David Abram
We were in the US. Once again, my youngest daughter was in between the stacks of the Border’s store on Columbus Circle, New York. She would go there straight after breakfast, and if I didn’t retrieve her, she would stay for hours. It was, in effect, a library filled with books almost all of which were new to her, and with no adult to say what she could read and what was forbidden! I find it hard to believe I was so trusting. She and I would catch the lift from our hotel floor to the entrance to the store: I guess I assumed she was safe once she was inside and tucked away. Before you imagine she was abandoned for hours on end, she was only there for part of the day, and I would check on her regularly. More to the point, we had to get her out as there was much more we wanted to do in New York.
Naturally enough, while I was in Borders keeping an eye on my daughter, I would spend some time looking at books. So many temptations. In the ‘newly released’ section I found a paperback, The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, with a strange, almost mystical cover, depicting something like a bird. I hadn’t heard of the author, had no real idea what it would be like, but I was captured by the back cover blurb, “What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relationship with the breathing earth”. It joined a few other books for the adults and several for my daughter, and the whole collection was shipped back to Australia.
The book’s brief background on David Abram explained he was interested in environmental issues, philosophy, phenomenology, psychology, history, and that he was an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, having lived and practiced magic with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and various parts of the Americas. With a background like that, it wasn’t surprising it was sold to a manager from Melbourne, who was clearly wanting books on more than business strategy, leadership ethics or scenario analysis. Back in Australia and back at work, The Spell of the Sensuous had to wait, joining several other volumes on the shelf where I kept those still unread: it was a small shelf, the result of my rather silly rule that new books had to go on that shelf, its diminutive size ensuring I had to read whatever I had acquired, as otherwise I couldn’t purchase any additions! It didn’t sit there for very long.
Four years earlier, I had had an epiphany, in my case not on the road to Damascus, but in the woods of Maryland! It was the second time I had been given the opportunity to rethink how I saw myself, my life, and what mattered. The first time was in my second year at university, when I discovered there was a world outside science, in my case geology, and transferred to studying social anthropology. This second time was when I was confronted with thinking deeply and seriously about philosophy, history and politics. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read books in all those areas over the intervening twenty-five years, I had, but in that time my career had shifted away from teaching, and I had become an executive. If had any skills, I think the benefit from my reading and education was to help me be reasonably participative and caring. However, I was given another lesson in humility at The Aspen Institute campus. There was a lot more to life than being moderately successful in running an organisation, and much to be thought about in the books I had read, and in the new reading list stretching out before me.
Once I began my new acquisition, The Spell of the Sensuous proved quite hypnotic. It started with talking about magic, and David Abram’s transition from being an entertainer to his understanding the magic of experiencing the environment around you, provided you were willing to open yourself to really sensing what was there. For Abram, this was enabled by moving from America to Bali, learning from shamans and observing their traditional healing practices. It was the perfect starting point for me: it drew on my years of studying and teaching social anthropology through to my more recent dive at Aspen into philosophy and the question of how to live a good life. Without any awareness this would be the outcome, I had chosen the perfect book to consolidate that second epiphany while linking it back to my previous years of work and reading. That took a lot of words to say what happened: quite simply, Abram’s book encouraged me to continue changing and focus more on thinking.
Revisiting it now, some 25 years later, the book has shamed me into realising how much of what I had read had slowly leaked away. My main recollection was that it had moved me, and that it had been another element in convincing me that we needed a better way to look at ourselves and the world around us. The core of the book sits around a phrase, ‘the more than human world’, which reappears constantly through the chapters. It was one of those terms that slowly eats its way into your brain, and it had stuck, but the rich exploration of issues by David Abrams had largely disappeared. Does the detail matter? Perhaps not, if the author has managed to change how the reader thinks. That certainly was the case for me. The Spell of the Sensuous snapped together ideas and thoughts that came from as far back as reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I was an undergraduate to Václav Havel’s speech in Philadelphia on receiving the Liberty Medal in 1994 just two years before I’d picked up Abram’s analysis. This wasn’t about environmentalism, although that was part, but rather the deeper issue as to how we see ourselves in the world, in the more than human world.
