 I am working my way through
David Abram's enthralling book The
Spell of the Sensuous. I will have more to say about it when
I've finished, but it has already affected me so much that I feel the
need to write about it.
In his books Ishmael and Story of B, Daniel Quinn describes
the "Great Forgetting", the loss of our memory of, and connection with,
the millions of years of human evolution in harmony with the rest of
life on Earth prior to the invention of totalitarian agriculture and
civilization just a few thousand years ago. This forgetting, in Quinn's
view, has been essential to our modern culture's reckless and
relentless pursuit of unsustainable growth, because we are no longer
aware of any other way to live. In A
Language Older Than Words Derrick Jensen tells us it is possible to remember, to
rediscover the way we lived before this Great Forgetting, and that if
we "listen closely to the land we will in time know exactly what to do"
to reconnect, to remember, and to make our way not back, but forward to
a post-civilization culture that once again respects all life on Earth,
restores the balance of our damaged planet, and brings an end to the
catastrophic violence, misery and destruction that civilization (though
well-intentioned) has wrought. And Peter Jay and a rising number of
historical revisionists now reassure us that life before civilization
was not short, nasty and brutish, but leisurely, joyful, harmonious and
idyllic.
Now David Abram adds two more important pieces to the prescription for
remembering: A solid philosophical framework, rooted in modern
phenomenology (the study of things as we spontaneously experience them,
prior to all conceptualizations and definitions), that provides a more
rational explanation for how
civilization has taken us off-track, away from our true place on Earth
(to bolster the instinctive argument which is compelling enough for me,
but not for many others), and a recipe, a set of exercises, to teach us
to remember, to reconnect, to break free of the abstract moral and
intellectual inhibitors of our culture and re-learn how to be part of the Earth. While Quinn
tells us that we need only "walk away" from the prison that is our
culture, our civilization, he does not make it clear how to do so:
The
prison is your culture, which you
sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from
your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their
parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents
how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile
Crescent ten thousand years ago.
Abram, it seems to me, is telling us that this prison has no bars, no
locks, and that the only thing keeping us inside is fear of what is
outside, of not knowing how to live 'out there'. But as the birds and
the spiders and the frogs show us, every day, living out there is easy.
We have blinded ourselves to this simplicity by elevating abstraction
above perception, closing ourselves to the learnings about how to live
that are all around us. Perception, to Abram, is, unlike abstraction, a
dance, a reciprocal activity that engages and involves the perceiver
and the perceived indistinguishably. He quotes phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty:
My
gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and
in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible
it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or
that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of
my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the
sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning...
Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the rule
[among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because
scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so
that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel,
in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the
physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel.
So, to me, Abram is saying that remembering our true place in nature,
in the web of life on Earth, is simply a matter of opening ourselves
up, to perceiving things we have been taught to block, conceptualize,
and define abstractly. Just like Drawing on
the Right Side of the Brain, it is more a matter of unlearning than of learning. Just
as we can 'unlearn' how not to draw
things as abstracted icons, so too can we 'unlearn' how not to live in a separate,
abstracted world disconnected from our senses and from the incredible
world of ever-changing form and life and knowledge and spirit all
around us. In a section Abram wryly calls "Returning to our Senses" he
describes the journey that will take of most of the rest of the book
(and perhaps, most of the rest of our lives):
As
we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived
world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to
consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory
participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our
focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward
the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin
to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. The
countless human artefacts with which we are commonly involved --
buildings, automobiles, television screens -- all begin to exhibit a
common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness; meanwhile,
organic entities -- crows, trees, rainfalls -- all these begin to
display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique
dance. Even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny
languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into
silent communication. In contact with the native forms of the earth,
one's senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and
recombining in ever-shifting patterns.
Even
language, the most seemingly abstract of our human inventions, is, in
Merleau-Ponty's and Abram's philosophy, deeply rooted in the expression
of our bodies and our senses. Here's a delightful excerpt that
particularly resonated with me, as I marvel at our ability to develop
deep friendships online, and at the amazing depth of meaning that is
carried in the tone of a voice, brought to me by Skype or one of the
other technologies I'm studying, that is absent in the mere stream of
words in an instant message:
If,
for instance, one comes upon two human friends unexpectedly meeting for
the first time in many months, and one chances to hear their initial
words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may readily notice, if
one pays close enough attention, a tonal, melodic layer of
communication beneath the explicit denotative meaning of the words -- a
rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather
like two birds singing to each other. Each voice, each side of the
duet, mimes a bit of the other's melody, while adding its own
inflection and style, and then is echoed by the other in turn -- the
two singling bodies thus tuning and attuning to one another,
rediscovering a common register, remembering
each other. It requires only a slight shift in focus to realize that
this melodic singing is carrying the bulk of communication in this
encounter, and that the explicit meanings of the actual words ride on
the surface of this depth like waves on the surface of the sea.
That is about as far as I have read. Just before he launches into the
next section (which I will start reading this evening), Abram teases us
with the promise of explaining the cause of Quinn's "Great Forgetting":
Nonhuman
nature seems to have withdrawn from both our speaking and our senses.
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?
I will write more about this book. I commend it to those who have not
yet discovered it, or those who read it but weren't yet ready for its
challenging and profound message -- please read it, or re-read it, with
me, and share your thoughts. Let us take this journey, and re-learn,
together.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
