@book{abram2010becoming,
title={Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology},
author={Abram, D.},
isbn={9780307379313},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=YKLOfABpUs4C},
year={2010},
publisher={Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
What if the very language we now speak arose first in response to an animate, expressive world—as a stuttering reply not just to others of our species but to an enigmatic cosmos that already spoke to us in a myriad of tongues? What if thought is a creativity proper to the body as a whole, arising spontaneously from the slippage between an organism and the folding terrain that it wanders?
Many long-standing and lousy habits have enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature, empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop, poison, or simply destroy so much of what quietly sustains us. Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as a sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away.
We prefer to abstract ourselves whenever we can, imagining ourselves into theoretical spaces less fraught with insecurity, conjuring dimensions more amenable to calculation and control. Technology can also, and easily, be used as a way to avoid direct encounter, as a shield—etched with lines of code or cryptic jargon—to ward o whatever frightens, as a synthetic heaven or haven in which to hide out from the distressing ambiguity of the real.
While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world. Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak in words. They may speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets and the ocean waves. They may speak a language of movements and gestures, or articulate themselves in shifting shadows.
Our words tend to forget that they are sustained by this windswept earth; they begin to imagine that their primary task is to provide a representation of the world (as though they were outside of, and not really a part of, this world). The primordial power of utterance to make our bodies resonate with one another and with the other rhythms that surround us.
Certain built structures may invite and enhance the erotic pulse of the ground; others may muffle and mute that pulse, but they cannot immobilize the pulse entirely. Regardless of how profoundly they have been alchemized in the laboratory, the matter that gleams or sleeps in our creations retains some trace of its old ancestry in the wombish earth.
There’s an affinity between my body and the sensible presences that surround me, an old solidarity that pays scant heed to our overeducated distinction between animate and inanimate matter.
This crystallizing sense of one’s body as a general locus of awareness does not arise on its own, but is accompanied by a dawning sense of the rudimentary otherness of the rest of the field of feelings. The self begins as an extension of the breathing flesh of the world, and the things around us, in turn, originate as reverberations echoing the pains and pleasures of our body. The things of the world continue to beckon to us from behind the cloud of words, speaking instead with gestures and subtle rhythms, calling out to our animal bodies, tempting our skin with their varied textures and coaxing our muscles with their grace, inviting our thoughts to remember and rejoin the wider community of intelligence.
The conviviality between the child and the animate earth is soon severed, interrupted by the adult insistence (expressed in countless forms of grown-up speech and behavior) that real sentience, or subjectivity, is the exclusive possession of humankind. The broken bond between the child and the living land will later be certified, and rendered permanent, by her active entrance into an economy that engages the land primarily as a stock of resources to be appropriated for our own, exclusively human, purposes.
Whenever we moderns hear of traditional peoples for whom all things are potentially alive such notions seem to us the result of an absurdly wishful and immature style of thinking. We know that such fantasies are illusory, and must ultimately come up against the cold stone of reality.
Simply to exist is a very active thing to be doing. Each thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is. The stillness, the quietude of this rock is its very activity, the steady gesture by which it enters and alters your life.
I find myself entwined in a great gift economy, wherein each life partakes of other lives and gives of itself in return. We, too, are edible. We, too, are food.
We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight. We are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us.
Most of this era’s transcendent technological visions remain motivated by a fright of the body and its myriad susceptibilities, by a fear of our carnal embedment in a world ultimately beyond our control—by our terror of the very wildness that nourishes and sustains us. To recognize this nourishment, to awaken to the steady gift of this wild sustenance, entails that we offer ourselves in return. We are bodily creatures that must die in order for others to flourish. We cannot abide our vulnerability, our utter dependence upon a world that can eat us.
An animistic style of speaking opens the possibility of interaction and exchange, allowing reciprocity to begin to circulate between our bodies and the breathing earth. Makes evident the consanguinity between ourselves and the enfolding terrain, invoking an explicit continuity between our lives and the vitality of the land itself. We bring our language back into alignment with the ambiguous and provisional nature of sensory experience itself—with the fact that we never perceive any entity in its entirety, but only encounter partial aspects according to the angle or mood of our approach.
