Earth in Eclipse

an Essay on the Philosophy of Science and Ethics

From: Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi, William S. Hamrick, SUNY Press, 2007. An early version of this essay was published as the cover article in Tikkun magazine, Sept/Oct 2003.

Art by Eliseo H. Zubiri

There is another world, but it is in this one.

— Paul Eluard

As a fresh millennium dawns around us, a new and vital skill is waiting to be born in the human organism, a new talent called for by the curious situation in which much of humankind now finds itself. We may call it the skill of “navigating between worlds.”

The last hundred years have been marked by an explosion of experiential domains, an abrupt expansion in the number of apparently autonomous realms with which people are forced to familiarize themselves. There has been an astonishing proliferation of separable realities, many of them mutually exclusive, that contemporary persons are increasingly compelled to engage in, or at least to acknowledge and acquaint themselves with. Each realm has its particular topology, its landmarks, its common denizens whom one comes to know better the more one participates in that domain. Many of these realms hold a powerful attraction for those who visit them and, complicating matters, many of these experiential dimensions seem to claim for themselves a sort of hegemony, surreptitiously asserting their priority over all other dimensions. Some of these spaces have been disclosed by the questing character of the human mind and imagination. Others have been made accessible to us through the probings of science, often in tandem with particular technological developments. Still others have been created by technologies operating more or less on their own. All of them now beckon to us.

Among the most efficacious of such worlds are those various experiential realms so recently opened by the electronic and digital media.  Over a century ago, the invention of the telegraph and, soon after, the telephone, made evident that geographical distance — the very sense of near and far that determines our bodily sense of place — was no longer an absolute constraint.  I, or at least my voice, could now make itself present somewhere else on the planet, as a friend across the continent could now make her thoughts heard over here, where I sit speaking to her. Our voice, and our ears, now found themselves wandering in a strange, auditory realm, often crackling with static, that reposed outside of our ordinary, sensuous reality — a new experiential dimension wherein earthly distance and depth seemed to exert very little influence.

Another instance of this distance-less dimension was rapidly embodied in the radio, which brought into our home news of daily events happening far beyond the horizon of our everyday landscape — even as those very events were still unfolding! And then the television began to capture our gaze, its flickering glow in the living room replacing the glowing flames around which the family had traditionally gathered each evening. Through its screen, those events happening elsewhere became visible as well as audible realities. Other lands, other countries and cultures suddenly became much more real to us, both in their strangeness and their familiarity. We could no longer ignore them; they increasingly became a part of our lives, just as real as the spiders spinning their webs in the grasses outside, or perhaps — it seemed — even more real. But the television brought other worlds as well: the storied worlds of serials and soap operas whose characters became as familiar to many people as their own families. Or perhaps even more familiar.

In the final decade of the twentieth century another, more expansive, pasture opened up before us: the apparently fathomless labyrinth of cyberspace — a realm far more versatile and participatory than that inaugurated by either the radio or the television. Through the internet and the World Wide Web we seem to have dissolved terrestrial distance entirely, or rather, to have disclosed an alternative terrain wherein we can at last step free of our bodies and journey wherever we wish, as rapidly as we wish, to dialogue and consult with other bodiless minds about whatever we wish.  Or to wander, alone, in a quiet zone of virtual amusements. Instantaneous access to anywhere, real or imagined, is now available for collective engagement or for solitary retreat. Cyberspace, of course, is hardly a single space, but rather an ever-ramifying manifold of possible worlds to be explored, an expanding multiplicity of virtual realities.

The Allure of Transcendence

New as it seems, our fascination with the bodiless spaces made accessible to us by the digital revolution is only the latest example of our ever-expanding engagement with worlds hidden behind, beyond, or beneath the space in which we are corporeally immersed. One of the most ancient of such other worlds, and perhaps the first to exert a steady pull upon our attention, was the dimension of pure mathematical truths, the rarefied realm of numbers (both simple and complex) and the apparently unchanging relations between those numbers. Like great sea-going explorers setting out toward continents suspected but as yet unknown, mathematicians have continually discovered, explored and charted various aspects of this alluring world, yet its lineaments, mysteriously, seem inexhaustible. The mathematical domain of number and proportion has long been assumed to be a separate, and purer, realm than this very changeable world in which we breathe and hunger and waste away — at least since the number-wizard Pythagoras promulgated his mystical teachings in the city of Crotona some two and a half millennia ago — and the vast majority of contemporary mathematicians still adhere to this otherworldly assumption.

Pythagoras’ faith that the realm of numbers was a higher world, untainted by the uncertainty and flux of mortal, earthly life, profoundly affected the thinking of the great Athenian philosopher, Plato, teaching his own students at the end of the fifth century BCE, and through Plato’s writings this faith has influenced the whole trajectory of European civilization. In Plato’s teachings, it was not just numbers and mathematical relations that had their source beyond the sensuous world, but also the essential form of such notions as truth, justice, and beauty;  the ideal form of each such notion enjoyed the purity of an eternal and transcendent existence outside of all bodily apprehension. Plato, that is, expanded Pythagoras’ heaven of pure numbers and proportions to include, as well, the pure and eternal “ideas” that lend their influence and guidance to human life. Indeed, according to several of the dialogues written by Plato for the students of his academy, every sensible thing — every entity that we directly experience with our senses — is but a secondary likeness of some archetypal form, or ideal, that alone truly exists. True and genuine existence belongs only to such ideal forms; the sensuous, earthly world, with its ceaseless changes, its shifting cycles of generation and decay — of coming to be and of passing away — is but an ephemeral facsimile of that more eternal dimension of pure, bodiless forms that, alone, genuinely exist. That dimension cannot be perceived by the body or the bodily senses: the reasoning intellect, alone, is able to apprehend that realm. According to Plato, the reasoning soul, or mind, can never be fully at home in this bodily world; its true source, and home, is in that bodiless realm of pure ideas to which the rational mind secretly longs to return. Genuine reality, for Plato, is elsewhere.

As the intellectual culture of ancient Greece mingled with other cultures in the Mediterranean region, including the monotheistic culture of ancient Israel, and as Pythagoras’ and Plato’s theories came in contact with the new religious impulses stirring on the edges of Hebraic culture, Plato’s eternal realm of pure forms — ostensibly the true home of the intellect — inspired and offered the model for a new notion of eternity: the Christian Heaven, or afterlife. And as this new belief was given shape by the early Christian fathers, this eternity beyond the stars became the dwelling place not so much of the questing intellect as of the faithful and pious soul.

Today, the Heaven of Christian belief, together with the various Heavens proper to other religious traditions, continues to exert a remarkable influence upon much of contemporary civilization. Even avowed atheists find their lives and their thoughts impacted by the collective belief in a heavenly realm presumed to exist radically outside of, or beyond, the palpable physicality of our carnal existence. Variously conceived as “the afterlife” or as “the dwelling place of God and his minions,” such realms are still assumed, by many, to be both the ultimate source of the sensuous world around us and the ultimate end and destiny of our apparent existence. Indeed, such transcendent realms still possess, for many of us, a clear primacy over the earthly world.

The Super-Small and the Ultra-Vast

The ancient fascination with numbers was not only formative for the emergence of Christian notions of Heaven; the mathematics it gave rise to also opened the way for the development of the secular sciences, and hence for the emergence of a host of abstract and increasingly otherworldly dimensions disclosed to us by those sciences. One such realm powerfully impacting our lives today is the supersmall dimension revealed by high energy physics: the subatomic world of protons and neutrons, of gluons and mesons and the mythical quarks of which they are composed, a world of electrons and neutrinos and perhaps, underneath all these, the vibrating one-dimensional loops, or superstrings,  that give rise to all such particles and their manifold interactions. Although very few of us have any clear apprehension of the subatomic world, or of the inscrutable particles that comprise it, we are continually assured by the physics community that this arcane realm is the ultimate source, or fundament, of all that we do apprehend: according to most contemporary physicists, the visible, tangible world glimpsed by our unaided senses is not at all fundamental, but is entirely composed and structured by events unfolding at scales far beneath the threshold of our everyday awareness.

And yet physicists are not the only band of scientists inviting us to look askance at the world that we directly experience. According to a majority of researchers in the neurosciences, the perceptual world that enfolds us — the world of oak trees and grasshoppers and children racing through the spray of a fire hydrant on a sweltering summer afternoon — is largely an illusion. Here, too, at the scale of our direct sensory experience, we must learn to recognize a dimension that is much more primary than our apparent experience; the realm of neurons firing and of neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses, of neural networks that interact with other neural networks, a ceaselessly ramifying web of patterns within patterns that continually generates — out of the endless array of photons cascading through our retinas and the sound waves splashing against our ear-drums and the gradients of chemical molecules wafting past our nasal ganglia — the more-or-less coherent appearance of the surrounding world that we are aware of at any moment. Although we have absolutely no intuitive apprehension of these events unfolding within the brain, our colleagues in the neurological sciences insist that such events provide the hidden infrastructure of all our perceptions. They  insist that this realm of neural networks and synaptic interactions must be carefully studied and understood if we really wish to know what is going on — that is, if we wish to truly understand just why the surrounding world appears to us as it does.

Meanwhile, in another set of laboratories, another group of intrepid researchers — molecular biologists tinkering with processes unfolding deep within the nuclei of our cells — have precipitated a collective suspicion that the real and unifying truth of things, at least for organic entities like ourselves, is to be found in the complexly coded structure of our chromosomes. After the discovery of the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, molecular biology has become the dominant field within the life sciences, with a majority of its practitioners attempting to isolate the specific sequences of DNA that compose particular genes, and to discern the manner in which these genes are transcribed, by multiple chemical reactions, to generate the host of proteins that compose both the living tissues of any organism and the manifold enzymes that catalyze its metabolism. In giant, massively-funded science initiatives like the Human Genome Project, researchers race to map the entirety of the human genome, while other researchers puzzle out the intricate epigenetic pathways whereby networks of genes interact to give rise to particular proclivities, dispositions,  and behaviors. Numerous high-profit corporations devoted to the burgeoning technology of genetic manipulation and modification are busy isolating or synthesizing the genes that ostensibly “code” for desirable traits, eagerly transplanting them into various plants and domestic animals in order to increase, presumably for human benefit, the productive yield of these organisms. Anyone even glancingly aware of these activities begins to suspect that the microscopic world of gene sequences and genetic interactions somehow determines our lives and our experiences. The ultimate source of our personality — of our habits, our appetites, our yearnings, and our decisions — would seem to be thoroughly hidden from our ordinary awareness, tucked inside the nuclei of our cells.

We are often assured that such scientific worlds are entirely continuous with one another — that the subatomic world of protons and quarks is nested within the molecular world that makes up our DNA, that the DNA in turn codes, among other things, for the neurons and neuronal patterns that weave our experience. In truth, however, these worlds do not so easily cohere, for the arcane language that enfolds each of these dimensions is largely closed to the others. Many of those who speak the language of the brain sciences believe that their discipline holds the key to all that we experience, yet an analogous conviction may be found among many who speak the very different discourse of molecular biology and the genome, as do those other experts who traffic in the lingo of particle physics. It may be useful to assume that there are multiple keys to the hidden truth of the world, each key unlocking its own realm; yet the precise relation between these unseen realms — or the precise way to understand the relation between these realities — remains mysterious.

Our access to many of these hidden dimensions was, of course, made possible by the invention of the microscope and its rapid evolution — from the simple optical instruments initially used by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek in the late 1600s to reveal the bacterial world, on up to the scanning-tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope, which today enable us to examine, visually, the exact structure of a DNA molecule. While Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes revealed a dimension one hundred times smaller than the resolution of the human eye, today’s powerful instruments bring us into visual contact with entities fully a million times smaller than our unaided eyes can perceive!

One of the more unnerving jolts to our experience of the world around us (and, consequently, to our experience of ourselves) occurred at the dawn of the modern era, when Nicolaus Copernicus offered a wealth of evidence for his theory — later verified by Galileo — that the fiery Sun, rather than the Earth, lay at the center of the visible universe. What a dizzying disclosure! The revelation that our Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the other way around, ran entirely contrary to the evidence of the unaided senses, and it precipitated a profound schism between the sensing body and the reflective, thinking intellect. Suddenly, even the most obvious testimony of our senses, which daily reveals the dynamic movement of the sun arcing across the sky and the unmoving Earth beneath our feet, had been dramatically undermined. Henceforth a new, modern distrust of the senses, and of the apparent world revealed by the bodily senses, began to spread throughout Europe. It is clarifying to recognize that Descartes’ audacious philosophical move, cleanly severing the thinking mind from the body — separating the world into two, independent orders: that of res cogitans (thinking stuff), or mind, and that of res extensa  (extended stuff), or matter — was largely motivated by this new and very disturbing state of affairs. For in order to maintain the Copernican worldview, the thinking mind had to hold itself entirely aloof, and apart, from the sensing body. Whether or not Descartes’ ploy was ultimately justifiable, his conceptual unshackling of the cogitating mind from the body’s world freed the modern intellect to explore not only the super-small realms of cells, atoms, and quarks, but also the ultra-vast spaces of star-clusters and galaxies.

And here as well, our access to the mind-shattering vastness of galactic space was made possible by technological instrumentation, in this case by the invention and development of the optical telescope. It was a simple telescope that enabled Galileo to closely observe the other planets and their moons, and so to verify the Copernican theory. Only later did astronomers, using more complex telescopes, recognize what Giordano Bruno had dared to envision in the 16th century (at the cost of his life) — that the myriad stars in the night sky are indeed other suns. And only in 1923 did Edwin Hubble demonstrate that those stars are clustered into galaxies, and that most of those galaxies lie far beyond our own local galaxy, the Milky Way. Today, an orbiting telescope that bears his name reveals not just hundreds, or thousands, but billions of galaxies. We have heard that these galaxies appear to be moving away from one another, and many of us have accepted, intellectually, the strange proposition that the universe is expanding. We have accepted, as well, the assumption of most astronomers and astrophysicists that our universe flared into existence in a primordial “Big Bang” (our most up to date version of the biblical creatio ex nihilo).  We’ve come to believe, quite matter-of-factly, in such logic-twisting phenomena as “black holes,” and in the rather confounding notion that, when looking up at a particular star in the night sky, we are in truth looking backward in time many thousands, or even millions, of years. Today, several of our most interesting and visionary astrophysicists and cosmologists suggest that this expanding universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies is in truth only one of an uncountable plenitude of actually existing universes…

An Outrageous Proliferation of Worlds

Thus, vying for our attention, today, are a host of divergent and weirdly discontinuous worlds. There is the almost impossibly small world of gluons and mesons and quarks, but also the infinitely vast cosmological field strewn with uncountable galaxies and galactic clusters. We may be drawn to penetrate the electro-chemical reality of neuronal interactions that moves behind our psychological life, or perhaps to ponder and participate in the complexly coded universe of genetic reality that lies at the root of all our proclivities and propensities, apparently determining so much of our behavior. Our desire may be stirred, today, not only by the religious heavens that many believe will supersede this world, or by the mathematical heaven of pure number and proportion toward which so many reasoning intellects still aspire, but also by the digital heaven of cyberspace, that steadily ramifying labyrinth wherein we may daily divest ourselves of our bodies and their cumbersome constraints in order to dialog with other disembodied persons who’ve logged on in other places, or perhaps to try on other, virtual bodies in order to explore other, wholly virtual, spaces.

This proliferation of worlds — this multiplication of realms both religious and secular, super-small and ultra-vast, collective and solitary — is not likely to slow down in the coming decades. The accelerating pace of technological development seems to ensure that the proliferation of spaces will continue to snowball. What is unclear, however, is whether the human mind can maintain its coherence while engaged in such a plural and discontinuous array, or disarray, of cognitive worlds. And if so, how?

Today, many persons rely on a kind of Alice in Wonderland strategy, taking one kind of cookie to shrink themselves down, and another to make them grow larger — popping one kind of pill to deal with the mass of digital information they must navigate at their desk jobs, another to deal with their cranky children at home, and still another to withstand the daily onslaught of sadness and hype to which they subject themselves whenever they turn on the News:

“The government of Nigeria today executed three members of the Ogoni tribe, including a world-famous poet, for protesting drilling by the Shell Oil Company on their ancestral lands…” “Mothers! Are your little ones getting the most out of their sleep? Researchers have shown that children under the age of ten have a harder time sleeping than they used to! Try ‘SedaKind™’, the patented sedative for children, now available in five flavors!” “Astro-physicists are scrambling to account for the evidence, published this week in Science, that the universe is several billion years younger than had been assumed…” “An earthquake in Kashmir has left many tens of thousands dead — but first, a message about your hair…!”

And so we tumble from one world to another, and from there to yet another, with no real translation between them: we slide straight from the horror of emaciated refugees running from the latest spate of ethnic cleansing to a bright and sparkly commercial for toothpaste. Turning off the television we may practice tai-chi for twenty minutes, tuning ourselves to the Tao, then go online to buy stocks in a genetech firm whose patented process for inducing cancer in lab mice promises huge short-term returns. The discontinuity — indeed, the sheer incommensurability — between many of the experiential worlds through which we careen on any given day, or which intersect the periphery of our awareness as we go about our business, entails a spreading fragmentation within our selves, like a crack steadily spreading through a china platter. We become increasingly multiple, without any clear way of translating between the divergent selves engendered by these different worlds — we seek to draw our coherence from whatever world we happen to be engaged by at any moment. Or else we become numb, ensuring that no encounter moves us more than any other encounter, that no phenomenon impinges upon us more than any other, maintaining our coherence at the cost of our sensitivity and vitality.

How, then, can we find a way to move, to navigate between worlds, without increasingly forfeiting our integrity, without consigning our minds and our lives ever more deeply to a kind of discombobulant confusion? Airplanes glide head-on into skyscrapers, to which the US president responds by asking citizens to keep shopping; he declares war on an uninvolved country and authorizes the CIA to start spying on environmentalists. Adolescent students strain, during the week, to make sense of evolutionary biology while being taught, on the weekend, that God designed the animals all at once; one unsuspecting eighth-grader posts a smiling photo of himself to an online acquaintance, and within weeks he’s receiving huge amounts of money (from countless people he’s never met) in exchange for stripping naked in front of his webcam every evening. South of the equator, indigenous, tribal communities that have long flourished without any notion of private property are abruptly plunged into the thick of modernity by the arrival of a television in their midst, or by the distribution of gifts by corporations eager to mine their ancestral lands. Such stark instances, for which there exist no maps to help negotiate between discontinuous realities, mirror a disarray becoming more familiar to each of us.

When it does not immediately threaten our way of life, the proliferation of experiential worlds can also, of course, be deliciously exhilarating — a wild ride that regularly spurs us into an alert and improvisational responsiveness akin, perhaps, to that known by white-water kayakers, or by jazz musicians. Can it be, then, that we must accept and adapt ourselves to this ongoing state of dispossession and estrangement? Is it possible that such ceaseless realignment must now become our home — that it is time to welcome the steady slippage from one world into another, from one set of landmarks into another strangely different set, and from thence into yet another, exchanging horizons and atmospheres like we now change clothes — becoming aficionados of the discontinuous and the fragmentary?

It is a tempting dream, but an impossible one. For in the complete absence of any compass, without a basic intuition of how these divergent universes nevertheless connect to one another — without a dependable way of balancing between realms — the exhilaration of steadily sailing from one wave-tossed medium into another cannot help but exhaust itself, giving way, in the end, to desperation, or to a numbed-out detachment void of all feeling.

But how, then, are we to find some equilibrium as we skid from realm to realm?  How to orient ourselves within this deepening proliferation of cognitive worlds? Perhaps by paying attention to the patterns that play across these different realms, seeking subtle correlations, sniffing the air for strangely familiar scents, striving to discern — hidden within this exploding matrix — the faint traces of a forgotten coherence. Perhaps by listening more closely we might glean certain clues to the way these diverse worlds conjoin. . . For indeed certain rhythms do seem to echo between various of these worlds, particular textures and tastes tug at the fringes of our awareness, reminding us of something…

Only by such a process of attention can we begin to discern the curious commonalities that are shared among various of these discontinuous dimensions. Only through such careful noticing are we brought to suspect that there may be a particular realm wherein all these common patterns cohere — that among this profusion of worlds there is a unique world that has left its trace upon all the others. A singular domain, indeed, that is the secret source, and ground, of all these other kingdoms; a remarkable realm that resides at the heart of all these others.

Yet how could this be? These experiential terrains seem far too incongruous, too incompossible, for them to be rooted in a common source. And how weirdly multiple and complex that source-world would have to be! If all these alien styles sprout out of the same land, how outrageously fecund and enigmatic would be that place!

Still, what a boon it would be to discover a specific scape that lies at the heart of all these others. For if there is such a secret world among all these — if there is a particular experiential realm that provides the soil and support for all these others — then that primordial zone would somehow contain, within its fertile topology, a kind gateway onto each of these other landscapes. And by making our home in that curious zone, we would have ready access to all those other realms — and could venture into them at will, exploring their lineaments and becoming acquainted with their denizens without, however, forfeiting all sense of orientation. We’d know that any world we explore remains rooted in that mysterious terrain where we daily reside, and so we could wander off into any of these other spaces without thereby losing our bearings; it would suffice simply to step back over a single threshold to find again our common ground.

