily expressiveness, we will be unable to restrict our renewed experience of language solely to animals,” Abram continues (81). Since phenomena are not passive or inert—since “[t]hings disclose themselves to our immediate perception as vectors, as styles of unfolding—not as finished chunks of matter given once and for all, but as dynamic ways of engaging the senses and modulating the body”—then each phenomenon “has the power to reach us and influence us,” meaning that all phenomena are “potentially expressive” (81). “Thus, at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks,” Abram contends (81). Fine, but isn’t he confusing a more general argument with a quite specific one about language here?
For Abram, phrases like “howling winds” aren’t just metaphors: “Our own languages are continually nourished by these other voices—by the roar of waterfalls and the thrumming of crickets” (82). Words like “splash” or “wash” reflect the sound of water, for instance (82). “If language is not a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily activity born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our discourse has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and rhythms besides those of our single species,” he writes. “Indeed, if human language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this language ‘belongs’ to the animate landscape as much as it ‘belongs’ to ourselves” (82).
Abram tells us that Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole; he found the relationship between the two “enigmatic” (82). “By describing any particular language as a system of differences, Saussure indicated that meaning is not found in the words themselves but in the intervals, the contrasts, the participations between the terms,” Abram writes (83). “[T]he weblike nature of language ensures that the whole of the system is implicitly present in every sentence, in every phrase,” and language is “constituted as much by silence as by sounds”; rather than being “an inert or static structure,” it is “an evolving bodily field” (83). “It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those who speak,” Abram suggests (83). Language changes as it is spoken: speech that merely repeats established formulas is barely speech at all, because “it does not really carry meaning in the weave of its words but relies solely upon the memory of meanings that once lived there,” treating the language “as a finished institution” (83-84). “Indeed, all truly meaningful speech is inherently creative, using established words in ways they have never quite been used before, and thus altering, ever so slightly, the whole webwork of the language,” Abram continues. “Wild, living speech takes up, from within, the interconnected matrix of the language and gestures with it, subjecting the whole structure to a ‘coherent deformation’” (84). “At the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of expressive speech,” Abram writes. “A living language is continually being made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak” (84). That silence consists of our “wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world” (84).
According to Abram, “Saussure’s distinction between the structure of language and the activity of speech is ultimately undermined by Merleau-Ponty,” who blends the two dimensions back together “into a single, ever-evolving matrix” (84). “Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience,” he writes (84). However, Merleau-Ponty retains Saussure’s notion of language “as an interdependent, weblike system of relations,” but he “comes in his final writings to affirm that it is first the sensuous, perceptual world that is relational and weblike in character, and hence that the organic, interconnected structure of any language is an extension or echo of the deeply interconnected matrix of sensorial reality itself” (84). The life-world is primary, not language; that life-world’s “wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language” (84).
Science has come to see nature “as a realm of complexly interwoven relationships” (85). This “biospheric web” idea is now commonplace, “and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty’s late description of sensuous reality, ‘the Flesh,’ as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part” (85). For Abram, “[i]t is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages” (85). Thus, “it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths” (85). The animate world speaks within us (85-86). For Abram, this notion suggests “that the complexity of human language is related to the complexity of the earthly ecology—not to any complexity of our species considered apart from that matrix” (86). As our technological civilization “diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished”—as the numbers of songbirds decline, “human speech loses more and more of its evocative power,” because it can no longer be “nourished by their cadences” (86). Our languages “become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance” (86). That’s an interesting notion, but I wish Abram had provided some evidence to support it.
For Abram, Merleau-Ponty’s fragmentary work on language “provides the most extensive investigation we have, as yet, into the living experience of language” (86). “When we attend to our experience not as intangible minds but as sounding, speaking bodies, we begin to sense that we are heard, even listened to, but the numerous other bodies that surround us,” he writes. “Our sensing bodies respond to the eloquence of certain buildings and boulders, to the articulate motions of dragonflies. We find ourselves alive in a listening, speaking world” (86). “Listening” and “speaking” seem to have become metaphors here, since the three examples in that sentence are all mute. But for Abram, Merleau-Ponty’s work leads back to the spoken beliefs of Indigenous, oral cultures (87). Many cultures believe that animals and humans once shared language, and although now their languages are different, they still all speak: “all have the power of language” (87-88). In addition, humans can understand the gestures of a deer, or the guttural utterances of a raven, and those other creatures can hear and sometimes understand our talking (88). “Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as a thoroughly incarnate medium, of speech as rhythm and expressive gesture, and hence of spoken words and phrases as active sensuous presences afoot in the material landscape,” Abram writes, “goes a long way toward helping us understand the primacy of language and word magic in native rituals of transformation, metamorphosis, and healing. Only if words are felt, bodily presences, like echoes or waterfalls, can we understand the power of spoken language to influence, alter, and transform the perceptual world” (89). Overlooking the power of words to influence the body “and hence to modulate our sensory experience of the world around us” renders language incomprehensible (89).
Here Abram summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s investigation of language. Perception is participatory and interactive; perceived things are encountered by the perceiving body “as animate, living powers that actively draw us into relation,” and rather than distinguish between animate and inanimate phenomena, we ought to distinguish “between diverse forms of animateness”; the complex interchange of language is rooted in that non-verbal exchange that is always going on “between our flesh and the flesh of the world”; and therefore human languages are informed by “the evocative shapes and patterns of the more than human terrain,” and they are not special properties of our species—they are rather “an expression of the animate earth that enfolds us” (89-90).
At this point, though, Abram suggests that this philosophy meets an impasse that threatens to invalidate its conclusions (90). If sensory participation is participatory and the inescapable source of all experience, “how can we possibly account for the apparent absence of participation in the modern world?” (90). How could we have forgotten the loss of our sense of the world as animate (90)? “We may suspect, at first, that the apparent loss of participation has something to do with language,” since it “has a profound capacity to turn back upon, and influence, our sensorial experience” (90-91). For Abram, the vulnerability of perception “to the decisive influence of language” explains Edward Sapir’s hypothesis of linguistic determination, which suggests “that one’s perception is largely determined by the language that one speaks” (91). But Abram doesn’t think language alone is responsible for “the shift from a participatory to a nonparticipatory world” (91). Still, how has language become separated from the “vaster life” around us (91)? “If participation, in its depths, is truly participatory, why do we not experience the rest of the world as animate and alive?” Abram asks. “If our own language is truly dependent upon the existence of other, nonhuman voices, why do we now experience language as an exclusively human property or possession?” (91). “Nonhuman nature seems to have withdrawn from both our speaking and our senses,” he continues. “What event could have precipitated this double withdrawal, constricting our ways of speaking even as it muffled our ears and set a veil before our eyes?” (92).
The next chapter, “Animism and the Alphabet,” might be expected to tackle these questions, and it starts by considering the origins of the ecological crisis, “modern civilization’s evident disregard for the needs of the natural world,” as discussed by philosophers (93). Some have concluded that all human activities are extractive, but others have noted that Indigenous cultures “display a remarkable solidarity with the lands that they inhabit” (93). “European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world,” Abram writes (94). Some philosophers see this rooted in the Bible and its command that humans rule over other creatures; others have seen its beginnings in the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato’s claim that the forms of the world are “mere simulacra” of eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm, which have “contributed profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial experience, and to our congruent estrangement from the earthly world around us” (94). Both the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks, then, “are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature” (94-95). However, even though those two traditions are very different, “they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing,” and both used the alphabet (hence the chapter’s title) (95).
Writing “is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and more-than-human world,” Abram contends, suggesting that that the latter “is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces,” both in landforms and in the markings of animals (95). “Our first writing . . . was our own tracks, our footprints, our handprints in mud or ash pressed upon the rock,” he suggests (96). Later, perhaps, we imitated the marks left by animals as a way of placing ourselves “in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its influence or to exert one’s own” (96). He cites Indigenous petroglyphs in North America as an example (96-97). Another example is Egyptian hieroglyphics, a more conventionalized pictographic system, like Chinese and Mesoamerican writing systems (97). “The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily entails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and gestures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made images,” he continues (97). But how could one represent an abstract concept, like the English word belief, without resorting to a visual pun (bee-leaf) (97-98). Such rebuses were used in pictographic languages, invoking the sound of a human voice rather than its referent (98).
The rebus “inaugurated the distant possibility of a phonetic script,” he suggests, “one that would directly transcribe the sound of the speaking voice rather than its outward intent or meaning” (98). But pictographs can be used by people who speak different linguistic dialects, and the elite status of scribes kept such written languages from widespread use (98-99). Nevertheless, in the ancient Middle East syllabaries appeared, “wherein every basic sound-syllable of the language had its own conventional notation or written character” (99). Then the alphabet was invented by Semitic scribes, based on an innovation—a recognition “that almost every syllable of their language was composed of one or more silent consonantal elements plus an element of sounded breath—that which we would today call a vowel. The silent consonants provided, as it were, the bodily framework or shape through which the sounded breath must flow” (99). The original Semitic alphabet “established a character, or letter, for each of the consonants of the language,” to which the vowels would be added “in order to make them come alive and to speak” (99-100). These innovations reduced the number of characters required for a written script to just 22—“a simple set of signs that could be readily practiced and learned in a brief period by anyone who had the chance, even by a young child,” a simplicity that made widespread literacy possible (100). Other languages developed their own alphabets (100).
With the invention of the alphabet, “a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature,” because “the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth” (100). “A direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured,” Abram emphasizes, and now “the larger, more-than-human life-world is no longer part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part of the system” (100-01). Or is that correct? he asks (101). The ancient Hebrew alphabet retains some elements of the pictographic system, although those connections are more tenuous than in earlier, nonphonetic scripts (101). “The other animals, the plants, and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning to lose their own voices,” Abram suggests. “In the Hebrew Genesis, the animals do not speak their own names to Adam; rather, they are given their names by this first man. Language, for the Hebrews, was becoming a purely human gift, a human power” (101).
But it was only with the invention of the Greek alphabet “that the progressive abstraction of linguistic meaning from the enveloping life-world reached a type of completion,” since the Greek scribes adapted the Semitic letters and their names, which had no grammatological meanings for them (101-02). “That is, while the Semitic name for the letter was also the name of the sensorial entity commonly imaged by or associated with the letter, the Greek name had no sensorial reference at all,” serving “only to designate the human-made letter itself,” and the pictorial or iconic significance of the Semitic letters was lost (102). “The indebtedness of human language to the more-than-human perceptual field, an indebtedness preserved in the names and shapes of the Semitic letters, could now be entirely forgotten,” Abram states (102).
