In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram argues that the phonetic, written alphabet has alienated us from our world. His conclusion: we need to reconcile ourselves with nature’s sensuousness.

After Abram’s journey to indigenous cultures and his return once again to US soil, he recognized a profound shift of consciousness regarding perception, the nature of reality, language, and time and space. This book reflects that shift. Reading this book and grasping his reflections was like looking into mirrors on parallel walls, which cause an infinite progression of the same image as far as the eyes can see – surreal, disorienting, profound, thought-provoking, and phenomenal all at the same time. The book is quite a ride, and not for the faint of heart.

David Abram argues that the phonetic, written alphabet has alienated us from our world. Each chapter dissects in intricate detail a specific aspect of his argument. Building on statements proven in preceding chapters, he moves quite persuasively through his arguments to his conclusion: our need to reconcile ourselves with nature’s sensuousness. Including topics such as the origin of the written language versus indigenous cultures’ oral connection to the sensuous world around them, his writing is eloquent, poetic, and lyrical.

Abram, a philosopher, ecologist, and slight-of-hand magician, begins his first book as a narrative of a personal journey to visit indigenous cultures (in locations including Indonesia and Nepal) to study the relation between magic and medicine, among sorcerers as well as traditional shamans. Abram discusses an often overlooked ecological dimension to the healing craft of sorcerers and shamans. Since the illness in the human community is often “traceable to a disequilibrium between that community and the larger field of forces,” healing humans includes restoring the imbalance to the community at large (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 7). As the bridge between the human world and the other worlds, sorcerers and shamans can sense imbalances between these realms and “heal” or balance both the community’s relation to its surrounding environment and the humans showing the disease. These sensuous other realms include all entities (like plants, animals), and even those Western civilization considers not “alive,” such as rivers, rainstorms, stones, and mountains. Meanwhile we Westerners are oblivious to the other realms and their mysteries, and see nature as simply a stock of “resources” for human civilization (28). The richness of experience, contrast, and enhanced perception of that yearlong adventure left Abram wondering how our Western civilization came to be so estranged from nature, so exempt from this sensory reciprocity (27).

Abram carefully chooses the word reciprocity, as he articulates our participation in the reciprocal nature of Nature and the world. Using Merleau-Ponty’s work, he recognizes the reciprocal nature of direct perception, that is “to touch is also to feel oneself being touched, that to see is also to feel oneself seen” (69). (You apply this to all our senses.) Our perception is precisely this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between the perceiver and the perceived – between our bodies and the entities that surround it (52). And again Abram asks, if perception is participatory, how could we have broken out of it into the “inert and determinate world we now commonly perceive?” (90).

Certainly language, which is itself participatory, contributes, but how and how much? To describe and get an essence and origin of language is itself a very limiting exercise, as it requires language to do so, but Abram tackles this feat, despite this obstacle with more help from Merleau-Ponty. It is this concept of language and in particular indigenous, oral cultures whose use of language deepens their participation in the senses and the world around them that is Abram’s focus for much of the middle of the book.

Examining the origin of writing, Abram walks us through our own footprints (the first writing) and on to pictorial illustrations – or picture writing (96). These pictograms carried the same sound as the spoken word. Using his example, “belief” might be depicted as the buzzing invertebrate bee, followed by a picture of a tree’s leaf – that is, “bee-leaf” (98). The invention of the phonetic alphabet by the Semites (around 1500 b.c.e.) and later perfected by the Greeks was an important step that distanced us away from life around us and the rest of nature as our language became merely “a gesture to be made by the human mouth” (100).

Abram examines Platonism, which honors intelligence and subjectivity in humans, while not denying these qualities to all non-human entities. This rational examination is contrast with the animism of oral cultures, which see all entities as intelligent and able to offer insight, guidance, and information to someone who seeks it. His quote from Socrates explains this well: “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do” (116). By contrast to Socrates’ city men, he offers three different examples of oral cultures in which their language is richly connected with the land and cannot be isolated from it. One such example is the Aboriginal of Australia who sing the land – that is, as they walk along the land during their walkabouts, connect to it, and sing the songs/stories of the land that reside there. This process sings the earth alive, while offering a code of behavior for the community and the land. It is a reciprocal process. These stories become alive in the Earth and to connect to the spot is to connect with the song/story of the land.

To these indigenous, oral cultures, writing down an oral story and publishing it is inconceivable, as it wrenches the story away from the very land on which it was connected and which provokes the story, leaving the story meaningless and disconnected. According to Abram, the studies, which he used to derive his examples of oral cultures, document convincingly the intimate dependence of the oral people and their landscape to their culture. These studies have been used to halt, on legal grounds, the industrial exploitation of native lands (178).