But surely it would be common knowledge, by now, if there were (among all these diverse domains) a unique world that somehow opened directly onto all these others! Surely it would be a truth taught to us all by our parents and professors as we gradually grew up into this dizzying situation! So we would expect. . . unless: unless the one realm that secretly holds the seeds of all these others has, traditionally, been the most disparaged and despised world of all — unless it is a place our elders prefer to ignore, the one dimension our scientific institutions all habitually overlook and forget. If, that is, this particular domain has conventionally been construed as the most derivative and drab dimension of all — the only realm consistently vilified by our traditions — then perhaps our inability to notice this world and take it seriously (and our reluctance to acknowledge its unruly magic), can be more readily understood.

The Blood and the Sap

The taken-for-granted world of which I speak is, of course, none other than the world we directly experience with our unaided senses — the realm of scents, tastes, and textures in which we are sensorially immersed. Long derided by our religious traditions as a fallen and sinful dimension, continually marginalized by scientific discourse as a secondary, derivative, and hence ultimately inconsequential zone — how shall we characterize the the sensuous world? It is the inexhaustible field of our unmediated experience, the very realm in which you now sit or recline, feeling the weight of your limbs as they settle within the chair, or the rough texture of the ground as it presses up against your flesh. It is the domain of smells wafting in from the kitchen, this field of rippling and raucous sounds, of shifting shapes and of colors: the smudged white surface of the ceiling overhead, or the rumpled gray of the gathering clouds outside the window, their shadows sliding slowly across the road and the bending grasses.

This, in other words, is the body’s world — that elemental terrain of contact wherein your tongue searches out a stray piece of lettuce stuck between your teeth, a fleshly zone animated by the thrumming ache within your skull and the claustrophobic feel of the shoes around your feet. Yet the sensuous field is animated by so much more than your own body; it is steadily fed by the body of the apple-tree and of the old oak with its roots stretching deep into the soil, and the swollen bodies of the clouds overhead, and the warm, asphalt skin of the street, and the humming bulk of the refrigerator in the next room. This living, carnal field seems to breathe with your own moods, yet it’s influenced, as well, by the rhythm of the rain now starting to pound on the roof, and by the dark scent of newly drenched leaves and grass and soil that drifts through the house when you swing open the front door. Shall we step out under those pelting drops to rescue the morning newspaper? Or perhaps that’s too timid for a hot day — haven’t we done enough reading? Why not toss this book into the corner, pry off our shoes and charge out under the trees to stomp and splash in the gathering puddles?

Why not, indeed? Lets do it! Since this –THIS! — is the very world we most need to remember! — this undulating Earth that we inhabit with our animal bodies. This place of thirst and of cool water, this realm where we nurse our most palpable wounds, where we wince at our mistakes, and wipe our tears, and sleepily make love in the old orchard while bird-pecked apples loll on the grass all around us — this world pulsing with our blood and the sap of pinon pines and junipers, awake with the staring eyes of owls and sleepy with the sighs of alley cats, this is the realm in which we most deeply live.

Sadly, it is also the world we have most thoroughly forsaken.

Of course, we have not entirely  lost touch with this place, where the moon slides in and out of the clouds, and the trees send down their thirsty roots, our nostrils flaring at the moistness of the night-breeze. Our flesh calls us back to this earthly place whenever we are injured or sick, whenever we need to wash the dishes by hand, or clean out the overflowing roof-gutters, or simply to empty our bladders and bowels on the toilet. Whenever we stumble and hurt ourselves (scraping our knee or tearing the skin on our arm); when one of our tools breaks or one of our technologies breaks down, we must turn our attentions, if only for a moment, to the bothersome constraints of this gravity-laden Earth that grips our bodies. Yet we’ll linger only as long as we must; we know well that this messy world, with its stains and pockmarks and pimples, is not our destined kingdom. As soon we’ve bandaged our knee, or repaired the dishwasher, or wiped our bottom, we turn our attentions back toward those other, more compelling worlds. We turn back toward the computer screen, or toward the next page of our latest book on how to survive in the digital economy, or toward the churning sounds of a favorite audio disk pulsing out of our high-fidelity speakers; we dial our colleague on the cell phone to ask if she can join us at next week’s conference on the most recent gene-splicing techniques; or perhaps we plunge our attention back into our meditations on the transcendental unity hidden behind the experienced world. It never occurs to us that the most profound unity may reside in the very depths of the experienced world itself, in the unfolding web of interdependent relations that ceaselessly draws the apparently disparate presences of the sensuous cosmos, ourselves included, into subtle communion with one another.

The enveloping Earth — this richly variant world alive with the swaying limbs of trees and the raucous honking of geese — is, of course, the very context in which the human body and nervous system took their current form. Our senses, that is, have coevolved with the diverse textures, shapes, and sounds of the earthly sensuous: our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, and our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the thrumming of crickets. Whether floating, for eons, as the single-celled entities that were our earliest biotic ancestors, or swimming in huge schools through the depths of the oceans, whether crawling upon the land as amphibians, or racing beneath the grasses as small mammals, or swinging from branch to branch as primates, our bodies have continually formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold forms of the animate Earth. Our nervous systems are thoroughly informed by the particular gravity of this sphere, by the way the sun’s light filters down through the sky, and by the cyclical tug of Earth’s moon. In a very palpable sense we are fashioned of this Earth, our attentive bodies coevolved in rich and intimate rapport with the other bodies — animals, plants, mountains, rivers — that compose the shifting flesh of this breathing world.

Hence it is the animate, more-than-human terrain — this earthly cosmos that carnally enfolds us — that has lent us our particular proclivities and gifts, our specific styles of behavior. The structure of our senses, our modes of perception, our unique habits of thought and contemplation, have all been profoundly informed by the mysterious character of the earthly world in which we still find ourselves. The sensuous terrain — the material Earth as it meets our senses — thus provides the inescapable template for our experience of every other world we devise or discover. Whether we are plugging into cyberspace or simply synapsing ourselves to the page of a new novel, whether we are mathematically exploring the sub-microscopic realm of vibrating, ten-dimensional strings or pondering the ultra-vast tissue of galaxies revealed by a new generation of radio-telescopes, we cannot help but interpret whatever we glimpse of these worlds according to predilections derived from the one world in which we uninterruptedly live — this bodily place, this palpable Earth where we still breathe and burp and make love. Our intuitions regarding the lineaments of Heaven are inevitably shaped by those sensuous experiences that seem to correspond with such a place of equanimity and ease (luminous clouds drifting in the celestial blue, or a ray of sunlight that suddenly pours through a rent in those clouds and spills itself across a green hillside) and hence our religious heavens inevitably borrow their imagined structure from the evocative structures of this earthly cosmos. The way we envision the workings of DNA and the complex interactions between genes is similarly influenced by our encounter with the way things unfold at the scale of our most direct, unmediated experience of the sensuous Earth around us. How could it be otherwise? It is our age-old encounter with the world at this scale that has provided the very organs by which we see and peer through all our microscopes and telescopes, that has fashioned the complex hands and keen eyes that now design our computer models!

Our comprehension of neuronal structures within the brain, and our surmises regarding the way those structures interact, is profoundly limited by the fact that those neurons did not evolve in isolation from the senses in their ongoing intercourse with the world. The human brain, that is, did not evolve in order to analyze itself — rather it evolved its particular structures as a consequence of our bodily engagement with the sensuous surroundings, and hence has a natural proclivity to help us orient and relate to those ambiguous and ever-shifting surroundings. Whenever we attempt to focus the brain back upon itself, or upon any other dimensions — whether subatomic or galactic — it cannot help but bring those predispositions to bear, anticipating gravity, ground and sky where they are not necessarily to be found, interpreting data according to the elemental constraints common to our two-legged species, yielding an image of things profoundly informed by our animal body and its accustomed habitat.

There is much to be gleaned from our investigations into other scales and dimensions, yet we consistently err by assuming our studies provide an objective assessment of the way these realms really are in themselves. In order to convince ourselves of the rigor and rightness of our investigations, we consistently ignore, or overlook, the embodied nature of all our thoughts and our theories; we negate or repress our carnal presence and proceed as though — in both our scientific and our spiritual endeavors — we were pure, disembodied minds, unconstrained by our animal form, or by our carnal and perceptual entwinement with the animate Earth.

Thus do our sciences, like our religions, perpetuate the age-old disparagement of sensorial reality.  The experienced Earth lends something of its atmosphere to every world that we can conceive, and hence haunts these other worlds like a phantom. Each of the diverse and multiply divergent worlds that cacaphonously claim our attention in this era — whether scientific or sacred, virtual or psychedelic, sub-microscopic or super-cosmological — is haunted by the animate Earth. Each is haunted, in some fashion, by the distant draw of all our thoughts toward that vast and enigmatic horizon that first drew those thoughts forth. Of course many of our professors, priests, and scientists prefer not to confront such vague presences that threaten, out on the very edge of our awareness, to disrupt all our certainties. Still, even the most confident scientists must sometimes find themselves wondering, late at night, how we can have gleaned such marvelous insights into the hidden structure of the universe when the most evident and apparent world that materially surrounds us seems to be choking and retching, its equilibrium disrupted and its diverse plants and animals tumbling into oblivion as a result of our human obliviousness. Can we really trust our apparently brilliant discoveries regarding the unseen causes that move the cosmos when our own local cosmos seems to be falling apart all around us, apparently as a result of our collective inattention? Is it possible that we have forgotten something, that some crucial element of our intelligence has been overlooked or misplaced? Indeed, is it not likely that everything we think we know about other worlds (super-small and super-vast, technological and philosophical) has been distorted by our refusal to recognize our thorough embedment in this world — by our refusal to acknowledge and account for the utter entanglement not only of our bodies but of our minds (our rarefied intellects) within this mysterious lattice of intertwined lives and living elements that we call Earth?

Ethics and Otherness

Of course, the fragmentation and loss of coherence experienced in our individual lives echoes a profound discombobulation within the larger community.  In the absence of a common or broadly shared world, ethical instincts  — including a basic respect for others, and the mutual restraint and conviviality that hold a community together — steadily lose their grip, and indeed morality gradually comes to seem a largely arbitrary matter. When each of us expends so much energy and time engaged in worlds not shared by our neighbors (or even by the other members of our family), when we continually direct our attentions to dimensions hidden above, behind, or beneath the shared world to which our senses give us access, it should come as little surprise that the common sense is impoverished, along with any clear instinct for the common good.

And yet an ethical compass — a feeling for what is right (or at least decent), and perhaps more important, for what is not right — is especially crucial in such an era as this, when our technological engagement in other dimensions gives individuals a far greater power to manipulate experience, to violate others’ lives and privacy, to inflict large-scale terror, and even to eradicate whole aspects of the real. Yet how is a genuinely ethical sensibilityinstilled and encouraged? How is an ethical sense (or, more simply, a good heart) born? Real ethics is not primarily a set of abstract principles; it is not, first, a set of “rules” (or “commandments) that can be memorized and then applied in appropriate situations. Ethics, first and foremost, is a feeling in the bones, a sense that there’s something amiss when one sees a neighbor kicking his dog, that there’s something wrong about hastening to one’s work past a stranger who has tripped and fallen, her grocery bags torn, with their pears, cabbage heads, and a busted bottle of olive oil strewn along the sidewalk. Yet from whence comes the impulse to stop and help? The impulse to intervene with the teenagers stomping on a line of ants, or simply to refrain from taking advantage of another’s bad luck — where do these impulses come from?

It seems unlikely that the ethical impulse can be learned, simply, from the pages of a book (not even from a book as deeply instructive as the Torah or the Koran). Still less can it be learned from the screen of a computer. For while these media readily engage the cognizing mind in various of its aspects, they cannot engage the whole of the cognizing body (this animate, intelligent creature with its muscled limbs and organs and skin) in the way that any face-to-face encounter, in the flesh, engages the whole body. It is in the flesh and blood world of our bodily actions and engagements that ethics has its real bearing. It is here, in this irreducibly ambiguous and uncertain world in which we live with the whole of our beings — with our hands and our feet and our faces, with our bellies as well as our brains — that we are most vulnerable, most affected by the kindness of others, or by their neglect and disrespect. It is here, in this mortal world, that we are most susceptible to violence.

Of course we can strive to be basically responsible when engaged in those other, less palpable realms — for instance, when we are cruising the internet, or responding to a mountain of email, we can certainly try to respect electronic perspectives that are different from our own, or to refrain from violating the integrity and the privacy of other participants. Similarly, we can attempt to be ethical in our experimental researches with gene sequences, or in our laboratory experiments with nanotechnology, or in our electronic explorations of other planets. Yet unless we are already striving to act appropriately in our day-to-day, face-to-face interactions with the things and entities immediately around us, at the very scale at which we live — unless we are grappling with the difficult ambiguity of interacting with other persons and other beings without doing violence to those others — then we have no reason to trust that our more abstract, virtual engagements are genuinely ethical or good-hearted at all. For it is only in this corporeal, earthly world that we are fully vulnerable to the consequences of our decisions and acts.

In those less corporeal dimensions (whether religious, scientific, or technological) we may readily find ourselves interacting with certain ideal presences that have been richly envisioned by our religious traditions, or with various provisional entities hypothesized by our fellow scientists, or with virtual beings invented and programmed for our entertainment. In such abstract, transcendent, and virtual worlds, in other words, we commonly encounter phenomena that may or may not be our own creation — we find ourselves interacting, there, with the manifold artifacts and projections of our own, richly imaginative species. But in the more immediate, palpable world to which our bodily senses give us access, we encounter not only human creations but other creative entities — other persons as unfathomable as ourselves, and other earthborn entities whose sensations and experiences are even more unfathomable and mysterious. It is only here, in the earthly world of our bodily engagements, that we continually come into contact with beings (persons, deer, spiders, hawks) whom we can be sure are not primarily our own fabrications,  but are really other — other selves, other centers of experience richly different from our own.

Even when we encounter another human person over the internet (or via the telephone, or any other technological medium), it is but a filtered and flattened trace of that other person, mediated by electronic circuitry and satellite technology, a virtual presence with which we interact only by (unconsciously) filling out this phantom with our own inadvertent projections and assumptions regarding how our interlocutor really appears at this moment, what sort of things she is doing while tapping out these messages to us on her keyboard or while talking to us on the phone, what is or is not going on around her, what sort of mood she is in, etc.. Whenever we interact with other persons through electronic and digital media it is necessarily a somewhat abstract interaction, and it is difficult to discern whether we are not interacting more with our own projections than with the reality of this other being. However, when I encounter another person in the flesh — both of us immersed in the same context, or place, breathing the same air and enveloped by the same textures and colors and sounds — then I cannot so easily shield myself from the evident otherness of this other person. Assumptions and even projections still inevitably come into play, yet here our projections are far more constrained by the visible, audible, and tactile presence of this other breathing body (by a range of subtle facial expressions, gesticulations, and silent gestures that cannot readily be conveyed via any technological medium — indeed by the countless subtle cues by which breathing bodies in proximity communicate feelings and moods to one another beyond the horizon of our conscious awareness).

It is thus in the sensuous world that we most readily find ourselves confronted by what is genuinely, and indubitably, other than ourselves. It is only in this sensorial terrain that we continually find ourselves in relation to other active agencies that are clearly not of our own making, to a world whose elemental lineaments we can be sure we did not devise. It is only here that we know we are in contact with what really exceeds us. And hence it is here, in this earthly world, that ethical questions have their primary bearing. It is here, first and foremost, that ethical action really matters.

And thus it is here, in the sensorial world, that an ethical sensibility is first engendered in any person. The seeds of compassion are sown in the palpable field of our childhood encounters with other sensitive and sentient bodies, in that richly ambiguous land where we gradually learn — through our pleasures and painful wounds, and through the rage and the tears of others — to give space to those other bodies, gradually coming to recognize in their sounds and gestures and expressions a range of sensations strangely akin to our own, and so slowly coming to feel a kind of spontaneous, somatic empathy with other beings and with our commonly inhabited world. It is this early, felt layer of solidarity with other bodies and with the bodily Earth that provides both the seeds and the soil necessary for any more mature sense of ethics; it is this non-verbal, corporeal ability to feel something of what others feel  that, given the right circumstances, can later grow and blossom into a compassionate life.

The child’s spontaneous somatic solidarity with others is inevitably a tentative and tenuous phenomenon, a layer of experience that emerges only when a child is free to engage, with the whole of her or his muscled and sensitive organism, in the animate world that immediately surrounds her. This quietly empathic layer of experience can arise, that is, only when the child is free to explore, at her own pace, this terrain of scents, shapes and textures inhabited by other sensuous and sentient forms (by trees and insects and rain and houses), and so to discover, gradually, how to resonate with the other palpable presences that surround. It can arise only when the child is not deflected from such spontaneous, sensory explorations by being forced to engage, all too quickly, in the far more abstract and disembodied dimensions that beckon through the screen of a television or a computer.

How much violence has been done, in the latter half of the twentieth century, by planting our children in front of the television! How many imaginations have been immobilized, how much sensorial curiosity and intercorporeal affinity has been stunted by our easy substitution of the television screen, with its eye-catching enticements, for the palpable presence of another person ready to accompany us on adventurous explorations of our mysterious locale? The screen of the computer, too, requires us to immobilize our gaze, and to place our other senses, along with our muscles, out of play. It isolates and engages only a narrow slice of a child’s sensorium, inviting her to set aside the full-bodied world that she shares with the fiery sun and the swooping birds. We should be properly cautious, then, regarding all the new education initiatives aimed at “placing computers in every classroom.” We should be profoundly skeptical about every exhortation by so-called experts to bring our children “on-line” as rapidly as possible in order to ensure their readiness and eventual competitiveness in the new “information economy.” There is of course nothing wrong with the computer, nor with the astonishing realms now so rapidly being opened for us by the wondrous capability of our computers — as long as we bring to these new realms both the curiosity and the restraint, the creativity and ethical savvy that grow out of our full-bodied encounters with others in the thick of the earthly sensuous.  But if we plug our kids into the computer as soon as they are able to walk, we short-circuit the very process by which they could acquire such creativity and such restraint.

The Escape from Materiality

The final years of the twentieth century bore witness to the spread of a new and heartbreaking form of violence among young people in the United States. In every part of the country, increasing numbers of teens were bringing firearms with them to school, and in the course of three years, from October 1997 to April 1999,  seven different kids around the continent had opened fire on their schoolmates, killing twenty-nine people and wounding almost twice as many. Numerous other children, in other communities, were arrested or detained on the suspicion of intending to wreak similar havok. The most collectively traumatic of these events — every one of which seemed to mirror, for the culture as a whole, a vast societal abyss previously unsuspected by most citizens — was the massacre at Littleton High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999, when two seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked through the halls gunning down thirty-five students and a teacher apparently at random (thirteen of them fatally) before turning their guns upon themselves. As the culture, along with the survivors, staggered through the cycle of shock, numbness, and outrage, the media straightaway began to focus the collective dismay upon the two adolescent killers themselves: Time Magazine placed the genial faces of Klebolt and Harris on the cover of that week’s issue, accompanied by the stark headline, in large block letters, “THE MONSTERS NEXT DOOR.” Numerous other journals, as well, depicted the two as “monsters;” in later weeks Time went on to describe the boys as “bad seeds” and “Natural Born Killers.” This easy demonization of Harris and Klebolt gave many in the populace a precise target for their outrage; it also helped ensure that few of us would recognize and come to terms with our own complicity in such careless violence. For it is likely that Klebolt and Harris were not at all deranged monsters, but rather impressionable kids who played out, and so made visible for all of us, a growing shadow that belongs to the culture a whole.

Predictably, many of those whose children were killed or wounded in the Littleton shooting have chosen to blame the parents of Harris and Klebold, and are pressing huge legal suits against these couples already struggling under a grief and shame unimaginable to most persons, having lost their own children in such an outrageous manner. (By all accounts of those who know them, including the repeated assertions of young Harris and Klebolt on video tapes that they recorded just before their bloody rampage, their parents were good and caring folks — if a bit lax in monitoring their children’s pastimes) A few of the bereaved have channeled their anger in a more constructive manner, and are working hard to convince lawmakers to enact stronger and more comprehensive legal restrictions on the purchase of guns. Other persons have reacted to the spread of school killings by decrying the ubiquitous violence in the entertainment industry and, in particular, the vicarious mayhem and murderousness of several very popular video-games.  Yet while such folks angrily critique the  content of the interactive entertainments and diversions now so readily accessible over the internet, few — if any — have noticed that the very form of the new digital universe, when continually engaged by children not yet fully awake to the wild complexity of the sensuous world, inevitably encourages a rather reckless disregard for this comparatively drab, difficult, and very mortal world in which they haplessly find themselves stuck whenever they’re forced to go offline.

Young Klebold and Harris — like the other teenagers (ranging from eleven to seventeen years of age) who shot up their own schools in Mississippi, Kentucky, Oregon, and Arkansas — were members of the very first generation of youth that had been brought up online; the first generation that had essentially grown up in steady and prolonged involvement with the computer. Most had been eagerly encouraged, by both parents and teachers, to actively engage in the rapidly emerging technology — not merely to access information but to plunge in and participate in the ongoing evolution of electronic worlds. Interacting with other screen personas without having to endure the strangeness and vulnerability of a face-to-face encounter, activating their curiosities and exercising their instincts for exploration and adventure without risk of physical pain or suffering, many children enjoy a far more exciting and compelling life online than they do in the palpable, bodily world with its boring rules and its tiresome rulekeepers. All around them, these kids notice adults and elders visibly trashing the directly-experienced world — fouling the air with the visible exhaust from their cars on the freeway, clearcutting hillsides and paving over wild lots and wetlands. They hear at school that growing numbers of species are tumbling over the brink of extinction due to the destruction of habitat by adult institutions and corporations supported by their country’s government, and that still other species are being genetically “engineered” by highly respected scientists to better suit the needs of human beings.  Kids and teenagers cannot help but notice, in other words, that the society of adults pays scant heed to the diverse otherness and integrity of earthly reality. Nor can they avoid noticing the innumerable gestures of obeisance made by those same adults toward a host of ostensibly more valuable realities clearly transcendent to the sensorial world — whether toward a religious heaven or afterlife hidden beyond the visible, or toward a subatomic reality hidden beneath the appearances, or toward that purely numerical heaven (composed of either abstract equations or huge sums of money) that seems to determine so much of what happens in the apparent world. American children, in other words, cannot help but imbibe the deep disdain of their parents’ culture for the body’s world — a disdain and a dismissal implicit in the collective assumptions, the discourse, and the actions of all who are “well adjusted” to the society.