It is only the lived, felt relationships that we daily maintain with one another, with the other creatures that surround us and the terrain that sustains us, that can teach us the use and misuse of all our abstractions.
It is not primarily a set of mechanisms waiting to be figured out, this breathing land. It is not a stock of resources waiting to be utilized by us, or a storehouse of raw materials waiting to be developed. It is not an object.
Our sensorial engagement with the ambiguous depth of our world has been largely overcome by our steady involvement with at representations of that world. For a great many persons the earth is now equated with the earth seen from outside. This “objective” view of the earth now conditions and supersedes our immediate experience, mere “subjective” distortions of a factual reality that has already been mapped, measured, and monitored. All this motion is not at all an illusion: it is the way the world lives, the way the world shows itself to itself—for there is there is NO view from outside!
Matter, as René Descartes described it, was spatially extended, determinate, and mechanical; mind, on the contrary, had no spatial presence whatsoever—it was pure thought, free of all physical constraint and limitation. While animals, plants, and indeed nature as a whole were composed exclusively of mechanical matter, and while God consisted entirely of mind, humans alone—according to Descartes—were a mixture of the two substances. Many scientists began to wonder if their own thoughts were nothing other than the felt experience of neuronal and neurochemical activites unfolding within their heads. Another, more surreptitious dualism to spread between the brain—now considered the very organ of awareness—and the rest of the human body.
The brain can hardly be considered an autonomous organ neatly separable from the body. Mental experience is dependent not only upon the functioning brain but upon the whole of the animate organism—that the mind is less an attribute of the brain than of the living body as a whole. Francisco Varela showed that perceptual
experience is thoroughly conditioned by the ongoing, active self-organization of the body as a whole. Spinoza arguing instead that mind and matter were not two separable substances but simply two di erent attributes, or aspects, of one and the
same substance, which he called Deus, sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” This unitary substance could appear either as matter, on the one hand, or as mind, on the other, depending upon the vantage we viewed it from. “God” was nothing other than the creative dynamism and intelligence of Nature itself, human mind was simply the specific sensitivity and sentience of that part of nature we recognize as a human body, all things were ensouled. The human mind could never be reconciled with the human body unless intelligence was recognized as an attribute of nature in its entirety.
Descartes’ philosophy authorized the modern mind to reflect upon the material world as though it were not a part of that world.
The human body is not a closed or static object, but an open, unfinished entity utterly entwined with the soils, waters, and winds that move through it—a wild creature whose life is contingent upon the multiple other lives that surround it, and the shifting flows that surge through it. Sentience emerges from the ongoing encounter between our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself.
What if mind is not ours, but is Earth’s?
Not too close, mortal, to these kinfolk of mine!
I’d been taught that meaningful speech is that trait that most clearly distinguishes us humans from all the other animals. There exists a primary language that we two-leggeds share with other species. To conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. To the fully embodied animal any movement might be a gesture, and any sound may be a voice, a meaningful utterance of the world.
I began to notice this animal dimension in my own speaking—conscious now not only of the denotative meaning of my terms, but also of the gruff or giddy melody that steadily sounds through my phrases, and the dance enacted by my body as I speak—the open astonishment or the slumped surrender, the wary stealth or the lanky ease. Trying to articulate a fresh insight, I feel my way toward the precise phrase with the whole of my flesh, drawn toward certain terms by the way their texture beckons dimly to my senses, choosing my words by the way they fit the shape of that insight, or by the way finally taste on my tongue as I intone them one after another. And the power of that spoken phrase to provoke insights in those around me will depend upon the timbre of my talking, the way it jives with the collective mood or merely jangles their ears.
If you speak honestly, then the audible modulations of your voice, along with the alterations in your visible musculature, and the olfactory emanations from your skin, will all be of a piece with the patterned meaning of your words, and so will readily convey something of your intent at a palpable, visceral level to the keen senses of the other animal. Your loquacious utterance is heard, or felt, or sensed—and it would be wrong to believe with certainty that you are not being understood.
