#david abram

So language, from the perspective of the fully embodied human, seems as much an attribute of other animals and plants as of our own garrulous species. Yet, as we know from many of the traditional, indigenous peoples among us, this is still too restrictive: language accrues not only to those entities deemed "alive" by modern standards, but to all sensible phenomena. All things have the capacity for speech—all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is perception if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things, wherein even ostensibly "inert" objects radiate out of themselves, conveying their shapes, hues, and rhythms to other beings and to us, influencing and informing our breathing bodies though we stand far apart from those things? Not just animals and plants, then, but tumbling waterfalls and dry riverbeds, gusts of wind, compost piles and cumulus clouds, freshly painted houses (as well as houses abandoned and sometimes haunted), rusting automobiles, feathers, granitic cliffs and grains of sand, tax forms, dormant volcanoes, bays and bayous made wretched by pollutants, snowdrifts, shed antlers, diamonds, and daikon radishes, are all expressive, sometimes eloquent, and hence participant in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation. It follows that the myriad things are also listening, or attending to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel that we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care—this full-bodied alertness—is the ancient, ancestral source of all word magic. It is the practice of attention to the uncanny power that lives in our spoken phrases to touch and sometimes transform the tenor of the world's unfolding.

Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words. Communicative meaning is always, in its depths, affective; it remains rooted in the sensual dimension of experience, born of the body's native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole. Linguistic meaning is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the "external" world. Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation.

What a mystery is the air, what an enigma to see these human senses! 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, my self. 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. Yet the air, on the other hand, is the most outrageous absence known to this body. For it is utterly invisible. I know very well that there is something there—I can feel it moving against my face and can taste it and smell it, can even hear it as it swirls within my ears and along the bark of trees, but still, I cannot see it. I can see the steady movement it induces in the shapeshifting clouds, the way it bends the branches of the cottonwoods, and sends ripples along the surface of a stream. The fluttering wing feathers of a condor soaring overheard; the spiraling trajectory of a leaf as it falls; a spider web billowing like a sail; the slow drift of a seed through space—all make evident, to my eyes, the sensuous presence of the air. Yet these eyes cannot see the air itself. 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. That which today lies beyond the horizon can at least partly be disclosed by journeying into that future, as that which waits under the ground can be somewhat unearthed by excavations into the past. But the air can never be opened for our eyes, never made manifest. Itself invisible, it is the medium through which we see all else in the present terrain. And this unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to live. It unites our breathing bodies not only with the under-the-ground (with the rich microbial life of the soil, with fossil and mineral deposits deep in the bedrock), and not only with the beyond-the-horizon (with distant forests and oceans), but also with the interior life of all that we perceive in the open held of the living present—the grasses and the aspen leaves, the ravens, the buzzing insects and the drifting clouds. What the plants are quietly breathing out, we animals are breathing in; what we breathe out, the plants are breathing in. The air, we might say, is the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, and thus a key to the forgotten presence of the earth.

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons; skyscrapers slice the winds and argue with one another over the tops of townhouses; backhoes and songbirds are coaxed into duets by the percussive rhythm of the subway beneath the street. Things "catch our eye" and sometimes refuse to let go; they "grab our focus" and "capture our attention," and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world. Whether ecstatic or morose, exuberant or exhausted, everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.

Spinoza challenged the older philosopher’s segregation of mental substance from material substance, arguing instead that mind and matter were not two separable substances but simply two different attributes, or aspects, of one and the same substance, which he called Deus, sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” This unitary substance could appear either as matter, on the one hand, or as mind, on the other, depending upon the vantage we viewed it from. Just as, according to Spinoza, the vast and originating power that his contemporaries called “God” was nothing other than the creative dynamism and intelligence of Nature itself, so the human mind was simply the specific sensitivity and sentience of that part of nature we recognize as a human body. Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled. The human body was the outward, material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body. “The mind and the body are one and the same thing …” (...) Still, in one important respect Spinoza remains ahead of even those researchers who today claim his heretical insights as their own. Most of those who now assert the centrality of the body in any understanding of the mind—those who argue that it is really the body as a whole, and not an isolated brain, that is the true locus of awareness—still remain trapped within the confines of an unnecessary presumption. It’s a presumption that lingers as our deepest inheritance from the Cartesian tradition: the assumption that awareness, or mind, is a special possession of our species, a property that isolates humankind from the rest of material nature. (...) Very few of those participant in the current “turn toward the body” seem to notice the wider, more subversive implications of their work. While they assert that the entirety of the body is integral to the mind, surely (they assume) it is only the human body that has this privilege, and not the body of an elk, or an aspen grove, or the dense flesh of the ground itself. Surely the gushing body of a river, or the ebb and flow of the breeze, has no real part in intelligence! It is here that their timidity contrasts with the far-seeing audacity of Spinoza. He alone saw that the human mind could never be reconciled with the human body unless intelligence was recognized as an attribute of nature in its entirety. To Spinoza, every sensible phenomenon had its own mental aspect; every tangible body within the material world was also an idea within the vast, encompassing intelligence that was known inwardly (to some) as God and outwardly (to all) as nature.

Mind, then, as the steady dreaming of this Eairth, the unseen depth from whence all beings draw their sustenance. Mind as wind, this whooshing force, the medium that moves between and binds all earthly beings. This mystery rolling in and out of breathing bodies, invisible: wafting up from the soil and gusting down from the passes in vortices and curling waves that splash against the grasses. A fluid receptacle, clear as crystal, for the inpouring fire of sunlight; the pellucid nighttime lens through which our eyes receive the stars. Sentience was never our private possession. We live immersed in intelligence, enveloped and informed by a creativity we cannot fathom.

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. Anthropological accounts from entirely different continents report that members of indigenous, oral tribes, after seeing the European reading from a book or from his own notes, came to speak of the written pages as "talking leaves," for the black marks on the flat, leaflike pages seemed to talk directly to the one who knew their secret.