Such a culture offers little, or nothing, to counterbalance the fascination that many children now have for the open-ended, interactive expanse of cyberspace. Is it any wonder that, having grown up spending far more time interacting with the digital screen than with palpable people, many teenagers begin to suspect that cyberspace is the truer and finer realm, and that fleshly, carnal reality is but a paltry substitute or delusion? Is not this suspicion a logical extension of their civilization’s age-old disparagement of the earthly sensuous? (After all, Plato himself — launching the entire enterprise of Western philosophy — taught that the ambiguous, shifting world to which our senses give us access was at best a facsimile of that eternal, bodiless realm hidden beyond the stars, and that one’s soul, or self, is trapped in this earthly body as in a prison). And if some kids conclude that their suspicion is correct, and that the bodily world of siblings and school is a bothersome illusion, are they not simply following the implicit lesson of a civilization that ceaselessly paves over the living land on behalf of technological progress and the technological dream of immortality?

It is possible, of course, that the two killers in Littleton were really “bad seeds” — two malignant and vicious “natural born killers” thirsty to inflict as much pain and death upon as many of their cohorts as they could manage. Yet this seems unlikely, especially given the reports of those who knew them. What is far more likely is that these two boys lacked any clear sense of the real substantiality, the depth, the real weight and gravity and palpable actuality of this commonly shared material world, relative to the virtual universe of websites and video games and richly designed virtual worlds in which they spent so much of their time. It is entirely possible that they were no more trying to really destroy people than they were trying to liberate people from the delusion that this rather painful material world — of schoolwork and taunts and family stresses and chores — has any meaningful reality or weight whatsoever.

The closest friend of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris was Brooks Brown — a classmate who had been Klebolt’s best friend through much of their childhood, and had recently been hanging out with Harris as well. Brown acknowledges that Klebold and Harris had mischievous tendencies, that they were drawn — like many teens — toward darkly shadowed aspects of experience, and that they carried some real resentment toward the football jocks who often taunted them at school. Yet according to Brooks Brown, “What they did wasn’t about anger or hate. It was about them living in the moment, like they were inside a video game.”[1]  A reporter interviewing Brooks Brown seems taken aback by Brown’s honest inability to construe his friends as bloodthirsty murderers, and by his contrary sense that during their rampage “the flesh and blood of the maimed and dying was no more real to them than pixels on a video monitor,” and hence that there was no great need to take their suffering seriously.[2]  Yet Brooks Brown’s perspective is an astute one, and it is probably far more insightful, and far more attuned to his friends’ experience, than the myriad analyses of all the adult experts trying to parse the event and its causes.

Curiously, in the same month that the Littleton massacre unfolded, a remarkable new film, entitled The Matrix, began showing at the suburban cinemas across the United States. A richly conceived and audaciously filmed science-fiction thriller, The Matrix followed the story of its central character, the computer hacker Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) as he gradually awakens to the fact that the everyday world of sights and sounds and smells that he, and everyone else, inhabits is a complex fabrication, a carefully constructed illusion calculated to lull the minds of its human inhabitants and so to keep them from suspecting the horrific reality of their situation: that humankind has been overcome and enslaved by a vast machine that is steadily drawing their vital fluids to power its various schemes. The “matrix” is the name given to this fabricated reality that holds everyone — except for Neo and a motley crew of renegade comrades — in its thrall.

“Matrix,” of course, is the Latin word for “womb;” it derives from the Latin word “mater” (meaning “mother”), and is cognate with the words “matter” and “material.” The premise of the film is that the material world around us — the sensorial matrix in which we find ourselves immersed — is itself no more than a collective delusion, an entirely virtual reality that holds us enslaved, and from which we must liberate ourselves by arduous mental discipline — and by computer-hacking our way behind the visible world into the hidden machinery that holds that world in place. For all its contemporary technological trappings, The Matrix, in this sense, is a profoundly Platonic film, and its runaway success among youth suggests the remarkable extent to which the Platonic faith — the belief in a truerreality hidden behind the sensuous world — has persisted as a structuring leitmotif for Western civilization down to the present moment, and indeed has attained a kind of apotheosis in the age of cyberspace.

The action sequence at the film’s climax takes place in a corporate building that houses the headquarters of the robot villains who are foisting the illusionary world upon the oblivious human race. Neo and his partner, Trinity, walk into this institutional building dashingly dressed in black trench coats. The trench coats conceal a small arsenal of guns and explosives, which Neo and Trinity soon deploy in a artfully choreographed display of vengeful firepower, obliterating the various guards and demolishing the marble walls and pillars of the lobby. When watching the film it is difficult to avoid the resemblance between this pair of trench-coated heroes and young Harris and Klebolt striding into their own institutional building, similarly bedecked with guns and explosives hidden under their own dark trench-coats, intent on their own Armageddon. Like the two figures in The Matrix, Harris and Klebolt striding into their high school are ready and eager to loose their rage on an accepted everyday world that they find intensely oppressive and pathetically overrated, and as they launch their carnage they seem to feel justified in violently exposing this stultifying reality as a sham.

The convergence and similarity between these two events (one fictional, one actual) which became visible in the culture at precisely the same moment, each of them carefully planned and prepared long in advance, should make us all pause, and should stir second thoughts in those who would classify Harris and Klebold as aberrant monsters. Clearly these two were enacting impulses that were brewing more broadly under the surface of the collective culture. Similarly The Matrix — with its multiple guns concealed under gothic trench-coats, its fascination with computer-mediated virtual realities, its suspicion that the visible, tangible world is something of a hoax, and its righteous rage against the boring constraints of this all-too-complacently accepted world — crystallized the zeitgeist of the first generation of teenagers to have grown up online.

Klebold and Harris gave themselves to that zeitgeist with a vengeance. Did either of them ever doubt that they would have the guts to follow through with their scheme? Probably. Dylan Klebold had even made a date for the evening after the massacre at which he and Harris killed themselves.[3]  On April 21st, he and two friends were going out to see a new film called The Matrix.

Drinking the Rain

We can have little hope of rejuvenating a collective sense of the ethical without beginning to acknowledge and honor the forgotten primacy of the one world that we all have in common. Strangely, the only world we all have in common is the very world that we share with the other animals and the plants — this earthly dimension of wind and water and sky, shivering with seeds and warmed by the sun. Hence, it seems unlikely that we will locate a lasting ethic without rediscovering our solidarity with all those other shapes of sentience, without remembering ourselves to the swallows and the meandering rivers.

We are understandably fascinated by the rich promise of our technologies, and deliciously dazzled by the new experiential realms opened to us by the genius of the electronic and digital revolution. Yet our enthrallment with our own creations is steadily fragmenting our communities and our selves; our uncritical participation with technology risks eclipsing the one realm that alone can provide the guidance for all our technological engagements. Indeed, only one realm is sufficiently outrageous and inexhaustibly complex enough to teach us the use and misuse of our own creations.

Only by remembering ourselves to the sensuous Earth, only by recalling ourselves to this bodily land that we share with the other animals and the plants, and rediscovering this place afresh, do we have a chance of integrating the multiple and divergent worlds that currently vie for our attentions. Only by rooting ourselves here, recovering our ageless solidarity with this breathing world — feeling the fur on our flesh, drinking the rain, and listening close to the wind as it whirls through the city streets — only thus do we have a chance of learning to balance and to navigate among the multiple worlds that now claim our attention at the outset of a new millennium.

To paraphrase the words of Paul Eluard at the start of this essay: there are many, many other worlds, yes, but they are all hidden within this one. And so to neglect this humble, imperfect, and infinitely mysterious world is to recklessly endanger all the others.

Notes:

[1]  Quoted in “Portrait of a Deadly Bond,” in the May 10, 1999 issue of Time magazine, p. 32.

[2] Ibid. These are not Brown’s words, but those of a reporter describing Brown’s viewpoint.

[3] Pam Belluck and Jodi Wilgoren, “Shattered Lives: Columbine Killers’ Pasts Hid Few Predictors of Tragedy,” The New York Times, July 6, 1999.

All Knowledge is Carnal Knowledge: A Correspondence (Copy)

David Abram, USA & David Jardine, University of Calgary, Canada

Published in The Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 5, Spring 2000.

Old-growth Forest with Setting Sun, Henri Rousseau

David Abram: Hi, David! Here I am at last. My sweetheart and I have been wandering through the American West, snooping around for a potential community, and although no place reached up through our feet and grabbed us, we’ve landed for a time in the high desert of northern New Mexico—in the midst of a mongrel community of activists I know fairly well from years spent living and loving in this dusty terrain before moving to Washington State three years ago. We had hoped that island realm would claim us, but the combined effects of Boeing, Microsoft, and the city of Seattle generally sprawling all around us, sprawling up into our noses and our ears, finally forced us to flee. We embarked on this most futile of quests in turn-of-the-millennium America: the quest for wildness—wildland and wild, earthy, close to the ground community. Slim pickin’s these days. Development everywhere, clearcuts even in the back of the backcountry, streams ravaged by effluent from abandoned mining operations. It’s not all hopeless: there’s still plenty mystery out in them thar hills, but I was mostly shocked by how the same all the towns are becoming. Ah well . . . I suppose Canada’s a decade or two behind the States, and if only we could get visas to live and work in Canada, we prob’ly be there in a flash.

Anyway, David, I’ve just finished reading, for the second time in three days, your little essay “Birding Lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas” (Jardine, 1998). I read it again only because, on reading it a few days ago, it brought me such pleasure, and I wanted to experience that pleasure again. And did. That whole little essay just makes me really happy—to know that someone is thinking and writing like that, saying these things as gently and gracefully as you are. I mean, I was really struck by the writing style that you’ve been forging for yourself, and it got me thinking about the ways of languaging that seem to reign within academia, and within Western education generally, and ultimately within our civilization at this curious moment.

Seems that you and I both are engaged, whether implicitly or explicitly, in trying to nudge the collective language—to loosen it up, perhaps, in hopes of making room for various other non-human voices to enter and influence the general conversation. No matter that these other voices do not speak in words (but rather in honks, or trills, or croaks, or whispering rat- tles)—what’s important, as your essay on “Birding Lessons” seems to show, is that our own words be awake to these other styles of expression, these other bodies, these other shapes of sentience and sensitivity. But, to let my words and my thoughts stay awake and responsive to these other voices entails, it seems, that I speak more as a body than as a mind—that I identify more with this breathing flesh (this skin and these hands and this ache in the gut) than my culture generally allows, and that I let my words and my thoughts blossom out of my limbs. That I acknowledge and hon- our my own animal presence, this curiously muscled form with its various affinities and cringes, and its apparent ability to echo, or reverberate off of, any other body it encounters—a sandstone cliff, or a water strider, or a wolf howling out in the forested distance.

For me, the whole reason and worth of reclaiming the body—or rather, of letting the body reclaim us—is so that we may find ourselves back inside this delicious world from which schooling had exiled us, rediscov- ering our embedment in the thick of things, remembering our real com- munity and being remembered by that community. I mean, how long did we think we could go on without the necessary guidance that herons and toads have to offer?

David Jardine: So, what if we try to think of our human inheritances, our cul- tural, disciplinary, textual . . . our mathematics, our buildings, our schools of art with their pulls of paints, the oddly named “language arts” found in schooling   as somehow, somehow bodies of knowledge? Given (and it is perhaps this seeming “given” that is the sorest point) the mandates of schools and the entrusting of the human disciplines to teachers and children, can we draw into those places the Earthly, bodily images and the sorts of sensuous, bodily encounters you suggest? What often happens when “environmental education” penetrates the school is that we come to under- stand the Earth as a special topic (distinct from but still) among others (lan- guage, mathematics, social studies, the fine arts, each with their own cur- riculum guide alongside the “environmental education” curriculum guides). We then pursue the delicious thick of things like sandstone cliffs, or water striders, or wolfy howlings and the guidance of herons and toads, but we have such a hard time finding our human works bodily delicious. All the rest of schooling is left behind (in the wake of “environmental education’s” desire to “get outside”) and, to be brutal about it, school subjects are drained of their body and life and blood. They have, in a weird way, been abandoned.

So, is it possible, is it even feasible, is it even desirable that the Pythagorean Theorem become something off which we can echo and reverberate? That it, too, might be a body of work we might remember and be remembered by, a real, living community of conversation, of contesta- tion, of shared and contested histories, of shoals and sedimented layers and evidences of erosion and restoration and longstandingness, of signs, sniffy tracks, pointing, a place that must be entered with care if it is to show itself and not be scared off by our interloping, leaving only math worksheets in its wake? I’m not sure where it is from: someone suggested that “it is lan- guageall the way down,” and someone responded: “if it is language all the way down, then it is also Earth all the way up.”

David Abram: Um, I vaguely remember that it was my philosophical colleague Jim Cheney (1989), responding to a statement by Richard Rorty that “it is language all the way down,” who said something to the effect of “well, yes, but it is also earth all the way up.” Earth all the way up—of course! So there’s really no realm of our experience, no layer of reflection so rarefied that it definitively breaks free of the Earth’s influence. No artifact that has not also been authored, or at least enabled, by the curious mix of minerals, winds, and waters that com- prise this wild planet, no “virtual” reality so virtual that it is not tacitly informed by the tastes and textures of this reality. Not even language is immune to the influence of gravity! All of which becomes apparent as soon as we return to our senses and acknowledge the sensuous, corpore- al character of all our experience. Even the most outrageous visions are still visual, still granted—that is—by the bodily eye in its dreaming or delirium, and hence already infected by the visible world.

And so why not mathematics, too—I mean how could it be other- wise? Does not all our mathematics grow out of the proportion between our bodies and the round earth? Is not “geometry,” as the very word sug- gests, the measure of Ge or Gaia—the way the earth measures itself in rela- tion to the human body?

I find rather odd the common assumption that another thoughtful species evolved on some other planet would somehow come up with the same mathematics that we have. Heck, even another species on this plan- et, if they chose to codify their sense of order, would surely incubate a dif- ferent mathematics than this that we’ve hatched. Indeed, the sea urchin who once inhabited the delicate calcium matrix that now rests on my win- dowsill, to say nothing of the giant undulating jellyfish I once came upon (while diving off the coast of Thailand) who had a whole school of hundreds of little, fluorescent blue fish living under the protection of her transparent and pulsing umbrella—these radial folks seem already to be practicing a mathematics very different from the one we two-leggeds seem to be pur- suing. It is our breathing body—with its symmetries, its rhythms, its ver- tebral sequences and distances and digits—that infiltrates us into the field of numbers and numerical relations—and so of course the body will lend something of its character to the mathematics that it glimpses and explores. And yet the sea urchin’s mathematics would not be entirely alien— indeed it would be weirdly complementary to any human mathematics we might devise, intimately familiar in its strangeness, since both we and the urchins, for all our corporeal differences, can only dream in relation to the same Earth, the same sphere, the same vast and spherical flesh. Our small bodies are so different, yet our larger body—our larger flesh—is the same. That’s an exercise I would love to have been assigned in high school math class: “What sort of mathematics might an octopus (or a consor- tium of octopi) devise?” Or: “Consider the web-weaving spiders: what might be one or two of the basic theorems of arachnid mathematics?” And plants: “Do individually-rooted trees, like oak and fir trees, enact a very different arithmetic than do those who propagate in a more rhizomal fash- ion, like aspens?” The chance to ponder such questions in the classroom would link mathematics to the bodily imagination as well as to the analytic intellect—would likely help students recognize early on, that mathematics is an imaginative endeavour as well as a ready-made set of abstract tools. I mean, it’s plenty obvious that even different human cultures (China and Europe, for example) can come up with different sciences, different math- ematics, different ways of relating to the common Earth. And so I am in utter agreement with your sense that these institutions are bodies of knowledge— that our schools, our sciences, our most refined arts are all living bodies of knowledge, with particular habits, rhythms and styles of comportment that have been grappled-over and handed down from generation to gen- eration. That these are not fixed and finished sets of facts but corporeal prac- tices, styles of engagement, ways of seeing, active ways of knowing. Of course this does not mean that they are arbitrary, since they are ways of relating to the actual Earth. They are not merely “socially constructed”—at least no more than the particular grasses we eat are constructed by the Earth .

In this sense your notion seems important to me, radically so—that we should teach even such a taken-for-granted truth as the Pythagorean Theorem as a living body of knowledge, a richly sedimented bunch of flesh- ly encounters and contested practices that we have inherited and, perhaps, can reactivate and contribute to. What a shift that would bring to contem- porary culture, if mathematics began to remember itself as a sensuous, breathing, carnal field of earthly interactions! I mean, what were Pythagoras and his secretive sect up to if not cultivating a set of bodily practices, of ways of looking and listening—to the world, to numbers, to the night sky stud- ded with lights.

But then again, wasn’t it Pythagoras himself who was early among Westerners to so segregate the realm of number and proportion from the sen- suous world to which our animal bodies give us access? Wasn’t it Pythagoras who, in our tradition, first insisted upon the purity and eternal nature of mathematical truth relative to the shifting, dangerous, and hence less real world of generation and decay in which we find ourselves bodily ensnared? Wasn’t it he, enamoured of numbers and their apparent generality, who first set the human mind lusting after a purity that was not of this Earth?

David Jardine: “Lusting for a purity that was not of this Earth.” I think you’ve got it there. Maybe, to really understand mathematics as a body of knowl- edge, we need to understand something of the lust for immortality that hides in its axiomatic allures. It wouldn’t be so alluring without its odd, inhuman promise that has aroused us humans so often.

Wouldn’t it be something to meditate upon this sort of thing with our children in schools? I remember one grade 7 kid out in the school yard, near winter solstice, talking about how low the sun had got, and how, even so, even with this sort of bodily evidence of the grand circles of change, some- how, the tree and its shadowcasts still carry Pythagorean proportionalities. So, after your meditations on octopuses and rhizomatic aspens (hmm, juicy phrase, that!), I’ve been thinking about standing upright and how it lends itself to Pythagoras’ musings. That kid and me standing upright, spooked by how the raise of the height of the sun meant it hit the tree top at a sharper angle and therefore splayed out its treeshadow towards us dif- ferently, shorter, but (spookily) perfectly so, in The Same proportion. Little wonder we might have imagined that mathematics portended an unearth- ly, everlasting life. A great glimpse of The Same. So mathematics becomes a distention of our desire to know what pertains, what remains.

This is the bodily energy I’ve seen when math gets taught right—stu- dents spooked and spirited by somehow glimpsing The Same, something that pertains.

Been thinking the odd similarity our work has, that both of us tell bodily tales, but we both also share a philosophical tradition that, for me any- way, handed me back my fleshy life out of a career in philosophical ideation. Phenomenology, the sensuous presence of the lived world, hermeneutics and the embodiment of ancestry and a seriously finite human subject . . . it is clear in your book (Abram, 1996) that your tale is somewhat similar.

When, in your work, you take up Merleau-Ponty and his visibilities and invisibilities (or Plato and his), it becomes clear that the ancestors can help us experience more deeply, more thoroughly. That is the feel I get from you book, that knife edge, where what presents itself to the critterbody, the sensuous spell, the sensuous Speil, is not just felt, but mulled-over, taken seri- ously enough to not just be stimulating, but thought-provoking as well. There is a Dharma-glimpse here: some things pertain in the roiling inter- dependencies of the flesh. For me, this is really the knife edge that I want my own work to have—the felt immediacies of the ancestors howling in the flesh. Robertson Davies once suggested that the outcome of education is that you become haunted by more ghosts. So when I think back to your words about Pythagoras and his motley, secretive crew, their work, even their for- mulae, become like old, odd inheritances passed down through many warm hands, and even though he might have aspired to otherworldli- ness, I can feel the fleshheat of that aspiration as a deeply human one.

So, let me try this. When Merleau-Ponty states that the eye that gazes out at the visible terrain is also visible, and hence is entirely a part of that visible field, so that, as you’ve written in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), I and the world share a common flesh—a common animate element that is at once both sensible and sensitive, perhaps even sentient—well, as we read and ponder this, it is some aspect of our embodiment that takes in these words of his and yours: we read them, we speak them out loud, we remember them, we write them out by hand in order to remember them, and they affect our thinking. Similarly, when we turn away from our books and tune in to the cicadas thrumming outside—well, some aspect of our bodies takes in that experience as well. To be sure, the latter experience has a different character, it is less verbal and more auditory, having to do with the dips and volumes of air and its humidity between me and these trees. But the tales told are analogous, somehow, even akin.

