An excerpt from David Abram's book Becoming an Animal – Earthly Cosmology (HOST, Brno 2024), from the final thirteenth chapter "Conclusion / In the heart of the heart of the world" (pp. 347-354); translation: Jiří Zemánek.
According to a story once told in various forms by numerous indigenous peoples around the world—from Aboriginal elders in Australia to Native storytellers in North America, to the ancient Maya in Mesoamerica, to the ancient Egyptians in the Nile basin—a fiery sun travels each night across the dark land beneath our feet. At dawn, we see the sun rise from the earth far in the east, beginning its long journey across the firmament, illuminating the world and feeding the earth with its warmth. As evening falls, we watch the sun set in the west (or slowly sink into the ocean in the west). All night long, the radiant sun then passes through the dense darkness that sustains our lives, setting the material depths ablaze with its brightness, and in the middle of the night it pauses in the center of the earth to rest and recharge before setting out again on its journey to the eastern point where it finally emerges. During the summer, when the days grow longer, the sun has little opportunity to linger in the earth, but in the fall it moves faster across the sky and has more time to rest in the dense rocky ground. Finally, during the long winter nights, especially at the winter solstice, the sun lingers for a long time and sleeps in the heart of the earth, nourishing the dark soil with its shimmering dreams and pouring into the depths a diverse life that, after several months of gestation, soon blossoms on the surface of the earth.
It is a story that was born from a way of thinking that is very different from the way most of us think today. A story that – one might say – has very little in common with “factual” reality. Yet the story of the sun’s journey through the depths of the earth resonates in a special way with many of us who hear it, even though we realize that the events it describes are not literally true. The story brings us closer to our senses and our direct bodily perception of the terrestrial cosmos.
In many versions of this story, the sun is a man, in others a woman. In some stories, the sun is transported through the underworld on a ship. In others, as it passes through darkness, it almost dies and turns into a gaunt skeleton, and each dawn it must clothe itself with flesh and blood to set out on its journey across the sky. In some stories, the setting sun is swallowed by a huge fish, which then swims far east with it and vomits it out at dawn, just as Jonah was vomited out of the whale. Among the Paiute Indians, the sun, which sleeps deep in the earth, is a great lizard that feeds on the stars: and that is why the stars flee whenever the sun rises back into the sky. The sun cannot help itself: in order to live, it must swallow several bright stars, which give it its radiance. The wife of this lizard-like sun is the moon, who is also the mother of these stars. He too travels to the earth to sleep there in a house inside her heart. But when the husband of the sun comes home, the moon sometimes prefers to go away—for if the sun could not catch any stars, it is likely to be sullen. When their mother, the moon, is in the sky, the stars are still; and when she passes by, she shines and dances. However, every twenty-nine days the sun manages to eat a few of these stars. Then the moon, as a sign of mourning, slowly smears her face with black pitch—analogous to the way Paiute women blacken their faces with pitch when their child dies. After a while the pitch disappears and the moon's face appears in all its visible fullness—a little blurred perhaps, but as bright as can be seen, before the sun swallows more stars again and sends his wife into mourning again.
We can be fairly certain that those who told such oral stories, and even those who listened to them, did not take them literally. Literal truth is a very recent invention, having come with alphabetic literacy. After all, the English word "literal" is derived from the Latin word for letter. To understand something literally originally meant to understand that it happened exactly like that, as it is written in the Scripture. However, the stories of most indigenous cultures—such as the various creation myths told among tribal peoples around the world, or the various stories of the sun's nightly journey underground—were usually told over and over again without ever being written down.
Once written on the page, language, we have discovered, takes on a detached permanence that is very different from the way it is experienced in a deeply oral culture. Everything speaks to our naked animal senses. But with the spread of phonetic writing, the capacity for meaningful speech seemed to withdraw from the surrounding landscape, and language increasingly appeared as a purely human prerogative. Words and phrases began to be used less as invocative and creative forces and more as representative ones—as labels to demarcate and define a mute cosmos that had previously seemed alive and eloquent in itself. Material things seemed more stable and definite.
