 Last week I wrote rhapsodically about David Abram's wonderful book The Spell of the Sensuous,
though at that time I had only worked one third the way through its
pages. I've now completed the book, and confess to a certain
disappointment, though that is due in no part to Abram's efforts, which
are startlingly original, or his arguments, which are brilliantly
articulated and scrupulously supported. Ultimately it was I, as the
reader, who failed to do my part, and fell short in the thorny, tangled
journey to rediscover what we civilized humans have so obviously lost.
Perhaps it is my own imaginative poverty that precluded me from
completing this important journey, despite my best intentions, or
perhaps I am just too far gone down civilization's lonely, separate,
sterile path, to be able to find my way back home, to fall again under
the spell of the sensuous.
As I mentioned in the earlier article, Abram presents a thorough
explanation of the history of phenomenological thought, applying in
particular the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to explain
how tribal cultures and other creatures appear to see, feel, and
perceive the world in a fundamentally different, and more profound way,
than we do in our modern Western culture. He goes on to explain why
this is, by describing how the invention of the written alphabet, and
through it the invention of the concepts of absolute space and
separate, linear time, and our conception of the air which surrounds us
as merely empty space -- allowed Western man to create a separate,
thoroughly plausible, abstract reality, that, in the civilized world,
with its need for hierarchy, laws, instructions, rules, and
restrictions, was (and is) a more useful reality
than the 'real' one. Over time, this abstracted reality and its
artefacts have dulled our sensitivity, our awareness of and ability to
reconnect with the 'real' world, the sensual world of which we are
inextricably a part, and upon which our survival utterly depends, but
which we are ever more unaware of, indifferent to, and detached from.
Abram describes the following exercise for reconnecting with the
sensuous, for sublimating the abstractions that interfere with our
ability to relate to the Earth:
I
locate myself in a relatively open space -- a low hill is particularly
good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around.
Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my
past -- the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I
call into awareness as well my whole future -- all those projects and
possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and
this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other
like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single
moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow
both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance
into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly,
imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by
the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in
proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large, and
the past and the future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of
this huge expanse. At this point, I let the past and the future
dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes...
Abram finds this exercise immensely increases his awareness, his
ability to perceive the here and now. Indeed, this exercise seems to me
not unlike many meditation, relaxation, hallucinogenic and spiritual 'stand still and look until you really see'
exercises I have tried before, always, as this time, alas, without
success. If this works for you I am envious. Abram paints some lovely
pictures of what he senses after this awakening:
A
butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with
a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower. The
seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while clustered
wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming insects that
motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant whiffs from new
blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir not only the winged
beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach me from afar,
drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds.
As much as I appreciate the beauty of this poetry, it describes to me
only another person's experience, one somehow inaccessible to me.
"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," Abram writes. "Within alphabetic civilization,
virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an
individual 'interior', a private mind or consciousness unrelated to the
other minds that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is
no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the
inside and the outside. There is no longer any flow between the
self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness, and all that exceeds
or subtends this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the
unconscious. Between civilization and wilderness."
So here we are, unable to remember the way home, unable to escape the
prison, the solitary confinement into which our minds have been so
seductively and systematically lured by the culture and language of
civilization that now forms and informs the very neural structures of
our brain. Only in art, in poetry, in wilderness, in music, and in the
rare book that attempts to liberate us with those very abstract words
and text-images that carried us away in the first place, those clumsy
tools that are simply not up to the task, can we even hear the echoes
of the world we have left behind:
An
alder leaf, loosened by wind, is drifting out with the tide. As it
drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron staring
intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The heron raises
one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As I watch, I,
too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly a bank of cloud
approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the earth,
folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into the
depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a common
flesh, a common story now bursting with rain.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
