The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Views and Reviews: Barbara Knott

WRITING LANGUAGE BACK INTO THE LAND

Review of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous

For thirteen years, in the words of writers who have columns here or who send us pieces to publish, The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon has been musing on being and becoming human. We have quoted passages from so many books that speak to our conversational themes. In our last issue, we listed some of them in our Recommended Reading feature, carried forward to this issue. Among those books, I want to single out The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram as the best readalong book for Issue 21 of The Grapevine.

We learn from the bio given in his other major work Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2011), that David Abram was named by both the Utne Reader and the British journal Resurgence as “one of a hundred visionaries transforming contemporary culture.” The Spell of the Sensuous “helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology.” The book is praised by such well-known people as Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Theodore Roszak, and Gary Snyder.

On the front, above the title of Abram’s book, appear the words of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who says: “I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world.” And Los Angeles Times tells us: “Long awaited, revolutionary. …This book ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it.” Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, offers this about Abram: “… he has written the best instruction manual yet for becoming fully human.”

Abram is certainly not a typical philosopher. He is an ecologist and anthropologist as well, one who lectures and teaches widely around the world. He is also a slight-of-hand magician who has interacted with indigenous shamanistic people in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. Co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics, he lives with his family in the southern Rockies of the United States.

The Spell of the Sensuous, in tracing the long Western philosophical history of abstraction shaped by Socrates and Plato, by Christianity, by Descartes and the Enlightenment, reveals the way in which humans have gradually moved out of touch with body and nature. He covers the history of writing as well, linking it to human abstraction away from the land and away from poetry where language embodies landscape, and finally, he urges us to make the return journey. He issues a call for humans, in speech and in writing, to return to their senses.

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land (p. 273).

Abram not only urges us to do something, but he enacts for us what he is talking about in his own writing.

Each place its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams—all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue (p. 262).

Finally, toward my purpose here in establishing a go-to source and companion for much of what this issue of The Grapevine is about, Abram offers this valuable advice for those of us who make and tell stories:

… a story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And “making sense” must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the 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 (p. 265).

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Here is a link to his website, the Alliance for Wild Ethics: http://wildethics.org/