After examining perception, origin of language, and oral languages, he traces time and space through written and oral languages. As Abram alluded to previously, once the stories are written down, the visible, phonetic text becomes the primary activator of the spoken stories. That is, there is no space or place required to satisfy reading of the story. The places to which the stories refer are no longer necessary to the remembrance or telling of the stories (183). By way of answering his question, he sees this phonetic writing as a form of disconnection with nature.

However, to indigenous, oral cultures, space and time are indistinguishable. In fact, in the Hopi’s their oral language, the Western concept of time disappears. Our concepts of future or past tense have no meaning to them. Rather they perceive existence as manifested (already evident to the senses) or manifesting (not yet present to the senses, but presumably on its way to manifestation) (192).

Returning to the concept of how the written word is separate from the land and manifests its own stories, Abram refers to the Hebrew written text that essentially became a temporal homeland after they were exiled. The written stories held the “sense of separation from the very possibility of being placed, from the very possibility of being entirely at home” (196 his emphasis).

Abram concludes his lyric dance through reality, perception, language, and time and space, to touch on other invisible or inconceivable concepts: under ground, the horizon, and lastly, air. For it is air, that invisible substance that we breathe in – in reciprocal action with nature’s exhale – that gives us life. And with this breath we are able to sound out the vowels in between the consonants of the words. And yet to us of the Western civilization, air is stripped of all sacred and spiritual meaning and is nothing other than taken for granted – a “forgotten dump site for a host of gaseous effluents and industrial pollutants”  (258). And at the same time a carrier for all the other media – television and radio broadcasts. It is these other human communications where our attentions are focused.

Abram’s romp through our perceptions is intended to offer up suggestions on how we can regain our sensuous bearings, by becoming aware of how we’ve lost them. As we intimately connect to the land around us, reengage our connection of reciprocity with the land, Earth, or environment, only then are we able to really hear and respond to its needs. From this place, Abram suggests that we can remove ourselves from the damaging trends of over consumption and the ever-present desire to move to something better, and replace it with a dedication to work with the land in harmony and coexistence and co-creation. But Abram doesn’t discard phonetic language, for along with these new perceptions, comes the awareness of the need to use language to bring our senses alive and in connection with the sensuous nature of the world.

Abram’s book matched the efforts of the other nature authors in its desire to help the reader re-perceive his or her connection with Nature. However, Abram’s definition of connection was at the most fundamental level, and he avoided the question of who created the concept of nature or natural or wilderness. Instead, he defined Nature as anything non-human. Essentially all of nature is sentience: the wind, the rain, the mountains and rivers, the woodlands and meadows and all their inhabitants. This is what we have lost our connection to and need to regain.

He used a rational and intellectual process of argument so commonly used in our Western civilization to convince the reader of his points. This belabored postulation, hard to follow at times, was unnecessary on me, as I quickly agreed with many of his concepts. Yet I’m sure the process is useful to a reader who needs more explanation or background to agree with his thought process. Probably because of his long explanations, he assumes that the reader agreed with his arguments as he proceeds, which may be difficult for a reader that does not. For example, he takes for granted that the indigenous cultures lived in harmony with their environment, a statement of fact disputed by some (Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1999).

But most significant to the reading for me was how he altered my own perceptions of reality as I’ve assumed/allowed them to be. For example, Abram emphasized his profound amazement at how those in our culture ignore the present time. Instead spending all our time concerned for the future (paying bills, insurance) while pinning for the past (“obsessively photographing and videotaping events”) (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 201). Of course all the while being totally oblivious to the present sensuous surroundings. While I do work to be more present and connected, I didn’t perceive that to do one must also spend less ‘time’ on or give less credence to the other realities.

Another example was his statement at how Euclid’s premise, that two straight parallel lines will never meet, demonstrated our flat, linear perception of reality. Yet he twists this to show that in our reality, two straight lines that start out parallel to each other on a curved surface (e.g., earth) will eventually converge and cross (198). [My emphasis.] I really loved the shift I felt as I read those words.

Another example of how reading the book caused me a shift in my perception was a story about when phonetic writing was offered as a gift to the Egyptian people. Thamus concluded that his people would be much better off without this writing. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks” (113). I loved the reminder that our Western civilization seeks answers outside of ourselves, thinking that books must be right or have the answer, never ourselves or nature.