When some theorists speak of “embodied knowing” they want to set up some sort of fight at this juncture, claiming, without often saying so in so many words, that academic work (like reading Merleau-Ponty), is in prin- ciple “disembodied,” that all those ancestral-bibliographic searches in what James Hillman (1991) called “the old place” (p. 101) are to be disparaged in favour of some image of immediacy. But I don’t think these two encounters are necessarily at odds here, or that one is any less embodied than the other. They are simply two different aspects of the body, or two different ways of being body.

David Abram: This must be a quick missive: I am in the grip of some intense sickness misery at the moment, and trying to fathom how to deal rightly with it before it deals overmuch with me, so I ask your patience for a few days. I’ll climb back into the conversation as soon as I can think straight (or, better, curved—as soon, that is, as I can curve my thoughts again without flying into a tailspin).

But your last comments about “disembodiment,” and how maybe what seems “disembodied” within the academic world is perhaps not really disembodied at all, unquiets me. I mean sure—a lot (or at least some) of that scholarly textual tracking of phrases and forgotten foibles and bibliographic peering after “who was quoting who and why and where” is indeed a kind of marvellous mudra for the muscles—a way of communing with long-dead ancestors and ancestral haunts, and of learning from them how to haunt the library stacks in style when we, too, have transmogrified into a trail of traces. I mean of course everything felt or sensed or even thought is felt and thunk by a body (whether that body is furred, or feath- ered or made of bricks). But shucks, man!—the question is whether that body blossoming into song is singing in a way that blesses the other bod- ies that abound, or whether it’s proclaiming only and endlessly itself, at the expense of all else, by pretending it’s not a body in blossom but a burst of brilliance from beyond Alpha Centauri, a burnished piece of bombast that wants to blast the bodily world to bits, despising its own density and tex- ture for being vulnerable to the wind and the wet (and the withering away). The abstract intelligence, I think, is a sheer delight when it’s in serv- ice to the earthly dance, but reckless and stifling mean when it strives to cer- tify its dominion, terrified of noticing that it’s enmeshed in the world it seeks to control. The terror of being vulnerable, and the consequent wish to dis- embed oneself, to stand forever outside the sensuous world—to possess the world in thought, to comprehend it and own it and finally to control it: that is the sad dance that I’d call “disembodied.” It’s still a dance, yes, but one that has forgotten the pleasure of the thing.

Drat! I seem to have forgot my resolve to hold off on these thoughts till I’d felt a bit better in my limbs, and a bit more limber in my brain—feel free to ignore the above paragraph if it’s just ranting without grokking yer main point, which I sense is a kindhearted one. The problem, David, is this: schooling did indeed hurt me, wounded me bad. The schools I went to did- n’t leave any room between their four walls for such folks as myself, “dyslexic” they’d probably call it now, and maybe also “attention deficit dis- order” or some other dysfunctional label—’cause they didn’t recognize any value in the sort of delicious somatic empathy I inadvertently felt in rela- tion to creatures and grasses and rock faces, and in general, every sensor- ial thing I met and pondered, which translated into a kind of slowness in regard to less tangible matters like logical theorems and abstract principles. And so I guess I’ve got a chip on my shoulder, one that sends splinters into my flesh every time I remember sitting, shaking and sweating, in front of yet another timed test while the clock on the wall ticks away, or whenev- er I remember the frogs pinned to the dissection boards by students who’d never gazed at a live frog in wonder (classmates laughing as they flung a few severed limbs around the lab).

Yes indeed, there is a rich kind of scholarship and a yearning to learn that knows knowledge is a way into a deeper relationship with things. But there is also a type of learning that accumulates knowledge solely in order to acquire a new power over things—a kind of scholarship that by its exercise hopes to avoid and indeed to vanquish the difficult ambiguity of relationship (with all its attendant vulnerability and responsibility). This is a strategy one can pursue only by denying or forgetting one’s bodily embedment in the thick of things. This is what I’d call a disembodied approach—the approach of a body trying to pretend its not there.

Crisp, crisp stars out tonight . . . .

David Jardine: Hey, look, get better. Actually loved your last message because it broke something for me and is precisely the sort of slap I often need in my work and my life. I used an image ages ago in a paper about the loss of the fourth R in environmentalism (Jardine, 1994). We’ve still got “recycle, reduce, reuse.” The R that got lost was “refuse:” not simply “refuse” in the sense of “garbage” but refusing some things. Your lovely ire in your last message—that is the sword that compassion required to prevent what you graciously called “tenderness” above from being what Chogyam Trungpa (1995) called “idiot compassion” (p. 122). You’re right: some of what the academy suggests is ecologically and spiritually insane and must be refused. Much of what goes on in schools is horrifying in its violences against children and against this great inheritance and great task of bodi- ly remembering. That is why Merleau-Ponty’s words of flesh are worth our love and attention, because of their character, because of what they say and what they ask of us and our lives. We must learn again to refuse, to say “no” now from deep down in the belly breath.

Your school wounds are tethered to wounds in what could have been the sensuous beauty of geometry, for example—itself, like you, in a schooled desk, tied down to tests that hate the lovely ambiguities and allures of its body, as much as school hated you and your body. School(ed) child/school(ed) mathematics: each bears a wound.

I’ve attached another recent paper called “All beings are your ancestors” (Jardine, 1997). The title is from Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157), in a text called Cultivating the Empty Field (1991): “Transforming according to circumstances, meet all beings as your ancestors.”

Enjoy. Later.

David Abram: Thanks for the paper, David. It’s an interesting piece, written with style and precision. As in this line of yours “Giddy sensation, this. Like little bellybreath tingles on downarcing childgiggle swingsets.” Hah! What a precise muscleskin memory in my belly, yet not named from outside before.

David Jardine: That line you mentioned is one I also really like—because, as you say, it voices such an intimate bodyplace that is so rarely said out loud. It is such a schoolyard image, as if children, out of school, had some secret not-school knowledges they were secreting away into bodily recesses at recess. Each of us knows something of this, down on hands and knees with yer snout in the tall grasses in intimate bug worlds and dirt smells, know- ing something, something carnal, that no one seems able to admit. So we experienced it, all of us, and never ever said anything at all about it. Secret Knowledge. Perhaps something we shouldn’t leave to schools, perhaps we shouldn’t even let them know, given what they’ve often done with so many other things.

David Abram: Yeah. I call it “shadow knowledge” since it’s gathered or gleaned outside of the officially sanctioned spaces, away form the gaze of the adults, out of the spotlight cast by those ostensibly in charge of what’s worth knowing.

Here’s another thing I thought I would mention, in case you’ve met other kids like this. You know, as a kid I actually loved numbers and their mysteries, but I got befuddled by the way mathematics was taught in high school. Whenever there were timed exams, I discovered that I was unable to simply memorize formulas and simply plug them into equations wherever needed (though I certainly tried to)—because, for some reason I felt I had to work those formulas out afresh every time, reacquainting myself with them, bodily, (almost as though I were working them out on my fingers, but it was rather like some strange metaphorical extension of bodily space) before I could deploy them in any particular instance, which usually made it impossible for me to finish any test in the allotted time (although whatever I did complete, I always got correct). I simply had to experience each formula in my muscles, had to feel how it moved, how it acted, in order for it to make sense to me. (Similarly with reading: I was and still am unable to abstract the meaning of a printed phrase directly off the page, but rather have to feel it in my flesh, have to sound it out or at least feel it in my tongue-muscles, and it is this bodily experience that disclos- es the meaning to me. Hence I am a really, really slow reader compared to everyone else that I know—I read at about the same speed at which I could read aloud, and indeed any text I’m really interested in I do read aloud). If mathematics had been taught to me more in the way that you advocate—as a living body of knowledge, with a corporeal history—well, it sure would’ve opened mathematics up to me and others like me, instead of effectively closing it off to us. It took many years before I was able to regain my appreciation and fascination with that field.

David Jardine: You ask if I’ve met other kids like that. Can you keep a secret? I’m that other kid. And so are many of the children I see squatted in desks, and many of the teachers I meet, their eyes bloodshot with trying to keep up the charade they don’t even know they are in.

Let’s rest here for a bit.

David Abram interviewed by Derrick Jensen

Originally published in How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization, 2008.

Black Woodpecker, Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Derrick Jensen: I’d like to start with two questions that might actually be one. They are: Is the natural world alive? And second, what is magic?

David Abram: Is there really anything that is not alive? Certainly we are alive, and if we assume that the natural world is in some sense not alive, it can only be because we think we’re not fully in it, and of it.

Actually, it’s difficult for me to conclude that any phenomenon I perceive is utterly inert and lifeless; or even to imagine anything that is not in some sense alive, that does not have its own spontaneity, its own openness, its own creativity, its own interior animation, its own pulse — although in the case of the ground, or this rock right here, its pulse may move a lot slower than yours or mine.

Now your other question: What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It’s the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web…

DJ: Another human being.

DA: That too. Sure. Magic is that astonishing experience of contact and conviviality between myself and another shape of existence, whether that be a person, or an aspen tree, or a gust of wind. It’s that sense of wonderment that arises from the encounter with that which I cannot fathom, with something that I cannot ever fully plumb with my thoughts or understanding. Many of my most intense experiences of magic have been encounters in the wild with other species, other shapes of earthly intelligence. From the meeting and exchange that one might call interspecies communication.

DJ: When most people think of magic, they think either of sleight-of-hand or sorcerers casting spells. Is there a relationship between these definitions and yours?

DA: Hmmm…I wouldn’t call what I’ve said a definition. If you try to to define something as unruly and wild as “magic,” you’re asking for trouble. But these other, more restricted notions of magic are still dependent upon the experience of a living world: a magician, really, is one who is able to participate richly in that world; who can communicate with the elements, or call a wild hawk down out of the sky — one who can understand something of the language of the other animals, or who can communicate quietly with certain plants and so is able to draw upon the particular powers of certain herbs in order to heal or alleviate illness.

Sleight-of-hand magic is somewhat more distantly related but still utterly dependent upon the animistic experience of a world all alive and aware. In our modern, technological civilization, the sense that the natural world is alive is considered a delusion or superstition. We conceive of nature — and indeed of the material world in general — as a set of basically inert or mechanical objects. Such a conception profoundly influences the way we see the world around us. It closes our senses to the inexhaustible strangeness and wild otherness of the things around us. For instance, when we speak of the behavior of other animals as just “programmed” in their genes, it deadens our ears to the all the birdsong going on around us. ‘Cause those birds, we assume, are not really saying anything; those are just automatic sounds, “programmed,” as it were. So our ears begin to close down — we become deaf to the living voices all around us. And our eyes, too, begin to glaze over. If we speak of the world as a mechanically determined set of processes, then there’s no real strangeness or mystery to engage the curiosity of our senses, and so our senses begin to shut down, and we come to live more and more in our heads.

The sleight-of-hand magician is one who can startle the senses out of the slumber induced by such obsolete ways of speaking. By making a coin vanish from one hand and appear under your foot, making a stone float between his hands or a silk scarf change its colors, the magician wakes up that old, animistic awareness of objects as living, animate entities with their own enigmatic styles and secrets; he coaxes our senses to engage the strangeness of things once again.

This was my own craft, my profession for many years. As a sleight-of-hand magician working in the late twentieth century, I felt my task was to undermine, to disrupt, to explode the determinate and habitual ways of perceiving that we fall into in a culture that speaks of and defines nature as a set of inert, inanimate, and determinate objects. A skilled sleight-of-hand magician is involved in shaking that accepted view of reality until it begins to unravel; freeing up our animal senses to begin to see and to hear and to taste the world creatively once again. In order to do this, I make use of various “sleights,” these little manipulations of my fingers that I use to lure your senses and to loosen them out of their expectations. I have to roll this coin around my fingers enough times so that at some point it begins to come alive and dance. Then it can start shapeshifting, vanishing from this hand and reappearing over here.

Our world is so domesticated, so defined. People have learned to view things in such conventional and habitual ways that they’ve stopped actually seeing those things at all. Because they always know exactly what they’re supposed to perceive, they no longer really perceive what’s there. They see more a set of concepts than the actual world; they’re not participating with their eyes in the branching life of that cottonwood tree, or in the swirling life of those clouds riding that mountain. But a sleight of hand magician disrupts our expected experience of the visible so that we actually start looking once again, actively gazing and peering at things, our senses drawn into a kind of silent dialog with things.

D.J. So magic has a lot to do with perception.

D.A. Absolutely! The magician — whether an indigenous sorcerer or a modern sleight-of-hand conjurer — is someone who is adept at altering the perceptual field, adept at shifting others’ senses, or at altering her own senses in order to make contact with another shape of awareness, another entity that perceives the world very differently than we do — with a coyote, perhaps, or a frog. Or a whole forest, for that matter.

We’ve been taught to think of perception as a kind of one-way process, whereby information from the world out there is picked up by our senses and transferred to our nervous system in here. But when we really attend, mindfully, to the experience of perception, we discover that it’s a reciprocal, interactive process — a dynamic interaction, or participation, between oneself and what one perceives. To our own sensing, animal bodies, the things are not passive. We walk down the street, and a particular building, or leaf, or stone, actively catches my attention.

DJ: It grabs your awareness.

DA: It calls my eyes, or captures my focus. And thus I’m drawn into a relationship with this other body, this other being. And the more I enter into this relationship – the more I grant it my attention – perhaps moving toward that stone, picking it up and hefting it in my hands, feeling its textures with my fingers, the more articulately that rock speaks to my body, and begins to teach me.

DJ: What is it that motivates your writing and speaking?

DA: My work is motivated in great measure by my sense of loss, by the spreading destruction and desecration of so much earthly beauty. By the accelerating loss of other species — the extinction of so many other styles of sensitivity and sentience, by the destruction of wetlands and forests, the damming and draining of so many rivers to serve our own, purely human interests. I’m trying to understand how it’s possible that a culture of intelligent critters like ourselves can so recklessly and so casually destroy so much that is mysterious and alive, and in the course of it destroy so much of ourselves and our own capacity for wonder.

And it seems to me that it is not out of any real meanness that we are destroying so much of our world. It’s simply that we no longer notice these other beings, no longer really notice or feel that we are a part of the same world that the ravens and the rivers inhabit. We don’t sense that weíre inside the same story in which the squirrels and the salmon are characters. Somehow our ways of speaking, and our ways of living, perpetuate this odd notion that we stand outside of the world, apart from the world, looking at it, pondering it as if from some distant vantage point. And our science steadily tries to figure out the world, to come up with a precise blueprint of how it all works — as if the world were a vast machine we could somehow diagram and control if we can just get the right perspective.

Logically, however, this is all a bit silly. We’re obviously immersed in this world, utterly dependant upon it, our nervous systems coevolved in delicate interaction with all these other beings and shapes and textures. Rather than figuring out the workings of this machine from outside, in hopes of trying to engineer it to suit our purposes, it would make much more sense for our sciences to study the world from our experienced place within this world — using our experiments to discern how we might establish a more sustaining relationship with a particular species, or with a particular wetland or forest, rather than trying to figure out just how that species or that wetland works in itself, as though we were somehow not participant in its processes. Those are the sort of questions our sciences should be asking: how can both we and these frogs flourish in right relationship to one another; how can we humans live in right relation to this river valley so that both we and the river and the salmon can all flourish — rather than: what kind of a machine is a salmon in itself, or what are the mechanisms that make this forest tick? By asking these latter questions we take ourselves out of relation to the forest, out of relation to the salmon, in order comprehend their workings. I suppose it would be okay if we then brought ourselves back into a living relation with those beings. But we don’t! Instead we begin to focus on how to manipulate the forest, how to engineer the genome of the salmon for our own ostensible benefit. So much research, today, seems motivated less by a sense of wonder than by a great will-to-control. It is a mark of immaturity, I think, a sign that science is still in its adolescence. A more mature natural science – the science to come – will be motivated more by a wish for richer relationship, for deeper reciprocity with the world that we study.

But perhaps today we do see some stirrings of such a mature science — in the emergence and development of conservation biology, for instance, or in the empathy cultivated by some field biologists for the animals and plants that they study — or even in the growing recognition of indeterminacy, and “chaos,” as a principle that undermines all our attempts to understand the world from outside.

In our culture we speak about nature a great deal. Mature cultures speak to nature. They feel the rest of nature speaking to them. They feel the ground where they stand as it speaks through them. They feel themselves inside and a part of a vast and steadily unfolding story in which storm clouds and spiders are just as much players as they are. So that’s what part of my work is about: how to coax people back inside the world, how to startle their senses awake so they recognize that they are really immersed in this breathing world, not spectators but active participants in this curious world.

DJ: A few minutes ago, you were suggesting that perception, itself, is a participatory thing.

DA: When we speak of the world as a set of objects, or of mechanisms waiting to be figured out by us, we are implicitly saying that the world has nothing that is, in principle, hidden from us, that given enough time and research we could plumb the depths of the whole shebang, and know how it all works. It’s the God trick — the idea that we can understand the world from outside, from a God’s eye perspective. But when we pay attention to our actual experience of things and of the world, we realize that we never encounter the totality of anything all at once. There is always some aspect of what we encounter that is hidden from us: the other side of that tree, or its roots under the ground. It’s these hidden aspects, these mysteries or uncertainties, that invite us to look further, that draw us into relation, into participation with whatever we meet. Perception is a kind of improvised dance with the world, a dynamic interaction between my sensing body and the sensuous landscape. Simply to be gazing the blue sky, or watching those storm clouds approach, is already to be in relationship, to be participating in an active exchange between my body and those roiling clouds. But if I speak of the clouds or the weather as a purely mechanical, quantifiable set of processes, then I’m speaking of them as things that have no life of their own, no otherness, nothing really hidden from our awareness, and so I’m stifling the possibility of an ongoing relation with those storm clouds — which is to say, I stop seeing them. I no longer really notice the sky with all its shifting patterns. To the extent that we speak of the world as a set of objects, we stop seeing with our eyes, and hearing with our ears. We stifle the spontaneous reciprocity between our bodily senses and the sensuous cosmos. We climb up into our heads and begin to live in a world of abstractions.

If we want to actually start noticing where we are, if we wish to find ourselves in a more respectful relation with the rest of the earth around us, the simplest and most elegant way I know of is simply to stop insulting all the things around us by speaking of them as passive objects, and instead begin to allow things their own elemental spontaneity, their own active agency — their own life. As soon as you begin speaking in such a way, you start noticing things a hell of a lot more. You suddenly find yourself in a dynamic relationship with all the presences around you — with the air you breathe, the chair you’re sitting on, the house in which you live. You find yourself negotiating relationships with other beings all the time. And you realize that ethics is not something to be practiced only with other humans — that all of our actions have ethical consequences.

DJ: You said a chair. When you talk about things being alive, you’re not just talking about rocks, salmon, clouds, wind. . .

DA: I’m also talking about telephone poles, about houses. . . .

DJ: So you perceive this tape recorder as something to be entered into relationship with — or rather as something that we’re already in relationship with, if we would just notice and acknowledge it?

DA: Sure. A tape recorder can be seen as having its own quirky existence. To speak of anything as inanimate is kinda disrespectful. It’s insulting to the thing. Why do it? It cuts me off from listening to what that thing might want in the world, to what that object, that presence, might be asking of me. I don’t see any usefulness in making a conceptual division between that which is animate on one hand, and that which is inanimate on the other. And I know of no healthy culture that makes such a division between animate and inanimate matter.

Often when discussing these notions, people will say, “Okay, well, sure, humans are alive. Other animals, okay, I can get that — critters have their own lives, sure. And even plants, I get that they’re alive. But stones? Rocks? Matter? No way! The matter of which this table or that chair is made? You’re going to tell me that it’s alive? I can’t go there — forget it! — that’s just inanimate matter.”

People always want to draw the line somewhere. But you see, it’s drawing the line at all that’s the problem: the idea that at bottom matter is ultimately inert, or inanimate. The word “matter,” if you listen with your animal ears, is basically the word “mater,” or mother. It comes from the same indo-european root as the word “matrix,” which is Latin for “womb.”

We all carry within us an ancient, ancestral awareness of matter as the womb of all things, a sense that matter is alive through and through. But to speak of matter as inanimate is to think of mother as inanimate, to imply that the female, earthly side of things is inert, is just an object. If we want to really throw a monkey wrench into the workings of the patriarchy, then we should stop speaking as though matter is in any way, at any depth, inanimate or inert.

Every indigenous, oral culture that we know of — every culture that has managed to sustain itself over the course of many centuries without destroying the land that supports it — simply refuses to draw such a distinction between animate and inanimate matter.

If we speak of matter as essentially inanimate, or inert, we establish the need for a graded hierarchy of beings: stones have no agency or experience whatsoever; bacteria have a minimal degree of life; plants have a bit more life, with a rudimentary degree of sensitivity; “lower” animals are more sentient, yet still stuck in their instincts; “higher” animals are more aware; while humans alone are really awake and intelligent. In this manner we continually isolate human awareness above, and apart from, the sensuous world. It takes us out of relationship with the things around us. If, however, we assume that matter is alive and self-organizing from the get-go, then hierarchies vanish, and we are left with a wildly differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has its gifts relative to the others. And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this web, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.

In relation to certain human artifacts, particularly the mass-produced objects, it ís difficult to make contact with and feel the unique life of that presence. Yet one can find that life pulsing, most readily, in the materials of which that artifact is made. In the wood of the telephone pole, which was once standing in a forest, in the clay bricks of the apartment building, even in the smooth metal alloy of the truck door that you lean against — there, in those metals originally mined from the bones of the breathing earth, one can still feel the presence of patterns that are earthborn, and that still carry something of that wider life. But if I look at the truck purely as a truck, what I see is not something that is born, but something that is made. And there is surely an important distinction between the born and the made. But even with that distinction, the made things are still made from matter, from the flesh of a living cosmos.

