The Spell of the Sensuous

"...in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish life. It is not by sending his awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface."
pg. 10

"Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure its is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses."
pg. 32

"The sciences are commonly thought to aim at clear knowledge of an objective world utterly independent of awareness or subjectivity. Considered experientially, however, the scientific method enables the achievement of greater intersubjectivity, greater knowledge of that which is or can be experienced by many different selves or subjects. The striving for objectivity is thus understood, phenomenologically, as a striving to achieve greater consensus, greater agreement or consonance among a plurality of subjects, rather than as an attempt to avoid subjectivity altogether. The pure "objective reality" commonly assumed by modern science, far from being the concrete basis underlying all experience, was, according to Husserl, a theoretical construction, an unwarranted idealization of intersubjective experience."
pg. 38

"The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or 'reality'"
pg. 39

"Husserl shed light on this most primordial, most deeply intersubjective dimension of the life-world in a series of notes written in 1934. The notes describe a set of phenomenological investigations into the contemporary understanding of space. Underneath the modern, scientific conception of space as a mathematically infinite and homogeneous void, Husserl discloses the experienced spatiality of the earth itself. The encompassing earth, he suggests, provides the most immediate, bodily awareness of space, from which all later conceptions of space are derived. While according to contemporary physics the earth is but one celestial body among many others "in" space, phenomenologically considered all bodies (including our own) are first located relative to the ground of the earth, whereas the earth itself is not "in" space, since it is earth that, from the first, provides space. To our most immediate sensorial experience, "bodies are given as having the sense of being earthly bodies, and space is given as having the sense of being earth-space." Further, while contemporary science maintains that "in reality" the earth is in motion (around its own axis, and around the sun), Husserl maintains that the very concepts of "motion" and "rest" derive all their meaning from our primary, bodily experience of being in motion or at rest relative to the "absolute" rest of the "earth-basis."
pg.42

"After the investigations of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the sun came to be conceived as the center of the phenomenal world. Yet this conception simply did not agree with our spontaneous sensory perception, which remained the experience of a radiant orb traversing the sky of a stable earth. A profound schism was thus brought about between our intellectual convictions and the most basic conviction of our senses, between our mental concepts and our bodily percepts. "
pg.42

"The enigma that is language, constituted as much by silence as by sounds, is not an inert and static structure, but an evolving bodily field. It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those who speak. Merleau-Ponty here distinguishes sharply between genuine, expressive speech and speech that merely repeats established formulas. The latter is hardly "speech" at all; it does not really carry meaning in the weave of words but relies solely upon the memory of meanings that once lived there. It does not alter the already existing structures of the language, but rather treats the language as a finished institution. Nevertheless, those preexisting structures must at some moment have been created, and this can only have been effected by active, expressive speech. Indeed, all truly meaningful speech is inherently creative, using established wordsin ways they have never quite been used before, and thus altering, ever so slightly, the whole webwork of language. Wild, living speech takes up, from within, the interconnected matrix of language and gestures with it, subjecting the whole structure to a "coherent deformation."
pg. 83-84

"What Merleau-Ponty retains from Saussure is Saussure's notion of any language as an interdependent, weblike system of relations. But since our expressive, speaking bodies are for Merleau-Ponty necessary parts of this system—since the web of language is for him a carnal medium woven in the depths of our perceptual participation with the thing and beings around us—Merleau-Ponty comes in his final writings to affirm that is is first the sensuous, perceptual world that is relational and weblike in charcter, and hence that the organic, interconnected structure of any language is an extension or echo of the deeply interconnected matrix of sensorial reality itself. Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language."
pg. 84

"So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization's mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar distance from the nonhuman environment."
pg. 95

"The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily entails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and gestures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made images. However, the glyphs which constitute the bulk of these ancient scripts continually remind the reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human field of meanings. As signatures not only of the human form but of other animals, trees, sun, moon, and landforms, they continually refer our senses beyond the strictly human sphere."
pg. 97

"One of the strong claims of this book it that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall––is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures. It is, we may suspect, a spontaneous propensity of the human organism––one that is radically transformed, yet not eradicated, by alphabetic writing."
pg.176