Abram notes that Socrates, in the Phaedrus, says he has nothing to learn from trees or open country, only from other men, and suggests that statement is hard to reconcile with the Greece we know through Homer’s poetry, where “the natural landscape itself bears the omens and signs that instruct human beings in their endeavors,” and where the gods speak through clouds, waves, and the flight of birds (102-03). “This participatory and animate earth contrasts vividly with the dismissive view of nature espoused by Socrates in the Phaedrus,” he states (103). Abram argues that the difference can be explained by the difference between Homer’s oral literature and Plato’s written texts—by the invention of the Greek alphabet—and suggests that what we see in Plato are “many of the mental patterns or thought styles that today we of literate culture take for granted” (104). He describes the differences between oral and written texts—Homer’s use of repeated verbal formulae and stock epithets as mnemonic devices, for instance (105)—and suggests that when those poems were recorded in writing, “the art of the rhapsodes began to lose its preservative and instructive function” as the knowledge the poems and other myths contained “was now captured for the first time in a visible and fixed form, which could be returned to, examined, and even questioned” (107). It was only now that language became “a ponderable presence in its own right,” as scribes or authors began “to dialogue” with their own “visible inscriptions, viewing and responding to” their words as they wrote them down (107). “A new power of reflexivity was thus coming into existence, borne by the relation between the scribe and his scripted text,” Abram emphasizes (107). Plato was writing at the time that alphabetic literacy was becoming widespread and collective, when the gods were being expelled from the natural world, and he “may be recognized as the hinge on which the sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy. Indeed, it was Plato who carefully developed and brought to term the collective thought-structures appropriate to the new technology” (108-09).
The Socratic dialectic, Abram continues, “was primarily a method for disrupting the mimetic thought patterns of oral culture,” because it forced speakers to separate themselves from their own words, “from the phrases and formulas that had become habitual through the constant repetition of traditional teaching stories” (109). “Prior to this moment, spoken discourse was inseparable from the endlessly repeated stories, legends, and myths that provided many of the spoken phrases one needed in one’s daily actions and interactions,” Abram writes. “To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one’s closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one’s own mouth. Such, as we have said, is the way culture preserves itself in the absence of written records” (109). But by interrupting his interlocutors and asking them to explain themselves in other words, Socrates interrupted this process, “by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking” (109). “Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed,” he states (109-10).
Before the spread of writing, positive ethical qualities “were thoroughly entwined with the specific situations in which those qualities were exhibited,” and “they had no apparent existence independent of those situations” (110). So justice or temperance were “experienced as living occurrences, as events,” “inseparable from the particular persons or actions that momentarily embodied them” (110). However, “as soon as such utterances were recorded in writing, they acquired an autonomy and a permanence hitherto unknown,” becoming something unchanging and independent of the speaker and “the corporeal situations and individuals that exhibited” those virtues (110). “Socrates clearly aligned his method with this shift in the perceptual field,” Abram writes (110). He is “clearly convinced that there is a fixed, unchanging essence of ‘justice’ that unites all the just instances, as there is an eternal essence of ‘virtue,’ of ‘beauty,’ of ‘goodness,’ ‘courage,’ and all the rest,” a conviction that would only be possible with the alphabet: “For only when a qualitative term is written down does it become ponderable as a fixed form independent of both the speakers and of situations” (111). “Not all writing systems foster this thorough abstraction of spoken quality from its embeddedness in corporeal situations”—Chinese ideographic script juxtaposes ideographs to the world of sensory experience, for example—and so it was not writing alone, but phonetic writing, “and the Greek alphabet in particular, that enabled the abstraction of previously ephemeral qualities like ‘goodness’ and ‘justice’ from their inherence in situations, promoting them to a new realm independent from the flux of ordinary experience” (111). That’s because “the Greek alphabet had effectively severed all ties between the written letters and the sensible world from which they were derived; it was the first writing system able to render almost any human utterance in a fixed and lasting form” (111). So, along with specific, individual rivers, there was now the singular notion, “river,” which could be considered apart from those specific examples (112). No wonder Plato believed that “genuine knowledge must be of what is unchanging and eternal” (112).
“For the letters of the alphabet, like the Platonic Ideas, do not exist in the world of ordinary vision,” Abram contends. “The letters, and the written words that the present, are not subject to the lux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seem to hover, as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension” (112). They also deflect “our attention from its visible aspect, effectively vanishing behind the current of human speech that it provokes” (112). In addition, being able to view and even dialogue with one’s own words after writing them down “enables a new sense of autonomy and independence from others, and even from the sensuous surroundings that had earlier been one’s constant interlocutor” (112). That reflective self gains from writing “a timeless quality,” “a sense of the relative independence of one’s verbal, speaking self from the breathing body with its shifting needs” (112). “The literate self cannot help but feel its own transcendence and timelessness relative to the fleeting world of corporeal experience,” Abram suggests (112). Socrates calls this “new, seemingly autonomous, reflective awareness” psychê, and it is separated from the body, becoming “that aspect of oneself that is refined and strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate the intelligible Ideas, the pure and eternal forms that, alone, truly exist” (112-13). The psychê, then, “is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters” (113).
In the Phaedrus, Plato critiques the influence of writing, by having Socrates tell a story about an Egyptian king, Thamus, rejecting writing because “spoken teachings, once written down, easily find their way into the hands of those who will misunderstand those teachings while nevertheless thinking that they understand them,” and because writing erodes the memory (113). “It is remarkable that Plato held to such criticisms despite the fact that he was an inveterate participant in the alphabetic universe,” Abram suggests (114). Nevertheless, despite his cautions, Plato “did not recognize the extent to which the very content of his teaching—with its dependence upon the twin notions of a purely rational psychê and a realm of eternal, unchanging Ideas—was already deeply under the influence of alphabetic writing” (114). At the time, while an observer might see the effects of writing on the memory, “it was hardly possible to discern the pervasive influence of letters upon patterns of perception and contemplation in general” (115). In a similar way, “we are simply unable to discern with any clarity the manner in which our own perceptions and thoughts are being shifted by our sensory involvement with electronic technologies, since any thinking that seeks to discern such a shift in itself is subject to the very effect that it strives to thematize” (115). In any case, in retrospect, we can see “how the distinctive shape of Western philosophy was born of the meeting between the human senses and the alphabet in ancient Greece” (115).
At this point, Abram digs more deeply into the critique of writing in the Phaedrus, particularly the notion that the trees and open country have nothing to teach—a statement that would be nonsense in a hunter-gatherer society, where “nature itself is articulate; it speaks” (116). Socrates’s words are “a vivid indication of the extent to which the human senses in Athens had already withdrawn from direct participation in the natural landscape,” of the way that the relationship between people and the land had diminished (117). Nevertheless, that dialogue in the Phaedrus suggests ambivalence rather than outright rejection, since it takes place within the open country and under the trees (117). Plato takes philosophy outside of the city “to confront and come to terms with the older, oral ways of knowing” (117). In the dialogue, trees and animals have magical powers (118). He tells a story about how the cicadas were transformed into their present form, a “functional myth” that “serves to explain certain observed characteristics of the cicadas, like their endless humming and buzzing, and their apparent lack of any need for nourishment” (119). Such stories have a practical function: “Without a versatile writing system, there is simply no way to preserve, in any fixed, external medium, the accumulated knowledge regarding particular plants . . . and regarding specific animals . . . or even regarding the land itself. . . . Such practical knowledge must be preserved, then, in spoken formulations that can be easily remembered, modified when new facts are learned, and retold from generation to generation” (119-20). Stories are necessary to make evident the characteristics of plants and animals through narrated events (120). If the living, sensuous body cannot appropriate inert facts, it can “easily assimilate other dynamic or eventful processes, like the unfolding of a story, appropriating each episode or event as a variation of its own unfolding” (120). The more lively the story, the more readily it can be incorporated (120).
In this way, “that which we literates misconstrue as a naïve attempt at causal explanation may be recognized as a sophisticated mnemonic method whereby precise knowledge is preserved and passed along from generation to generation” (121). In addition, by evoking a distant time when humans and plants or animals spoke together, “these stories affirm human kinship with the multiple forms of the surrounding terrain” (121). “They thus indicate the respectful, mutual relations that must be maintained with natural phenomena, the reciprocity that must be practiced in relation to other animals, plants, and the land itself, in order to ensure one’s own health and to preserve the well-being of the human community,” Abram writes (121).
So, in the Phaedrus, “Plato accords much more consideration to the oral-poetic universe, with its surplus of irrational, sensuous, and animistic powers, than he does in other dialogues” (121). That text, then, “seems to attempt a reconciliation of the transcendent, bodiless world of eternal Ideas proposed in this and other dialogues with the passionate, feeling-toned world of natural magic that still lingered in the common language of his day” (121). However, “this conciliatory affirmation of the animistic, sensuous universe is effected only within the context of a more subtle devaluation,” particularly in Socrates’s account of love as divine madness, in which the lover is reminded, “however faintly,” of “the more pure, genuine beauty of the eternal, bodiless Ideas which it once knew” (121-22). Thus “the bodily desire for sensuous contact and communion with other bodies and with the bodily earth” is really only “an incitement or spur toward the more genuine union of the reasoning soul with the eternal forms” which “lie beyond the sensory world entirely” (122). “The erotic, participatory world of the sensing body is conjured forth only to be subordinated to the incorporeal world toward which, according to Plato, it points,” Abram writes. “The literate intellect here certifies its dominion by claiming the sensuous life of the body-in-nature as its subordinate ally” (122). In the Phaedrus, then, “we may still discern the seeds of nature’s eventual eclipse behind a world of letters, numbers, and texts” (123).
According to Abram, “none of the major twentieth-century scholars who have directed their attention to the changes wrought by literacy have seriously considered the impact of writing—and, in particular, phonetic writing—upon the human experience of the wider natural world” (123). Instead, research has focused on “the alphabet’s impact on processes either internal to human society or presumably ‘internal’ to the human mind” (123). This limitation demonstrates “an anthropocentric bias wholly endemic to alphabetic culture” (123). In oral cultures, “neither society, nor language, nor even the experience of ‘thought’ or consciousness, can be pondered in isolation from the multiple nonhuman shapes and powers that lend their influence to all our activities” and “human communities come to know themselves primarily as they are reflected back by the animals and the animate landscapes with which they are directly engaged” (123). “This epistemological dependence is readily evidenced, on every continent, by the diverse modes of identification commonly categorized under the single term ‘totemism,’” Abram writes (123). Literate people are simply unable to approach “the vividness and intensity with which surrounding nature spontaneously presents itself to the members of an indigenous, oral community,” but in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, we begin to see “a deeply participatory relation to things and to the earth, a felt reciprocity curiously analogous to the animistic awareness of indigenous, oral persons” (124). So, to understand the impacts of phonetic literacy, we need to return “to the intimate analysis of sensory perception inaugurated by Merleau-Ponty” (124).
Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the importance of synaesthesia “resulted in a number of experiential analyses directly pertinent to the phenomenon of reading” (124). Reading is “a profoundly synaesthetic encounter”:
Our eyes converge upon a visible mark, or a series of marks, yet what they find there is a sequence not of images but of sounds, something heard; the visible letters . . . trade our eyes for our ears. Or, rather, the eye and the ear are brought together at the surface of the text—a new linkage has been forged between seeing and hearing which ensures that a phenomenon apprehended by one sense is instantly transposed into the other. (124)
This sensory transposition is mediated by our mouths and tongues, since vocal sounds are created there (124). Reading only became silent in the Middle Ages (124). “Alphabetic reading, then, proceeds by way of a new synaesthetic collaboration between the eye and the ear, between seeing and hearing,” and Abram is interested in the consequences of this development (125). He begins by considering “the centrality of synaesthesia in our perception of others and the earth” (125). He notes that the experiencing body is “not a self-enclosed object, but an open, incomplete entity” with “multiple ways of encountering and exploring the world,” all of which “continually open outward from the perceiving body, like different paths diverging from a forest” (125). But our “divergent senses meet up with each other in the surrounding world, converging and commingling in the things I perceive. We may think of the sensing boy as a kind of open circuit that completes itself only in things, and in the world” (125). It is through engagements with things in the world that one integrates one’s senses and thereby experiences one’s own “unity and coherence” (125).