David Abram is not a unique writer on what some call deep ecology. Many others have contributed to how we study the environment around us. However, I found his focus on ‘seeing’ was especially telling. What he did in his analysis and has continued to do since establishing the Alliance for Wild Ethics, is push us to rethink our confidence about what makes us unique, a view which can encourage us to believe we are in some sense special. Asked about this, he commented, “I am dazzled, yes, by the creativity of the human mind, but I am also struck dumb by the ability of various aspen groves to maintain and replenish themselves, through their common root system, for eighty thousand years and more. Gadzooks! And by the ability of a spring meadow to utter forth into the mountain air a resplendence of wildflowers, the hue and tone of this complex utterance slowly altering throughout the season. Or by the audacious ability of hummingbirds to fly, um, backwards. Are we humans unique? Sure we are. But so is everyone else around here.” Great comment, and I love that word ‘gadzooks’ by the way!
The Spell of the Sensuous was tailor-made to entrance a person like me, with a background in social anthropology and a fascination with thinkers. It opens with an account of Abram’s time in Bali, where what starts out as an account of shamans and how they were involved with Balinese society almost unnoticeably morphs into a series of reflections on the physical and animate world in which he found himself. Without my noticing, he had drawn me into reflecting on seeing, on really paying attention to what we observe, hear and touch; the spell, as he suggested, of allowing ourselves to respond to our senses.
Having set the scene so visually, the book becomes serious in the second chapter, introducing us to phenomenology. Years before, I had read several books on phenomenology, and tried to come to grips with the approach. Over time, I had come to understand that it was not a ‘framework’ in the sense we usually think of the underpinning of a discipline, but rather a set of techniques, tools if you like, to understand the processes of consciousness and perception. For me, central to this philosophical perspective was the concept of the ‘epoché’, the suspension of judgment in experiencing perception, free of frameworks and conceptual representations: engaging with things as we apprehend them, not as we understand them through making sense of them in advance. I had read some of Husserl’s books and his analysis of phenomena ‘as they really are’, not as we construct them in our minds. He explained that this reality could only be grasped by ‘bracketing’ theoretical explanations and structures, or, to use another way of explaining the approach, by suspending what we usually take for granted. If that wasn’t hard enough to grasp, Merleau-Ponty, whose work I found the most engaging, took this one step further and sought to explain how the experience of perception sits outside of our normal mental processes, and is a direct engagement with what we are trying to apprehend.
Abram dances through all that challenging stuff and suggests one way to make it clear is to imagine we are stuck behind a curtain, trying to break through the ways of seeing we have learnt, and instead allowing ourselves to perceive through direct engagement with the object. There is a lot more to be said than any instant overview I can offer; his book addresses the phenomenologists’ approach in a way that’s both accessible and helpful. The Spell of the Sensuous is not seeking a place in philosophy courses, however. What it does demand of us is that we re-examine how we look at the world around us.
For an Australian, there is a compelling chapter on Aboriginal dreaming and songlines. Abram draws on various anthropological accounts to examine the ways in which ‘Dreaming songs’ serve two functions. One is to link the geography of outback Australia to critical places, the tracks, caves, waterholes, hunting sites and ceremonial centres. They provide an oral guide if you like, a complex series of essential word maps important for survival in the country’s harsh terrain. At the same time, the stories of these places are also the ways in which relationships are to be managed, hunting to be carried out, customs and etiquette to be understood. When Indigenous Australians explain their relationship to the land, it is because, quite literally, the land is part of their society, and their society is part of the land.
In pursuing his commentary on Australian Dreamtime stories, Abram makes a second even more important point. Writing down the stories and publishing them for us to read can be seen as a form of violence. If the stories are integrated with the land, then to separate them is to remove their meaning. They aren’t novels or adventure stories; they are a way of seeing and being in the world. It is observations like these that help explain why The Spell of the Sensuous is important today, even more important, perhaps, than when it was first written. To reread the book is to bring home very clearly what we are losing, and why the plea for a ‘deep ecology’ is so important.