It was only with the advent of writing and the spread of alphabetic texts that a clear distinction began to be made between "literal" and "metaphorical" uses of language (between literal truth and figurative or poetic truth). For this simple reason, many of these indigenous stories about the sun's nocturnal journey through the earth could hardly be understood by people who heard them in their original environment. verbatim.
Similarly, it would be a mistake to assume that these stories were purely for the benefit of those who originally told them, as well as those who listened to them. metaphorical meaning. For these stories were told long before there was a break in felt meaning caused by the writing that created on one side literal speech and on the other hand metaphorical speechIf we want to hear the old stories of our ancestors in their original meaning, we must imagine the way of listening that preceded such a division.
When we say that a statement is "purely metaphorical," we often mean that it is an imaginative formulation that has little direct bearing on the tangible world. Yet ancient stories were the primary language form in which people communicated practical information about the tangible universe; it is clear that oral peoples understood these stories as narratives of the actual lived world. If they referred to underworld, it couldn't just be metaphorical areaEven though the underworld was hidden from us humans, it was still a hidden aspect of this very tangible landscapes. It was veiled from our consciousness by the opacity of the solid ground beneath our feet; the very ground, riddled with the tracks of moose, wolves, and bears, from which we dug up all sorts of roots and upon which we lay down when we wanted to sleep. The underworld was, strictly speaking, underground.
And yet this sensory terrain could not be experienced as literally reality: it could not be a world of determined and unchanging facts. The world expressed through our oral stories was neither entirely literal nor entirely metaphorical: it was rather in every moment metamorphicThe landscape was alive: every place had its own pulse, every tangible presence seemed poised to become something else.
Our animal senses still open up such a realm to us. Our immediate perceptual experience reveals to us a world that is constantly changing. Even the most seemingly stable landforms around us change as we move through them, their hues shift as the sun sinks behind clouds. The color of every landscape changes with the changing seasons. Two weeks ago, while my partner and I were gathering herbs in the mountains north of our house (digging up the roots of fennel and pulling nettles), I heard the faint but unmistakable cry of a sandhill crane, which sounds a bit like the rusted hinges of an old door. I looked up into the cloudless, resonant blue of the autumn sky, but I saw no birds. I scanned the surrounding valleys and the cliffs towering above us. Nothing. And then I heard it again—that grating but impressive honking that seemed to be coming from several directions at once, as if there were several cranes, and I thought the voice was echoing off the high cliffs. I looked back up at the sky, and suddenly, high up in the blue, a shimmering white pattern rose from the blue. It was a perfect V-shaped arrowhead made up of thirty or thirty-four cranes, visible only by the reflection of the sun on their flapping wings—like white ripples spreading from the arrowhead back along each of the slanting edges as the arrow moved across the sky. I stared and stared until the apparition was directly overhead, and then I looked at Carmen for a moment; she grinned at me, and we both turned our faces to the sky again. But… Where were they? I searched the sky, but I couldn't find the slow-motion arrow. The cranes disappeared again into the blue depths.
I heard Carmen's slightly anxious voice: "Do you see them?"
"No."
"Did they just disappear, or what?"
Two or three more times the shrill cry came down to us from the heights, but our eyes could no longer overcome the magic of the sky, so we finally gave up.
The next morning, after this apparition and strange disappearance, I was startled by a brazen animal that chased me: it jumped and bumped into trees as it moved along the wooded slope—my adrenaline was surging—until the predator suddenly transformed into a large, overturned rock that rolled down the slope. Relieved, still shaking, I stopped to catch my breath. When my heart rate had calmed down again, I noticed a flood of dazzling azure flowers on a nearby bush. I couldn’t identify them, so I moved closer to them to better absorb their color; at that moment, the flowers seemed to quiver and wave, and then suddenly they soared into the sky and turned into a swarm of blue butterflies.