DJ: How would you convince a skeptic that a river, or a mountain, is alive?

DA: Actually, Derrick, I’m not interested in convincing anyone that this is true in some objective, literal sense. ‘Cause it seems to me that the literal view of the world is often part of the problem. I’m not trying to get people to just replace one view of what is literally the case with another view of what is absolutely literally true. No.

I know, however, that we cannot change the way we live, the way we interact with the world, without changing the way we speak. We currently speak about the world in a very goofy way that holds us apart from it, and makes us feel like we’re outside, and hence able to control it, master it, manipulate it. There are other ways of speaking that hold us in a very different relation to the world. I don’t think that any of these ways of speaking are “true” in some utterly objective sense. I think they’re all just different strategies for speaking, different ways of wielding our words. And one strategy, it seems to me, leads us into a richer way of life, into a deeper reciprocity with the land around us, and with the myriad beings that comprise this land.

This is a very different notion of truth from the one that holds sway right now within conventional science, which is still trying to figure out the “truth” of “how nature works.” It seems to me that a more fruitful understanding of truth would ask how we can live in right relation with this rainforest, so that neither we nor the rainforest are suffering. If we’re going to study humpback whales, how can we as a human community and a humpback whale community flourish as parts of the same world? I’m not interested in pursuing the questions of: what is a humpback whale? How does it work? What are its mechanisms? To even ask those questions presumes that I am something other than an animal myself — that I am some kind of bodiless mind, a pure spectator of nature, rather than a participant in it.

So there’s this problem with much of what we’ve been talking about. Within our contemporary technologized civilization, it is all too easy to say “that rock is alive, that tree is aware and awake.” It’s too facile, because it’s so simple for people to just translate this into their objectified, literal view of the world, and to believe: “oh, so it is literally alive and aware and awake.” It feels to me too much like a perpetuation of our current way of speaking, which uses language to dominate the world, rather than to make contact with the world around us, to touch things, and to feel them touching us, to respond to things. At this strange cultural moment in the West, our way of wielding words is even more of a problem than the content of those words. Of course, when we speak of the world around us merely as a conglomeration of objects, that is a problem. But even more of a problem is that when we speak, we speak as though nothing else is listening. We speak as though none of these other beings can hear what’s being said, or can be influenced by our speaking.

DJ: As though nothing else is listening. . .

DA: Yes. Not in the sense that the birds or the trees could understand the dictionary definitions of our words. I mean, none of the creatures around here — the coyotes and the ravens and the magpies — know the denotative meanings of the words I say, but they can nonetheless hear the tonality in our speaking. They feel the rhythm in our words. They can hear the music and the melody in our conversation. And in that sense some of the meaning comes across. Yet we speak as though nothing else hears, as though we needn’t take care how we speak of these other beings. We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.

But what I’m suggesting is that those of us who work to heal or mend the rift between humankind and the more-than-human earth oughta pay more attention to how we speak, we oughta be way more mindful about how we wield our words. If you already know that you’re entirely a part of this wild world, if you’ve already entered, now and then, into a deeply felt reciprocity with another species, or have tasted a profound kinship and solidarity with the living land around you, still: it is not easy, today, to find a way of speaking that does not violate that experience, that does not tear you out of that felt rapport. It’s real hard to flow your phrases in a manner that invokes and encourages that reciprocity, or even allows it. Our civilization is masterful at twisting even our most beautiful words to make them into slogans for a commodity-based reality. Our habits of speech have co-evolved with a violent relation to the world for so for so many centuries, that one cannot step out of them very easily.

Given the power of this crazed culture to co-opt even the best of our terms, I think that even more important than the content of what we say is the style of our saying, the form of our speaking, the rhythm of our rap.Somehow the music and the texture of our speaking has to carry the meaning, has be appropriate to the meaning at every point. Our deepest intent makes itself felt in the cadence, in the rhythm and the melody of our discourse. If we are not, in fact, disembodied minds hovering outside the world, but are sensitive and sentient animals – bodily beings palpably immersed in the breathing body of the world – then language is first and foremost an expressive thing, the patterned sounds by which our body calls to other bodies, whether to the moon, or to the geese honking overhead, or to another person. It is really a kind of singing, isn’t it? Even the most high-falutin and abstract discourse is still a kind of song, a way of singing the world. It may be a really lousy song — a song that’s awfully insulting to many of the beings that hear it, one which grates on the ears of owls and makes the coyotes wince — but it's still a song. And those of us who are working to transform things, we’re trying to change the tune, to shift a few of the patterns within the language.

In a sense, we all have to become poets. I don’t mean that we should be writing poems for poetry anthologies — no: rather, that our everyday speaking has to touch people bodily as well as mentally. We have to notice the music in our speaking, and take care that the music has a bit of beauty to it, so that we’re not just talking as disembodied minds to other abstract minds but as sensuous and sentient creatures addressing other sensuous creatures, so that our animal bodies are stirred, and are brought into the conversation, and so that the other animals are not shut out either. We feel their presence nearby, and so we take care not to violate our solidarity with the animals and the animate earth.

DJ: When I write, I don’t want anyone to say, What a great idea. I want them to burst out sobbing, or to become agitated: to have a bodily response.

DA: Uh-huh. When I write, I sometimes feel I’m in service to the life of the language itself. Maybe I write to rejuvenate that life, to open it back on to the wider life of the land, so it can draw sustenance from there. I’m working to return meaning to the more-than-human terrain, which is where all our words are rooted in the first place. I guess I really don’t think language, or meaningful speech, is a particularly human thing at all — it seems to me that language is a power of the earth, in which we’re lucky to participate.

So I guess for me, then, the question is not really: “Is the world alive?” but rather “How is it alive? How does that life hit us? How can we let it sing through us?”

DJ: If traditional indigenous cultures speak of the world as animate and alive, and if, as you’ve suggested, our own most immediate and spontaneous experience of the world is inherently animistic, disclosing a nature that is all alive, awake, and aware — then how did we ever lose this experience? How did civilized humankind lose this participatory sense of reciprocity with a living world? How did we tear ourselves out of the world?

DA: Lots of factors. Settlement. The development of large-scale agriculture, which entailed fencing out the wild. The emergence of agricultural surpluses, which often led to hierarchical forms of control and distribution of those surpluses. Urbanization. New technologies. But I also believe it had a great deal to do with one of the oldest and most powerful of our technologies: writing. And, in particular, the alphabet.

But in order to understand why, you have to recognize that the animistic experience is not just a sense that everything is alive, but also an awareness that that everything speaks, that everything, at least potentially, is expressive. The evidence suggests that this is baseline for the human organism, an experience common to all our indigenous ancestors. For most of us today, it seems an extraordinary and unusual experience, but in fact it could not be more ordinary and more normal. The normal human way of encountering the world and the things around us is to sense that they are also encountering us, and that they are experiencing each other, and to sense as well that the things are speaking to one another, and to us at times — not in words, but in the rustle of the leaves. . . .

DJ: . . . which are quite possibly tree words. It hit me about a year ago that there is no difference between us speaking and trees speaking. We both use the wind, or maybe the wind uses us. The wind going over the vocal cords and the wind going over the leaves.

DA: Sure. Language is just the wind blowing through us.

DJ: I took us down a side alley. You were saying. . . .

DA: That everything speaks. The howl of a wolf, the rhythms of cricketsong, but also the splashing speech of waves on the beach. And of course, as we were both suggesting, the wind in the willows. To indigenous people, there are many different kinds of speech. Many manifold ways of pouring meaning into the world. But if that is our normal human way of experiencing the world, how could we ever have lost it? How could we ever have broken out of that animate, expressive field into this basically mute world that we seem to experience today, where the sun and moon no longer draw salutations from us, but just arc blindly across the sky in determinate trajectories, and so we no longer feel that we have get up before dawn in order to pray the sun up out of the ground?

How did that happen?

I think one of the factors that has been too easily overlooked until now is the amazing influence of writing. All of the genuinely animistic cultures that we know of — whether we talk of the Haida people of the northwest coast or the Hopi of the southwest desert, whether we consult the Huaorani of the Amazon Basin, or the Pintupi or Pitjanjara of Australia — these are oral cultures, cultures that have developed and flourished in the absence of any highly formalized writing system. Animistic cultures, in other words, are oral cultures. And so we should wonder: what is it that writing does to our animistic experience of the world?

I would say that writing is itself a new form of animism, a kind of magic in its own right. Writing makes use of the same animistic proclivity that led our oral ancestors to experience the surrounding world as alive, and to feel themselves spoken to by a passing bird or a cloud. To learn to read is to enter into an intense sensorial participation with the letters on the page. I focus my eyes so intently on those written scratches that the letters themselves begin to speak to me. Suddenly, as we say, “I see what it says.” The written words “say” something, they speak to me.

Indeed, that’s what reading is. We come downstairs in the morning, we open the newspaper, and we focus our eyes on these little bits of ink on the page, and suddenly we hear voices! We feel ourselves addressed, spoken to! We see visions, of events unfolding in other times and places! This is magic. It is not so very different from a Hopi elder walking outside the pueblo; he finds his attention drawn by a large rock at the edge of the mesa, focuses his eyes on a patch of lichen spreading on the flank of that rock, and suddenly hears the rock speaking to him! Or a Kayapo woman who, while walking through the forest notices a spider weaving its intricate web, and as she focuses her eyes on that spider she abruptly hears herself addressed by the spider. As other animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the inert letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless — as outrageous as a talking spider.

The difference, of course, is that now it is only our own human marks that speak to us. We have entered into a deeply animistic participation with our own signs, a concentrated interaction that short-circuits the more spontaneous participation between our senses and the sensuous surroundings. Written signs have usurped the expressive power that once resided in the whole of the sensuous landscape: what we do now with the printed letters on the page, our oral ancestors did with aspen leaves, and stones, the tracks of deer and elk and wolf, with the cycling moon and the gathering storm clouds.

Our written signs have tremendous power over us. It’s certainly not by coincidence that the word “spell” has this double meaning: to arrange the letters of a word in the correct order, or to cast a magic spell — because to learn to read and write with this new technology was indeed to learn a new magic, to enter into a profound new world, to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses. Our own written signs now speak so powerfully that they have effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of participation in which we used to engage. And of course it is no longer just our written signs, but our tv screens and our computers and our cars that have us in a kind of dazzled trance. The alphabet is the mother of invention, the progenitor of all our Western technologies. It seems we first had to fall under the spell of the alphabet before we could enter into this fever of technological invention.

I don’t mean to be getting down on technology, only to say that many of these very complex technologies could only have emerged from the alphabetic mindset. But nor do I mean to be demeaning the alphabet here — I’m a writer, after all — I’m not saying that the alphabet is something bad, not at all. What I’m trying to say is that the alphabet is magic — that it is a very concentrated form of magic, and that like all magics it must be used with real care. When we just take it for granted, when we don’t notice its potency, then we tend to fall under its spell.

So while our indigenous ancestors dialogue richly with the surrounding field of nature, consulting with the other animals and the earthly elements as they go about their lives, the emergence of alphabetic writing made it possible for us to begin to dialogue solely with our own signs in isolation from the rest of nature. By short-circuiting the ancestral reciprocity between our sensing bodies and the sensuous flesh of the world, the new participation with our own written signs enabled human language to close in on itself, enabled language to begin to seem our own private possession, and not something born from our encounter with other expressive beings — from the speech of thunder and the rushing rivers. We no longer sense that language was taught to us by the sounds and gestures of the other animals, or by the roar of the wind as it pours through the trees. Language now seems a purely human power, something that unfolds only between humans, or between between us and our own written signs. The rest of the landscape loses its voice; it begins to fall mute. It no longer seems filled with its own manifold meanings, its own expressive power.

I now look out at nature from within my privileged interior sphere of mental subjectivity, but this subjectivity is not shared by the coyotes or the swallows or the salmon. They now seem to inhabit another world — a purely exterior, objective world. They just do their own thing automatically. Creativity, imagination — for so many of us today these seem purely human traits. The mind, we think, is a purely human thing, and it resides inside our individual skulls. You have your mind, and I have my mind; we have this sense that mind is something that is ours — its no longer a mystery that permeates the landscape. We own it.

DJ: Why can’t we engage our own writing and still engage with an animate natural world as well?

DA: We can! The written word didn’t necessitate that we break our sensorial participation with other beings: it just makes it possible for us to do so. It doesn’t necessitate that the land become superfluous to us, or that we no longer pay much attention to the more-than-human world. But we no longer need to interact with the land in order to recall all the stories that are held in those valleys, we no longer need to encounter coyotes and dialogue with ravens in order to remember all the knowledge originally carried in the old Coyote tales and Raven tales, because now all that knowledge has been written down, preserved on the page. Once the language is carried in books, it no longer needs to be carried by the land, and we no longer need to consult the intelligent earth in order to think clearly ourselves. For the first time we no longer need to speak to the mountains and the wind, or to honor the land’s life with prayers and propitiations, because all our ancestrally gathered insights are preserved on the page.

So, the written word was not a sufficient cause of our forgetting, as we philosophers say, but it was a necessary cause, a necessary ingredient in our forgetfulness.

DJ: This reminds me of something John A. Livingston wrote in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. He says that once we reduce our input to everything being mediated by humans, we’re essentially in an echo chamber, and we begin to hallucinate. We’re sensorily deprived, because we’re not getting the variety of sensory stimulation we need. His point is that much of our ideology, much of our discourse, is insane, delusional, hallucinations based on the fact that weíve put ourselves in solitary confinement.

DA: I think I share a similar intuition, which I might put a little differently. Our senses have coevolved with the whole of the sensuous world, with all these other sentient shapes and forms, all these other styles of life. Our nervous system emerged in reciprocity with all that rich otherness, in relationship and reciprocity with hummingbirds and rivers and frogs, with mountains and rivers, with an animate, living land that spoke to us in a multiplicity of voices. I mean, human intelligence evolved during the countless millennia when we lived as gatherers and hunters, and hence our intelligence evolved in a thoroughly animistic context, wherein every phenomenon that we encountered could draw us into relationship. Yet suddenly we find ourselves cut off from that full range of relationships, born into a world in which none of those other beings are acknowledged as really sentient or aware. We abruptly find ourselves in a world that has been defined as a set of inert or determinate objects and mechanical processes, rather than as a community of animate powers with whom one could enter into relationship. A dynamic or living relationship is simply not possible with an object.

Today the only things you can enter into relationship with are other humans. Yet the human nervous system still needs the nourishment that it once got from being in reciprocity with all these other shapes of sensitivity and sentience. And so we turn toward each other, toward our human friends and our lovers, in hopes of meeting that need. We turn toward our human partners demanding a depth and range of otherness that they cannot possibly provide. Another human cannot possibly provide all of the outrageously diverse and vital nourishment that we once got from being in relationship with dragonflies and swallowtails and stones and lichen and turtles. It’s just not possible. We used to carry on personal relationships with the sun and the moon and the stars! To try and get all that, now, from another person — from another nervous system shaped so much like our own — continually blows apart our relationships, it explodes so many of our marriages, because they can’t withstand that pressure.

DJ: That reminds me of something I wrote in my book ‘A Language Older Than Words:’ One of the great losses we endure in this prison of our own making is the collapse of intimacy with others, the rending of community, like tearing and retearing a piece of paper until there only remains the tiniest scrap. To place our needs for intimacy and ecstasy — needs like food, water, acceptance — onto only one species, onto only one person, onto only the area of joined genitalia for only the time of intercourse, is to ask quite a lot of our sex.

DA: Indeed. Our intimate relationships become increasingly brittle. We finally turn toward our lover and say “I really care about you, darlin’, but I’m somehow not quite feeling met. I’m just not being met by you in all the ways I feel that I should be.” Of course not! Another person cannot possibly meet us in all those ways that we were once engaged by the breathing world! Even a large bunch of human relationships cannot make up for the loss of all that more-than-human otherness, and it is this that makes our human communities intensely brittle and violence-prone. I don’t think we have a hoot of a chance of healing our societal ills, or the manifold injustices we inflict on various parts of the human community, without renewing the wild Eros between ourselves and the sensuous surroundings — without “falling in love outward” (in Robinson Jeffers’ wise words) with this earthly cosmos that enfolds us.

As long as we continue to construe the land as little more than a passive backdrop against which our human projects unfold, we’ll continue to close ourselves off from the very sustenance that the human community most needs in order to thrive and flourish. As long as we hold ourselves out of relationship with the surrounding earth, we’ll be unable to tap the necessary guidance that we need from the old oaks or the elder ponderosa pines that surround our town, from the winds and weather patterns, from the mountains and rivers. Many of these beings live at scales much vaster than our own, and so can offer us some real perspective, and a sense of humility.

We simply need their wild guidance. Every human community is nested within a more-than-human community of beings. Until we notice this, many of our human relationships will remain exceedingly fragile, and brittle, and we’ll keep slamming each other in frustration, busting each other up with bullets and with bombs.

If you really crave a healthy and lasting relationship with your lover, then instill it with a wider affection for the local earth — for the local critters, and plants, and elements. That affection will hold and nourish your relationship, will feed it and enable you and your partner able to be fluid with one another.

DJ: You’ve talked eloquently already about not needing to enter into new relationships, but simply noticing and acknowledging the relationships that already exist. . . .

DA: Well we’re obviously already embedded in a complex web of relationships, both with our own kind and with many entities very different from us. How then is it that we don’t notice them, don’t honor our relationships with the plants and animals and all the other elemental presences (soils, rain clouds, rivers…) who support and nourish us? It can only be because somehow we’re oblivious to that direct, unmediated layer of carnal exchange which is always already going on — ’cause we’re oblivious to the bodily level of our existence. It is my body that steadily drinks of the oxygen breathed out by all the green and growing plants, and my body that breathes out the carbon dioxide these plants steadily draw upon in order to photosynthesize and flourish. It is this body, this muscled flesh that rests in intimate relationship with the tree-trunk I’m now sitting on. From walking barefoot in the garden or wandering through all these arroyos, my toes are well acquainted with the life and texture of the soil. But we don’t live our body’s life anymore. We live a life of abstractions, of mental cogitations massively influenced by all of the human-made artifacts and signals that surround us. We’re incessantly reflecting off of our own reflections. We have been taught not to trust our senses, and our direct sensory experience. The senses, which are our most instinctive animal access to the world — our eyes, our ears, our tongue, our nostrils — these magic organs open us directly onto the more-than-human field! Yet we’ve been taught not to trust any of these powers; we’re told that the senses lie, we’re taught in school that the senses are deceptive.

What do our senses tell us? I step out at dawn, walk out across the arroyo, and I see with my own eyes the sun rising out of the nearby Sangré de Cristo Mountains, and in the evening I see it sinking down into the distant Jemez Mountains. And then I watch the moon being hatched from the Sangrés, arcing across the sky, and then see it slip down into the ground far to the west. But at school I’m told, “No, no, no, no, no! The sun is not really moving at all! It’s the earth that is moving. Do’ít trust your senses. The sun is not rising up and setting down. The truth of the matter is that it is the earth that is turning.”

Fair enough. But do we really need to disparage our sensory experience in this manner? Surely there is also a truth to our more spontaneous experience of the rising and setting of the sun. I mean, everyone still says that “the sun rises” and “the sun sets,” whether they are scientists or farmers, and it’s kinda bizarre to simply invalidate this collective experience, as though our bodies have no wisdom of their own. So many indigenous cultures speak of how the sun, after sinking down into the western earth every evening, journeys all night through the ground underfoot on its way toward the east, and how in the course of this journey the sun feeds the deep earth with its fiery life, seeding the depths with the multiple plants that will later sprout forth from the earth’s surface. It’s a tale that honors our direct experience. There is a deep truth to the body’s spontaneous experience of things, a truth that underlies, and secretly supports, all the more abstract and rational insights that we erect upon it. It’s a truth that we ought not to toss aside when we teach the modern, “more sophisticated” cosmology. Rather, we should show how the new view grows out of that older, more primordial experience that has in fact never been lost — that these are like different layers of our encounter with the world, different layers of interpretation. Just as a text has different levels of interpretation, so does the world. And each layer or lever entails a different kind of awareness.

Nonetheless, ever since Copernicus and Galileo and their grand intuition, we have all learned to distrust our senses. We generally pay far more attention to what we are told by the experts than to what we can learn with our unaided senses. We have split our reasoning minds off from our sensing bodies. In order to buy into the Copernican worldview, it would seem we had to accept this split, had to hold our thinking selves apart from the sensuous and sensing life of the body. But what great damage that’s done — we’ve forgotten our instinctive, corporeal solidarity with the breathing earth.

After all, we now know that the sun, too, is in motion, and that even the “fixed” stars are rapidly rushing apart from one another – indeed all of the celestial bodies are in motion relative to one another. Hence it seems an arbitrary choice where one chooses to stabilize one’s perspective. But since we find ourselves here, on this earth, it perhaps makes just as much sense to consider the breathing earth as the stable center of our world (to recognize the ground underfoot as the very ground of our reality) than to consider the Sun as the unmoving center.

