A friendly critique of David Abram’s excellent book The Spell of the Sensuous.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2022
David Abram is well-known in environmental circles, which he has wandered for decades much as he wandered the world speaking with native magicians. His writing is both ecological and poetic. It includes environmental science as well as philosophy, history, linguistics, and anthropology.
The Spell of the Sensuous argues for written language as one factor in our growing distance from direct experience of the natural world, a world once of presences rather than objects. It is not the only factor, but it is an important one.
The book has seven chapters. The first two are introductions, one personal (“The Ecology of Magic”) and the other philosophical. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological thinkers to describe how “The Flesh of Language” can link us to a world of presences. By contrast, Chapters 4 and 5 show our natural animistic sense dimming as we collectively learn to read and write, particularly when, in the hands of the Greeks, words wholly detach themselves from imagery found in the world. Chapter 6 takes up the distinction between felt natural time and artificially linear time made possible by how words preserve stories beyond considerations of location or season. The final chapter uses air as an example of a sensuous, invisible, yet omnipresent reality can draw us back into direct sensuous contact with the living world. A brief coda calls for “taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land.”
“The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
Before the written word:
The color of sky, the rush of waves—every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.
After:
Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies…. Without the oxygenating breath of the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them.
What we have succumbed to is a collective ecological forgetting. The more writing has amplified the conceptual and the private, the deeper our ignorance of where so much of our perception derives. The sense of an enduring, boundaried, inner self, for example, is largely an artifact of modernity, a shadow cast by how stories written down continue their existence wholly detached from where they originated.
Even spiritually has grown displaced: “Our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-hoofed powers.” Abram confirms this by speaking with and reading about indigenous medicine people. “When a magician spoke of a power or ‘presence’ lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the roof…”
Phenomenology illuminates the actual relationship by describing the life world below all conceptual worlds. Motion, rest, and other concepts in physics echo the body in motion and at rest. Abram mentions a comment by Husserl scrawled on the back of an envelope: “Overthrow of the Copernican Theory…The original ark, earth, does not move.” Under ideas of time and space, Earth lives on as a primary presence, if an overlooked one.
What happened to this sense of intimacy with everything?
Around 1500 BCE, Semitic tribes developed an early alphabet. Gradually, its characters, which take after images found in nature, developed into a phonetic alphabet in which written characters no longer refer concretely to anything found outside us and words are solely a gesture made by the human mouth. For example, the Greeks of the eighth century turn “aleph,” the first letter and the Hebrew word for “ox,” into “alpha.” “Beth,” second letter and word for “house,” becomes “beta”; and so on. No wonder adherents of the oral traditions resisted this pivotal change. The Iliad and Odyssey are often taken for literary texts, but instead they mark the transition as collections of oral tales finally written down. Socrates takes advantage of this in his debates by midwifing the separation of his audiences’ story-based knowledge from their personal sense of it. As self draws back from words, the Good, Beautiful, and True become entities in their own right, though largely severed from their earthly expressions. The eternal is now what counts as interpreted by a disembodied intellect (“psyche”) strengthened by literacy.
Linking literacy with loss of both ecological and storied perception makes a strong claim. Abram cites old research on how learning to read and write disabled oral improvisation among groups of storytellers. The Middle Ages practice of adding spaces between words furthers the transition by allowing silent reading. Seeing, hearing, and other sensory modalities separate out of their indigenous synesthesia into partitioned activities and lose contact with the storied and seasonal presence of actual places. Abstract space and time dominate.
Abram understands the many benefits long conferred by writing. One is that it served exiled Hebrew tribes as a kind of portable homeland. There are many others. The parallels he draws between the rise of literacy and the domination of conceptual being are evocative.
Nevertheless, “This deeper sense of displacement, this sense of always already being in exile, is inseparable, I suggest, from alphabetic literacy” is such a strong, causally tinged claim that it requires research backup that Abram does not provide. Likewise, “For by using visible characters to represent the sounded breath, the Greek scribes effectively desacralized the breath and the air.” These claims offer an ecopoetics of literality rather than a felt ecology of metaphor. Nor do they answer the question: Why would Greek scribes do this? One of the gaps of a phenomenological approach is that it seldom recognizes the presence of the unconscious, whether personal or collective. The possible unconscious agenda of controlling people through words remains mostly unaddressed, although references are made to coloniality here and there.
By literalizing the parallel between alphabetization and dissociation with nature, Abram loads literacy with a conceptual weight it does not deserve. He claims, for example, that because Chinese ideographs retain some connection with nature, so do Chinese perception and expression. The ideogram for “red,” for example, pictures a rose, a cherry, iron rust, and a flamingo; Chinese therefore (the “therefore” is implicit) explain a general quality like “red” by sticking to specific examples of it. That has not been my own experience in my dealings with Chinese colleagues and students.
My ex-partner, who lived in China and speaks fluent Mandarin, reports that how Chinese people explain something general depends on their level of education (which is true everywhere). The better educated have more conceptual language at their command. She points out that the ideogram for “work” is heart + death, but for many Chinese, this image has largely lost its sense of doom and subsided into an abstraction.
Too, the sheer volume of ecological damage inflicted by Chinese heavy industry argues against the preservation of a significant conscious connection with the natural world. All industrialized nations suffer from this rupture.
How deeply we suffer it and how much we miss receives clear articulation in Abram’s deft use of phenomenologically informed ecopoetics.