Reality changes forms. Beneath our definitions, beyond all ready explanations, the world revealed by our bodily senses is a breathing universe—ecstatic, alive, and incalculable.
Oral stories thus bring us closer to our animal senses. They remind us of our bodily participation in the metamorphic depths of the sensory. The narrative of the sun's journey through the earth resonates strongly with us because it transcends our simple abstractions and invites us to return to a direct engagement with the surrounding space. We spontaneously perceive the sun with our senses as a fiery presence that rises and sets. Despite everything we have learned about the stability of the sun in relation to the earth, no matter how thoroughly we have convinced our intellects that it is the earth that is actually rotating while the sun is essentially stationary, our animal eyes still perceive the sun as emerging each morning from a distant land and sinking each evening somewhere deep underground. Whether we are farmers or physicists, we all talk about the "rising" and "setting" of the sun, because that remains our basic experience.
This story follows a perceptual logic that is very different from the abstract logic we learned in school. It closely observes the sensory play of the world and allows the unfolding pattern of this story to transport us to a place of dark wonder, to the possibility that the sun renews itself at night in the material depths of the earth. The story is a vivid imagination, even if it is an imagination that is constantly fed by our senses, that feeds back to us. This story does not ask us to give up the evidence before our eyes, but invites us to look deeper and listen even more attentively, to come to a participation with a tangible cosmos that is at least as alive and conscious as we are. The clashing elemental forces that make up this living universe are sometimes clear and sometimes confused—just as we must surrender to sleep and the magic of dreams if we are to renew ourselves.
This story, shaped by the logic of our senses, suggests a great mystery: in the heart of the earth dwells a blazing light. It suggests that the beneficent goodness of light has its main home in the density and darkness of matter. That the transcendent life-giving radiance that reaches us daily from the heights of heaven also comes to us from below, from the depths of the earth. That in the very center of the earth dwells and dreams the Sacred.
That which transcends the sensory world has its hidden home deep within in This world. Blasphemous as such a claim may sound to theistic people, the indigenous idea of the radiance and brilliance inherent in matter fits well with the new sense of the sacred that is now emerging.
Our age-old disregard for physical reality has now brought not only our species but the entire biosphere into a terrible impasse. The desire for incorporeal purity that has led many to denigrate terrestrial nature as a fallen and sinful realm (and the associated desire for control that leads us to shamelessly conquer and manipulate it for our own, uniquely human, benefit) has reduced this elegantly interconnected world to a pile of rubble. Yet a new vision of our planet is quietly taking shape; even as old, armored ways of seeing still stumble and struggle for dominance, their metal joints creak and rust. Under the onslaught of ideologies and the clash of civilizations, a new perception is slowly taking shape—a lucid encounter between the human animal and its elemental environment.
It is a perception that honors the immeasurable otherness of things, the way in which any earthly existence transcends the calculations we make on it—where every stone, every gust of wind, every termite-infested log, or every floating sea turtle harbors and embodies a creativity that defies definition. It is as if within every perceptible presence there burns a subtle fire, a heartbeat unique to each being—not just humans and woodpeckers, but also cobblestones and granite slabs, lightning-struck trees, pollen grains, locusts, coral reefs, and shed snakeskins. This unique creativity makes us unable to perceive the beings around us until we set aside our already established certainties and open ourselves to what pulsates in each thing we encounter. The expectation of the fundamental mystery at the heart of every apparent “object” awakens in us a new humility; It induces an empathetic attitude towards our surroundings and a compassionate determination to do as little harm as possible.
Despite our inherited ideas, perceptible things are not fixed and finished objects that can be grasped at once. Their unfinished nature opens them to the influence of other things, which ensures that each entity—earthworm, muskrat, storm cloud, cactus flower—is maintained in an interdependent web of relationships, in a matrix of exchanges and reciprocities that is not fixed in itself but remains fluid and adaptable, able to respond to stimuli coming from afar; in this way a biosphere is born, which is ultimately not a collection of determinate mechanisms but a living, breathing sphere.