Vision itself is a form of synaesthesia, since it blends the two perspectives of our eyes (125). Vision “often prompts the added collaboration of the other senses”: if we see a blackbird eating berries, we may notice “a slightly acidic taste” in our mouths, or if we see someone fall from a bicycle, we may feel the impact (126). The sound of the crash may obscure other ambient sounds (127). “The diversity of my sensory systems, and their spontaneous convergence in the things that I encounter, ensures this interpenetration or interweaving between my body and other bodies—this magical participation that permits me, at times, to feel what others feel,” Abram contends. “The gestures of another being, the rhythm of its voice, and the stiffness or bounce in its spine all gradually draw my senses into a unique relation with one another, into a coherent, if shifting, organization” (127). However, “the dynamic conjunction of the eyes has a particularly ubiquitous magic, opening a quivering depth in whatever we focus on, ceaselessly inviting the other senses into a concentrated exchange with stones, squirrels, parked cars, persons, snow-capped peaks, clouds, and termite-ridden logs” (127). That power is important for understanding the perceptual effects of literacy (127).
Here Abram turns to what he sees as the most important chapter in Merleau-Ponty’s last, unfinished book, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” (127). He notes that “chiasm” means “criss-cross” or crossover (127). There is a chiasm between our two eyes (which creates depth perception), and there is a chiasm between “the various sense modalities, such that they continually couple and collaborate with one another” (128). “Finally, this interplay of the different senses is what enables the chiasm between the body and the earth, the reciprocal participation—between one’s own flesh and the encompassing flesh of the world—that we commonly call perception,” he writes (128). Phonetic reading uses the conjunction between sight and hearing, both of which are distance senses, and which create most vividly the sense of being “confronted by another power like myself, another life” (128-29). When hearing and sight converge, “we may suddenly feel ourselves in relation with another expressive power, another center of experience,” the way trees may seem to speak when their leaves rustle in the wind (129). For Abram, “the animistic discourse of indigenous, oral peoples is an inevitable counterpart of their immediate, synaesthetic engagement with the land they inhabit,” since “the creative interplay of the senses in the things they encounter” is “our sole way of linking ourselves to those things and letting the things weave themselves into our experience” (130). But today, most of us seem far from such experiences—phenomena in the world “no longer address us, no longer compel our involvement or reciprocate our attention” (130). Abram wonders why that is—what could have frozen that “ongoing animation” or blocked “the wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them,” since doing so “would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in its tracks” (131).
He suggests that “the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation”: the written text (131). “For to read is to enter into a profound participation, or chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page,” he writes. “In learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order to recouple those senses on the flat surface of the page” (131). Reading, then, “is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone” (131). Only when “a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters” do “the stones fall silent” (131). However, to be more precise, it was only “when the written characters lost all explicit reference to visible, natural phenomena” that we moved “into a new order of participation,” and only then that “speech or language” came “to be experienced as an exclusively human power” (132). Only then “did civilization enter into the wholly self-reflexive mode of animism, or magic, that still holds us in its spell” (132). That argument falls down in the face of environmental devastation in China, however. It can’t just be the phonetic alphabet that’s at the root of our separation from the life-world.
“That alphabetic reading and writing was itself experienced as a form of magic is evident from the reactions of cultures suddenly coming into contact with phonetic writing,” Abram writes (132). He cites Tzvetan Todorov’s suggestion that Cortez was able to defeat the Aztecs because of the way that phonetic writing allowed the Spanish to see themselves as only in communication with each other, rather than with “the sensuous forms of the world,” whereas the Aztecs had to answer “in their actions as in their speech, to the whole sensuous, natural world that surrounds them; the Spanish need answer only to themselves” (134). “In contact with this potent new magic, with these men who participate solely with their own self-generated signs, whose speech thus seems to float free form the surrounding landscape, and who could therefore be duplicitous and lie even in the presence of the sun, the moon, and the forest, the Indians felt their own rapport with those sensuous powers, or gods, beginning to falter,” Abram writes (134). In other words, in the face of “aggression from this new, entirely self-reflexive form of magic,” Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere “felt their own magics wither and become useless, unable to protect them” (135).
The following chapter, “In the Landscape of Language,” seems to inaugurate a new section in the book. Abram suggests that in the book’s first part, the question of how Western civilization became so estranged from nature, leading to widespread ecological destruction, was discussed. “Or, more specifically, how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciprocity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal peoples?” he asks. “How did civilization break out of, and leave behind, the animistic or participatory mode of experience known to all native, place-based cultures?” (137). Animism didn’t disappear, though, Abram reiterates—it transferred from the life-world to the alphabet, to reading (137-38). “Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters become to come alive and to speak,” he states (138). As the letters came alive and spoke, nature lost its voice (138).
“The highly anthropocentric (human-centred) mode of experience endemic to alphabetic culture spread throughout Europe in the course of two millennia, receiving a great boost from the calligraphic innovations introduced in the monastic scriptoria” and by the invention of moveable type in the 15th century (138). Today “alphabetic awareness” has infiltrated “even those cultures that had retained iconic, ideographic writing systems”—which perhaps explains China’s environmental catastrophe, then (139). “Nevertheless, there remain, on the edges and even in the middle of this ever-expanding monoculture, small-scale local cultures or communities where the traditional oral, indigenous modes of experience still prevail—cultures that have never fully transferred their sensory participation to the written word,” Abram writes:
They have not yet closed themselves within an exclusively human field of meanings, and so still dwell within a landscape that is alive, aware, and expressive. To such peoples, that which we term “language” remains as much a property of the animate landscape as of the humans who dwell and speak within that terrain. Indeed, the linguistic discourse of such cultures is commonly bound, in specific and palpable ways, to the expressive earth. (139)
This chapter will look at a few of the ways “in which the common discourse of an oral culture may open, directly, onto the evocative sounds, shapes, and gestures of the surrounding ecology” (139).
Abram warns that whenever people from literate cultures “seek to engage and understand the discourse of oral cultures, we must strive to free ourselves from our habitual impulse to visualize any language as a static structure that could be diagrammed, or a set of rules that could be ordered and listed” (139). That’s because without writing, “the language of an oral culture cannot be objectified as a separable entity by those who speak it, and this lack of objectification influences not only the way in which oral cultures experience the field of discursive meanings, but also the very character and structure of that field” (139). “In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning,” Abram states. “The land, in other words, is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all the motion and metamorphosis within the land” (139-40).
Abram suggests that the sounds of an oral language “are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape,” and that the humans who speak that language are also attuned “to the various nonhuman calls and cries that animate the local terrain” (140). “Such attunement is simply imperative for any culture still dependent upon foraging for its subsistence,” he suggests, since that way of living requires a sensitivity to the subtleties of the land (140). Hunters need to get close to the animals, not just physically but emotionally, “empathetically entering into proximity with the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing” (140). In effect, the Indigenous hunter enters into an apprenticeship with the animals, gradually developing “an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts,” and especially “the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals” (140). “A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night,” Abram continues (141). In addition, a skilled hunter will be able to mimic those calls and cries (141). This is precisely Jon Young’s argument about becoming aware and attuned to birds, particularly their alarm calls.
Abram provides accounts from the Peruvian rainforest and from northwestern Alaska to support this argument (141-53), which explain the ways that different Indigenous peoples see human and animal language as being intertwined. These accounts provide “some evidence for the thesis that language, in indigenous oral cultures, is experienced not as the exclusive property of humankind, but as a property of the sensuous life-world” (154). He cites anthropologist Keith Basso’s discussion of the importance of place names in the Apache language and culture (154-56) and the way that the land can “ensure mindful and respectful behavior in the community,” a power that is “mediated by a whole class of brief stories that are regularly recounted within the village (156). Stories that are intended as corrections can make the offender feel ill or weak, and the place where the story occurred can become “the guarantor of corrected behavior, the visible presence that reminds one of past foibles and ensures one’s subsequent attentiveness” (158-59). Those stories establish “an almost familial bond between the persons at whom the stories are aimed and particular sites or features of the natural landscape” (159). The stories inhere in the land, and to lose contact with sites invoked by place-names is to lose touch with the stories that reside in those places (160). “To members of a non-writing culture, places are never just passive settings,” Abram contends:
Remember that in oral cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word. Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses. A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there. (161-62)
For that reason, stories are not told “without identifying the earthly sites where the events in those stories occur”—at least, that’s the case for the Western Apache (162). Human events “simply cannot be isolated from the places that engender them,” because places are themselves active elements in the genesis of the events (162). To an oral culture, “experienced events remain rooted in the particular soils, the particular ecologies, the particular places that gave rise to them” (162).
“Yet there remains another reason for the profound association between storytelling and the more-than-human terrain,” Abram writes. “It resides in the encompassing, enveloping wholeness of a story in relation to the characters that act and move within it. A story envelops its protagonists much as we ourselves are enveloped by the terrain. In other words, we are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story” (163). This is more than an analogy: “along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is unfolding all around us” (163).
Here, Abram turns to the Dreamtime beliefs common to Aboriginal peoples of Australia (163-72). He praises the success of those peoples in surviving in a harsh environment for tens of thousands of years and suggests that their reliance on the land, rather than on technology, is the reason for their “astonishing endurance” (164). He tries to explain those beliefs, but I have no idea whether his explanation is accurate or not—perhaps not, since it relies on Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, but I don’t know. It’s a fascinating explanation, though. Abram notes that there is an intimate connection between stories and topographical features on the land, and that the Dreaming songs of the land “provide an auditory mnemonic (or memory tool)—an oral means of recalling viable routes through an often harsh terrain” (175). At the same time, “[t]he landscape itself . . . provides a visual mnemonic, a set of visual cues for remembering the Dreamtime stories” (175). Thus, “the songs and stories carry much more than a set of instructions for moving through the terrain”; they also “suggest, through multiple examples, how to act, or how not to act, in particular situations” by offering “a ready set of guidelines for proper behavior on the part of those who sing or hear those stories today” (175). “Social taboos, customs, interspecies etiquette—the right way to hunt particular animals or gather particular foods and medicines—all are contained in the Dreamtime songs and stories,” Abram writes. “And it is the land itself that is the most potent reminder of these teachings, since each feature in the landscape activates the memory of a particular story or cluster of stories” (175-76).
“One of the strong claims of this book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall—the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory—is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures,” Abram continues. “It is, we may suspect, a spontaneous propensity of the human organism—one that is radically transformed, yet not eradicated, by alphabetic writing” (176). Even in European culture, he notes, the memory palace technique has been used since the ancient Greeks to help orators remember long speeches (176). Unlike those orators, though, who constructed imaginary “topological matrices,” “the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song!” (176-77). Thus, “we can discern two basic mnemonic relationships between the Dreamtime stories and the earthly landscape,” Abram writes. “First, the spoken or sung Dreamings provide a way of recalling viable routes through an often difficult terrain. Second, the continual encounter with various features of the surrounding landscape stirs the memory of the spoken Dreamings that pertain to those sites” (177). Those stories and songs are thus “reciprocally mnemonic, experientially couples in a process of mutual invocation. The land and the language—insofar as the language is primarily embodied in the ancestral Dreamings—are inseparable” (177).”The narratives respond directly to the land, as the land responds directly to the spoken or sung stories,” in other words (177).
