The West has severed the link with the animate natural world. It has lost the ability to see, listen, and communicate with it, in effect, to feel itself as part of the woven tapestry of life. It chooses instead to stand apart, assuming that “human specialness...alone justifies so many of the cultural and research practices” (Abram 78) that devastate nature today. On the other hand, traditional societies such as the ones found in Bali, Indonesia, the Amazon, and North America, maintain a kinship with natural world. Their adherence to their ancient traditions and believes allows them to maintain a reciprocity with the Earth, thus living their lives to its rhythms and seeing themselves intertwined in its essence, or as Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Tribe once said:
Traditional societies, however, see the “weblike nature of language” (83). In the Amazon rain forest, “human and non-human life-worlds interpenetrate and inform one another”(144) as a means for survival. Tribal hunters learn to decipher the rhythms of their world by listening to and imitating its sounds. To the Koyukon of Northwestern Alaska, bird calls and songs have become part of their language and they believe that other animals such as caribou, grant them songs that ensure their success in hunting. The Apache of North America “travel in their minds” by “uttering the native names of various locations” (155) with in their valley. These names are actual descriptions of the landscape, and by uttering them they maintain a bond between themselves and the particular places.
In oral societies language not only links humans with nature to provide them with a means to subsist, its importance also lies in the fact that it allows them to share their personal experiences with the magic interwoven in the web of life. This magic is the “ability to shift out of [the] common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined (9). This ability to immerse our consciousness in the sensuous world around us is being kept alive, though tenuously at best, by these traditional peoples, but too many links have already been severed.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy for the peoples of “modern” culture is that we have forgotten the magical essence of our nature, preferring instead to replace it with the “wonders” of our technology. We have chosen to engulf ourselves in the deafening rumble of our machines and make our landscapes into panoramic vistas of asphalt, cement, steel, and glass. However, there are moments of lucidity that enable us to intuit that we are ripping apart the fragile threads of the web of life and we feel a sense of loss. This has given rise to ecological movements that try to prevent further destruction of the natural world, as well as a trend towards holistic medicine. But for some of us there is yearning that goes beyond this, and we find ourselves searching for one of the elusive magical threads.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The
Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Bob, Barefoot. “Chief
Seattle’s Letter to All the People.” <http://www.nidlink.com/~bobhard/seattle.html>
(30 Jan. 1998).
In Nepal, David’s experiences mimics Grenouille’s imaginary scent-filled kingdom where every scent imaginable was warehoused. David too begins collecting and hoarding different sensations and perceptions by traveling to, and living in various natural environments and among indigenous cultures. From “the honeyed pastries and fruits to the stench of organic refuse rotting.....corpses being cremated....to the countless wildflowers and the smoke from home fires....“ the air was a thick and richly textured presence, filled with invisible but nonetheless tactile, olfactory, and audible influences.” (Abram 26) In the United States however he found his senses were deprived and there was nothing but ‘empty space’. Just as Grenouille, who had been blessed with the most sensitive olfactory organ did not possess a scent of his own, set out to create a fragrance - the fragrance of life - so that he could indulge himself, so too David on his return to the U.S. sought out wood fires and garbage dumps to recreate his sensory experience in Asia.
Abram suggests that we have strayed from our beginnings and the way it was intended to be - man communing with nature, each respectful of the other’s territory. Native Americans have inhabited the North American continent for thousands of years without disrupting the natural order of the land. They have hunted, gathered and settled these lands without ravaging their surroundings. They lived in harmony with the land. However, the Europeans, who came later had no concern for their environment, thinking only of how to extract its resources for a profit and not give anything back to the land - treating like the land like a cheap prostitute and discarding her after a quick roll in the hay.
Language is explored as “a physical activity involving participation and reciprocity punctuated by gestures, sounds and rhythms, not entirely of our own making.” (Abram 36) We acknowledge that all animals, plants and other organisms are dependent on each other for survival. We see the symbiotic relationship between the communication of the animals and the way they influence our language, and how any upset in their world influences a shift in our language patterns. We begin to see language not merely as the spoken word but as a living, evolving experience. These are concepts that have not been explored before, unique, original thoughts about the coexistence and inter dependency of humans and the natural world we cohabit and how each contributes to the other’s existence.