DJ: This reminds me of the Groucho Marx line when he was caught in an obvious lie: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

DA: I’m interested in helping folks learn how to think with their senses once again, how to respect their direct experience of the world. Of course the senses reveal a world that is ambiguous and open ended, and by looking more closely, or by listening more carefully, we will always discover new things. But if you don’t trust the intelligence of your senses, then what is it that you are going to trust? You will have to place all your trust in the so-called experts to tell you what is really going on behind the scenes. It is rather like the situation of a church, or a temple, that tells you, “Well, the real Truth is not here but is in that heavenly dimension hidden beyond the stars, and only our high priests have access to that unseen realm.” Such is the situation that we’re in, today, when we neglect our direct sensory experience of things. I mean, no wonder it’s so difficult to mobilize people on behalf of the vanishing species, or the dwindling rivers, or the ailing life of the land around them! No wonder the surrounding earth is only a peripheral concern for most folks! Because the real mystery, we have heard, is somewhere else; the real Source is somewhere outside of this realm that our senses experience. Thus our physicists say that the deep source and truth of things is hidden in the subatomic world. The molecular biologists say that it is in the ultra-microscopic dimension of DNA base-pairs and gene sequences that the real source of life and behaviour resides. But of course, the neurobiologists say the deep cause of our behaviour is to be found in the neuronal structure hidden within the brain.

Each of these dimensions seems to hold the deep truth or cause of the world that we experience, and yet we have no direct access to these dimensions; one needs very fancy instrumentation, very high-powered microscopes and cyclotrons and such to get at them. And so we take our truth from the experts with the instruments (those with the massive funding needed to build or acquire such instruments), and we forfeit our own democratic power, our own immediate, sensorial access to the real. Perhaps we’ve heard that the deepest source and truth of things is to be found in the breaking of the initial symmetries in the Big Bang — another dimension which most of us have no way of glimpsing directly: you need massive orbiting telescopes to gain even a provisional entry to that realm so far beyond the scale of our direct experience. The truth is always hidden somewhere else for a culture that has forsaken the evidence of its own senses.

I mean, Heck: all these investigations into other dimensions are very elegant and sometimes even somewhat useful, but in our lust for Truth with a capital T we forfeit our responsibility to the scale at which we live, to this ambiguous and wild-flowering world that breathes all around us. We hide ourselves from the most outrageous and mysterious truth of all, which is our ongoing immersion in this outrageous web of relationships with all these other wild beings, all of whom request our awareness and our humble respect.

For all our dreams of a final certainty, after three full centuries of science the only thing we can ultimately be certain of is the world disclosed to us by our direct sensory experience. I suspect that the most we can really attain, with humility and humor, is a richer relationship, a deeper reciprocity with the persons, beings, and elements that surround us and compose – with us – our world.

So we’ve had it backward. The sensuous world around us is the secret source in which all those other dimensions – subatomic and galactic and neuronal – are secretly rooted. Similarly, we might suspect, all our religious heavens and hells are secretly born from the world of our direct experience, with it own winged beings and its hooved and horned powers. The sensuous world is always local. It is not, for me, what’s going on in another galaxy, nor even what’s happening in Senegal or Siberia right now. It is this very terrain that I happen to inhabit. This Rio Grande watershed, with these particular critters who like to hang out around these plants who happen to root themselves in these soils. These junipers and ponderosas and pinon pines. And that raven squawking from the telephone wire, and the lizards and horny toads that haunt this terrain, and the coyotes howling out there in the arroyos, and the vivid blue of these desert skies, and the reddish tones in these rocks.

This is my local universe. This is the primary cosmos for me. The sensuous world is always local, and it is never a merely human world. There is no aspect of the sensuous world that is exclusively human — since even on the top floor of a city skyscraper, I’d still be inhaling air that’s been breathed out by the green plants around the city; and I’d still be under the influence of gravity, the mysterious draw of my body toward the heart of the earth.

DJ: You have spoken a bit about the alphabet, and how writing has made it possible for us to neglect, to view as secondary and derivative, the sensuous, more-than-human world. Today, the computer is taking us even further away from our senses. It seems to me that literacy may have to fade before we find our way back to the sensuous earth, and to the primacy of place.

DA: Actually, I don’t think so. I don’t think we should imagine getting rid of writing or literacy — which, as I’ve suggested, is a pretty wondrous magic. We’re certainly not going to get rid of the computer and its digital networks, which are burgeoning all around us.

DJ: I donít think we’ll get rid of it, but it will be gotten rid of by the collapse of civilization.

DA: I wouldn’t count on it. It does seem to me, however, that the only cultures manifesting the primacy of place — the only cultures deeply tuned to this earthly world, informed by the particular places they inhabit (living appropriately in their place, and appropriated by their place) – are traditionally indigenous, oral cultures. There is something about oral culture that is inherently sensuous and local.

Meanwhile, alphabetic literacy that seems to be inherently cosmopolitan. The written word has brought with it great gifts, the cosmopolitan liveliness of Europe in the last millenium, and the pleasure of cities, the bubbling ferment of New York City or San Francisco, and the niftiness of all these exciting cultures converging from all these different places, and feeding each other and exchanging possibilities with each other. For all its problems, literate culture is really delicious.

The computer, of course, takes us even further away from our bodies and our direct sensorial experience. The computer seems to be inherently globalizing technology. When I log onto the computer, I seem to forget my body entirely, cognitively engaged in this abstract dimension wherein I might be dialoguing with a person in China as easily as with some person on a laptop in the next room.

But I’m not interested in decrying the computer. I’m certainly not interested in demeaning or demonizing literacy. But both the globalizing culture of the computer, and the cosmopolitan culture the book, will begin to make sense only when they are rooted in a thriving oral culture of unmediated face-to-face interactions within one’s local community. It is only then that the computers and even books will really begin to nourish us in a way that is more benevolent than it is destructive. Oral cultures are necessarily storytelling cultures, which are inevitably place-based cultures — because the stories that thrive and live in this valley will be very different from the ones being told on the other side of this mountain range. Rejuvenating the primacy of the sensuous world— renewing our solidarity with the more-than-human locale — is only going to happen by rejuvenating oral culture. Face to face storytelling, and all the things that go with it. Rituals, community festivals, collective and good-hearted initiations of the young men by the older men, and of the young women by the elder women, community celebrations honoring the seasonal changes.

DJ: I agree, except that I don’t think we’re wise enough, and maybe we’re not capable of being wise enough, to have writing, and to still listen to the natural world. I don’t believe we are wise enough to be able to have computers without them destroying local cultures.

DA: Well, I don’t know about that. It seems that if we want to be able to communicate with our younger brothers and sisters, we need to be able to say yes to the things that they find exciting and inspiring, to some of the technologies that turn them on. We need to be able to say, “Yes, that is cool. It’s a part of the story.”

DJ: I don’t disagree. In fact, there is a statistics-based computer baseball game I play with people all over the world. It’s fun. That doesn’t alter the fact that I don’t think weíre wise enough, and that I don’t think computers are going to be around in five hundred years.

DA: Do you think WE’RE going to be around in five hundred years?

The point really is that we don’t have to be wise enough. It’s more a matter of realizing that the wisdom, or intelligence, was never ours to begin with. Mind is not a human property: it’s a quality of the Earth. As we begin to loosen up, to allow the life of the things around us, and to speak accordingly, we start to notice that this awareness we thought was ours does not really belong to us. It is the earth that’s really intelligent, not humans apart. Along with the other animals, the plants, and the drifting clouds, we are bodily immersed in the mind of this living world.

So perhaps we don’t need to become exceedingly intelligent or wise. We simply need to open up, once again, to the living land, learning its intricacies and patterns. Of course each land has its own particular style of awareness. The intelligence of this land, here in this valley, is quite different from the salty intelligence of the Puget Sound, which is quite different from the wild mind of the eastern forests. Each place has its own style of awareness, its own wisdom. If we humans are still around at the end of the twenty-first century, it will likely be because we’re at last finding our way toward a new humility, a new reciprocity with the animate earth.

DJ: Many of my environmentalist friends say that as things become increasingly chaotic, they want to make sure that some doors stay open. If Grizzly bears are still alive in fifty years, that door is still open. What I hear you saying is that one of the doors you would like to make sure stays open is the door to the body. . .

DA: So many people have a sense of this world as unreal, as secondary, as something ephemeral. We’re all suffering from a confusion of worlds, since we have given far more weight to abstractions — whether the abstract truths propounded by many of our scientific colleagues or the disembodied spiritual certainties propounded by so many new age teachings — than we do to the much more ambiguous, difficult, and dangerous world that we experience face-to-face, here and now, in the flesh.

The animate earth around us is far lovelier than any heaven we can dream up. But if we wish to awaken to its richness, we’ll need to give up our detached, spectator perspective, and the illusion of control that it gives us. That is a terrifying move for most over-civilized folks today — since to renounce control means noticing that we really are vulnerable: to loss, to disease, to death. Yet also steadily vulnerable to wonder, and unexpected joy.

For all its mind-shattering beauty, this earth is hardly safe; it is filled with uncertainties, and shadows — with beings that can eat us, and ultimately will. I suppose that’s why contemporary civilization seems so terrified to drop the pretense of the view from outside, the God trick, the odd belief that we can master and manage the earth.

But we can’t master it — never have, never will. What we can do is to participate more deeply, respectfully, and creatively in the manifold life of this breathing mystery we’re a part of.

All-Species Representation at the Bioregional CONGRESS

David Abram and Amy Hannon

Originally published in the Trumpeter, 1990.

wapeminskink celebration [mohican, chestnut tree place], Zev York

Resolution From NABC II

We resolve that NABC III recognize four participants to represent the interests and perspective of our non-human cousins:

One for our four-legged and crawling cousins, One for those who swim in the waters, One for the winged beings, the birds of the air, and One very sensitive soul for all the plant people.

Other participants who wish to keep faith with other species are welcome; however, those four individuals formally recognized to act as all-species representatives will not participate in any other capacity during the time that they function as representatives. Their role in the Congress is partly one of deep stillness, of being profoundly awake, of keeping faith with those beings not otherwise present within the circles.

Affirming that it is a very delicate, mysterious process whereby these representatives are recognized, we choose not to completely codify this process, but we hope that the representatives will be recognized not just by human consensus but by non-human consensus.

Members of this committee suggest that at least two of the four representatives functioning at any time be inhabitants of the host bioregion. Peace.

Statement of the Committee (Also Adopted in Plenary):

We know that bioregionalism inevitably, unavoidably, is involved in magic processes. Many individuals in this time are beginning to feel strange sensations, sudden bursts of awareness, communication from other dimensions. Those of us who work not with formal religion but with magic, do not in general interpret these as out-of-the-body experiences, but as the body itself waking up to where it is; not as communications from other worlds outside of or beyond this material world, but rather as communications from forgotten dimensions of this world, communications from other embodied forms of sensitivity and awareness too long ignored by human civilization.

The other animals, for instance, have given us a great deal, and they have been patient with us humans, as have the plants, the rivers and the land itself. Many creatures have donated their lives to our quest— many for instance are undergoing excruciating pain in our laboratories before being sacrificed — yet still they remain unaware of our purposes. The fish find it more and more difficult to swim in the stinging waters, while the passage upstream is blocked by freshly built dams; birds spin through the chemical breeze, hunting in circles for that patch of forest which had been their home. They are not alone in their dizziness, for things are quickly worsening throughout the biosphere.

Naturally, then, the mountains, the creatures, the entire non-human world is struggling to make contact with us. The plants we eat are trying to ask us what we are up to. The animals are signalling to us in our dreams or in forests. The whole Earth is rumbling and straining to let us remember that we are not just in it but of it; that this planet, this macrocosm is our own flesh — that the grass is our hair and the trees are our hands and the rivers our own blood — that the Earth is our real body and that it is alive.

And so everywhere, now, our exclusive space of purely human language is beginning to spring leaks as other styles of communication make themselves heard or seen or felt. All over, in so many different ways, we feel intimations of a wholeness that is somehow foreign to us and we see the traceries of another reality. It is now indeed a time for magic, a magic time. But it is no supernatural thing, this magic. We are simply awakening to our own world for the first time, and hearing the myriad voices of Earth.

• The four individuals formally designated as all-species intermediaries do not, in fact, have a vote in the congress plenary. They are empowered to be present as minders, and reminders, of the perspectives of other species, and — if the needs of other species are being neglected or violated — to growl, squawk, or (if possible) talk on their behalf. Yet the human congressers should be aware that these four intermediaries have no vote, and hence that they, alone, cannot block passage of any proposal that has the consensus approval of the human participants.

• Those who functioned as species-intermediaries at NABC III were exhilarated, moved, and - some of them - transformed by the process. Most, too, were disturbed by the apparent triviality and even absurdity of many points we humans chose to consider or debate, the compromised nature of the visions we chose to share with each other. (Remember, however, that the world as perceived by herons or sequoias is commonly very different from our human experience.) Of course, just because other species perceive things in a certain light does not necessarily mean that they are ”right” or that we must adopt their perspective. What is important is that we actually consider their perspective. We must take their experience in- to consideration. Failing this, our own perspective risks being seriously impoverished.

• At any rate, the practice of keeping faith with other species during a council of human egos is not easy. The difficulty was greatly exacerbated at NABC III by the fact that the formal congress was held indoors. Non-human animals — save those so domesticated that they have relinquished their own earth-born experience and now live, like most of us, at the behest of abstract and oversized human technologies — do not enjoy being indoors. Electric lights make them wither. Their eyes do not enjoy straight lines and right angles. It pains them to be so thoroughly cut off, by concrete and glass, from their wild sisters and brothers.

• For these reasons, the committee for Mischief, Animism, Geomancy and Interspecies Communications (MAGIC), together with the caucus of Women Interested in Talking to Crows and Herbs (WITCH) has proposed that at future Congresses, all decision-making plenaries or councils be held out of doors, on the ground and under the sky — save when this is made truly inexpedient by inclement weather.

• Some may object that it is difficult to concentrate or focus upon the crucial ”matters at hand” when we are out beyond the four walls, where our attention is easily distracted by the rubbing of trees, by soaring hawks or the shape of cloud. All-species intermediaries, maintain that such events are not distractions — by exposing our senses to the cawing crows and the throb of crickets we ensure that the breathing Earth plays a part in our human decision-making.

• The practice of keeping faith with another species, or with several other species, is a discipline. It is, we might say, a practice that requires practice. Individual persons wishing to act in this capacity should be intimately aware of the biology and ecology of their familiars. And they should know, too, the traditional myths and stories regarding these species that are told by indigenous people — such stories and songs often carry a keen awareness of the emotional character, the traits and the habits of other species, an awareness (honed over generations of contact) far more nuanced and intimate than is commonly attainable by the civilized and literate intellect. Yet neither of these sources, the scientific or the storied, can take the place of direct, personal contact with other species on their own terms. Scientific evidence from ecology and ethology, like the insights embedded in totemic myths, provide us — at best — with ”clues” for entering into a living rapport with other beings. Yet a genuine reciprocity and empathy with other shapes of intelligence is not easily come by, nor quickly achieved — this we all know.

• Finally, the practice of maintaining such a rapport while being attentive to the voices and visions of human decision-makers is difficult indeed. It requires listening with one ear to the human speakers while lending the other to the wind whispering in the trees, to the churning voices of the river, to the beating of one’s own heart. In this way we begin to bring the human community into resonance with the larger community of beings. We stand poised on the boundary between human culture and the wilderness, keeping the flow open — ensuring that the boundary functions more like a membrane and less like a barrier. This is a unique ritual — a kind of meditation for our time.

• Once again, it is a practice that requires practice. It can be practiced following a deer-tail in the mountains, or while lying on the ground in one’s backyard staring sideways into the deep forest of grass. It can be practiced at town meetings, and at regional congresses. Those of us who acted as species-intermediaries at NABC III suggest that any other folks interested in this work begin preparing themselves as soon as possible.

In the Depths of a Breathing Planet

Gaia and the Transformation of Experience

Originally published in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, October, 2019.

Snow Clouds, Franklin Carmichael 

By providing a new way of viewing our planet—one that connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth—Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human. For much of the modern era, earthly nature was spoken of as a complex yet mechanical clutch of processes, as a deeply entangled set of objects and objective happenings lacking any inherent life, or agency, of its own. Such a conceptual regime helped sustain the cool detachment that was generally deemed necessary to the furtherance of the natural sciences. Yet the thorough objectification of nature also served to underwrite the sense of human uniqueness that has permeated the modern era. As long as the Earth had no unitary life, no agency, no subjectivity of its own, then we humans could continue to ponder, analyze, and manipulate the natural world as though we were not a part of it; our own sentience and subjectivity seemed to render us outside observers of this curious pageant, overseers of nature rather than full participants in the biotic community. The thoroughgoing objectification of the Earth thus enabled the old, theological presumption—that the Earth was ours to subdue and exploit for our own, exclusively human, purposes—to survive and to flourish even in the modern, scientific era. Gaia theory, however, gradually undoes this age-old presumption.

Minding Earth

By demonstrating that organic life is reciprocally entangled with even the most inorganic parameters of earthly existence, Gaia theory complicates any facile distinction between living and nonliving aspects of our world. By showing that Earth’s organisms collectively influence their environment so thoroughly that the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, soils, and surface geology together exhibit behavior more proper to a living physiology than an abiotic system, Gaia theory suggests that the biosphere has at least a rudimentary kind of agency. It suggests that like any living entity, the biosphere is not just an object but also, in some curious sense, a subject.1

To the extent that we take seriously the ongoing disclosures of Gaian science, we cannot help but feel a transformation in our own relation to the planet. If agency is an attribute of the biosphere as a whole, then the felt sense of our own agency need not isolate us from the material world that surrounds us. Just as our life is now recognized as part of a vast, planetary metabolism, so human sentience can now be felt as an extension, an elaboration, even an internal expression of the organic sentience of the biosphere itself.2 Rather than the sole carriers of awareness within an essentially inanimate or mechanically determinate world, we now find ourselves fully embodied and embedded within a nature that has its own wild intelligence, and our own subjectivity seems no longer entirely ours.

Of course, awareness—or consciousness—is an exceedingly amorphous and ephemeral phenomenon, one that is notoriously difficult to pin down. Numerous scientific papers and books have been published in recent years trying to account for the emergence of consciousness, or to explain how awareness is constituted within the brain. Yet many of these explanations are dramatically at odds with one another, for there exists no clear agreement as to just what this enigma that we call “consciousness” actually is. Part of the difficulty stems from the intransigence of old notions—in particular, our age-old assumption that consciousness, or mind, is a uniquely human property, an utterly intangible substance that resides somewhere “inside” each of us.

It may be far more parsimonious, today, to suggest that mind is not at all a human possession but rather a property of the breathing Earth— a property in which we, along with the other animals and plants, all participate. The apparent “interiority” that we ascribe to the mind would then have less to do with the notion that there is a separate consciousness located inside me, and another, entirely separate and distinct consciousness that resides inside you, and more to do with a sense that you and I are both situated within it—a recognition that we are corporeally immersed in an awareness that is not ours but is rather the Earth’s.

Our experience of awareness actually has much in common with our experience of the planetary atmosphere that circulates around and between earthly organisms, and that circulates within them as well.3 Like the quality of awareness, we are steadily informed by the fluid air, and yet it is very difficult to catch sight of: we glimpse it only indirectly, as it bends the branches of an oak or rips a note from our hand and sends it tumbling along the street. We partake of the air ceaselessly, yet seem unable to fully bring it to our attention. Itself invisible, the atmosphere is that element through which we see everything else—much as consciousness, which we cannot see or grasp, is that through which we encounter all other phenomena. We are unable to step apart from consciousness, in order to examine it objectively, for wherever we step it is already there.

Consciousness, or awareness, is in this sense very much like a medium in which we are situated, and from which we are simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist. Everything we know or sense of ourselves is conditioned by this atmosphere. We are intimately acquainted with its character, ceaselessly transformed by its influence upon us. And yet we’re unable to characterize this medium from outside. We are composed of this curious element, permeated by it, and hence can take no real distance from it.

To acknowledge this affinity between air and awareness, however, is to allow this curious possibility: that the awareness that stirs within each of us is continuous with the wider awareness that moves around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds. Every organism partakes of this awareness from its own angle and place within it, each of us imbibing it through our nostrils or through the stomata in our leaves, altering its chemistry and quality within us before we breathe it back into the surrounding world. Consciousness, in this Gaian sense, may be ineffable, but it is hardly immaterial, for it is a quality in which we participate with the whole of our breathing bodies. Hence just as your body is different from mine in many ways, so your sensations and insights are richly different from mine. The contrasting experience of a praying mantis or a pileated woodpecker—or of a field of wild lupines, for that matter—is as different from our experience as their bodies are different from ours. Each being’s awareness is unique, to be sure, yet this is not because an autonomous mind is held inside its particular body or brain but because each engages the common awareness from its own extraordinary angle, through its particular senses, according to the capacities of its flesh.

Such a Gaian way of articulating the mind—one that speaks of awareness as an attribute of the living biosphere, rather than a discrete property unique to privileged entities within that biosphere—offers an audacious and unexpected resolution to the mind-body problem that has long plagued Western philosophy. Yet it offers much more besides. By shifting the locus of intelligence from the human interior to the encompassing biosphere, such a way of speaking offers a corrective to contemporary assumptions that dramatically overlook the thorough dependence of human culture upon the continued creativity and flourishing of the more-than-human natural world.

