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Book review: The Spell of the Sensuous
I seem to be on a roll, with posting, here. More yet to come, too.
At Falcon Ridge, I didn't bring enough reading material - and as I may spend several hours a day reading while nursing and otherwise tending to Sylvana, I feel pretty strongly about having something to read. So I had to buy a Merchants' row being flooded, the bookseller didn't have much available, but I begged, so he brought out a handful, and I bought the only thing that seemed interesting, The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. I wouldn't otherwise have encountered it, so it seems quite serendipitous. The timing, as I was preparing for a trip to the west coast where I'd encounter a lot of beautiful and relatively unspoiled landscapes, was spot-on as well.
Like many excellent books, this one is rather hard to encapsulate. There were definitely points where I didn't feel intelligent enough to get it. More than those, though, there were points where what Abrams was saying was so counter to assumptions that have permeated my life, it was really difficult for me to wrap my head around the concepts. (And no, I'm not talking about neoconservative philosophy.) I already know I want to reread it, after a fairly short while, and I rarely let myself reread anything. As I read it, I kept thinking, "Oh, I'd like to share this thought with this person, I wonder what that person would think of this theory..." I'd often find myself taking a long, curious look at my own thinking, at the bedrock of assumptions that govern my awareness, behavior, and choices. (Another book that made me do this was Our Babies, Ourselves, which also fuses genres in its thinking and which I also strongly recommend.)
If you wanted to boil it down to the absolute basics, it would be filed under "environmentalism." But it's certainly not a tome about "We've lost n% of the rainforest and will experience global warming of between 4 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century," or whatever. It's about how humans lived in relation to the rest of the environment (and how a very few still do) before the advent of writing.
Writing: one of many things this book called my attention to, that I completely take for granted. I, who have journalled since I was six, had never considered how strange it was that I could do so; I had never wondered how our species had evolved a system of symbols for inscribing and preserving the language. Abram's theory is that as cultures gained literacy, they became more and more reflective, recursive, inward-looking, and disengaged from that which is not human. Turning our attention more and more towards ourselves, we've had less and less to dedicate to the complexity of the natural world, to balance, to land and place, to space and air, to wind and breath and soul.
What I think of as altered consciousness - through whatever means - used to be much more of a way of life. Our current consciousness, if you want to think of it that way, is the one that's altered, that's moved far from what it was a few hundred generations ago. We surround ourselves, in some cases to an incredibly high degree, in an us-made world. Our interactions with others, our time spent thinking and feeling and experiencing, almost exclusively take place in spaces dramatically changed from the natural. Abram argues that our ability to experience is much deprived, and much impoverished, for it.
He writes vividly, passionately, densely, wondrously, creatively. He's not tsk-tsking, suggesting that we junk modern civilization, burn down the libraries, and all go back to eating berries and roots. He's just laying out a picture of what life could be like, if we considered our consciousness and our skin not a boundary, but a connection-point, between ourselves and everything else. He mixes anthropology, sociology, shamanism, ecology, philosopy, linguistics, history, and a bunch of topics not easily categorizeable. Reading it was frequently thought-provoking, occasionally humbling, and overall inspiring. It made me want to go out and spend more time in nature, and let it influence me more. I didn't get all of it, and not all of the ideas were equally important to me, but there was plenty that really grabbed me and had me reading and pondering, reading and pondering. It made me seek out library books about breathing. It dovetails with thoughts I have about how I want my longterm future to be, and excites me the more to think about what I want to start doing now, to achieve that future.
It's not for everyone, but if you're at all intrigued by the description, put this on your reading list. I hope you'll find it as enriching as I do.
At Falcon Ridge, I didn't bring enough reading material - and as I may spend several hours a day reading while nursing and otherwise tending to Sylvana, I feel pretty strongly about having something to read. So I had to buy a Merchants' row being flooded, the bookseller didn't have much available, but I begged, so he brought out a handful, and I bought the only thing that seemed interesting, The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. I wouldn't otherwise have encountered it, so it seems quite serendipitous. The timing, as I was preparing for a trip to the west coast where I'd encounter a lot of beautiful and relatively unspoiled landscapes, was spot-on as well.