"It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indigenous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their traditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless––or to render their speech meaningless––to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply to, to force them out of their mind."
pg. 178

"The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or tohers when in its vicinity. To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site, and indeed to participate in its expressive potency. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there—to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground."
pg. 182

"On the high plateaus in the Rocky Mountains, where the visible horizon is especially vast and wide, are circular arrangements of stones arrayed around a central hub. It is known that such "medicine wheels," still used by various North American tribes, once served a calendrical function. Or, rather, they enabled a person to orient herself within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely temporal—the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of the sun's northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in time (the summer solstice) as in space."
pg. 189

"To the ancient Hebrews, or what we know of them through the lens of the Hebrew Bible, the cyclical return of seasonal events commanded far less attention than those happenings that where unique and without precedent (natural catastrophes, sieges, battles, and the like), for it was these nonrepeating events that signaled the will of YHWH, or God, in relation to the Hebrew people. In Eliade's terms, these unique occurrences, whose consequence were often devastating (either to the Hebrew or their enemies), were interpreted by the prophets as "negative theophanies," as expressions of YHWH's wrath. Thus interpreted, these discordant and nonrepeating events acquired a coherence previously unknown, and so began to stand out from the cyclical unfolding of natural phenomena. And the Hebrew nation came to comprehend itself in relation to this new, nonrepeating modality of time—that is, in relation to history."
pg.194

"As we have also discerned, the ancient aleph-beth, the first thoroughly phonetic writing system, prioritized the human voice. . . It was a voice that clearly preceded, and outlasted, every individual life—the voice, it would seem, of eternity itself—but which nevertheless addressed the Hebrew nation directly, speaking, first and foremost, through the written letters.

While the visible landscape provides an oral, tribal culture with a necessary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for remembering its ancestral stories, alphabetic writing enabled the Hebrew tribes to preserve their cultural stories intact even when the people were cut off, for many generations, from the actual lands where those stories had taken place. By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories earlier carried by the terrain itself, the written text became a kind of portable homeland for the Hebrew people. And indeed it is only thus, by virtue of this portable ground, that the Jewish people have been able to preserve their singular culture, and thus themselves, while in an almost perpetual state of exile form the acutal lands where their ancestral stories unfolded." 
pg.195

"Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be dis-placed, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to yearn, to hope, that such contact and conviviality may someday return."
pg. 196

"The conceptual abstraction that we commonly term "the future" would seem to be born from our bodily awareness of that which is hidden beyond the horizon––of that which exceeds, and thus holds open, the living present. What we commonly term "the past" would seem to be rooted in our carnal sense of that which is hidden under the ground––of that which resists, and thus supports, the living present. As ground and horizon, these dimensions are no more temporal than they are spatial, no more mental than they are bodily and sensorial."
pg. 214-215

"It is precisely the ground and the horizon that transform abstract space in space-time. And these characteristics––the ground and the horizon––are granted to us only by the earth. Thus, when we let time and space blend into a unified space-time, we rediscover the enveloping earth."
pg.216

"...the perceptual boundary constituted by any language may be exceedingly porous and permeable. Indeed, for many oral, indigenous peoples, the boundaries enacted by their languages are more like permeable membranes binding the peoples to their particular terrains, rather than barriers walling them off from the land. By affirming that the other other animals have their own languages, and that even the rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove is itself a kind of voice, oral peoples bind their senses to the shifting sounds and gestures of the local earth, and thus ensure that their own ways of speaking remain informed by the life of the land."
pg. 256

"...the outpouring of technological by-products and pollutants since the Industrial Revolution could go on only so long before it would begin to alter the finite structure of the world around us, before its effects would begin to impinge upon our breathing bodies, inexorably drawing us back to our senses and our sensorial contact with the animate earth."
pg 259

"...a story that makes sense in one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are."
pg. 263

"The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent..."
pg. 267

"A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply into the sensorial present. it strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment."
pg.272


The Spell of the Sensuous 
David Abram
1996 Random House