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  Acclaim for

  The Spell of the Sensuous

  “Forges a thoroughly articulate passage between science and mysticism.… Speculative, learned, and always ‘lucid and precise’ as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.”

  —Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “This is a landmark book. Scholars will doubtless recognize its brilliance, but they may overlook the most important part of Abram’s achievement: he has written the best instruction manual yet for becoming fully human. I walked outside when I was done and the world was a different place.”

  —Bill McKibben,

  author of The End of Nature

  “Abram manages, almost magically, to stir in us a long-lost memory: deep in our bones, in our blood, in the air we breathe, we know that the world lives and speaks to us.… He shows that it is possible to reawaken the animistic dimension of perception and feeling without renouncing rationality and intellectual analysis.… A joy to read and a brilliant gift to our rapidly darkening world.”

  —Shambhala Sun

  “This is a major work of research and intuitive brilliance, an archive of clear ideas. At the end of our century of precarious ecology, The Spell of the Sensuous strikes the deepest notes of celebration and alertness—an indispensable book!”

  —Howard Norman,

  author of The Bird Artist

  “A tour-de-force of sustained intelligence, broad scholarship, and a graceful prose style that has produced one of the most interesting books about nature published during the past decade.”

  —Terra Nova

  “The wind, the rain, the mountains and rivers, the woodlands and meadows and all their inhabitants; we need these perhaps even more for our psyche than for our physical survival. No one that I know of has presented all this with the literary skill as well as the understanding that we find in this work of David Abram. It should be one of the most widely read and discussed books of these times.”

  —Thomas Berry,

  author of The Dream of the Earth

  “Abram’s Spell must be praised. It’s so well done, well written, well thought. I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world.”

  —James Hillman,

  author of The Soul’s Code

  “Important and highly original, a fresh look at the world we live in but don’t see.”

  —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,

  author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

  “A masterpiece—combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for generations, to come.”

  —Joanna Macy,

  translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s

  The Book of Hours

  “The Spell of the Sensuous does more than place itself on the cutting edge where ecology meets philosophy, psychology, and history. It magically subverts the dichotomies of culture and nature, body and mind, opening a vista of organic being and human possibility that is often imagined but seldom described. Reader beware, the message is spell-binding. One cannot read this book without risk of entering into an altered state of perceptual possibility.”

  —Max Oelschlager,

  author of The Idea of Wilderness

  “This book by David Abram lights up the landscape of language, flesh, mind, history, mapping us back into the world.”

  —Gary Snyder,

  author of Mountains and Rivers Without End

  “Nobody writes about the ecological depths of the human and more-than-human world with more love and lyrical sensitivity than David Abram.”

  —Theodore Roszak,

  author of Where the Wasteland Ends

  “Disclosing the sentience of all nature, and revealing the unsuspected effect of the more-than-human on our language and our lives, in unprecedented fashion, Abram generates true philosophy for the twenty-first century.”

  —Lynn Margulis, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, author of What Is Life?

  David Abram

  The Spell of the Sensuous

  David Abram, Ph.D., is an ecologist and philosopher whose writings have had a deepening influence upon the environmental movement in North America and abroad. A summa cum laude graduate of Wesleyan University, he holds a doctorate in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Watson and Rockefeller Foundations and a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. He is an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician and has lived and traded magic with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. This is his first book.

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by David Abram

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Permissions acknowledgments are on this page.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Abram, David.

  The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world / David Abram.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83055-5

  1. Philosophy of nature. 2. Body, Human (Philosophy). 3. Sense (Philosophy). 4. Perception (Philosophy). 5. Human ecology. I. Title.

  BD581.A25 1996 95-31466

  128—dc20

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1_r1

  to the endangered and vanishing ones

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  1. The Ecology of Magic

  A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

  2. Philosophy on the Way to Ecology

  A TECHNICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY PART I: Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology

  PART II: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Participatory Nature of Perception

  3. The Flesh of Language

  4. Animism and the Alphabet

  5. In the Landscape of Language

  6. Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth PART I: Abstraction

  PART II: The Living Present

  7. The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air

  Coda: Turning Inside Out

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears,
and to which we replied—whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. 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.

  Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

  Does such a premise imply that we must renounce all our complex technologies? It does not. But it does imply that we must renew our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques and technologies are all rooted. 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. We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention. Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN WITH TWO GOALS IN MIND. I HAVE hoped, first, to provide a set of powerful conceptual tools for my colleagues in the broad world of environmental activism—for conservationists, wilderness advocates, community organizers, bioregionalists, nature writers, conservation biologists, ecopsychologists, and all others who are already struggling to make sense of, and to alleviate, our current estrangement from the animate earth. Yet I have also wished to provoke some new thinking within the institutional realm of scholars, scientists, and educators—many of whom have been strangely silent in response to the rapid deterioration of wild nature, the steady vanishing of other species, and the consequent flattening of our human relationships.

  In light of these twin aims, I have tried to maintain a high standard of theoretical and scholarly precision, without, however, masking the passion, the puzzlement, and the pleasure that flow from my own engagement with the living land.