In the chapter’s concluding pages, Abram notes that “the linguistic patterns of an oral culture remain uniquely responsive, and responsible, to the more-than-human life-world, or bioregion, in which that culture is embedded” (178). So when Indigenous people are forcibly displaced from their territories, they are destitute: “The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, for force them out of their mind” (178). Forced displacement projects are thus a form of cultural genocide, Abram states (178)—genocide proper, I think. “Yet while such civilizational ‘progress’ rumbles forward, a mounting resistance is beginning to emerge within technological civilization itself, fired in part by a new respect for oral modes of sensibility and awareness,” Abram continues (178). The work of the anthropologists he has cited has been used to stop development on Indigenous lands (178).
But, more importantly, I think, for his book is Abram’s recognition that for Indigenous, oral cultures, “the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse” (179). This chapter leaves me wondering about Cree place names, and why I’ve learned so few, and what it might mean when colonization disrupts the process of intergenerational transmission of those names, along with the names of species of plants, animals, and birds. Perhaps, in the courses I’ve taken, we’ve been trying to learn the basics first—perhaps place names, in the pedagogy of the language, are considered something you learn after that. Or perhaps they’ve been lost, either because of residential schools or forced displacement and confinement on reserves. Or Abram could be wrong about all of this, I suppose, although I find his argument quite convincing. I would love to be able to discuss this book with someone who would be able to explain whether what he’s saying holds water or not.
The next chapter, “Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth,” begins with the way that stories—hearing them, and then telling them—“actively preserve the coherence of one’s culture,” its “practical knowledge,” “moral patterns and social taboos,” and “indeed the very language or manner of speech of any non writing culture maintain themselves primarily through narrative chants, myths, legends, and trickster tales—that is, through the telling of stories” (181). Those stories are often “deeply bound to the earthly landscape inhabited by that culture” (182). That is, “earthly locales may speak through the human persons that inhabit them” through stories (182). Such stories demonstrate “the unique power of particular bioregions, the unique ways in which different ecologies call upon the human community”; they also give evidence “about specific sites within those larger regions” (182). Not rooting a story in a specific location can “render the telling powerless or ineffective” (182). “The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity,” Abram writes. “To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site, and indeed to participate in its expressive potency” (182). “Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence,” he continues (182).
However, as writing spreads through a previously oral culture, “the felt power and personality of particular places begins to fade,” because the stories that embody that power get written down, rendering them separable from the places where those stories took place, making it possible to carry them anywhere, and as a result, the stories “come to seem independent of any specific locale” (183). Instead of the “instructive value and moral efficacy” of those stories resting on their contact with the actual places where they took place, “the visible text becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories—the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly traces left by the animals, and by one’s ancestors, in their interactions with the local land” (183). “The places themselves are no longer necessary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human events that might just as easily have happened elsewhere,” Abram writes. “The transhuman, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely. In this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, performative character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-human earth” (183-84). And the earth, stripped of its “particularizing stories,” “begins to lose its multiplicitous power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually, the felt primacy of place is forgotten, superseded by a new, abstract notion of ‘space’ as a homogenous and placeless void” (184). I wonder if that shift makes destructive and extractive practices easier to carry out.
As writing developed in the Middle East, China, and Mesoamerica, it was accompanied by “a large increase in the scale of human settlements, as well as by a concomitant growth in the human ability, or willingness, to manipulate and cultivate the earth” (184). The spread of agriculture led to “new, sedentary economies” (184). “The ability to precisely measure and inventory agricultural surpluses, itself made possible by numerical and linguistic notation, enabled the new, highly centralized cities to survive and perpetuate themselves,” and eventually “enabled the commercial trading of surpluses , and the rise of nation-states” (184). The growing number of people living in towns and cities “could only intensify the growing estrangement of the human senses from the wild, animate diversity in which those senses had evolved” (184). However, Abram points out that he’s not primarily interested in agriculture or urbanization, but with writing itself—“with the influence of writing upon the human senses and upon our direct sensorial experience of the earth around us” (184). He reiterates the “double retreat” writing occasions, of “both the senses and of spoken stories, from the diverse places that had once gripped them,” and posits that these twin retreats “cleared the way for the notion of a pure and featureless ‘space’—an abstraction conception that has nevertheless come to seem, today, more primordial and real than the earthly places in which we remain corporeally embedded” (185).
Alphabetic writing was also central “to the emergence of abstract, linear ‘time’” (185). For Indigenous cultures, time is cyclical, inseparable from “the circular life of the sun and the moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the animals—from the eternal return of the greening earth” (185). In a literate, technological civilization, however, we “conceive and even feel, behind all the seasonal recurrences in the sensuous terrain, the inexorable thrust of a linear and irreversible time” (185). But cultures without writing have “no separate vantage point from which to view and take note of the subtle mutations and variations in the endless cycles of nature. Those changes that are notices are often assumed to be part of other, larger cycles” (185). “The trajectory of our visible, tangible world—the world disclosed to humankind by our unaided senses—is circular,” Abram contends (185-86). “The curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articulate on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line,” he continues. “Yet to fully engage, sensorially, with one’s earthly surroundings is to find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles. The ancestral stories of an oral culture are recounted again and again—only thus can they be preserved—and this regular, often periodic repetition serves to bind the human community to the ceaseless round dance of the cosmos” (186). Telling those stories means “actively participating in a creative process that is felt to be happening right now,” rather than at some point in the distant past (186). Events are assumed to have archetypes enacted in the mythic times, even highly extraordinary events, such as the arrival of Cortés in Mexico, which was interpreted by the Aztecs as the return of Quetzalcoatl to his kingdom (186-87). In oral cultures, “human events take on meaning only to the extent that they can be located within a stories universe that continually retells itself; unprecedented events, singular encounters that have no place among the cycling stories, can have no place, either, among the turning seasons of the cycles of earth and sky” (187). “The multiple ritual enactments, the initiatory ceremonies, the annual songs and dances of the hunt and the harvest—all are ways whereby indigenous peoples-of-place actively engage the rhythms of the more-than-human cosmos, and thus embed their own rhythms within those of the vaster round,” Abram states (187). So, to take a personal example, my sense of my aging body as existing in a linear process, beginning in childhood and ending, eventually, perhaps, in decrepit old age, would be experienced in an oral culture as part of a cycle of life, something experienced by many others before me. I wonder if it’s possible that sometimes people would consider aging as both cyclical and linear—if Abram’s account ignores the possibility that linear time would still have existed, although it would have been secondary to cyclical time, the way that cyclical time still exists in a literate culture, even if linear time is predominant—or perhaps linear time is an new invention, which seems to be Abram’s argument?
In any case, Abrams argues that the alphabet changes cyclical time, because “[i]n order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth,” and the letters of the alphabet themselves “begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves,” establishing “a new reflexivity between the human organism and its own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the end,” creating what Abram calls a “reflective intellect,” which is that reflexive loop between ourselves and our written signs (187-88). “Human encounters and events begin to become interesting in their own right, independent of their relation to natural cycles,” he states (188). When mythic events are written down, they “are no longer able to shift their form to fit current situations,” and so current events lose “their mythic, storied resonance,” acquiring “a naked specificity and uniqueness hitherto unknown” (188). Writing fixes events in their particularity, taking on “their singular place within the slowly accreting sequence of recorded events” (188). In this way oral story gives way to written history: “They cyclical shape of earthly time gradually fades behind the new awareness of an irreversible and rectilinear progression of itemizable events. And historical, linear time becomes apparent” (188).
Moreover, “a time that is cyclical, or circular, is just as much spatial as it is temporal” (188). This idea, for Abram, is “one of the most intransigent barriers preventing genuine understanding between the modern, alphabetized West and indigenous, oral cultures” (188). “Unlike linear time, time conceived as cyclical cannot be readily abstracted from the spatial phenomena that exemplify it—from, for instance, the circular trajectories of the sun, the moon, and the stars,” he explains. “Unlike a straight line, moreover, a circle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. Indeed, the visible space in which we commonly find ourselves when we step outdoors is itself encompassed by the circular enigma that we have come to call ‘the horizon’” (188-89). Abram suggests that medicine wheels “enabled a person to orient herself within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely temporal—the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of the sun’s northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in time (the summer solstice) as in space” (189). Thus, “a cyclical mode of time does not readily distinguish itself from the spatial field in which oral persons find themselves experientially immersed,” although that spatial field is experienced as place, or places—“as a differentiated realm containing diverse sites, each of which has its own power, its own way of organizing our senses and influencing our awareness” (190). Each place is “a qualitative matrix, a pulsing or potentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness,” and for that reason, we shouldn’t be surprised “that oral peoples speak of what to us are purely spatial phenomena as animate, emerging processes, and of space itself as a kind of dynamism, a continual unfolding” (190).
And, to address my earlier question about the potential existence of linear time in oral cultures, Abram points out that linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf found no evidence of linear time in the Hopi language during his analyses in the 1930s and 1940s, and no was to refer to space that excludes time (190-91). Whorf’s work has been misunderstood and “taken simplistically” by other researchers, according to Abram, and “he did discern, in the Hopi language, a distinction between two basic modalities of existence, which he terms the ‘manifested’ and the ‘manifesting’” (191). Here, “manifested” roughly equates to our notion of “objective” existence, but with no attempt to distinguish between the present and the past (but excluding the future), while “manifesting” includes both what we consider to be the future but also everything that exists or appears in the mind” (191-92). “The ‘manifested,’ in other words, is that aspect of phenomena already evident to our senses, while the ‘manifesting’ is that which is not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed to be psychologically gathering itself toward manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena,” Abram explains. “One’s own feeling, thinking, and desiring are a part of, and hence participant with, this collective desiring and preparing implicit in all things” (192). In fact, human intention “contributes directly to the becoming-manifested” of phenomena like the ripening of corn or “the bestowal of rain” (192).
Abram contends that a distinction similar to the one between “manifested” and “manifesting” exists in Navajo as well (a language from a very different linguistic group than Hopi) (192). In both languages, there is “a sense of space as a continual emergence from implicit to explicit existence, and of human intention as participant with this encompassing emergence” (193). “The indistinction of space and time” is also evident in the Aboriginal Australian notions of Dreamtime (103). There are many other examples, according to Abram, and they
demonstrate that separable “time” and “space” are not absolute givens in all human experience. It is likely that without a formal system of numerical and linguistic notation it is not possible to entirely abstract a uniform sense of progressive ‘time’ from the direct experience of the animate, emergent environment—or, what amounts to the same thing, to freeze the dynamic experience of earthly place into the intuition of a static, homogenous “space.” If this is the case, then writing must be recognized as a necessary condition for the belief in an entirely distinct space and time. (193)
He suggests that it was the ancient Hebrews who discovered “a linear, nonrepeating mode of time,” and of course they were one of the pioneers of alphabetic writing (194). “[T]he new recognition of a nonmythological, nonrepeating time by the Hebrew scribes can only be comprehended with reference to alphabetic writing itself,” Abram contends, because writing fixes events in their particularity, making them permanent “while inscribing them in a steadily accreting sequence of similarly unique occurrences” (195).
