 "The earthly reality" | 2009-08-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: A399LR4IH3RX0P |
The Song of Songs of the concrete reality of the Earth is sung by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous from 1996. The foundation is laid by a demonstration that phenomenology not, as by Husserl, has to reduce the experience of reality to something purely subjective (solipsism). As by Merleau-Ponty, it can also look at perception as a duet between the body and the landscape it inhabits, a dance for two, an open cycle completed first in the concrete environment. Traditional science focuses the material world apart from the experience of it, while New Age often maintains that material reality is an illusion created by an immaterial consciousness. They seem to be opposed, but both see nature as something passive, to be manipulated by man. Both views are unstable, but by bouncing from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism and back, contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and at once both sensible and sensitive. Merleau-Ponty is of the opinion that language has a first sensuous, evocative dimension of tone, rhythm and resonance and that added abstract dimensions build upon this flesh of language. Our speech inscribes us in the chattering, whispering landscape.
But how did we end up in this inert, deterministic world that we often seem to live in? One reason is the Jewish and Christian traditions with a God who is not of this world; another one is the philosophical tradition from Socrates' and Plato's Athens with the derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world in favour of pure ideas in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world. And both traditions were, from the start, profoundly informed by writing, by the strange and potent technology we have come to call "the alphabet". Abram tells about the history of the alphabet, were the crucial point is the transfer of the Semitic aleph-bet into the Greek "alphabet". The Semitic letters kept a certain relation to physical reality: Aleph meant ox and "A" had the shape of the head of an ox etc. But when the Greeks took over, the letters lost all sensorial reference and turned into an abstract human system of signs.
Abram strolls in the landscape of oral language, more exactly in those by Indians and the Aborigines in Australia. In the "Dreamtime" of the Aborigines he finds a total symbiosis between landscape and language. Innumerable Ancestors wandered in the Dreamtime, singing, across its surface, shaping the landforms by their actions. Every trait in the landscape is loaded with stories, speeches and songs. For my own part, I am back in the landscapes of Selma Lagerlöf's Gösta Berling's saga and Nils Holgersson.
Abram ponders upon space and time, earth and air, especially air. To us today air is not much more than empty space - we forget how air by the vital breathing connects the smallest cell within us with the whole earthly world. Words like "psyche", "pneuma", "spiritus", "anima", "atma" once also meant air, breath, wind. Air seems to have been looked upon as the stuff that builds mind, as the subtle body of the soul.
For many oral, indigenous people, the boundaries enacted by their language are more like permeable membranes, binding the people to their landscape. But after the establishment of phonetic writing, language became an impenetrable barrier, a hall of mirrors: from a purely "interior" zone the speaking self looks out at a purely "exterior" nature. But the human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.
Something is terribly wrong with our global aspirations, Abram means. In order to obtain the image of the earth whirling in the darkness of space, humans have had to relinquish something just as valuable - "the humility and grace that comes from being fully a part of that wirling world. [...] If, however, we simply persist in our reflective cocoon, then all of our abstract ideals and aspirations for a unitary world will prove horribly delusory. If we do not soon remember ourselves to our sensuous surroundings, if we do not 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."
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 "This book made me think..." | 2009-05-17 |
| - Reviewed By rellenh |
| This book has brings into focus what is so easily forgotten or ignored. It hasn't opened my eyes much (much that I've already known) but it has made me think. We live in a society that ignores most living things and regard as less than intelligent and worth little attention. This book reminds us of what is really important and it's time we start listening. |
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| "Spellbound -- and also slightly tricked." | 2009-02-14 |
| - Reviewed By User: ACQEFDTEHSGY2 |
David Abram has written an extraordinary book about how we stopped perceiving the world as sacred and came to feel cut off. It's a daring darting mix of ecology, linguistics, indigenous traditions and philosophy. It is also is a book that is remarkably different from chapter to chapter.
The first chapter, about Abram's experiences as a sleight-of-hand magician in Nepal and Indonesia, is lyrical and gorgeous. I admit that I also caught myself thinking, "Dude! I want some of what you are smoking!"
I thought chapter two might advocate wearing amethyst pendants. Not remotely. The next two chapters -- on philosophy and linguistics -- require black coffee and a clear-headed morning. It is exhilarating to watch someone think this way -- like watching a daredevil making leaps over cars -- except the leaps he is making are not sport but the leaps we need to survive on the planet.
Abram investigates the present, the past, the future, and where each can be found in the landscape. He even goes so far as to offer, on page 202, a meditation on how to dissolve time. (Of course I annotated my copy; you never know when you're going to need just this sort of thing.) The last section is about writing, how the Hebrews left out the sacred vowels but the Greeks left us marooned in the abstract. My crude summary does violence to the text. It is exhilarating to read.
Then comes the coda and, a few pages before the end, he says, basically, "This might be true and it might not and what is true anyway? Truth is what heals the planet and falsehood is what harms it." Part of me agreed and part of me felt like the victim of a sleight-of-hand magician. I want my truths to be, well, true and not just gorgeous. The whole section made me feel uneasy.
I do not mean to condemn the book. Not at all. I have told everyone I know to read it -- I want people discuss it with! Abram gave me raptures, lectures, arguments and questions. A beautiful book, well worth wrestling with and re-visiting.
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| "Vision Changing" | 2009-02-06 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1VYBKDO4OC9DQ |
You've read nothing like this. This book reminds you what I think most of us have forgotten: that we live in an amazing planet, are part of an amazing multicultural human kind, and that we need to understand a planet (with incredible living creatures, including us, and a great history ) that we take for granted every day.
If you ever feel like you're disconnected with reality, out of touch with nature, spending too much time inside, forgetting about the world, if you feel you should be more spiritual, if you want to appreciate things more, understand more, learn more and learn things you wouldn't learn anywhere else... buy this book.
It will hang on to you after you finish it. |
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| "Something to consider" | 2008-05-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2ZKTBW0HTQFQ5 |
| An interesting discussion regarding the egocentric modern world. Abram makes reference to a myriad of unconsciously driven facets of human existence, now either ignored or forgotten. Although he limits his argument to the issue of language, his overall thesis is certainly something to consider and apply. |
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| "Wonderful, Wonderful" | 2008-03-26 |
| - Reviewed By madrasi |
I have been trying to figure out how to write about this book for years; all I can say, really, is that if you lvoe the Earth, and are trying to figure out how we got into this horrible ecological mess AND you want to read some of the finest writing EVER on this, buy this book.
This man writes poetically, lyrically and with profundity. Where is the NEXT BOOK!!!! |
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