David Abram has continued to be part of a movement to push for a re-examination of the ways in which we work and live. He has explained his views this way: “Modern, conventional science has long presumed to observe the natural world from a detached position entirely outside that world. And the science of ‘ecology’ inherited this presumption from the older sciences that preceded it – the assumption that we could objectively analyse the interactions of various organisms and their earthly environment as though we ourselves were not participant in that same environment, as though our rational minds could somehow spring themselves free from our coevolved, carnal embedment in the thick of this ecology in order to observe it from a wholly detached and impartial perspective. … the primary lesson I learned was that earthly nature is an objective, determinate phenomenon that can best be studied from outside, not an enveloping mystery in which I am wholly participant.”
He uses this commentary to argue that our commitment to a purely objective understanding of nature, or how the world works, is like a belief in an entirely flat world seen from above, a world without depth. Given this, he argues deep ecology, or depth ecology, “calls this presumption into question; it suggests that such cool, disembodied detachment is itself an illusion, and a primary cause of our destructive relation to the land. It insists on the primacy of our bodily embedment in the encompassing ecology, on our thorough entanglement within the earthly web of life. It suggests that we are utterly immersed in, and dependent upon, the world that we mistakenly try to study, manipulate, and manage from outside … By acknowledging that we are a part of something so much vaster and more inscrutable than ourselves – by affirming that our own life is entirely continuous with the life of the rivers and the forests, that our intelligence is entangled with the wild intelligence of wolves and of wetlands, that our breathing bodies are simply our part of the exuberant flesh of the earth – depth ecology opens a new (and perhaps also very old) sense of the sacred.” I could keep on quoting, but what I would like you to do is read the book for yourself: it offers so much more than a few sentences in a blog like this.
That image of a flat world is very helpful. Looking around at our surroundings, it is as if we have trodden on our environment. In part, this is obvious. We have literally flattened out the land to build roads and cities, airports and shopping centres, stamping on the ground to put down what we need on it. However, Abram is alerting us to the fact that vegetation, fauna and flora have been flatted out too, a setting where we carry on our lives, all there for our enjoyment, but rather like a picture behind glass. Yes, we go on trips, walks in the country, travel on rivers and lakes, but we do so disengaged from what we see. Instead of our being part of a more than human world, the world has become absorbed into our human domain.
As I write, I am sitting in Canberra. The Territory’s government is concerned about global warming, increasing summer temperatures and the threat of bush fires. One proposal is to plant more trees. Trees to absorb carbon dioxide, provide shade, and help reduce urban temperatures. A good move? Of course. However, only good in that it is better than current practice. Abram reminds us we’re dominating the environment, bending it to our will, not engaging with it. Can we do more? Canberra exemplifies a worldwide phenomenon: like those occasional pest invasions from northern Australia, humans are over-running the world. People need shelter, food, clean water, health care, education, transport, and we have created technologies to do this. However, our success contains the seeds of our failure as the planet is increasingly unable to sustain the lifestyle to which we think we’re entitled.
There is a more than human world around me. There are birds close to where I live; varieties of wattles and eucalypts; some wildflowers seen away from city streets; and, although they are becoming harder to spot, there are echidnas, frogs, snakes and skinks. The natural world is being pushed to the fringes, however, as houses and roads dominate the landscape, encircling the barren areas of car parks and shopping centres. I can still see a little of life beyond the human world, take a trip out to a protected parkland or venture into uncultivated bush but, given I am exaggerating somewhat, it is the flattened world Abram describes.
I am not making a claim for David Abram as the key spokesperson for our environment. There are many other well-respected voices speaking to the insights from phenomenology, environmental issues and a respectful form of ecology. However, like them, he’s in a minority, as more aggressive approaches to science and technology increasingly dominate our view of the world. We should listen to voices like his, but is it too late? I’m not sure if it’s the coruscating force of hard-headed rationality or the increasing destruction from climate change, but I fear the spell of the sensuous is about to be dissipated. I hope not.