“While the visible landscape provides an oral, tribal culture with a necessary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for remembering its ancestral stories, alphabetic writing enabled the Hebrew tribes to preserve their cultural stories intact even when the people were cut off, for many generations, from the actual lands where those stories had taken place,” Abram continues. “By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories earlier carried by the terrain itself, the written text became a kind of portable homeland for the Hebrew people” (195). The Hebrew Bible is structured by the motif of exile, from the very beginning, with the exile from Eden, and so “[t]he Jewish sense of exile was never merely a state of separation from a specific locale, from a particular ground,” but rather “it was (and is) also a sense of separation from the very possibility of being placed, from the very possibility of being entirely at home” (196). For Abram, “this sense of always already being in exile” cannot be separated “from alphabetic literacy, this great and difficult magic of which the Hebrews were the first real caretakers”:
Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be dis-placed, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to yearn, to hope, that such contact and conviviality may someday return. (196)
All of this reminds me of Robert Graves’s wonderful poem “The Cool Web,” although that poem is about acquiring language in childhood, rather than literacy (Graves).
“The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what has been lost, the intimation of a forgotten animacy,” Abram continues (196). Stories in Genesis are “deeply attuned to the animistic power of places” (196). Moreover, for the ancient Hebrews time was not entirely linear: “The holy days described in the Bible are closely bound to the intertwined cycles of the sun and the moon” (196). In this way, “[t]ime and space are still profoundly influenced by one another in the Hebrew Bible. They are never entirely distinguishable, for they are still informed, however distantly, by a participatory experience of place” (197).
It was the ancient Greeks who came up with “an entirely placeless notion of eternity—a strictly intelligible, nonmaterial realm of pure Ideas resting entirely outside of the sensible world,” and for Abram, it was their alphabet that “contributed to a kind of theoretical abstraction very different from that engaged in by the Hebrew prophets and scribes” (197). The Greek thinkers “were the first to begin to objectify space and time as entirely distinct and separable dimensions” (197). He sees this in the use of prose, rather than poetry, by Greek historians, who “practiced a new skepticism regarding the storied gods and goddesses of the animate environments,” and who, “by separating past events from the tradition-bound rhythms of verse and chanted story,” were able to loosen “time itself from the recurrent cycling of the sensuous earth, opening the prospect of a nonrepeating, historical time extending indefinitely into the past” (197-98). Aristotle tried to define time “as it makes itself evident in our experience,” and his definition was a linear series of points (198). After that, Euclid postulated that “space itself could be conceived as an entirely homogenous and limitless three-dimensional continuum” (198). The homogenous character of that space is indicated by Euclid’s assertion that parallel lines will never meet (198). The sphericality of our planet confounds that idea: on the earth’s curved surface, parallel lines will eventually meet at the poles (198). Nevertheless, Euclid’s work “provided the classical basis for Western, scientific notions of space, from the Renaissance until the work of Albert Einstein” (198). According to Abram, “the spread of alphabetic literacy” altered “the perceptual relations between the Greeks and the sensible world around them,” and so “the new, apparently independent dimensions of space and time” were disclosed, to which numerical notation and measurements were applied (198-99).
However, “a thorough description of homogenous ‘space’ and sequential ‘time,’ as objectively existing entities, had to wait until the invention of the printing press” (199). The wide dissemination of printed texts “effectively sealed the ascendance of alphabetic modes of thought over the oral, participatory experience of nature” (199). So long as large numbers of people in a given community still perceived the earth as animate and alive, “as long as material (spatial) phenomena were still perceived by many as having their own inherent spontaneity and (temporal) dynamism,” the separation of time from space was not possible (199). Abram sees the burning of witches as “the attempted, and nearly successful, extermination of the last orally preserved traditions of Europe—the last traditions rooted in the direct, participatory experience of plants, animals, and elements—in order to clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a natural world increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set of objects” (199).
Isaac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, “finally gave an absolute formulation to separable ‘time’ and ‘space’ as the necessary frame for his clockwork universe” (199). Newton was separating relative space from absolute space, and relative time from absolute time; both absolute space and absolute time exist apart from our perceptions (200). Absolute time “underlies all material events and their relations,” while absolute space “is empty—a void” (200). Both are infinite, neither can be created or destroyed, and no part of either can be distinguished from any other part (200). By assuming the existence of this empty space, Newton was able to calculate the motion of the moon or the earth in relation to it, and he was only able to come up with his theory of gravity by assuming those absolute references (200). Philosophers debated the existences of absolute time and space as distinct from relative time and space, but when Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, agreed with Newton “that space and time were absolute, that they were independent of particular things and events,” the debate ended (200-01). However, Kant believed that “these distinct dimensions did not belong to the surrounding world as it exists in itself, but were necessary forms of human awareness, the two forms by which the human mind inevitably structures the things it perceives,” arguing that space and time “were distinct and inescapable dimensions” (201).
Here Abram goes back to his return to North America from Indonesia and Nepal: “Assumptions that I had previously taken for granted, or that I had since childhood as obvious and unshakable truths, now made little sense to me” (201). Was there an autonomous past and future? Where were they? Why were people so unaware of the present? Why were they so preoccupied by the past and the future? “They seemed utterly oblivious to all those phenomena to which I had had to sensitize myself in order to communicate with indigenous magicians in the course of my fieldwork: the lives of other animals, the minute gestures of insects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux of sounds and smells,” he writes. “My family and my old friends all seemed so oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world. The present, for them, seemed nothing more than a point, an infinitesimal now separating ‘the past’ from ‘the future’” (201-02). He found himself cut off “from the life of the land” (202).
Next Abram describes an exercise he came up with to keep himself from “falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time,” in which he imagines the past and the present leaking into the future until they have dissolved and he finds himself standing in a vast, eternal present, defined by the sensory data he receives from the earth (202-03). The “unshakable solidity” of the experience of the present this produces “is curious indeed” (203). “It seems to have something to do with the remarkable affinity between this temporal notion that we term ‘the present’ and the spatial landscape in which we are embedded,” he writes. “When I allow the past and the future to dissolve, imaginatively, into the immediacy of the present moment, then the ‘present’ itself expands to become an enveloping field of presence. And this presence, vibrant and alive, spontaneously assumes the precise shape and contoure of the enveloping sensory landscape, as though this were its native shape!” (203-04). He sees a “remarkable fit between temporal concept (the ‘present’) and spatial percept (‘the enveloping presence of the land)” and believes that this fit explains “the relatively stable and solid nature of this experience,” which prompts him “to wonder whether ‘time’ and ‘space’ are really as distinct” as he was taught to believe (204). “There is no aspect of this realm that is strictly temporal—for it is composed of spatial things that have density and weight, and is spatially extended around me on all sides, from the near trees to the distant clouds,” he explains. “And yet there is no aspect, either, that is strictly spatial or static—for every perceivable being, from the stones to the breeze to my car in the distance, seems to vibrate with life and sensation. In this open present, I am unable to isolate space from time, or vice-versa. I am immersed in the world” (204).
Einstein challenged the Newtonian view of absolute time and space with his theory of relativity, which treated space and time as two aspects of a unitary continuum, “space-time” (204). “Space-time, however was a highly abstract concept unthinkable apart from the complex mathematics of relativity theory,” Abrams writes, and so it did not “challenge the Kantian assumption that separable space and time were necessary and unavoidable forms in all ordinary perception” (204). So phenomenology had to “call into question the distinction between space and time at the level of our direct, preconceptual experience,” although phenomenologists tended to assume “a clear distinction between space and time” (204). Only toward the end of his writing about “time consciousness” did Husserl “suggest that the experience of time is rooted in a deeper dimension of experience that is not, in itself, strictly temporal” (204-05). Martin Heidegger wrote about our experience of time, particularly in Being and Time (which I tried and failed to get through), where he, according to Abram, found an unrepresentable mystery of primordial time (205). For Heidegger, the past, the present, and the future were three “ecstasies” of time, “the three ways in which the irreducible dynamism of existence opens us to what is outside ourselves, to that which is other” (205). However, Heidegger decided “that this implicit, preconceptual mode of time could not be held apart from our preconceptual experience of space,” and so in a late essay he discusses “space-time”—“a realm neither wholly temporal nor wholly spatial, from whence ‘time’ and ‘space’ have been artificially derived by a process of abstraction” (205). Merleau-Ponty also decided that time was space, and space was time, although he died before he could complete that analysis (205).
“So all three phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—came independently, in the course of their separate investigations, to suspect that the conventional distinction between space and time was untenable from the standpoint of direct, preconceptual experience,” Abram states (205). Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, at the ends of their careers, were attempting to describe “a more primordial dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather—somehow—both at once” (206). Such a mode of experience “is commonplace for indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been sundered,” and it seems that phenomenology “has been striving to recover such an experience from within literate awareness itself—straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born” (206). None of the phenomenologists Abram discusses were successful in bringing time and space together, but “their later writings provide tantalizing clues, talismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness of the present” (206).
Abram now returns to his exercise, where he brings past and future together into the present. He acknowledges that he hasn’t done away with the past or the present, just with those dimensions as they are conventionally conceived—“as autonomous realms existing apart from the sensuous present” (206). His exercise opens the way for their discovery “as aspects of the corporeal present, of this capacious terrain that bodily enfolds me” (206). He wonders, though, where the past and present can be located in the sensuous world (207). “Of course, we may say that we perceive the past all around us, in great trees grown from seeds that germinated long ago, in the eroded banks of a meandering stream, or the widening cracks in an old road,” he writes. “And, too, that we are peering into the future, wherever we look—watching a storm cloud emerge from the horizon, or a spiderweb slowly taking shape before our eyes—since all that we perceive is already, in a sense, pregnant with the future” (207). But how do we distinguish between the past and the present? They are distinct, yet “they are strangely commingled within all that we perceive,” so how “do they distinguish themselves perceptually?” (207).
“As an animal myself,” Abram continues, he is suspicious of “all these dodges, all these ways whereby my species lays claim to a source of truth that supposedly lies outside of the bodily world wherein plants, stones, and streams have their being, outside of this earthly terrain that we share with the other animals” (207). But, as a philosopher, he wants to account for the mysteries, “for these ‘times’ that are somehow not present, for these other ‘whens’” (208). So he sets out to locate the past and future within the sensory landscape, taking methodological guidance from Merleau-Ponty, who asserted “the primacy of the bodily world relative to the universe of ideas” (208). What Abram is looking for “are specific aspects of the perceivable landscape that have lent their particular character, or shape, to these two persistent ideas, ‘the past’ and ‘the future’” (208). He is searching for “a structural correspondence” or isomorphism, a match “between the conceptual structure of ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ and the perceptual structure of the surrounding sensory world” (208). He finds Heidegger’s definition of time, in a late essay called “Time and Being,” very helpful (208). Heidegger decides that we should think of the present as presence, rather than as now (209). “Heidegger’s philosophical move, here, to disclose behind the present considered as ‘now’ a deeper sense of the present as ‘presence,’ approximates our own experiential move to expand the punctiform ‘now’ by dissolving the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ as conventionally experienced, thereby locating ourselves in a vast and open present, which we, too, have called ‘the present as presence,’” Abram writes. “According to Heidegger, it is only from within this experience of the present as presence that ‘real time’ (which, later in the essay, he will call ‘time-space’) can begin to make itself evident. In our case the present has determined itself as presence only by taking on the precise contours of the visible landscape that enfolds us” (209). That enables Abram to look around “for the place of the past and of the future” (209).