In this chapter I would like to explore just a few of the experiential shifts and insights that might follow from such a transformed way of speaking. I hope to suggest, by these explorations, something of the way that Gaia might come to be experienced not merely as an objective set of facts but as a felt reality—as a vast and enigmatic presence whose life both pervades and exceeds our own.4

Place and Awareness

When we allow that mind is a luminous quality of the Earth, we swiftly notice this consequence: each region—each topography, each uniquely patterned ecosystem—has its own particular awareness, its unique style of intelligence. After all, the air, the translucent medium of exchange between the breathing bodies of any locale, is subtly different in each terrain. The atmosphere of the coastal northwest of North America, infused with salt-spray and the tang of spruce, cedar, and fir needles, tastes and feels quite different from the air shimmering in the heat rising from the soil of the southwest desert—hence the black-gleamed ravens who carve loops through the desert sky speak a very different dialect of squawks and guttural cries than the cedar-perched ravens of the Pacific northwest, whose vocal arguments are filled with the liquid tones of falling water. Likewise the atmosphere that rolls over the great plains, gathering now and then into vorticed tornados, contrasts vividly with the mists that advance and recede along the California coast, and even with the blustering winds that pour through the Rocky Mountain passes. The specific geology of a place yields a soil rich in particular minerals, and the rains and rivers that feed those soils invite a unique blend of grasses, shrubs, and trees to take root there. These in turn beckon particular animals to browse their leaves, or to eat their fruits and distribute their seeds, to pollinate their blossoms or simply to find shelter among their roots, and thus a complexly entangled community begins to emerge, bustling and humming within itself. Every such community percolates a different chemistry into the air that animates it, joining whiffs and subtle pheromones to the drumming of woodpeckers and the crisscrossing hues of stone and leaf and feather that echo back and forth through that terrain, while the way that these diverse elements blend with one another is affected by the noon heat that beats down in some regions, or the frigid cold that hardens the ground in others.

Each place has its rhythms of change and metamorphosis, its specific style of expanding and contracting in response to the turning seasons, and this, too, shapes—and is shaped by—the sentience of that land. Whether we speak of a whole range of mountains, or of a small valley within that range, in every case there is a unique intelligence circulating among the various constituents of the ecosystem—a style evident in the way events unfold in that place, how the slow spread of the mountain’s shadow alters the insect swarms above a cool stream, or the way a forested slope rejuvenates itself after a fire. For the precise amalgamation of elements that structures each valley exists nowhere else. Each place, that is to say, is a unique state of mind, and the many powers that constitute and dwell within that locale—the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the humans—all participate in, and partake of, the particular mind of the place.

Of course, I can hardly be instilled by this intelligence if I only touch down, briefly, on my way to elsewhere. Only by living for many moons in one place, my peripheral senses tracking seasonal changes in the local plants while the scent of the soil steadily seeps in through my pores—only over time can the intelligence of a place lay claim upon my person. Slowly, as the seasonal round repeats itself again and again, the lilt and melody of the local songbirds becomes an expectation within my ears, and so the mind I’ve carried with me settles into the wider mind that enfolds me. Changes in the terrain begin to release and mirror my own, internal changes. The slow metamorphosis of colors within the landscape; the way mice migrate into the walls of my home as the air grows colder; oak buds bursting and unfurling their leaves to join a million other leaves on that tree in agile, wind-tossed exuberance before they tumble, spent, to the ground; the way a wolf spider weaves her spiraling web in front of the rear porch light every spring—each such patterned event, quietly observed, releases analogous metamorphoses within myself. Without such tunement and triggering by the earthly surroundings, my emotional body is stymied, befuddled—forced to spiral through its necessary transformations without any guidance from the larger Body (and hence entirely out of phase with my neighbors, human and nonhuman). Sensory perception here is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.

Human communities too are inflected by the particular sentience of the living lands that they inhabit. There is a unique temperament to the bustling commerce and culture of any old-enough city, a mental climate that we instantly recognize upon returning after several years, and that we mistakenly ascribe solely to the human inhabitants of the metropolis. It is a result, we surmise, of the particular trades that the city is known for, or the dynamic mix of ethnicities that interact there, or the heavyhanded smugness of the local police force. Yet all such social dynamics draw nourishment from the elemental energies of the realm—from the heavy overcast that cloaks the sky for weeks at a time, or the profusion of flocking birds that nest on the ledges of apartment buildings, or the splashing speech of the river that rolls through downtown, tossing glints of sunlight into the eyes of all who walk near, or from the way the greasy exhaust from fifty thousand commuting cars interacts with the humidity of the summer air. The dismal social ills endemic to certain cities have often been stoked by the foolishness of urban designers who ignored the specific wildness of the place, the genius loci, the unique intelligence of the land now squelched and stifled by local industries. A calloused coldness, or meanness, results when our animal senses are cut off for too long from the animate Earth, when our ears—inundated by the whooping blare of car-alarms and the muted thunder of subways—no longer encounter the resonant silence, as our eyes forget the irregular wildness of things green and growing behind the rectilinear daze.

Each land has its own psyche, its own style of sentience, and hence to travel from Manhattan (in the Hudson River estuary) to the upper Rio Grande valley is to journey from one state of mind to another, very different, state of mind. Even to travel by train from New Haven to Boston, or simply to walk from one New England town to another, is to transform one’s state of awareness. Traveling on foot makes these variations most evident, as the topography gradually alters, easing the stress on one’s muscles as mountains give way to foothills and foothills become plains, and as the accents of the local shopkeepers transform in tandem with the shifting topography. The very texture of the air changes, as the moisture-laden atmosphere of the highlands, instilled with the exhalation of roots and decaying leaves and the breath of cool granitic caves, opens onto the drier wind whirling across the flatlands, blending the scents of upturned soil with hints of exhaust from the highway, and—especially strong in some places—the acrid smell of processed fertilizer.

Such alterations in the unseen spirit of the land are mostly hidden to those who make the journey by car, since then all the senses other than sight are held apart from the sensuous Earth, isolated within a capsule hurtling along the highway too fast for even the eyes to register most changes in the texture and tone of the visible. Still, subtle clues drift into the cabin, now and then—the insistent stench of those fertilized fields, or the reek from an unfortunate skunk, finding its way even into nostrils well-insulated by air-conditioning. And the ears can engage some aspect of the shifting psyche of the land if we turn on the radio—the percussive hip-hop and blues of the city opening onto the lilting voices and plucked strings of country music (laced with funk in some regions and more plaintive in others). Along certain stretches of highway the wave-lengths give way to a saturated array of Christian stations, with smooth or gravel-voiced preachers citing chapter and verse. This too is a register of the mind of that locale. Yet how much more thoroughly the land would feed our thoughts if we were not driving but rather strolling on foot across this land—or even pedaling a decent bicycle, the gusting wind swelling our lungs as our muscles work themselves against the slope.

If the automobile isolates our speeding senses, by and large, from the land around us, the airplanes in which we fly abstract us almost entirely from the breathing Earth. After checking in our bags at the airport, we tighten our buckles and loudly levitate up out of the ecosystem, shaking our senses free from the web of relationships that comprise the specific intelligence of that place. Only to plunk down some time later in an entirely different ecology—in an entirely different state of mind—without experiencing any of the transitional terrain between them, without our nervous system being tuned and tutored for this change by the gradual changes in the sensorial topography as we move across it. The sudden strangeness is jarring to our animal bodies, and especially shocking when we’re compelled to adapt to the new circumstance in a matter of minutes.

Yet for those who have managed to keep their animal senses awake, the journey from one ecosystem into another is precisely a journey from one state of mind into another, strangely altered, state. From one mode of awareness, flavored by saltspray and the glint of sunlight on waves, to a different mode of awareness wherein the sorrowful cries of the coastal gulls become only a vague, half-remembered dream.

The Land’s Elemental Moods

Alterations in the very texture of the mind, however, are not only brought about by traveling from one geography to another. Those who dwell steadily in a single terrain, whether by choice or necessity, also experience profound shifts in the collective awareness. The psychological qualities of a particular place steadily metamorphose as the powers that comprise that place shift among themselves—as the first rays of morning, for instance, spill their warmth across the fields—or as that place exchanges specific constituents with other places. The migratory flight of certain birds, for example, may bring large flocks to settle for days or months in a particular region, and their arrival will alter the psyche of that land even as those birds enter and partake of that very psyche. Seasonal shifts in the collective sentience are especially obvious, of course, while other, more continuous transformations go mostly unnoticed by us. Yet we can be sure that there are manifold changes unfolding in the local mindscape, changes that imperceptibly—but inevitably—affect our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions.

I have suggested that the subtle intelligence of a particular place is akin to the medium of air that circulates invisibly within and between the inhabitants of that locale, nourishing their breathing bodies even as it bends the grasses and lofts the clouds. The most dramatic modulations within the collective psyche of a place are often those that alter the sensuous quality of this medium, changes that we commonly ascribe to the “weather”—those transformations in the collective atmosphere that often confound our conscious plans, sometimes curdling the unseen medium into a visible fog that slows our steps and clogs our thoughts, or suddenly congealing the depth around us into a thicket of slanting raindrops.

Changes in the weather transform the very feel of the world’s presence, altering the medium of awareness in a manner that affects every breathing being in our vicinity. We sometimes refer to such phenomena, collectively, as “the elements,” a phrase that suggests how basic, how primordial, these powers are to the human organism. The ephemeral nature of weather phenomena—the way such modulations in the atmosphere confuse the boundaries between the invisible and the visible, between inner and outer, between “subjective” and “objective”—ensures that the weather holds a curious position in the civilized world of modernity. We refer to it constantly; inquiring after or commenting on the weather establishes the most basic ground on which any social communication can proceed. Although it rarely occupies our full attention, the weather is always evident on the periphery of that attention, an everpresent reminder that the reality in which we live is ultimately beyond our human control.

For the activity of the atmosphere (presumably a strictly objective matter) remains the most ubiquitous, the most intractable, the most enigmatic of practical problems with which civilization has daily to grapple. Despite the best efforts of science and the most audacious technological advances, we seem unable to master this curious flux in which we’re immersed, unable even to glean a clear comprehension of this mostly invisible field of turbulence and tranquil eddies so fundamental to our existence. The difficulty is compounded, today, by the abrupt warming of the global climate due to the industrial-era accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; how this accelerating trend will affect the weather in particular regions is all but impossible to predict. We rely on satellites to monitor the atmosphere’s unruly behavior from outside, hoping to gain from such external data a rudimentary sense of its large-scale patterns, so we can better guess at its next moves.

But suppose we were to analyze this turbulent dimension from within— from our perspective as sensing and sentient organisms thoroughly permeated by this flux? How then would we articulate its manifold modes of activity, its storms and its calms, its clarities and its condensations as they resound in our bodies and move through the terrain? We would need a term that suggests the subjective quality of these elemental phenomena, the way in which they subtly alter the palpable mind of the place, transforming the awareness of all who dwell there.

For our own species, at least, it’s clear that such changes in the ambient weather do not force a change in our conscious thoughts, but rather alter the felt context of those thoughts—the somatic background, or mood, within which thinking unfolds. From our own creaturely perspective, then, we might say that shifts in the weather are transformations in the mood of the land. Different atmospheric conditions—different kinds of weather—are, precisely, different moods.

Wind, rain, snow, fog, hail, sunshine, heavy overcast—each element, or mood, articulates the invisible medium in a unique manner, sometimes rendering it (partly) visible to the eyes, or more insistently palpable upon our skin. Each affects the relation between our body and the living land in a specific way, altering the texture and tonality of our dreaming.

Humidity

During the summer, near the coast, one sometimes wakes to a day that seems like any other, although as one goes through the motions of dressing and preparing breakfast, one notices one’s thoughts lagging behind, as though they have yet to fully separate themselves from the state of sleep. A slowness attends all one’s cogitations—the newspaper, today, seems written with less zip, reporting the same old thing with the same stale phrases, and when you put it aside you wonder if a minute’s rest on the couch would be in order before tackling the day’s work. The immediate tasks to be accomplished are after all somewhat vague and unfocused; it’s hard to remember just what they are.

Only on stepping outside, and surveying the world from one’s stoop, does the material cause of this mental lethargy become apparent. For the leafy trees, the electric wires, and the other homes are all bathed in a humid atmosphere that renders their outlines fuzzy and imprecise, while the mountains that usually rise from the far edge of town have dissolved, or are wholly shrouded, somehow, in the moisture-thick air. There’s no cloud to be seen in the washed-out sky, only the too-big sun, hovering in the east, sweating like a spent tennis ball mouthed by too many dogs; its dull heat presses in from every direction.

Lucidity

Then there are those rare days—not entirely unknown in any region of the Earth—that dawn with a clarity that muscles its way into every home and office, lending a crispness and cogency to almost every thought. One feels uncommonly good on such days, and others do too; deliberations move forward with unaccustomed ease. Ambiguities resolve themselves, or render themselves more explicit, the choices more defined and clearcut. There’s a delicious radiance that seems to come from the things themselves, from even the tables and the plush rug, and when we step outside we can taste it in the air and the way a few fluffed clouds rest, almost motionless, in the crystal lens of the sky. How far our vision travels on such days! When I climb to the top of the street I can see clear to the mountain range that rises from the plain in the neighboring state! And how sharp that horizon is. Long-term goals abruptly become evident; possibilities far in the future seem more accessible, lending perspective to the present. Hence planning goes more smoothly, with a marked absence of the usual friction—no sweat.

Although, to be sure, we’re not always in sync with such felicitous weather—with the strangely clarified transparence that lifts the weight of the whole suburb on such unpredictable days, or that wraps the aspen branches outside our cabin with such a pellucid and form-fitting cloak of blue. Sometimes we’re still carrying the strains and stresses of recent weeks, struggles that followed us into our dreams and now cling to our face and our feet, or we’re still in the dank doldrums due to the wreck of a relationship we’d trusted our hearts to. These are the worst days for depression, when everyone we meet moves so smooth through the world. Even if we’re off on our own, well away from the human hubbub, the despondence can be darker on such days when we feel that the stones and the singing sky and the green blades of grass are all tuned to another frequency. For there’s an insistent and eager harmoniousness to things, an ease that we sense on the periphery—the hillside itself humming with pleasure for a whole afternoon—yet the mood cannot penetrate through the thick pellicle of our pain. The mismatch of the world with our own traumatized state feels distressing, even terrifying, shoving us deeper into the pit.

Of course I am writing of these earthly elements, or moods, from an entirely human perspective. Indeed I’m writing from the quite subjective perspective of a single human creature—myself. Nonetheless, I write with the knowledge that there cannot help but be some overlap between my direct, visceral experience and the felt experience of other persons— whose senses, after all, have much in common with my own. Moreover I’ve confidence that my bodily experience is a variation—albeit, in many cases, a very distant variation—of what other, nonhuman, bodies may experience in the same locale in a common season, at a similar moment of the day or night. For not only are our bodies kindred—all mammals, for instance, sharing a common ancestry, and hence still enacting different variations of what were once common sensibilities—but also we are all of us, here and now, interdependent aspects of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle, and with our own specific capabilities, yet nonetheless all participant in the round life of the Earth, and hence subject to the same large-scale flows, rhythms, and tensions that move across that wider life.

The world we inhabit is not, in this sense, a determinate or determinable set of objective processes. It is flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience. It is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind, a round field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives, the myriad sensibilities that compose it. We come to know more of this sphere not by standing apart from our bodily experience but by inhabiting our felt experience all the more richly and wakefully, feeling our way into deeper contact with other experiencing bodies, and thus with the wild, inter-corporeal life of the world itself.

Stillness

The pencil whirls above my scribbling fingers, letters arranging themselves on the paper as I list the matters I must attend to in the next couple days. It’s too much stuff. Between getting the wood stacked for winter and my daughter’s dental appointment, between repairing the steady roof leak and dropping a clutch of packages at the post office, I’ve no idea when I’ll ever compose the lecture I agreed to deliver Thursday evening.

Something catches my peripheral vision, and I turn toward the window. My eyes widen in surprise: snowflakes! A great crowd of snowflakes floating down, a deep thicket of slowly tumbling white. How long has this been happening? I stand and stare for a few moments, then pull on a sweater and step out the door into a landscape transformed as if by a spell. My steps make no sound—the white blanket already plush upon the ground and layered in tufts upon the juniper and pine branches, as flakes drift down like loosened stars. A hundred of them swerve into my face, melting cold against my skin as I walk slowly through a world utterly transfigured by this silent grace cascading through every part of the space around me.

The surge and press of the week’s worries has simply vanished. When I try to call those concerns back to mind, I cannot find them behind the teeming multitude of slowly falling flakes—past and future have dissolved, and I am held in the white eternity of a moment so beautiful it melts all my words. All weight has lifted; the innumerable downward trajectories have convinced my senses that I myself am floating, or rather rising slowly upward, and the ground itself rising beneath me—the Earth and I now rising weightless through space.

A sound—the flutter of a bird’s wings, and a small explosion of snow from a branch the bird launched from. Then, just silence. Not silence as an absence of sound but as a fullness, as the very sound ten thousand snowflakes make as they meet the ground. A thick silence, muffling the whole valley, and for all I know the whole cosmos. I cannot imagine that any bird, squirrel, coyote, or hare is not similarly held in the visible trance of this slowly cascading silence. The clumps on the branches deepen.

The snow falls through the night, the porch light illuminating a charmed space through which powder floats steadily down. I turn it off before sleeping, then step outside to breathe the darkness: now even the house, and the car asleep in the driveway, have fallen under the spell.

By morning the snowfall has stopped. Yet the enchantment holds; when I step outside and snap my boots into my skis, there is a soft stillness everywhere. I glide between the trees and onto the dirt road, whose many ruts are now invisible; unbroken goodness extends from the tips of my skis in every direction. There is a hushed purity to the world, and to awareness itself as I glide across the snowy fields. The dentist will wait, and the post office will get its packages when the roads are clear. Thursday’s lecture is forming itself, easily, as I glide over the white expanse, my body writing its smooth script across the unbroken pages.

Now and then a high limb releases its too-heavy mound of snow, and a spray of powder drifts down in sheets, glittering, scintillating, then vanishing into the clarified air.

Wind

Of all the elements, wind is the most versatile and protean, offering in each region a different set of aspects, varying itself according to the season, and often, too, according to the direction from whence it arrives. We can easily find ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer variety of wind’s incarnations, and so must choose only a few examples from an outrageous range of styles.

Toward the tail end of winter, when a few days of unexpected warmth bring whiffs of spring—and a buried store of state-specific memories proper to that season send a few green shoots into one’s conscious awareness—the winter will often reassert itself, swooping low at night to chill the walls of your house and repossess the snowy fields. When you step outside in the morning the recently melting surface of the snow has now frozen solid and slick like a pane of glass. And gusting across that glass, a fine mist of crystals speeds past the trunks of trees, some of them tinkling in eddies against the windows as the main current of wind gallops through the fields. Boots slip along the frozen surface as you try to take a few steps, ears and face stung by the icy blast. Nothing in the landscape beckons or reaches out to you, for each bush or branch or telephone pole seems entirely focused on staying in place, every parked car and house holding fast with all its fingers to the ground beneath, each being doing its best to become an inconspicuous part of the ground, a mute lump or appendage of the Earth, affording the wind nothing other than a smooth surface to glide past on its way to wherever. Under the onslaught of the chill wind, each entity subsides into the anonymity of the Earth, and even you, too, find your individuality subsumed into the rigor of standing solid against the icy blasts, as your body makes itself into a smooth stone. Thought is stilled, all interior reflection dissolves, no memory apart from this ancient kinship and solidarity with the density of metal and rock, of heartwood and stone. The outward roar of wind forces one to find the blessed silence of stone at the heart of the mind. Anonymous, implacable, unperturbed—the biting cold of a winter wind returns one to one’s unity with the bedrock.

Yet a wind of comparable velocity in the late spring or early summer can have a nearly opposite effect. As when after a long hike one ascends at to a high pass from the eastward slope and peers over into the valley beyond. A moist breeze is riding up the western slope, carrying fresh scents from the forests below, and clouds previously unseen are slowly massing on that side of the range. The wind becomes stronger, more insistent, and you realize that a storm is brewing; it is time to head down and find shelter. Yet something holds you on the pass. As the wind begins to rage, pouring over the crest and rushing down the boulder-strewn slope behind you, it tugs your hair back from your head and fills your cheeks when you open your mouth, whipping your unbuttoned shirt like a kite as an exuberance rises in your muscles. Laughing, crouching and leaping in the wind, facing into it and feeling the first raindrops as you gulp from the charging gusts, imbibing its energy, meeting its wildness with your own as you dance drenched like a grinning fool down the trail—a wild wind can return us to our own vitality more swiftly than any other element. And the needled trees swaying and tossing around us as we descend, jostled by the same wind—are not they, too, caught up in something of the same mood? Not the giddiness, but the exuberant pleasure that lies beneath it, the way the wind challenges us in this season when the sap’s already been rising in our veins, testing our flexibility, waking our limbs and our limberness, goading us each into our own animal abandon, our own muscular dance?

There are also the winds of autumn, winds that whirl through the streets tearing the dry, gold-brown leaves from their moorings. Alive with the dank scents of soil and fallen fruit and the composting Earth, the autumn wind teases our nostrils with the sweet scent of smoke as it whooshes past, scattering the humped piles of carefully raked leaves and sending their constituents tumbling across lawns to meet other leaves spiraling down from the branches. Soon the oaks, maples, and beeches stand denuded and exposed, their fractaled complexity silhouetted against the sky. Our own bodies witness this gradual release of leaves, this stripping away of life from the skeletal eloquence of the gray trunks and limbs, and cannot help but feel that the animating life of things is slipping off into the air—that the wind blowing in our ears and moaning in the branches is composed of innumerable spirits leaving their visible bodies behind. We feel enveloped by a moving crowd of unseen essences— sighing, whooshing lives that reveal themselves to us only as fleeting scents, or by a momentary turbulence of dust and spinning leaves. The wind is haunted, alive. Only in this liminal season, before the onset of winter, does the wild psyche of the land assert itself so vividly that even the most reflective and analytic persons find themselves lost, now and then, in the uncanny depths of the sensuous. Their animal senses awaken; the skin itself begins to breathe.