The activity that we commonly call “prayer” springs from just such a gesture, from the practice of directly addressing the animate surroundings. We’ve shifted the other toward whom we direct such mindful speech away from the diverse beings that surround us to a single, all-powerful agency assumed to exist entirely beyond the evident world. The quality of respectful attention that such address entails—the steady suspension of discursive thought and the imaginative participation with one’s chosen interlocutor—is much the same. It is a practice that keeps one from straying too far from oneself in one’s open honesty and integrity, a way of holding oneself in right relation to the other, whether that other is a God outside the world or the many-voiced world itself.
Human speech, too, is really the wind moving through …
All things have the capacity for speech —all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. When we are at ease in our animal
flesh, we will sometimes feel that we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care—this full-bodied alertness—is the ancient, ancestral source of all word magic. It is the practice of attention to the uncanny power that lives in our spoken phrases to touch and sometimes transform the tenor of the world’s unfolding.
Most of my Pueblo friends are curiously taciturn and reserved when it comes to verbal speech. It is a consequence of their habitual expectation that spoken words are heard, or sensed, by the other presences that surround. Choosing their words with great care so as not to offend, or insult, the other beings that might be listening.
From the Mattole Indians: The water watches you and has a definite attitude, favorable or otherwise, toward you. Do not speak just before a wave breaks. Do not speak to passing rough water in a stream. Do not look at water very long for any one time, unless you have been to this spot ten times or more. Then the water there is used to you and does not mind if you’re looking at it. Older men can talk in the presence of the water because they have been around so long that the water knows them. Until the water at any spot does know you, however, it becomes very rough if you talk in its presence or look at it too long.
Such an etiquette ensures that those who practice it will remain exquisitely attentive to the fluid ways of water, ensuring that the community will not readily violate the health of the local waters, or the vitality of the watershed.
Entranced by the denotative power of words to de ne, to order, to represent the things around us, we’ve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral ancestors. How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world. The numerous powers of this world will no longer address us—and if they still try, we will not likely hear them. They withdraw from our attentions, and soon refrain from encountering us when we’re out wandering, or from visiting us in our dreams.
The relative detachment from earthly reality inaugurated by monotheism seems to have hardened, today, into a cool and calloused imperviousness to the suffering of other creatures and the plight of the living land.
Intelligence, we assume, is a strictly centralized phenomenon, mistaking our distinctively human form of intelligence for intelligence itself. An expanding complex of technologies now mediate between our body and the earthly elements; instead of navigating the elements directly, we’re accustomed to adjusting the switches on those technologies, using our intelligence to maneuver among a determinate set of abstract parameters rather than to improvise our way through an indeterminate and ever-shifting material field.
Whenever we hear the companion calls of one species flowing back and forth in a regular rhythm, it’s a clear indication that the birds are in a relaxed or “baseline” state, a condition of ease that expends little unnecessary energy. If the rhythm is interrupted—if one mate stops replying—then the other will call again in an irregular pattern, sometimes raising the volume. This interruption in the normal pattern is instantly noticed by other wildlife in the area alerting them to the possible presence of a predator or intruder. This interruption in the normal pattern is instantly noticed by other wildlife in the area. Other animals, too, commonly stop and take notice. We’re usually oblivious to the wary commotion we set o as we wander the woods. A keen attunement to the vocal discourse of the feathered folk has been a necessary survival skill for almost every indigenous community.
Science has tried to push past the carnal constraints on our knowledge by joining deductive reason to the judicious application of experiment. Traditional, tribal magicians or medicine persons take a different approach. They seek to augment the limitations of their specifically human senses by binding their attention to the ways of another animal. The animal ally will begin visiting the novice shaman’s dreams, imparting understandings wholly inaccessible to her waking mind. She may spend a whole night journeying as that other animal, stalking her prey and sometimes killing and devouring it, before awakening in this two-legged form. Her allegiance to her own single species begins to loosen. Now and then she may catch herself pondering matters less from a human angle than from the perspective of the forest or the river valley as a whole …
Most of the medicine persons whom I met were precisely such individuals, whose sensitive nature empowered them to tend the boundary between the human collective and the local earth. Learning to dance another animal is central to the craft of shamanic traditions throughout the world. To move as another is simply the most visceral approach to feel one’s way into the body of that creature, and so to taste the flavor of its experience, entering into the felt intelligence of the other.