Once again, Heidegger offers a clue: the notion of past, present, and future as the three “ecstasies” of time, which suggests “that the past, the present, and the future all draw us outside of ourselves,” towards “a particular ‘horizon’” (209). For Abram, there is “an obvious correspondence between the conceptual structure of time, as described by Heidegger, and the perceptual structure of the enveloping landscape,” in the metaphor of the horizon (209). “Just as the power of time seems to ensure that the perceivable present is always open, always already unfolding beyond itself, so the distant horizon seems to hold open the perceivable landscape, binding it always to that which lies beyond it,” Abram writes (209-10). Thus the visible horizon is “a kind of gateway or threshold, joining the presence of the surrounding terrain to that which exceeds this open presence, to that which is hidden beyond the horizon. The horizon carries the promise fo something more, something other” (210). This, for Abram, is his first discovery: “the way that other places—places not explicitly present within the perceivable landscape—are nevertheless joined to the present landscape by the visible horizon” (210). One of the things I’ve noticed about walking in Saskatchewan is the horizon, the way it slowly moves—slowly compared to driving down a highway—and discloses what was previously hidden. Abram now asks if “the realms we are looking for, the place of the past and that of the future,” might be “precisely beyond the horizon” (210).
This question is Abram’s first step: we can’t see the past or the future, “and yet they seem everywhere implied” (210). So it’s “plausible to suppose that both the past and the future reside beyond the horizon,” although this supposition leaves him confused, because it doesn’t allow him to “account for the difference between the past and the future” (210). On his journeys, like my walks in this province, he has seen the horizon shift, recede, as he approaches (210). “And yet if I glance behind me as I journey, I see that this enigmatic edge is also following me, keeping its distance behind me as well as in front, gradually swallowing those terrains that I walk, drive, or pedal away from,” he states (210). Indeed: the horizon is a circle. This doesn’t help him understand the distinction between past and present, since he could turn around and walk back the way he came, turning his past into his future, even though, he says, trying to revisit the town where he used to live is never successful, because it has changed—it is not the same as it was in the past (210-11). “I cannot, it seems, journey toward the past in the same way that I can journey toward the future,” he writes. “For the past does not remain past beyond the horizon; it does not wait for me there like the future” (211). Indeed, the past behind him is simply another form of the future.
“It is this strange asymmetry of past and future in relation to the present that Heidegger describes in his late essay “Time and Being,” Abram continues (211). In that essay, Heidegger “stresses the centripetal, inward-extending nature of time, describing time as a mystery that continually approaches us from beyond, extending and offering the gift of presence while nevertheless withdrawing behind the event of this offering” (211). This description is strange, but for Abram, it’s important to listen to him carefully, since he is “shaking terms free from their conventional usages” (211). So “past” and “future” are here “articulated as hidden powers that approach us, offering and opening the present while nevertheless remaining withdrawn, concealed from the very present that they make possible” (211). However, the way the future conceals itself is different from the way the past is concealed: “the future, or that which is to come, withholds its presence, while the past, or that which has been, refuses its presence” (211). “Where can we perceive this withholding and this refusal of which Heidegger speaks?” Abram asks. “Where can we glimpse this refusal and this withholding that open and make possible the sensuous presence of the world around us?” (212).
The horizon might be a withholding, but it’s not a refusal, since we know that if we approach the horizon, it will disclose what it now withholds (212). So where is the refusal Heidegger describes? “In ‘Time and Being,’ he writes of the past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern us, and so make themselves felt within the present,” Abram continues (212). That description is helpful, because we find that we are looking for modes of absence “which, by their very way of being absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the open landscape”—or, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology in The Visible and the Invisible, “we could say we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us. The beyond-the-horizon is just such an absent or unseen realm” (212). This recognition leads to a question: “Is there another unseen aspect, another absent region whose very concealment is somehow necessary to the open presence of the landscape?” (213). We can’t see the other side of objects, the side that faces away from us; we can’t see the back of our bodies, or their insides; we can’t see what’s under the ground (213). This last recognition is important for Abram, because it is “so familiar, and so necessary to the open presence of the world around us, that we take it entirely for granted” (213). “For these would seem to be the two primary dimensions from when things enter into the open presence of the landscape, and into which they depart,” Abram writes. “Sensible phenomena are continually appearing out of, and continually vanishing into, these two very different realms of concealment or invisibility. One trajectory is a passage out toward, or inward from, a vast openness. The other is a descent into, or a sprouting up from, a packed density” (213-14). The open horizon represents a withholding, while what’s under the ground represents a refusal (214). “We may describe this reciprocity and this contrast thus: The beyond-the-horizon, by withholding its presents, holds open the perceived landscape, while the under-the-ground, by refusing its presence, supports the perceived landscape,” Abram writes (214). That reciprocity and asymmetry resembles the reciprocity and contrast between future and past in Heidegger’s description, where the future withholds and the past refuses: “both of them are thus making possible the open presence of the present” (214). “Dar we suspect that these two descriptions describe one and the same phenomenon?” Abram asks. “I believe that we can, for the isomorphism”—the match—“is complete” (214).
By reading Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty together, and setting them against his own experience, Abram has started to see that the past and the future “may be just as much spatial as they are temporal”:
The conceptual abstraction that we commonly term “the future” would seem to be born from our bodily awareness of that which is hidden beyond the horizon—of that which exceeds, and thus holds open, the living present. What we commonly term “the past” would seem to be rooted in our carnal sense of that which is hidden under the ground—of that which resists, and thus supports, the living present. As ground and horizon, these dimensions are no more temporal than they are spatial, no more mental than they are bodily and sensorial. (214-15)
The visible landscape has moments of time “behind itself,” Abrams suggests, citing one of Merleau-Ponty’s late notes, “precisely in that the future waits beyond the horizon, as well as behind every entity that I see, as the unseen ‘other side’ of the many visibles that surround me,” while “the visible landscape has the other moments of time ‘inside itself,’ precisely in that the past preserves it under the ground as well as inside every entity that I perceive” (215). “The sensorial landscape, in other words, not only opens onto that distant future waiting beyond the horizon but also onto a near future, onto an immanent field of possibilities waiting behind each tree, behind each stone, behind each leaf from when a spider may at any moment come crawling into our awareness,” Abram writes. “And this living terrain is supported not only by that more settled or sedimented past under the ground, but by an immanent past resting inside each tree, within each blade of grass, within the very muscles and cells of our own bodies” (215). The present and the past aren’t elsewhere; instead, they are “the very depths of this living place—the hidden depth of its distances and the concealed depth on which we stand” (216).
Abram states that he has succeeded in demonstrating at least one way to unify the experiences of space and of time, “that it is indeed possible to perceptually reconcile the temporal and the spatial in a manner that accounts for the apparent oneness of what we have come to call the ‘future’ and the apparent closedness of what we have come to call the ‘past’” (216). This unification transforms space: “Space is no longer experienced as a homogenous void, but reveals itself as this vast and richly textured field in which we are corporeally immersed, this vibrant expanse structured by both a ground and a horizon. It is precisely the ground and the horizon that transform abstract space into space-time” (216). And this transformation allows us to “rediscover the enveloping earth” (216). “It would seem, then, that the conceptual separation of time and space—the literate distinction between a linear, progressive time and a homogenous, featureless space—functions to eclipse the enveloping earth from human awareness,” Abram continues. “As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a rectilinear time, we will be able to ignore, or overlook, our thorough dependence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing” (216-17).
Abram acknowledges that this might seem strange, that most of us have been trained to distrust our sensory experience and “to orient ourselves instead on the basis of an abstract, ‘objective’ reality known only through quantitative measurement,” but he suggests that for Indigenous cultures “still participant with the more-than-human life-world,” these things “are felt as vast and powerful mysteries, the principle realms from whence beings enter the animate world, and into which they depart” (217). He explains how these ideas appear in the beliefs of Indigenous peoples of the U.S. southwest (217-20). He notes that the journey of the sun can be conceptualized as a journey beyond the horizon, or a journey under the ground (220-21). “We begin to glimpse here the secret identity, for oral peoples, of those topological regions that we have come to call ‘the past’ and ‘the future’—the curious manner in which these two very different modes of absence can nevertheless transmute into each other, blur into one another, like moods,” Abram writes. “It is thus that many indigenous cultures have but a single term to designate the very deep past and the far distant future” (221). “The cyclical metamorphosis of the distance past into the distant future, or of that-which-has-been into that-which-is-to-come, would seem to take place continually, in the depths far below the visible present, in that place where the unseen lands beyond the horizon seem to fold into the invisible density beneath our feet,” he continues (221-22).
Heidegger, Abram reminds us, wrote about three temporal dimensions, not two: present, past, and future (222). The present has its own ecstasy, suggesting “that phenomena can be hidden not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thickness of the present, itself—that there is an enigmatic, hidden dimension at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge” (222). There is, paradoxically, an absence in the present, from which the present comes into presence (222). “Is there, then, yet another mode of absence or invisibility entirely endemic to the open landscape?” Abram asks (222). It is, he concludes, the invisibility of the air itself that is “a third mode of invisibility, of an unseen dimension in which I am so thoroughly and deeply immersed that even now I can hardly bring it to full awareness” (223). And the air is the subject of the following chapter, “The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air.”
That chapter begins with an evocation of the mystery of the air, its enigma to our senses, in poetic prose:
On the one hand, the air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and trachea to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, myself. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea. (225)
But on the other hand, the air is invisible—we know it is present, we feel and smell and taste it, but we cannot see it (225-26). We can see its effects, but not its substance (226). “Unlike the hidden character of what lies beyond the horizon, and unlike the unseen nature of that which resides under the ground, the air is invisible in principle”—it can never be disclosed or made manifest (226). “Itself invisible, it is the medium through which we see all else in the present terrain,” Abram writes. “And this unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to live” (226). The air is “the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment” (226). “As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, an d thus a key to the forgotten presence of the earth,” he contends (226).
A recognition of the air, the wind, and the breath as aspects of one sacred power is common among Indigenous cultures: it is “the archetype of all that is ineffable, unknowable, yet undeniably real and efficacious” (226-27). It is associated with speech, and therefore linguistic meaning and thought, and its ineffability links it to the ineffability of awareness itself, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that some Indigenous peoples see awareness not as something that resides inside themselves “but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds” (227).