  The reader will discover, for instance, that there are two introductory chapters to the book. There is, first, a “Personal Introduction,” which details some of the unusual adventures that first led me to raise the various questions addressed in this work. This chapter focuses upon my encounters and reflections while living as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician among traditional, indigenous magicians in rural Asia. Second, there is a “Technical Introduction,” outlining the theoretical approach brought to bear upon the questions addressed herein. More specifically, this chapter discusses the development, in the twentieth century, of the tradition of “phenomenology”—the study of direct experience. Originally intended to provide a solid foundation for the empirical sciences, the careful study of perceptual experience unexpectedly began to make evident the hidden centrality of the earth in all human experience; indeed, phenomenological research began to suggest that the human mind was thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our forgotten relation with the encompassing earth.

  While sensorial experience, philosophical reflection, and empirical information are thoroughly entwined throughout this book, those readers who have little patience with philosophical matters should feel free to leap across the technical introduction (Chapter 2)—perhaps touching briefly down to explore those subsections whose titles provoke their curiosity. Others may wish to dance across parts of Chapter 3, which necessarily contains a few somewhat technical sections regarding the bodily nature of language. Toward the end of Chapter 3 a very brief summary will set the stage for what follows.

  MANY COMRADES LENT THEIR SUPPORT TO THIS PROJECT. AMONG those whose curiosity and kindness helped engender this book are the bioregional animateur Chris Wells, ecological cellist Nelson Denman, seeress Heather Rowntree, dreamtracker R. P. Harbour, Julia Meeks, Francis Huxley, Sam Hitt, Vicki Dean, Rich Ryan, Stella Reed, and the rest of the All-Species clan of northern New Mexico.

  The various reflections in this work were honed in passionate conversations with friends in diverse places, among them David Rothenberg, Arne Naess, Rachel Wiener, Bill Boaz, Gary Nabhan, Ivan Illich, Christopher Manes, Drew Leder, Max Oelschlager, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, James Hillman, Chellis Glendinning, Laura Sewall, Rick Boothby, Baird Callicott, Starhawk, Rex and Lisa Weyler, Valerie Gremillion, Tom Jay, and the greathearted Thomas Berry. Mountain-wizard Dolores LaChapelle and letter-scribe Amy Hannon gave essential encouragement in the earliest stages. Among those who read through parts of the earliest manuscript, Peter Manchester, Anthony Weston, Paul Shepard, and John Elder all offered fine insights.

  Philosopher Edward Casey provided fellowship and guidance, as did the wild salmon-sage Freeman House. Historian Donald Worster provided encouragement and inspiration. The Buddhist scholar-poet Stan Lombardo offered unexpected hospitality, as did prairie-stewards Ken Lassman and Caryn Goldberg. Christian Gronau and Aileen Douglas shared their keen insights into the worlds of other animals. Rachel Bagby provided soul sustenance.

  My editors were both a pleasure to work with. Jack Shoemaker deserves my warm thanks for his immediate enthusiasm with the book, and for taking time out from the bustle of setting up a new publishing house in order to read and refine the manuscript. Dan Frank provided patient guidance through the publishing maze, and many keen-sighted suggestions. He has my gratitude, as does his assistant Claudine O’Hearn, Thanks, as well, to my agent Ned Leavitt.

  Generous grants from the Foundation for Deep Ecology and from the Levinson Foundation, as well as a year-long fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, greatly aided the researching and writing of this book.

  Few people are gifted with great artists for parents, as I have been. Blanche Abram and Irv Abram, pianist and painter, provided much tactical help during the crafting of this work. I thank them for their encouragement, and for the intuition of beauty that they carefully granted to their children.

  Finally, I extend a gratitude beyond words to my closest friend and ally, Grietje Laga, whose graceful intelligence deepens all my thoughts, and whose gentle magic ceaselessly returns me to my senses. Her company has made this whole adventure ever so much more wonderful.

  As THE CRICKETS’ SOFT AUTUMN HUM

  IS TO US

  SO ARE WE TO THE TREES

  AS ARE THEY

  TO THE ROCKS AND THE HILLS

  —Gary Snyder

  1

  The Ecology of Magic

  A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

  LATE ONE EVENING I STEPPED OUT OF MY LITTLE HUT IN THE rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out the darkness between them, and more loosely scattered in other areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all streamed the great river of light with its several tributaries. Yet the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each other by narrow two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all filled with water. The surface of these pools, by day, reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright green tips of new rice. But by night the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever.

  I was no longer simply beneath the night
sky, but also above it—the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, I felt that now the little room in which I lay was itself floating free of the earth.

  Fireflies! It was in Indonesia, you see, that I was first introduced to the world of insects, and there that I first learned of the great influence that insects—such diminutive entities—could have upon the human senses. I had traveled to Indonesia on a research grant to study magic—more precisely, to study the relation between magic and medicine, first among the traditional sorcerers, or dukuns, of the Indonesian archipelago, and later among the dzankris, the traditional shamans of Nepal. One aspect of the grant was somewhat unique: I was to journey into rural Asia not outwardly as an anthropologist or academic researcher, but as a magician in my own right, in hopes of gaining a more direct access to the local sorcerers. I had been a professional sleight-of-hand magician for five years back in the United States, helping to put myself through college by performing in clubs and restaurants throughout New England. I had, as well, taken a year off from my studies in the psychology of perception to travel as a street magician through Europe and, toward the end of that journey, had spent some months in London, England, exploring the use of sleight-of-hand magic in psychotherapy, as a means of engendering communication with distressed individuals largely unapproachable by clinical healers.1 The success of this work suggested to me that sleight-of-hand might lend itself well to the curative arts, and I became, for the first time, interested in the relation, largely forgotten in the West, between folk medicine and magic.