Two excerpts from a book by American ecophilosopher David Abram The Magic of the Senses / Perception and Language in a More Than Human World (DharmaGaia, Prague 2013): the first sample “Animism and the Alphabet” is from the 4th chapter of the same name (pp. 154-155, 163-164); the second sample “What a Mystery Air Is” is from the last 7th chapter of Remembering Air (pp. 271-273, pp. 310-313). Translated by Michaela Melechovská and Jiří Zemánek.
Animism and the alphabet
It is remarkable that none of the leading 20th-century scholars who studied the changes brought about by literacy gave serious thought to the impact of writing—and especially phonetic writing—on our experience of the wider natural world. Their interest has usually focused on how phonetic writing affects the structure and construction of human language, the ways in which we know and think, or the internal organization of human society. In other words, most major research has focused on the impact of the alphabet on processes either within human society or in the “inner” human mind. However, limiting such research to the realm of human social interactions and the personal self itself reflects the anthropocentric bias that is so pervasively characteristic of alphabetic culture. In the absence of phonetic literacy, neither society nor its language, nor even the experience of "thinking" or consciousness, can be considered in isolation from the multiple nonhuman forms and forces that influence all our actions (think of our continuous connection with the earth beneath our feet, the air that swirls around us, the plants and animals we consume, the daily warmth of the sun, and the cyclical pull of the moon). Indeed, in the absence of a formal system of writing, human communities come to know themselves primarily as reflected back to them by the animals and the animated landscape with which they are directly engaged. This epistemological dependence is readily attested in the indigenous cultures of all continents by the diverse ways in which man identifies with the living landscape, collectively known as "totemism."
It is extremely difficult for us literate people to even attempt to approach the liveliness and intensity with which the surrounding nature spontaneously reveals itself to the members of an indigenous, oral community….
The animistic language of native, oral peoples, far from distorting their real relationship to the world, is the inevitable counterpart of their immediate synaesthetic connection with the landscape they inhabit. The animistic tendency to perceive the angular shape of a boulder (as shadows move across its surface) as a kind of meaningful gesture, or to engage in an emotional conversation with clouds and owls—all of these might be dismissed as fictitious distortions or fanciful mirages if such active participation were not the very structure of perception, if the creative interplay of the senses in the things encountered did not represent for us the only way to connect with these things and let them weave themselves into our experience. Immediate, prereflexive perception is inherently synaesthetic, participatory, and animistic, and it discovers the things and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects, beings, forces, powers.
And yet most of us today seem very far removed from such an experience. Trees rarely, if ever, speak to us; animals no longer come to us as ambassadors from different realms of intelligence; the sun and moon no longer awaken in us prayers, but seem to only blindly arc across the sky. How is it that these phenomena They don't call us anymore.that they no longer compel our participation or return our attention? If participation is the very structure of perception, how could it ever cease? To freeze that continuous liveliness, to block that wild interchange between the senses and the things that engage them, would be to freeze the body itself, to stop it suddenly in its movement. And yet our bodies still move, still live and breathe. If we no longer experience the land that surrounds us as expressive and alive, it can mean nothing other than that the soulful interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, to another center of participation.
It is the written text that offers this new focus. Because to read is to enter into a deep participation, or chiasm, with the characters marked in ink on a sheet of paper. When we learn to read, we must interrupt the spontaneous participation of our eyes and ears with the surrounding terrain (where these senses have been constantly converging in synesthetic encounters with animals, plants, and streams) so that they can reconnect on the flat surface of the page. Just as the Zuñi elder focuses his eyes on a cactus and hears it begin to speak to him, so we focus our eyes on these printed characters and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, and even experience other lives. Just as non-human animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so those “still” letters on paper speak to us today! It is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless – as mysterious as a talking stone..
And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its sensory participation into these printed letters that the stones become silent. It is only when our senses shift their animating spell to the written word that the trees cease to speak and other animals become mute as well.