“The omnipresent and yet invisible nature of the air ensures that the indigenous beliefs and teachings regarding this elemental mystery are among the most sacred and secret of oral traditions,” Abram writes. “Native teachings regarding the wind or the breath are exceedingly difficult to track or to record, for to give voice to them unnecessarily may violate the mystery and holiness of this enveloping power” (228). But we do know that “the air was an uncommonly sacred power for most of the native peoples of North America” (228). Abram gives examples from the Creek, the Lakota (related, he says, to the pipe ceremony, in which the pipe is offered to the Four Directions, or the four winds), and the Navajo (228-37). The Navajo identify awareness with the air; they believe “that the psyche is not an immaterial power that resides inside us, but is rather the invisible yet thoroughly palpable medium in which we (along with the trees, the squirrels, and the clouds) are immersed,” and while that might seem strange to people raised in Western ways of thinking, the Greek word psychê is related to the verb psychein, meaning “to breathe” (237). The word “spirit” is related to the word “respiration” (238). “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for the ancient Mediterranean cultures no less than for the Lakota and the Navajo, the air was once a singularly sacred presence,” Abram writes:
As the experiential source of both psyche and spirit, it would seem that the air was once felt to be the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind. And hence that awareness, far from being experienced as a quality that distinguishes humans from the rest of nature, was originally felt as that which invisibly joined human beings to the other animals and to the plants, to the forests and to the mountains. For it was the unseen but common medium of their existence. (238)
Abram wonders how the air lost its psychological quality, how the psyche withddrew from the world around us and retreated into our skulls, “leaving the earth itself a thin and taken-for-granted presence, commonly equated, today, with mere empty space” (239). But he does more than wonder; he explains.
That explanation begins with the recognition that Hebrew has one world for both “spirit” and “wind”: the word ruach (239). Ruach is central to early Hebrew religiosity and closely associated with the divine, as the first sentence of Genesis makes clear (239). God was present as a wind moving over the waters before creation took place (239). “And breath, as we learn in the next section of Genesis, is the most intimate and elemental bond linking humans to the divine; it is that which flows most directly between God and man,” since God breathes into Adam to give him life, although in that case the word used is neshamah, rather than ruach (239-40). He notes that the Hebrews “renounced all animistic engagement with the visible forms of the natural world”—that engagement was considered idolatry, and wisdom was considered to be in the written letters of holy texts, rather than in the land—but “they nevertheless retained a participatory relationship with the invisible medium of that world—with the wind and the breath” (240). That relationship is in their alphabet, the aleph-beth, which has no characters that represent vowels (241). Vowels are made with human breath, and it is possible “that the Hebrew scribes refrained from creating distinct letters for the vowel-sounds in order to avoid making a visible representation of the invisible” (241). Doing that “would have been to concretize the ineffable, to make a visible likeness of the divine,” of “a mystery whose very essence was to be invisible and hence unknowable—the sacred breath, the holy wind. And thus it was not done” (241-42).
Unlike the Greek or Roman alphabets, a Hebrew text needed to be “enspirited by the reader’s breath” (242). “The invisible air, the same mystery that animates the visible terrain, was also needed to animate the visible letters, to make them come alive and to speak,” Abram states. “The letters themselves thus remained overtly dependent upon the elemental, corporeal life-world—they were activated by the very breath of that world, and could not be cut off from that world without losing all of their power” (242). Thus “the Hebraic sensibility would remain rooted, however tenuously, in the animate earth” (242). A Hebrew text also required the reader’s participation in a particularly conscious and overt way—through the choice of the vowel sounds which would go between consonants (243). In addition, the Talmud, with its commentaries arrayed around the primary text, “displays a sense of the written text not as a definitive and finished object but as an organic, open-ended process to be entered into, an evolving being to be confronted and engaged” (244). Also, breath is central within the Jewish mystical tradition (247-48).
I’m not that interested in the way that the Hebrew aleph-beth “retained a profoundly oral relation to the invisible medium” of the life-world, “to the wind and the breath,” but Abram’s point is that “this oral awareness of the invisible depths that enfold us—this sense of the unseen air as an awesome mystery joining the human and extrahuman worlds”—was “sundered by the Greek scribes” (250). That’s because their alphabet included written vowels (251). “The resulting alphabet was a very different kind of tool from its earlier, Semitic incarnation—one that would have very different effects upon the senses that engaged it, and upon the various languages that adopted it as their own,” Abram writes. “For the addition of written vowels enabled a much more thorough transcription of spoken utterance onto the flat surface of the page. A text written with the new alphabet had none of the ambiguity that . . . was inherent in a traditional Hebrew text” (251). So texts written in the Greek, and later the Roman, alphabets “did not invite the kind of active and ever-renewed interpretation that was demanded by the Hebrew texts,” and the “interactive, synaesthetic participation involved in reading—in transforming a series of visible marks into a sequence of sounds,—could not become entirely habitual and automatic” (251). Greek texts, then, “had a remarkable autonomy—they seemed to stand, and even to speak, on their own” (252). The price of this precision and efficiency was a desacralization of the breath and the air: “By providing a visible representation of that which was—by its very nature—invisible, they nullified the mysteriousness of the enveloping atmosphere, negating the uncanniness of this element that was both here and yet not here, present to the skin and yet absent to the eyes, immanence and transcendence all at once” (252).
“The awesomeness of the air had resided precisely in its ubiquitous and yet unseen nature, its capacity to grant movement and life to visible nature while remaining, in itself, invisible and ungraspable,” Abram continues (252). Hebraic writing preserved this mystery, but “by transposing the invisible into the register of the visible, the Greek scribes effectively dissolved the primordial power of the air” (252). Eventually, this shift meant that “[t]he psychê . . . was no longer an invisible yet tangible power continually participant, by virtue of the breath, with the enveloping atmosphere, but a thoroughly abstract phenomenon now enclosed within the physical body as in a prison” (253). The connection Plato saw between “the immortal psychê and the transcendent realm of eternal ‘Ideas’” was “dependent upon the new affinity between the literate intellect and the visible letters (and words) of the alphabet,” and “this relation between the psychê and the bodiless Ideas was dependent, as well, upon a gradual forgetting of the air and the breath, itself made possible by the spread of the new technology” (253). One fascination with an invisible entity—the air—was replaced by a fascination with another invisible entity—“the utterly incorporeal realm of pure ‘Ideas’”—and the Platonic, rational psychê was connected to that realm “as much as the earlier, breathlike psychê was joined to the atmosphere” (253).
The alphabet spread throughout Europe, and eventually throughout the Americas, and “wherever the alphabet advanced, it proceeded by dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible influences—by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic depth” (253). “In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things—animals, forests, rivers, and caves—had the power of expressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the air,” Abram writes. “In the absence of writing, human utterance, whether embodied in songs, stories, or spontaneous sounds, was inseparable from the exhaled breath. The invisible atmosphere was thus the assumed intermediary in all communication, a zone of subtle influences crossing, mingling, and metamorphosing” (253-54). That atmosphere “was also the unseen repository of ancestral voices, the home of stories yet to be spoken, of ghosts and spirited intelligences—a kind of collective field of meaning from whence individual awareness continually emerged and into which it continually receded, with every inbreath and outbreath” (254). As “the invisible wellspring of the present,” the air “yielded an awareness of transformation and transcendence very different from that total transcendence expounded by the church,” because the “experiential interplay between the seen and the unseen,” a “duality entirely proper to the sensuous life-world,” was felt by oral peoples to be more real than “an abstract dualism between sensuous reality as a whole and some other, utterly non-sensuous heaven” (254). So the spread of Christianity needed the spread of writing and literacy: “one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology on which that faith depended” (254). Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade,” Abram contends. “And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air” (254). The air then became empty and unnoticed, “displaced by the strange new medium of the written word” (254).
“The progressive forgetting of the air—the loss of the invisible richness of the present—has been accompanied by a concomitant internalization of human awareness,” Abram continues. “In contact with the written word a new, apparently autonomous, sensibility emerges into experience, a new self that can enter into relation with its own verbal traces, can view and ponder its own statements even as it is formulating them, and can thus reflexively interact with itself in isolation from other persons and from the surrounding, animate earth” (255). This new way of being “seems independent of the body—seems, indeed, of another order entirely—since it is borne by the letters and texts whose changeless quality contrasts vividly with the shifting life of the body and the flux of organic nature” (255). No wonder “this new sensibility comes to view itself as an isolated intelligence located ‘inside’ the material body,” since it is premised on “the forgetting of the air,” “this sensuous but unseen medium that continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the subtle depths within us to the fathomless depths that surround us” (255).
Abram contends that “every human language secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous terrain that they inhabit,” and that language is a process by which we order “our sensations in a common manner,” thereby “limiting our spontaneous access to the wild world that surrounds us” (255). Back to Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web”! However, “the perceptual boundary constituted by any language may be exceedingly porous and permeable,” and for people in oral cultures, “the boundaries enacted by their languages are more like permeable membranes binding the peoples to their particular terrains, rather than barriers walling them off from the land” (256). “By affirming that the other animals have their own languages, and that even the rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove is itself a kind of voice, oral peoples bind their senses to the shifting sounds and gestures of the local earth, and thus ensure that their own ways of speaking remain informed by the life of the land,” he continues (256). The boundary between language and world is “a margin of danger and magic, a place where the relations between the human and the more-than-human worlds must be continually negotiated,” a place where shamans dwell, where they “act as intermediaries between the human and more-than-human realms” (256). The shaman, by “regularly shedding the sensory constraints induced by a common language,” and “periodically dissolving the perceptual boundary in order to directly encounter, converse, and bargain with various nonhuman intelligences—with otter, or owl, or eland—and then rejoining the common discourse,” manages to keep “the human discourse from rigidifying, and keeps the perceptual membrane fluid and porous, ensuring the greatest possible attunement between the human community and the animate earth, between the familiar and the fathomless” (256).
However, the adoption of a formal writing system “solidifies the ephemeral perceptual boundary already established by a common tongue,” and now “the spoken language has a visible counterpart that floats, fixed and immobile, between the human body and the sensuous world” (256). That’s particularly the case with phonetic writing, which “further rigidifies the perceptual boundary enclosing the human community,” since phonetic writing doesn’t depend “upon the larger field of sensuous phenomena,” and instead refer only “to a strictly human set of sounds” (257). The language ends up functioning like a mirror, reflecting humans back to themselves (257). The addition of vowels by the Greek scribes “transformed the breathing boundary between human culture and the animate earth into a seamless barrier segregating a pure inside from a pure outside” (257). Human language “became a largely self-referential system closed off from the larger world that once engendered it,” and “the speaking self” became “hermetically sealed within this new interior” (257). Today, “the speaking self looks out at a purely ‘exterior’ nature from a purely ‘interior’ zone, presumably located somewhere inside the physical body or brain” (257). In literate cultures, every human psyche sees itself as “a private ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ unrelated to the other ‘minds’ that surround it, or to the environing earth,” because “there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside” (257). “There is no longer any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness and all that exceeds, or subtends, this determinate realm,” Abram argues. “Between consciousness and the unconscious. Between civilization and the wilderness” (257).
Now, in modernity, the air is taken for granted and neglected, without mystery, conscious influence, or meaning (258). It is a place where we dump waste (258). However, the dumping of that waste “could go on only so long before it would begin to alter the finite structure of the world around us, before its effects would begin to impinge upon our breathing bodies, inexorably drawing us back to our senses and our sensorial contact with the animate earth” (259). Abram makes a clear distinction between smoke from fires before the Industrial Revolution, and smoke from fires after that moment—perhaps as a gesture to the burning of fossil fuels. In any case, he continues:
Phenomenologically considered—experientially considered—the changing atmosphere is not just one component of the ecological crisis, to be set alongside the poisoning of the waters, the rapid extinction of animals and plants, the collapse of complex ecosystems, and other human-induced horrors. All of these, to be sure, are interconnected facets of an astonishing dissociation—a monumental forgetting of our human inherence in a more-than-human world. Yet our disregard for the very air that we breathe is in some sense the most profound expression of this oblivion. For it is the air that most directly envelops us; the air, in other words, is that element that we are most intimately in. As long as we experience the invisible depths that surround us as empty space, we will be able to deny, or repress, our thorough interdependence with the other animals, the plants, and the living land that sustains us. (260)
“Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world,” he continues (260). The “primordial affinity between awareness and the invisible air cannot be avoided,” and as we become “conscious of the unseen depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large: we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the sensuous world” (260). The “breathing landscape” becomes “a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate,” and “as we awaken to the air, and to the multiplicitous Others that are implicated, with us, in its generative depths, the shapes around us seem to awaken, to come alive” (260).