We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between those tastes and those of our invention.” (Abram x) David’s experiences gives you a new respect for nature and the animal kingdom and an appreciation of the beauty in experiences we take for granted such as a bird in flight, ants foraging for food or the land after a heavy rainfall. David Abram takes us on a sensory journey that makes us acutely aware of the things we come in contact with daily, and ordinary, commonplace things are seen as the intricate and complex structures that they really are.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abram, David. The Spell
of the Sensous. New York: Random House, 1997
Suskind, Patrick.
Perfume. New York: Knopt, c 1996
In reading David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, one might wonder about its intended audience. The book it a learned treatise on some of the possible causes of why modern man is out of touch with Nature. The author takes us to parts of the world where “indigenous oral cultures” (154) are living lives that appear to be participating with nature. Abram makes a strong case that our culture, which has moved away from an oral tradition, has moved away from nature. He demonstrates that the advent of writing coincides with the formation of the basic tenets of western civilization, and that these ideas have alienated us from our environment. But one must ask: To whom is Abram writing?
It is fitting that Abram explains his talent for sleight-of-hand to us from the outset, because he then proceeds to use misdirection to conjure “ambiguous gaps and lacunae” in the trajectory of our thoughts. His observations make us question our pasture, playing on our susceptibility to our “the grass is greener” doubts. In the end he makes apologies as to what we are to do about regaining the tantalizing vistas of Eden and Bali that he parades before us in the form of ‘it is surely not a matter of “going back.”’(270) He finishes by saying that he will fight fire with fire, that he will use writing to dispel the evils of writing. He feigns the roll of shaman, dancing upon the threshold between the written and oral cultures, all the while far within the western world of inanimate ideas.
Abram’s attempts at tricking us out of our intellectual cages by using complex philosophical and scientific theories, paints him as a later-day shaman. His book reads like “a shaman’s guide for the intellectual elite.” He points out that in oral cultures “the elite of society were all reciters and performers” (104), and that ‘the elders and “persons of high degree” within such ...communities...,’ chose certain talented individuals “to become a seer or shaman...” (116) Abram is writing to other shamans.
We read (266):
About sixty years ago the renowned Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard De Chardin pointed out, in his work The Phenomenon of Man, that man is probably the most complex “phenomenon” to have occurred in the history of the universe. Our little part of it anyway. He begins with inanimate matter and describes the various chemical evolutions that led to biology. His description follows evolution from early protozoan sparks of life to the light of consciousness in man. All throughout his work he places man in nature, as an integral component, emphasizing the inability to be apart from matter. According to Teilhard, man is matter in its most complex form: matter conscious of itself. But, like Abram, Pierre Teilhard was writing to the likes of Sir Julian Huxley and his kind--the intelligentsia.
About twenty years ago, when some of us were watching Viking spacecraft search for life on Mars, a certain professor James Lovelock was finding life on Earth. His Gaia hypothesis that the Earth, in its entirety, was a single living organism met with much abuse from the scientific community. His book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, points to man as part of a larger organism: Earth. Here too the author was writing to some intellectual fringe. Twenty years later in a new preface (ix) he makes apologies, similar to Abram’s ending note, but the damage has been done. We may have only recently put a label on it, but the “sound bite” mentality has been there all along and authors should be mindful of whose hands their ideas are most liable to fall into.
Whether its Pierre Teilhard theorizing on some “Omega Point” at which we all become cells in some great godlike super-organism (body of Christ), or James Lovelock professing us as organelles in the body of some “Great Mother Amoebae”, or David Abram suggesting we pass the peace pipe and inhale a little of the “Great Spirit”, we seem to have a penchant for the miraculous. It’s as if Abram’s sleight-of-hand were at work on us, and as if the child in us, that cannot avoid a magic show, gets drawn in to these grandiose pageants. When will we grow up, and assume our role as adults? We need practicality. You want whimsy, go read Peter Pan to pre-schoolers.
The initiation rites of most religions were performed during adolescence. They were performed at this time so as to take advantage of the hormonal and psychological crystallizations that were going on within the individual. The person experiencing initiation was susceptible the idea that some great magic was at work, and it was up to the culture to make sure that the individual was inoculated against the alternative. This method had worked for thousands of years, but the time has come for us to put away childish things and do the work of adults. Perhaps Abram’s work, by pointing out our journey from childhood, can work a little magic on those of us that can make sense of it. Perhaps there is a little shaman in all of us.
Bibliography
Abram, David. The Spell of the
Sensuous. New York: Random
House, 1996.
Lovelock, James. GAIA: A New Look at Life on
Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Teilhard De Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man.
Trans. by Bernard Wall. Intro. by Julian Huxley.
New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1959.