What a mystery is the air,
What a mystery to our senses! On the one hand, it is the most penetrating presence I can ever mention—it surrounds me, embraces and caresses me both inside and out, it ripples along my skin, flows between my fingers, swirls around my arms and thighs, swirls in eddies along the roof of my mouth: it flows incessantly through my throat and my windpipe, filling my lungs, nourishing my blood, my heart, and myself. Without the participation of this fluid element, I cannot move, I cannot speak, nor even think a single thought. I am immersed in its depths as naturally as a fish in the sea.
But on the other hand, air is the most unsettling absence known to this body. It is completely invisible to it. I know very well that something is there—I can feel it flowing toward my face, I can touch it and smell it, I can even hear it swirling in my ears and along the bark of trees, but still I cannot see it. I can observe the constant movement that air causes in the changing shapes of clouds, the way it bends the branches of a cottonwood tree and ripples the surface of a stream. The fluttering feathers on the wings of a condor soaring above me, the spiral path of a falling leaf, a spider's web billowing like a sail, the slow movement of a seed through space—all these make the sensory presence of air obvious to my eyes. But air itself cannot be seen by these eyes of mine.
Unlike the hidden nature of what lies beyond the horizon, and unlike the invisible nature that lies underground, air is invisible. in principle. What lies beyond the horizon today can be revealed, at least in part, by going there in the future; and similarly what lies underground can be uncovered by delving into the past. But air can never be apparent to our eyes, never becomes apparent to them. The invisible itself is the medium through which we see everything else in the present terrain.
And it is this invisible enigma that is the real mystery that makes life possible. It connects our breathing bodies not only to what lies beneath the earth's surface (with the rich microbial life of the soil, with the fossil and microbial deposits deep in the bedrock), and not only to what lies beyond the horizon (with the distant forests and oceans), but also to the inner life of all that we perceive in the open field of living presence - with the meadows and aspen leaves, with the ravens, the buzzing insects, and the floating clouds. What the plants quietly exhale, we animals inhale; what we exhale, the plants inhale. We could say that air is the soul of the visible landscape, the mysterious realm from which all beings draw their nourishment. As the real mystery of living presence, it is the most intimately known absence from which presence arises, and therefore the key to the forgotten presence of the Earth.
Nothing unites the diverse indigenous cultures of the Earth more than the understanding of air, wind, and breath as aspects of an extraordinary sacred power. Air, with its pervasive presence, its utter invisibility, and its obvious influence on all manner of visible phenomena, represents for people of oral cultures the archetype of all that is ineffable, unknowable, and yet undeniably real and effective. The obvious connection of air with language—in the sense that spoken words are structured breath (try saying a word without exhaling) and that spoken sentences really do draw their communicative power from this invisible medium that moves between us—brings it into profound connection with linguistic meaning and thought. The ineffability of air seems indeed to be akin to the intangibility of consciousness itself, and so it should come as no surprise that many indigenous peoples understand consciousness or “mind” not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that inside which themselves are found together with other animals, plants, mountains and clouds….
In the modern world, on the other hand, air has become the most overlooked phenomenon. Although we breathe it incessantly, we usually fail to notice that anything is there. We speak of the invisible depth between things—between people, trees, or clouds—as mere empty space. The invisibility of the atmosphere, far from making us notice it more, now allows us to ignore it altogether. Although we are completely dependent on it for the nourishment it provides for all our actions and thoughts, this absorbing medium no longer holds any secrets for us, any conscious influence or meaning. Stripped of all sacredness, stripped of all spiritual meaning, air today represents little more to us than a conveniently forgotten dumping ground for a mass of waste gases and other industrial pollutants. Our fascination is directed elsewhere, carried away by all those by other species media – newspapers, radio broadcasts, television networks, computer news bulletins – all these fields or channels exclusively lIndian communications, which so easily capture our senses and shape our thinking once our age-long participation with that original, more than human medium has been interrupted.