Synaesthetic experience is not just commonplace; it is the very structure of perception. Perception is this very commingling of different senses in the beings we perceive.
It is a commonplace to observe that today the perceived world is everywhere altered and transformed by technology, altered by the countless tools that interpose themselves between our senses and the earthly sensuous. It is less common to suggest that there’s a wildness that still reigns underneath all these mediations—that our animal senses, coevolved with the animate landscape, are still tuned to the many-voiced earth. Our creaturely body remains poised and thirsting for contact with otherness.
Non-written, oral languages are far more transparent, allowing the things and beings of the world to shine through the skein of terms and to touch us more directly.
The oral frame of mind:
Oral, storytelling cultures, with their heterogeneous, place-based economies rooted in barter and gift exchange, engender a very different kind of self than literate culture, with its cosmopolitan market economy, or than digital culture, with its homogenizing global monetary systems.
No wonder that, despite all we may have learned of the ethical intelligence of the ages, we remain so oblivious, so impervious, to the rest of nature! We have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings. Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance.
By writing oral traditions down, we thought simply to preserve them, and to render their teachings more accessible. We did not realize that in order to plant them on the page we were uprooting these deep teachings from the soils that gave them their specific vitality. Slowly the landscape fell mute.
The global culture of the Internet and the cosmopolitan culture of the book both depend, for their integrity, upon the place-based conviviality of a thriving oral culture. Left to itself the literate intellect, adrift in the play of signs, comes to view nature as a sign, or a complex of signs. It forgets that the land is not first and foremost an arcane text to be read, but a community of living, speaking beings to whom we are beholden. The computerized mind, when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth.
There are certain stories we may stumble upon that ought not to be written down—stories that we might instead begin to tell with our tongue in the particular topography where those stories live! It requires that we set aside, now and then, the books that we read to our children in order to recount a vital story with the whole of our gesturing body—or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise a tale. We begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in relation to the geographic place where our lessons actually happen.
Many persons steeped in Western science tend to assume that native notions are superstitious or simply naĂŻve, unaware that indigenous thought stems from a radically different view of what language is, and what thinking is for.
Literal truth is a very recent invention, brought into being by alphabetic literacy. Words and phrases began to be used less as invocational and
creative powers, and more as representational functions—as labels by which to demarcate and define a mute cosmos that had previously appeared animate, and expressive, in its own right. Material things seemed to become more stable and determinate. We must try to imagine ourselves into a mode of listening prior to any such split if we wish to hear the old, ancestral stories in anything like their original meaning. Neither entirely literal nor entirely metaphoric, the world that articulated
itself through our oral stories was rather, at every point, metamorphic.
The oral stories, then, bring us close to our animal senses. They recall us to our bodily participation in the metamorphic depths of the sensuous.
Despite the several pleasures we might draw from life in this world, there remains something about earthly reality that frightens us, and especially unnerves most of us born into civilization. Not just the decay to which our earthborn bodies are prone, and the death that patiently awaits us, but also our steady subjection to what exceeds us, to the otherness of other persons and other beings, and to an anarchic array of elemental forces over which we have little control.
Whenever the wild diversity of experience is twisted into a simple opposition between what’s good and what’s bad, whenever the heterogeneous multiplicity of life is polarized into a battle between a pure Good and a pure Evil, then the earth itself is bound to suffer at our hands. When the sacred is conceptually stripped of its various shadows and idealized as a pure light, or Goodness, without any taint of the dark, then those stripped-away shadows inevitably seem to gather into a concentrated and implacable gloom, or Badness. The unsullied light can only be located above and beyond this ambiguous world with its shadowed woodlands and its swamps, its cycles of growth and decay.
Animal senses are neither deceptive nor untrustworthy; they are our access to the cosmos.