In the book’s final chapter, “Coda: Turning Inside Out,” begins with our current estrangement “from the world of hawk and otter and stone” (261). “This book has traced some of the ways whereby the human mind came to renounce its sensuous bearings, isolating itself from the other animals and the animate earth,” Abram writes (261). But the purpose of the book has been “to renew some of those bearings, to begin to recall and reestablish the rootedness of human awareness in the larger ecology” (261). “The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology,” he continues. “Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth,” which provides “the subtle body of our thoughts” (262). “By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us,” he states (262). Intelligence becomes once again a property of the earth: “we are in it, immersed in its depths” (262). Each ecology, each place, “seems to have its own particular intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky,” and the “place-specific intelligence” shared by the creatures living in that place suggests that “[e]ach place has its own psyche” (262).
“This sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in the oral sstories and songs of indigenous peoples—in the belief that sensible phenomena are still alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity of speech,” Abram continues. “Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself” (263). He doesn’t deny that human language has its uniqueness, that it seems to have little in common with the language of animals or rivers, but his point is that we need to remember “that this was not the perspective held by those who first acquired, for us, the gift of speech” (263). Speech evolved in an animistic context, and it was not only a way for humans to communicate with each other, but also “a way of propitiating, praising, and appeasing the expressive powers of the surrounding terrain” (263). By denying that other beings have their own way of speaking, “we stifle our direct experience,” cutting ourselves off “from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing our language from that which supports and sustains it” (263).
Although Abram has concentrated on the invention of phonetic writing, he notes that writing was not the only factor in the way our civilization has isolated itself from the breathing earth (263). Other factors have played a role—the emergence of agriculture, the development of formal numbering systems and forms of measurement and quantification, the inventions of other technologies (263-64). “By concentrating upon the written word, I have wished to demonstrate less a particular thesis than a particular stance, a particular way of pondering and of questioning any factor that one might choose,” he states (264). He has sought rigour “without forfeiting our animal kinship with the world around us,” tried “to think in accordance with the senses, to ponder and reflect without severing our sensorial bond with the owls and the wind” (264). He suggests that this style of thinking is not about facts, but about “a quality of relationship” (264). It’s our relations with the earth that are true or false, he continues: “A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth” (264). On the other hand, beliefs “that foster violence toward the land” are false (264). “A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world,” Abram contends (264).
For that reason, he’s less concerned with the literal truth of his argument than with the kind of relationships it makes possible (264). He has tried to tell stories, and stories need to be judged on whether or not they make sense (265). “A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin,” he writes. “To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by the outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are” (265).
We now live in the “apparently autonomous, mental dimension originally opened by the alphabet” (265). But “[i]n contrast to the apparently unlimited, global character of the technologically mediated world, the sensuous world—the world of our direct, unmediated interactions—is always local” (266). It is “the particular ground on which we walk, the air we breathe” (266). He describes the place where he is writing these words, suggesting that humans “are shaped by the places they inhabit, both individually and collectively,” although our technologies “short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain” (266-67). “The alphabetized intellect . . . extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent,” Abram states—as if he’s not just looked at maps, but travelled a grid road in Saskatchewan—“defining states and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the life of the land” (267). Those states and provinces and countries are abstractions, “ephemeral entities” compared to “the actual places that physically sustain us” (267).
“Only as we come close to our senses, and begin to trust, once again, the nuanced intelligence of our sensing bodies, do we begin to notice and respond to the subtle logos of the land,” Abram writes. “There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in in turn” (268). The senses are “the primary way that the earth has of informing our thoughts and of guiding our actions” (268). And “at the scale of our sensing bodies the earth is astonishingly, irreducibly diverse. It discloses itself to our senses not as a uniform planet inviting global principles of generalization, but as this forested realm embraced by water, or a windswept prairie, or a desert silence” (268). “We can know the needs of any particular region only by participating in its specificity—by becoming familiar with its cycles and styles, awake and attentive to its other inhabitants,” he continues (268).
Abram notes that there are disadvantages to oral cultures and their connection to place, and advantages to our civilization’s way of thinking (269-70), but he suggests our sense that “we are part of a single, unitary earth” is “a precarious value,” because that recognition has come along with the destruction of species and ecosystems (270). We have relinquished something as valuable as whatever we have gained—“the humility and grace that comes from being fully a part of that whirling world,” “the poise that comes from living in storied relation and reciprocity with the myriad things, the myriad beings, that perceptually surround us” (270). “Only if we can renew that reciprocity—grounding our newfound capacity for literate abstraction in those older, oral forms of experience—only then will the abstract intellect find its real value,” Abram writes. “It is surely not a matter of ‘going back,’ but rather of coming full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and particular” (270). If we cannot “reclaim our solidarity with the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute those surroundings, then the cost of our human commonality may be our common extinction,” he warns (270-71). He notes that many people are engaged in this work, in shifting their thinking and their behaviour (271-72). However, “the practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian” (272). It needs “to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present,” “to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment” (272).
But what about writing, given that this book has “called attention to some unnoticed and unfortunate side-effects of the alphabet” (273)? Our task, Abram writes, is not to abandon the written word but rather to take it up, “with all of its potency,” and patiently and carefully write “language back into the land” (273). “Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches,” he states. “It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps” (273-74). The chapter concludes with what may be an example: a description of an alder leaf, drifting on the tide, touching the leg of a great blue heron, in the silence, under a bank of cloud which folds the heron and the trees and Abram himself, as an onlooker, “within a common flesh, a common story now bursting with rain” (274).
Now comes the new afterword to the 20th anniversary edition. Abram notes that the book is uncategorizable, that it was intended as a work of philosophy but that it became “a key text within the broad movement for ecological sanity,” that it found readers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines (276-77). It’s a book about animism, “a participatory way of perceiving that simply defies any sharp distinction between things that are animate and things that are inanimate” (277). It “proposes—and marshals much evidence to demonstrate—that in the absence of intervening technologies, sensorial perception is inherently animistic,” that perception is “an ongoing dynamic wherein the sensing body finds itself drawn into an interactive, participatory exchange—a kind of nonverbal conversation—with the things that surround,” and in which “surrounding things are encountered not as inert or mechanically determined objects, but as material agencies—as active beings with whom we find our own lives entangled” (278). Those bodies are experienced “as open and enigmatic powers” with “the capacity for speech” (278). Rather than animism being “a confused understanding of how the world works, a magical belief system that was dispelled by the advent of writing,” the book argues “that animistic participation is still very much with us,” that “literacy itself is a highly concentrated form of animism,” a participation with the written word (278). Reading “is a form of animism, as uncanny as a talking spider,” and our senses “are now caught in a synesthetic participation with our own written signs” (279). “The ostensibly inanimate letters now speak to us with such a concentrated intensity that they effectively eclipse all the other, older forms of sensorial participation in which we once engaged,” he continues (279).
But Abram says he does not denigrate writing; rather, the book “fairly revels in the texture and rhythm of written words” (279). Abram believes that writing is magic—and that it is only by understanding “the written word’s not entirely rational, world-altering power” can we “have a chance of wielding this power responsibly, rather than simply falling under its remarkable spell” (279). If we take writing for granted, though, “we readily fall prey to a host of delusions—such as the assumption that meaningful speech is an exclusively human property; or the belief that the reflective mind is a wholly autonomous power, independent of the body and the earth; or the related faith that our science will someday achieve a completely objective comprehension of ‘reality’” (279). The alphabet allows us to converse with ourselves, and that self-reflexivity has allowed us “to neglect and finally forget the myriad nonverbal forms of discourse and interchange by which we are steadily nourished and sustained by the more-than-human worlds” (279). Abram lists a number fo writers who have used the alphabet to write “in service to the many-voiced earth,” and claims that while phonetic writing was “a necessary ingredient in our estrangement from the world,” “it was hardly a sufficient cause of our oblivion” (280).
Abram now discusses the way we now converse with things through voice-recognition technology, describing it as a faint echo of the way we used to be in discourse with the world (280-82). Without the otherness of things, there’s no magic in the promise of these technologies (282-83). The key to affirming the possibilities of these technologies “lies in according a new primacy to the many-voiced terrain that we encounter with our earthborn, animal senses” (283). “Only by giving primary value to the full-bodied world of our face-to-face—and face-to-place—encounters, do we have a chance of maneuvering wisely, and well, among the many other worlds that now claim our attention,” Abram concludes:
Only by really opening and offering ourselves to the local earth—unplugging ourselves from the digital thrall and stepping out to wander and bask in the scents drifting up from the night river, allowing the intersecting tones of this land (of its denizens and its solitudes) to recalibrate our organism—only thus do we begin to come to our senses and start to reckon the worthy use, and misuse, of all our technologies. (284)
We are only human “in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (284).
I have to say that I wish I’d read this book when I was supposed to have read it—when I was studying for my comprehensive exams—because it gives a new and important context to my walking project and the writing I’ve done about those walks. At the same time, I feel ill-equipped to evaluate The Spell of the Sensuous: to determine if it’s really as fantastic as I think it is. I just don’t have the philosophical or linguistic background to judge Abram’s argument, and I’m afraid of taking what he says uncritically. So I turn to reviews. “Abram’s work, for all of its artistry and animism, also presents a philosophically coherent and at times strikingly original argument for precisely this reevaluation of our sensuous involvement in the world,” writes James Hatley, who praises the way Abram roots his investigation in phenomenology (109). SueEllen Campbell calls it “an important book—stimulating and provocative, visionary and unusual, rigorous and evocative, erudite and down-to-earth, sensuous and sensible” (160). “Abram may well be mistaken at certain points,” writes Carl Mitcham in Science. “He nevertheless puts forth his daring hypothesis with a poetic vigor and argumentive insight that stimulate reconsideration of the technological commonplace” (174). I don’t know how many reviews I need to consult to confirm my initial hunch that this book could end up being central to my research, but after consulting these reviewers, I am more comfortable with that hunch. Now I’ll have to turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, since it’s not scholarly to rely on commentators instead of tackling the original texts. Wish me luck with that. Afterwords, I’ll probably have to return to Abram’s book, since if it’s as good as I think it is, it’s the kind of book that needs to be read multiple times.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, new edition, Vintage, 2017.
Campbell, SueEllen. Review of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 5, no. 1, 1998, pp. 159-160.
Graves, Robert. “The Cool Web.” The Poetry Archive, https://poetryarchive.org/poem/cool-web/.
Hatley, James.Review of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Environmental Ethics, vol. 19, no. 1, 1997, pp. 109-12.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Mitcham, Carl. “Review: Anthropologies of Technology.” Science, vol. 275, no. 5297, 10 January 1997, p. 174.
Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World, Mariner, 2013.