Like many excellent books, this one is rather hard to encapsulate. There were definitely points where I didn't feel intelligent enough to get it. More than those, though, there were points where what Abrams was saying was so counter to assumptions that have permeated my life, it was really difficult for me to wrap my head around the concepts. (And no, I'm not talking about neoconservative philosophy.) I already know I want to reread it, after a fairly short while, and I rarely let myself reread anything. As I read it, I kept thinking, "Oh, I'd like to share this thought with this person, I wonder what that person would think of this theory..." I'd often find myself taking a long, curious look at my own thinking, at the bedrock of assumptions that govern my awareness, behavior, and choices. (Another book that made me do this was Our Babies, Ourselves, which also fuses genres in its thinking and which I also strongly recommend.)
If you wanted to boil it down to the absolute basics, it would be filed under "environmentalism." But it's certainly not a tome about "We've lost n% of the rainforest and will experience global warming of between 4 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century," or whatever. It's about how humans lived in relation to the rest of the environment (and how a very few still do) before the advent of writing.
Writing: one of many things this book called my attention to, that I completely take for granted. I, who have journalled since I was six, had never considered how strange it was that I could do so; I had never wondered how our species had evolved a system of symbols for inscribing and preserving the language. Abram's theory is that as cultures gained literacy, they became more and more reflective, recursive, inward-looking, and disengaged from that which is not human. Turning our attention more and more towards ourselves, we've had less and less to dedicate to the complexity of the natural world, to balance, to land and place, to space and air, to wind and breath and soul.
What I think of as altered consciousness - through whatever means - used to be much more of a way of life. Our current consciousness, if you want to think of it that way, is the one that's altered, that's moved far from what it was a few hundred generations ago. We surround ourselves, in some cases to an incredibly high degree, in an us-made world. Our interactions with others, our time spent thinking and feeling and experiencing, almost exclusively take place in spaces dramatically changed from the natural. Abram argues that our ability to experience is much deprived, and much impoverished, for it.
He writes vividly, passionately, densely, wondrously, creatively. He's not tsk-tsking, suggesting that we junk modern civilization, burn down the libraries, and all go back to eating berries and roots. He's just laying out a picture of what life could be like, if we considered our consciousness and our skin not a boundary, but a connection-point, between ourselves and everything else. He mixes anthropology, sociology, shamanism, ecology, philosopy, linguistics, history, and a bunch of topics not easily categorizeable. Reading it was frequently thought-provoking, occasionally humbling, and overall inspiring. It made me want to go out and spend more time in nature, and let it influence me more. I didn't get all of it, and not all of the ideas were equally important to me, but there was plenty that really grabbed me and had me reading and pondering, reading and pondering. It made me seek out library books about breathing. It dovetails with thoughts I have about how I want my longterm future to be, and excites me the more to think about what I want to start doing now, to achieve that future.
It's not for everyone, but if you're at all intrigued by the description, put this on your reading list. I hope you'll find it as enriching as I do.
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*hugs*
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Then writing came along, and suddenly you no longer have to store memory's primary sources. Now you can just remember who wrote the information you're interested in. Copyright – "I thought of it first!" – comes out of that, I'm guessing. Twenty-first-century humanities scholarship, with its obsession with citing and attributing thoughts, almost elevates reference to other writers above the subject matter itself.
This is eerily in tune with dissertation-related stuff I've been working on today. So, tangent, sue me. :)
I'm writing the first chapter of RolandHT (http://wordsend.org/rht/) (due, um, on Friday). Most of the day has been spent trying to address the following:
So far, it seems to be boiling down to the following:
- it was a way for the Franks to address the trauma of a real-life Basque massacre of their army's rearguard in 778;
- more to the point here, Roland's fictitious biography (not all of it contained in the Song of Roland) seems to be a composite of real-life members of the Carolingian dynasty, which was pushed by the Royal Frankish Annals as the central symbol of Franks' medieval European successes and prosperity.
The RFA are something like a historical Bible of the Carolingian era. They seem to have been written largely as propaganda. On one hand, this is a bit funny; you'd think Charlemagne, the great Christian conquistador, would need no propaganda among his own in a time of a deeply Christian mentality. On the other hand, they were promoting not just a unity of religion, but a unity of people – gens – the Franks as an ethnic group, pitted repeatedly against 37 others in the course of the Annals. Rosamond McKitterick, in History and Memory in the Carolingian World, says that the RFA were the first such attempt at ethnic unity in Europe.
It's weird to think that this first ethnic us-against-them propaganda was woven straight into a history of the great Christianization of Europe, and even eclipsed the God's-work aspect of the Carolingian period. Man came crashing down to earth to battle himself.
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'Swhy religious mysteries have to be taught person-to-person. The Tao that can be described is not the true Tao. Gautama and Christ never made an effort to write down the profound beyond-human things they were saying.
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Thanks!