{"id":5266,"date":"2019-11-06T21:45:46","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T20:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=5266"},"modified":"2021-01-25T21:19:30","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T20:19:30","slug":"david-abram-ekologie-kouzla-aneb-o-inteligenci-pavouku","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/david-abram-ekologie-kouzla-aneb-o-inteligenci-pavouku\/","title":{"rendered":"David Abram: The Ecology of Magic or on the Intelligence of Spiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from David Abram's book The Magic of the Senses \/ Perception and Language in a More Than Human World <\/em>(DharmaGaia 2009, pp. 32-38; original:The Spell of the Sensuous. <\/em>Pantheon Books, New York 1996); Czech translation by Michaela Melechovsk\u00e1 and Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months after arriving in Bali, I left the village where I was staying to visit one of the island\u2019s pre-Hindu sites. I arrived there by bicycle in the early afternoon, just as the tourist bus had left the coast. A series of steps led me down into a lush, emerald-green valley, flanked on either side by sheer cliffs and flooded with the sound of the river and the howl of the wind in the tall, uncut grass. On a footbridge across the river, I met an old woman carrying a wide basket on her head and leading a small, shy child by the hand; she grinned at me with the red, toothless smile of a betel nut eater. On the other side of the river, I stood before a vast, moss-covered rock complex of passages, rooms, and courtyards, hand-carved from the black volcanic rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a bend in the gorge further downstream I saw other caves carved into the rock face. They seemed even more remote and inaccessible, and as it turned out there was no path to them. I headed towards them through the tall grass to explore them. It was much more difficult than I had expected, but after three successive trips through the tall grass and three fords across the river, I finally found myself directly below the caves. I scrambled up the rock to the mouth of one of them and crawled into it on all fours. The entrance to the cave was wide but only about four feet high, and the interior was only about five or six feet deep. The floor and walls were covered with moss, which formed green patterns on them and softened the roughness of the stone; despite its small size - or perhaps because of them - the place had a very welcoming feel. I climbed into two more caves of similar size, but then I felt drawn back to the first one, to sit cross-legged on a mossy cushion and stare out into the emerald-green canyon. It was quiet inside, a kind of intimate sanctuary carved into the rock. I began to explore the rich echoes of this enclosed space; I tried first humming, then intoning a simple chant that a Balinese had taught me a few days before. I enjoyed the undertones that the cave added to my voice, and I sat there singing and singing. I didn\u2019t even notice that the wind had changed outside and that the shadows of the clouds had covered the valley until the rain suddenly and violently came down. The first monsoon storm!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had only experienced light rain on the island so far, and so I was now stunned by the torrential downpour, which was driving rocks down the cliff, creating puddles and lakes in the green landscape below me, and flooding the river. Returning home was out of the question \u2013 I would not have been able to get through the flood to the entrance to the valley anyway. So grateful for the shelter, I crossed my legs to wait out the storm. Before long, the rivulets dripping from the cliff above me merged into streams, and two small waterfalls tumbled over the mouth of the cave. Soon I was staring into a continuous curtain of water, thin in some places \u2013 where the image of the canyon trembled uncertainly \u2013 and falling in thick curtains in others. All my senses were overwhelmed by the wild beauty of the cascade and the thundering sound, and my body trembled internally with a mysterious feeling of being, as if sealed within this hiding place of mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, amidst all the noise, I noticed a tiny, delicate activity. Directly in front of me, only an inch or two from the water wall, a spider was climbing a thin thread stretched across the opening of the cave. As I watched it, it attached another thread to its upper edge, then slid down the first thread, joining the two about halfway between the ceiling and the floor. Then it disappeared from my view, and for a moment it seemed to have disappeared, the thread and everything else with it, until I managed to focus on it again. Now two more threads stretched radially from the center to the floor, and then another was added to them; the spider soon began to circle between them as if on a circular lattice, winding an ever-longer thread, which it gradually attached to each successive rung as it moved from one to the next, spiraling outward from the center of the web. It seemed completely unfazed by the tumult of water that swirled around it, though it would occasionally break its spiral dance and climb up to the ceiling or lower itself to the floor to tug on the threads to make sure they were secure, then return to where it was before. Each time I lost my focus, I waited until I had caught sight of the spinning arachnid again, and then I let its dancing body gradually trace the outlines of the web back into the visible realm; as it moved, it drew my gaze to each new knot, weaving my gaze into ever deeper, more intricate patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then, suddenly, my vision was broken by a strange incongruity: another thread ran diagonally across the web, neither emanating from its center nor encircling it, thus disrupting its symmetry. As I followed it with my eyes, pondering its purpose in the whole structure, I began to realize that it was on a different plane of space than the rest of the web, for the rest of the web disappeared from my view each time this new line became clearer. I soon discovered that it was heading toward its own center about twelve inches to the right of the first web, to another knot of field lines from which several threads stretched to the floor and ceiling. And then I saw that there was still other <\/em>the spider that weaves this web, which, like the first one, tests its tension by dancing around its center, and now creates a silken cross of threads around the knot point, stretching outward from the center. Both spiders spun their webs independently of each other, but to my eyes they wove a single, interwoven pattern. My wide-open gaze soon revealed yet another spider, spiraling in the cave's opening, and I suddenly realized that a many<\/em> overlapping webs that radiated in various rhythms from myriad centers\u2014some higher, some lower, some in the immediate vicinity of my eyes, and some farther away\u2014and kept each other in balance between the stones above and the stones below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat amazed and enchanted by the ever more complex expansion of one living pattern after another, my gaze drawn like a breath into a group of converging lines, then exhaled out into open space, then drawn down again into another convergence. The water curtain became completely silent\u2014I tried to hear it at one point, but I couldn't. My senses were in raptures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had the distinct impression that I was observing the birth of the universe, galaxy after galaxy...