As a child growing up on the outskirts of New York City, I often watched the imposing factory chimneys belching dark, steaming clouds of smoke into the sky. But I soon stopped wondering where all that dirty garbage went: if the adults who made the decisions saw fit to dispose of it this way, then, I reasoned, everything must be fine. Later, when I was learning to drive, I would watch with some trepidation as the trucks roaring past me on the highway belched black smoke from their shiny exhausts, but I quickly forgave them, remembering that my own car also belched hot smoke into the air. Everyone does it. And because the white trails behind the jet planes flying overhead seemed to dissolve perfectly into the endless blue, we assumed that this waste, this colorful smoke and chemical gases, somehow completely canceled themselves out in that invisible void.
It seemed as if, with the retreat of the pagan gods of our ancestors, the burnt offerings of Western civilization had become more and more persistent, more extravagant, and more poignant—as if we were invoking some unknown dormant forces, as if we were trying to provoke some great dragon to life, as if we were trying to invoke some unknown or long-forgotten power that, if awakened, might call us back into relationship with something other than ourselves and our own creations and projects. The mass spewing of technological byproducts and pollutants that began with the Industrial Revolution could, of course, continue only so long before it began to change the ultimate structure of the world around us, before its effects began to affect our breathing bodies and inexorably return us to our senses and our sensory connection with the soulful earth.
Today, the technological media—newspapers, radio, television—are themselves beginning to take notice of the changes taking place in the air and to draw attention to them. It is through these secondary media that we have recently learned about the massive accumulation of synthetic chemical compounds in the upper atmosphere, which are burning a bigger hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica every year, while thinning the rest of this protective layer everywhere else in the world. We also learn from these media about the drastic increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and we hear again and again that this excess of carbon dioxide, together with the saturation of the atmosphere with other heat-absorbing gases, is already fueling a serious warming of the Earth's climate, a change that threatens the survival of numerous ecosystems and animal and plant species, stressed by the ever-increasing human population, many of which are on the verge of extinction.
However, the information thus published and broadcast, which reaches us through these technological channels, remains too often an abstract cluster of statistics; it can make little difference to our intellectual detachment from the sensual earth until we ourselves, returning from a journey, see with our own eyes the brown veil that has just settled over the city in which we live, until we feel the moist mucous membranes of our noses irritated by the chemical breeze, or until we watch with anxiety as a gale tears the blinds from our shop windows. Or perhaps it is only when we recover from our fifth fever in a single winter that we realize that our physical resistance has been weakened by the increased radiation that daily penetrates the exhausted sky, or by the radioactive fallout spreading across the continent from the latest nuclear power plant failure.
From a phenomenological perspective – that is, from our experience – the changing atmosphere is not the only part of the ecological crisis; it also includes the pollution of the waters, the rapid extinction of animals and plants, the collapse of entire ecosystems, and other horrors caused by us humans. All of these are undoubtedly intertwined aspects of a staggering detachment – a monumental oblivion of our human inclusion in a more than human world. Yet our ignoring the very air we breathe is in a sense the deepest expression of this oblivion. For it is the air that most immediately surrounds us; in other words, air is the element in which we are most intimately cast. As long as we experience the invisible depths in which we are immersed as nothing more than empty space, we will continue to deny or suppress our total dependence on other animals, plants, and the living earth that nourishes and sustains us. We may intellectually admit our physical dependence on the plants and animals we consume for food, yet our civilized minds still perceive themselves as somehow separate, autonomous, and independent of the body and corporeal nature in general. It is only when we begin to re-aware and re-experience our immersion in the invisible air that we begin to remember what it is like to be fully a part of this world.
The primordial affinities between consciousness and the invisible wind are cannot be avoided. When we begin to become aware of the invisible depths around us, of that interiority that we have hitherto associated with the personal soul, we then begin to encounter it everywhere in the world: we experience ourselves within the sensory world – how we are surrounded by it, how we are immersed in it, how we are absorbed by it. This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop, a mere background for human history, but a powerful field of intelligence in which we participate through our activities. As that self-referential system of functioning begins to disintegrate, as we become increasingly aware of the air and the countless Others who are contained with us in its fertile depths, the shapes around us begin to awaken, begin to come to life…