<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night filled the cave with darkness. The rain continued. Yet, strangely enough, I felt neither cold nor hunger\u2014only a remarkable sense of peace and homeliness. I stretched out on the damp mossy floor along the back wall of the cave and fell asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I woke up, the sun was already peeking into the canyon, and the meadows below were waving in brilliant blue and green. But there was no sign of the spiderwebs or their weavers anywhere. Thinking that they were invisible to my eyes without the water wall, I carefully groped around with my hands at the cave exit, hoping to feel them. But the spiderwebs were there. I went down to the river and washed; then I walked across the entire canyon and out to where my bike was slowly drying in the sun, and I set off back to my valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, I have never been able to meet a spider without feeling that I was encountering something extraordinary that inspired great awe in me. Of course, insects and spiders are not the only forces, let alone the central beings, in the Indonesian universe. However, they were my<\/em> an initiation into the world of spirits, into a magic that stands on the ground. It was from them that I first learned of the intelligence that lies hidden in non-human nature, that a different form of perception has the ability to resonate within us, to imprint its echo on us, temporarily shaking our accustomed ways of seeing and feeling, and allowing us to open ourselves to a world in which everything is alive, awake, and conscious. From these tiny beings, my senses first learned of the countless worlds within worlds that are woven in the depths of this world we inhabit together; these beings taught me that my body, with a certain amount of practice, could enter these dimensions through its senses. The precise and barely perceptible skill of the spiders sharpened and concentrated my consciousness to such an extent that the very "web" of this universe, of which my own body was a part, seemed to be woven by their mysterious art. I have already spoken of the ants, and of the fireflies, whose sensory resemblance to the lights in the night sky taught me the fickleness of the earth's gravity. The long and cyclically recurring trance which we call malaria was also brought to me by insects, in this case mosquitoes, and I spent three whole weeks in a feverish state of chills, sweating, and hallucinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until then, I had rarely paid much attention to the natural world. However, my exposure to traditional magicians and soothsayers shifted my perception; I became much more sensitive to the urgent voices of non-human things. As I tried to decipher the magicians' strange gestures and their constant references to unseen and inaudible forces, I began to see<\/em> and hear<\/em> as never before. When the magician spoke of a power or "presence" dwelling in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that came through a crack in the roof and illuminated a column of swirling dust, and to realize that the column of light was a real force, affecting the air currents and the atmosphere of the room with its warmth; and though I had never realized it before, it was already shaping my experience. My ears began to notice the songs of birds in a new way\u2014no longer just a melodious background to human speech, but a distinct, meaningful language that responded to and expressed events in the surrounding landscape. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze might stir a single leaf on a tree while leaving all the others still and silent (had the leaf not been touched by magic?); or how the intensity of the sun's heat is expressed in the precise rhythm of the crickets' chirping. Walking along dusty roads, I learned to slow down so that felt<\/em> the difference between a nearby and a more distant hill, or to experience the presence of a particular field at a certain time of day, when, as one local told me, duncan<\/em>, this place had a special power and offered unique gifts. This presence was a force that communicated with my senses, for example through the shadows of the trees - the way they fell to the ground at a given hour -, the scents that rolled on the tops of the grasses without being carried away by the wind, and through other elements that I was able to distinguish only after many days of concentration and listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As time went on, other animals began to stop me in my wanderings, as if some quality in my posture or the rhythm of my breathing had disarmed their vigilance; I found myself face to face with monkeys, large lizards that did not crawl away when I spoke, but instead leaned forward with obvious curiosity. In the rural areas of Java, I often saw monkeys accompanying me in the treetops, and also crows walking along the path to meet me, cawing. While in Pangandaran, a nature reserve on a peninsula that juts out from the southern coast of Java (\u201ca place of many spirits,\u201d I learned from local fishermen), I emerged from a thicket of trees and found myself staring into the face of one of those rare and beautiful aurochs that are found only on this island. Our eyes locked. When he snorted, I snorted in response; When he moved his back, I moved too; when I shook my head, he shook his head in response. their own<\/em> head. I was caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other, in a duet of gestures with which my waking consciousness had little in common. It was as if my body had suddenly become, in its expressions, a being motivated by a wisdom older than my thinking mind, as if it were held and moved by a logos deeper than words, speaking through the body of this Other, through the trees and the rocky ground on which we stood.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous \/ Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (DharmaGaia 2009, pp. 32-38; original: The Spell of the Sensuous. Pantheon Books, New York 1996); Czech translation by Michaela Melechovsk\u00e1 and Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek. A few months after my arrival in Bali, I left the village where I was staying to visit one of the island's pre-Hindu sites.\u2026 Continue reading David Abram: The Ecology of Magic or on the Intelligence of Spiders<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[40,35],"class_list":["post-5266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-david-abram","tag-ekofilosofie","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5955,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions\/5955"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}