For wind is moodiness personified, altering on a whim, recklessly transgressing the boundaries between places, between beings, between inner and outer worlds. The unruly poltergeist of our collective mental climate, wind, after all, is the ancient and ever-present source of the words “spirit” and “psyche.” It is the sacred “ruach” of the ancient Hebrews, the invisible rushing-spirit that lends its life to the visible world; it is the Latin anima, the wind-soul that animates all breathing beings (all animals); it is the Navajo “Nilch’i,” the Holy Wind from whence all earthly entities draw their awareness.

Indeed, whenever the native peoples of this continent speak matterof-factly about “the spirits,” we moderns mistakenly assume, in keeping with our own impoverished sense of matter, that they’re alluding to a disembodied set of powers entirely outside of the sensuous world. We would come closer to the keen intelligence of our indigenous brothers and sisters, however, if we were to recognize that the spirits they speak of have much in common with the myriad gusts, breezes, and winds that influence the life of any locale—like the particular wind that whooshes along the river at dusk, rustling the cottonwood leaves, or the mist-laden breeze that flows down from the western foothills on certain mornings, and those multiple whirlwinds that swirl and rise the dust on hot summer days, and the gentle breeze that lingers above the night grasses, and the various messenger-winds that bring us knowledge of what the neighbors are cooking this evening. Or even the small but significant gusts that slip in and out of our nostrils as we lie sleeping. We moderns pay little heed to these subtle invisibles, these elementals—indeed we tend not to notice them at all, convinced that a breeze is nothing other than a mindless jostling of molecules. Our breathing bodies know otherwise. But we will keep our bodies out of play; we will keep our thoughts aligned solely with what our complex instruments can measure. Until we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, we will assume that matter, itself, is utterly devoid of felt experience.

In this manner we hoard and hold tight to our own awareness—like a frightened whirlwind spinning ever faster, trying to convince itself of its own autonomy, struggling to hold itself aloof from the ocean of air around it.

Thunderstorm

On a warm afternoon, new leaves creeping out of the just-opened buds, when the apricot trees shamelessly offer their blossoms to a thousand bees, one notices a faint rumble in the air. It dissipates or fades back into the incessant whirring of the bees, until then, sometime later, a similar trembling. The tremor is more felt than heard, a vibration noticed more by our bones and the trunks of trees than by our conscious reflections. Behind the branches of cottonwood, far off to the west, a darkness is growing, massing in the sky, a vague threat on the horizon. Yet now the irregular rumble, once again, more audible now, ominous. The rabbits (who have only just begun appearing near the road and at the edge of the orchard) are sniffing the air, hesitant. And how odd; what’s become of all those bees? Now only a few stragglers are moving between the blossoms. Birdlife is more evident, several wingeds calling and swooping between the telephone wires and the trees, expending an unusual amount of energy. Everyone here is now feeling it: the background hush that has come over the land as the clouds thicken into a too early dusk, the rabbits ducking into their digs—a deep hush broken by the alarm call of a bird, and then a bit later by the thudding violence in the near distance. As though the sky was a skin that’s been stretched taut. Everyone is finding somewhere safe and hunkering down, tremulous, waiting. And then, quietly, a soft breeze stirs the tips of the grasses, rippling and bending the blades, a kind of pleasure spreading there among the green life, maybe even an eager anticipation very different from the threat vaguely sensed within one’s chest and the muscles of other animals.

And then without warning the air splits open, white fire tracing an impossibly erratic path between the sky and the hills opposite, a jagged gash burning itself into one’s retinas and turning the entire landscape into a negative afterimage of itself, for an instant, before the shadowed darkness returns. Silence. And then the shattering sound of that splitting, the syncopated cracking, ripping open the world as it explodes in the skull and reverberates off the cliffs. The sound from which all other sounds must come, the Word at the origin of the world. And as the visible world settles back into itself, another bright flame rips haphazard through the gray, and soon the anticipated yet un-prepared-for SHOUT! shatters the air and shudders through the ground underfoot.

Nothing, no creature or stone or flake of paint on the wall of the house, escapes the shattering imperative of the thunderbolt’s shout—the way it undoes us and recreates us in a moment. No awake creature is distracted at that moment, no person remains lost in reverie or inward thought; all of us are gathered into the same electric present by the sudden violence of this exchange between the ground and the clouds, the passionate mad tension and static that reverberates through all of us in the valley this afternoon. This rage in the mind.

This passion now rising, it seems, in the branches of the tall Ponderosa pines on the hillside opposite, and soon in the swaying limbs of the closer cottonwoods, and now even the roiling needles of junipers and piñons along the dirt road below the house—some power is moving rapidly across the valley, a tumult of wind in the branches, and the rushing cool sound of . . .

Rain

A few drops, at first, on my shoulder and nose, as I hear it begin to pelt the soil of the orchard, and then I am taken up within the cold thicket of drops, soaking my clothes and then the body beneath those clothes, rolling off my nose and dripping off the apricot branches to pool among the grasses, spilling down my arms and gathering in the cuffs of my jeans. The obvious effect triggered by the rain is release—a steady, dramatic release of tension, like held-back tears finally sliding across our cheeks.

Lightning still flashes through the downpour, and the stuttering of thunder, but all this cascading water drumming on the ground and on my head eases the violence of that darker percussion, drawing my attention back from the splintering tension in the sky to my own cool and shivering surfaces, and the intersecting patterns in the near puddles— returning awareness to the close-at-hand locale. A few minutes earlier, when the lightning seemed to strike nearby, all attention was gripped by the immediate present, yet that present moment was a vast thing, opening onto the whole of the clouded sky, including the whole span and expanse of the valley. A strong rain, however, rapidly shrinks the field of the present down to an intimate neighborhood that extends only a few yards in any direction. For the dense forest of droplets falling all around me is not easily penetrated by my senses. Past and future are utter abstractions, yesterday and tomorrow are far-off fictions; I am gripped in the slanting immediacy of water and mud and skin. I turn my face upward, blinking, trying to follow individual drops as they fall toward me. Difficult. I give up and just open my mouth. The sensuous density of the present moment, and me inside it, drinking the rain.

I head into the house to strip off soaked clothes and towel myself dry. The many-voiced rain sounds steadily on the roof. I stand at the window, staring out. Drops splash against different points on the pane, sliding in scattered droplets down the glass, each droplet picking up others as it descends—every added straggler increasing the velocity of the drop—until they all pool along the bottom.

Even the interior of the house is transformed by the thrumming rain; objects seem more awake and attentive to the things around them—the reclining chairs, tables, and books seem to have shed their distracting ties to the world outside and are now committed citizens of this small but commodious cosmos wholly isolated from the rest of the valley. And the familiar bonds that these objects have with one another, and with me, are all heightened by the sound of the downpour on the sheltering roof and the walls, and the tremble of thunder.

Later, after the rain has dissipated, I open the door onto a different world—a field of glistening, shiny surfaces, of beings quietly turning their inward, protective focus back outward, as creatures poke noses out of burrows, and a thrush swoops down to the edge of a puddle, and then hops in to splash its wings in the wet. Everything glints and gleams, everything radiates out of itself as a thousand scents rise from the soil and the branches and the fungus-ridden trunks, from insect egg-cases and last year’s leaves and the moist, matted fur of two squirrels chasing each other along the edge of the roof. A tangle of essences drift and mingle in the mind of this old orchard, each of us inhaling the flavor of everyone else, yielding a mood of openness and energetic ease as the lightened clouds begin to part and the late afternoon sun calls wisps of steam from the grass.

But wait! Are we not simply projecting our own interior moods upon the outer landscape? And so making ourselves, once again, the source and center of the earthly world, the human hub around which the rest of nature revolves?

It is a key question, necessary for keeping us on our toes and turning our attention, always, toward the odd otherness of things—holding our thoughts open to the unexpected and sometimes unnerving shock of the real. So are we merely projecting our emotional states upon the surroundings? Well, no—not if our manner of understanding and conceptualizing our various “interior” moods was originally borrowed from the moody, capricious Earth itself. Not, that is, if our conception of anger, and livid rage, has been borrowed, at least in part, from our ancestral, animal experience of thunderstorms and the violence of sudden lightning. Not if our sense of emotional release has been fed not only by the flow of tears but by our experiences of rainfall, or if our concept of mental clarity has long been informed by the visual transparence of the air and the open blue of the sky on those days of surpassingly low humidity. If our sense of inward confusion and muddledness is anciently and inextricably bound up with our outward experience of being enveloped in a fog—if our whole conceptualization of the emotional mood or “feel” of things is unavoidably entwined with metaphors of “atmospheres,” “airs,” “climates”—then it is hardly projection to notice that it is not only human beings (and human-made spaces) that carry moods: that the living land in which we dwell, and in whose life we participate, has its own feeling tone and style that varies throughout a day or a season.

The Return of the Repressed

Today, as Gaia shivers into a fever—the planetary climate rapidly warming as oil-drunk civilization burns up millions of years of stored sunlight in the course of a few decades—clearly the felt temper of the atmosphere is shifting, becoming more extreme. As local weather patterns fluctuate and transform in every part of the globe, the excessive moodiness of the medium affects the mental climate in which creatures confront one another, lending its instability to human affairs as well. Our human exchanges—whether between persons or between nations— easily becoming more agitated and turbulent, apt to flare into storms of blame and anger and war as the disquietude in the land translates into a generalized fearfulness among the population, a trepidation, a readiness to take offense or to lash out without clear cause.

Indeed the propensity for random violence becomes more pronounced whenever the sources of stress are unrecognized, whenever a tension is felt whose locus or source remains hidden. And as long as we deny the animate life of the Earth itself—as long as we arrogate all subjectivity to ourselves, forgetting the sentience in the air, and the manifold intelligence in the land—then we’ll remain oblivious to what’s really unfolding, unable to quell the agitation in ourselves because we’re blind to the deeper distress.

For the possibility of a human future, and for our own basic sanity, we need to acknowledge that we’re not the sole bearers of meaning in this world, that our species is not the only locus of feeling afoot in the real. To weather the changes now upon us, we must become ever more attentive to the more-than-human field of experience, consulting the creatures and the old local farmers, comparing notes with the neighbors, learning the seasonal cycles of our terrain even as we notice new alterations in those cycles. Listening at once outward and inward, observing the shifts in the animate landscape while tracking the transformations unfolding within us—in this way we weave ourselves back into the fabric of our world.

The violence and disarray of the coming era, its social injustices and its wars, will have their deepest source in systemic stresses already intensifying within the broader body of the biosphere. Yet such systemwide strains cannot be alleviated by scapegoating other persons, or by inflicting violence on other peoples. They can be eased only by strengthening the wild resilience of the Earth, preserving and replenishing whatever we can of the planet’s once-exuberant biotic diversity while bringing ourselves (and our communities) into greater alignment with the particular ecologies that we inhabit. Acknowledging that human awareness is sustained by the broader sentience of the Earth; noticing that each bioregion has its own style of sentience; observing the manner in which the collective mood of a terrain alters with every change in the weather: such are a few of the ways whereby we can nudge ourselves toward such an alignment.

The era of human arrogance is at an end; the age of consequences is upon us. The presumption that mind was an exclusively human property exemplified the very arrogance that has now brought the current biosphere to the very brink of the abyss. It led us to take the atmosphere entirely for granted, treating what was once known as the most mysterious and sacred dimension of life as a conveniently invisible dumpsite for the toxic by-products of industrial civilization.

The resulting torsions within the planetary climate are at last forcing humankind out of its self-enclosed oblivion—a dynamic spoken of, in psychoanalysis, as “the return of the repressed.” Only through the extremity of the weather are we brought to notice the uncanny power and presence of the unseen medium, and so compelled to remember our thorough immersion within the life of this breathing planet. Only thus are we brought to realize that our vaunted human intelligence is as nothing unless it’s allied with the round intelligence of the animate Earth.

Notes

1. See Abram (1991).

2. See Abram (1985).

3. The modern word for the mind, “psyche,” originates in the ancient Greek word for wind and breath, much as the word “spirit” derives from the Latin spiritus, meaning a breath or a gust of wind. Similarly the Latin word for the soul, anima, originates in the older Greek word for the wind, anemos. In the ancient world, it would seem, the unseen air was commonly felt to be the very substance of consciousness. Thus the English word “atmosphere,” is cognate with the Sanskrit word for the soul, atman, through their common origin in the older term atmos, which signified both the air and the soul inseparably. The Hebrew word for the spirit, ruach, signifies (at one and the same time) the wind, and hence is often translated as “rushing spirit.” Such an identification of air with awareness is found in innumerable indigenous, oral languages. See “The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air,” in Abram (1996: 225–60).

4. The theoretical approach of this chapter brings the philosophical tradition of phenomenology—the careful study of direct, sensorial experience—to bear on Gaian ecology. Readers wishing to learn more regarding the phenomenological tradition and its relevance to environmental thought may wish to look at the following books: The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram; Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Bruce Foltz and Robert Frodeman; The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, by Edward Casey. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature, by Bruce Foltz; Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, edited by Thomas Baldwin.

Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth

Originally published in Environmental Ethics , volume 10 (1988), pp. 101-120.

Road with Trees in Rocky Mountains, Paul Cézanne

INTRODUCTION

Slowly, inexorably, members of our species are beginning to catch sight of a world that exists beyond the confines of our specific culture—beginning to recognize, that is, that our own personal, social, and political crises reflect a growing crisis in the biological matrix of life on the planet. The ecological crisis may be the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species, a unique form of myopia which it now forces us to correct. For many who have regained a genuine depth perception — recognizing their own embodiment as entirely internal to, and thus wholly dependent upon, the vaster body of the Earth — the only possible course of action is to begin planning and working on behalf of the ecological world which they now discern.

And yet ecological thinking is having a great deal of trouble taking root in the human world—it is still viewed by most as just another ideology; meanwhile, ecological science remains a highly specialized discipline circumscribed within a mostly mechanistic biology. Without the concerted attention of philosophers, ecology lacks a coherent and common language adequate to its aims; it thus remains little more than a growing bundle of disparate facts, resentments, and incommunicable visions.

It is my belief that the phenomenological investigations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provide the seeds of a new and radical philosophy of nature that remains true to the diversity of experience within the biosphere of this planet. In this paper I show why a phenomenology that takes seriously the primacy of perception is destined to culminate in a renewed awareness of our responsibility to the Earth, and why the movements toward an ecological awareness on this continent and elsewhere have much to gain from a careful consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s discoveries.

Merleau-Ponty was born on the west coast of France in 1908. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he began teaching upon receiving his certificate in philosophy in 1931. A careful student of developments in psychology and the natural sciences, he was a powerful innovator within the tradition inaurgurated by Edmund Husserl, and he won wide recognition after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945. Influenced by Marx’s profound sense of the material embodied relations that underlie our ideas and ideals, Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology was far more embodied than that of the the other phenomenologists and more attentive to the nuances of political engagement. With Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he founded Les Temps Modernes — a journal of cultural and political critique for which he was editor-in-chief from 1945 to 1952. In 1952 he was named to fill the prestigious chair of philosophy at the College de France, a position which he held until his sudden death in 1961. He was also a prose stylist of stunning originality. The work of such theorists as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida owes much to certain formulations in the late work of Merleau-Ponty; nevertheless, many of his most radical insights have yet to be discovered by later thinkers and activists.

I will be, of necessity, simplifying his work. I am not, moreover, interested in merely repeating his ideas twenty-five years after his death; I wish rather to accomplish a creative reading of his writings in order to indicate, not necessarily what Merleau-Ponty knew he was saying, but rather what was gradually saying itself through him. Where this interpretation moves beyond the exact content of Merleau-Ponty’s texts, it is nevertheless informed by a close and long-standing acquaintance with those texts. Since I am here interested less in the past than in the future of his project, I have organized this paper in accordance with the plan that Merleau-Ponty himself proposed in the final working note that he wrote down in March 1961, shortly before his unexpected death, in which he projected three major sections for the new book on which he was working: first “The Visible,” then “Nature,” and finally “Logos.” (1)

THE VISIBLE

The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed at the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as that between the sea and the strand. (2)

There must be depth since there is a point whence I see—since the world surrounds me…. (3)

The great achievement of Merleau-Ponty’s major completed work, The Phenomenology of Perception, (4) was to show that the fluid creativity we commonly associate with the human intellect is an elaboration or recapitulation of a deep creativity already underway at the most immediate level of bodily perception.

Phenomenological philosophy had, since its inception, aimed at a rigorous description of things as they appear to an experiencing consciousness. Yet the body had remained curiously external to this “transcendental” consciousness. Merleau-Ponty was the first phenomenologist to identify the body, itself, as the conscious subject of experience. Transcendence, no longer a special property of the abstract intellect, becomes in his Phenomenology a capacity of the physiological body itself—its power of responding to other bodies, of touching, hearing, and seeing things, resonating with things. Perception is this ongoing transcendence, the ecstatic nature of the living body.

By thus shifting the prime focus of subjectivity from the human intellect to what he called the “body-subject” or the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty uncovered the radical extent to which all subjectivity, or awareness, presupposes our inheritance in a sensuous, corporeal world. And this presupposed world is not entirely undefined, it is not just any world, for it has a specific structure—that is, it exists in both proximity and distance, and it has a horizon. More specifically, this always-already-existing world is characterized by a distant horizon that surrounds me wherever I move, holding my body in a distant embrace while provoking my perceptual exploration. It is a world that is structured in depth, and from the Phenomenology of Perception on, depth—the dimensional spread from the near to the far—becomes the paradigm phenomenon in Merleau-Ponty’s writings.

The depth of a landscape or a thing can often be construed by the body-subject in a number of different ways: that cloud that I see can be a small cloud close overhead or a huge cloud far above; meanwhile what I had thought was a bird turns out to be a speck of dust on my glasses. Depth is always the dimension of ambiguity, confusion. The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one’s own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world where indeed no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves—their other side, or their interior depths—for further exploration. Depth, this mysterious dimension, which every schoolchild knows as the “third” dimension (after height and breadth), Merleau-Ponty asserts is the first, most primordial dimension, from which all others are abstracted.(5) To the student of perception, the phenomenon of depth is the original ambiguity: it is depth that provides the slack or play in the immediately perceived world, the instability that already calls upon the freedom of the body to engage, to choose, to focus the world long before any verbal reflection comes to thematize and appropriate that freedom as its own. And so the experience of depth runs like a stream throughout the course of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophizing, from the many analyses of visual depth and the incredible discussion of focussing the eyes in the Phenomenology of Perception(6) to the extended meditation on depth in his last complete essay, “Eye and Mind”(7) —a subterranean stream which surfaces only here and there, but which ceaselessly provides the texture of his descriptions, the source of his metaphors. As he himself asserts in a late note:

The structure of the visual field, with its near-bys, its far-offs, its horizon, is indispensable for there to be transcendence, the model of every transcendence.(8)

It is no accident that the crucial chapter of his final, unfinished work is entitled “The Chiasm,”(9) a term commonly used by neurologists and psychologists to designate the “optic chiasm,” that place in the brain where the two focusing eyes intertwine. Yet Merleau-Ponty always maintained a critical distance from the sciences that he studied, acknowledging specific discoveries while criticizing the standard, Cartesian interpretations of those findings. Merleau-Ponty was one of the first to demonstrate, contrary to the assertions of a dualistic psychology, that the experience of depth is not created in the brain any more than it is posited by the mind. He showed that we can discover depth, can focus it or change our focus within it, only because it is already there, because perception unfolds into depth—because my brain, like the rest of my body, is already enveloped in a world that stretches out beyond my grasp. Depth, which we cannot consider to be merely one perceptual phenomenon among others, since it is that which engenders perception, is the announcement of our immersion in a world that not only preexists our vision but prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind that curved horizon.

Indeed, if I attend to my direct sensory experience, I must admit that that horizon I see is curved around me, as surely as the sky overhead is arched, like a dome, like a vault. Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows. Our civilized distrust of the senses and of the body engenders a metaphysical detachment from the sensible world — it fosters the illusion that we ourselves are not a part of the world that we study, that we can objectively stand apart from that world, as spectators, and can thus determine its workings from outside. A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience, however, enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own.

Often it takes a slightly unusual circumstance to disturb our metaphysical distance from the corporeal world. On certain days, for instance, when the sky is massed with clouds, I may notice a dense topography that extends overhead as well as underfoot, enclosing me within its layers, and so come to feel myself entirely inside. In general, if I pay close attention to bodily perceptions over a period of time, I may notice that the primordial experience of depth is always the experience of a sort of interiority of the external world, such that each thing I perceive seems to implicate everything else, so that things, landscapes, faces all have a coherence, all suggest a secret familiarity and mutual implication in an anonymous presence that subtends and overarches my own. I may discern, if I attend closely, that there is a certain closure which is suggested by the horizon and its vicissitudes, a sort of promise, in the distance, of a secret kinship between the ground and the sky, a fundamental non opposition, a suggestion that ground and sky are not two distinct entities but two layers or leaves of one single power, two leaves that open as I move toward that horizon and that close up, behind me, back there.(10)

The importance of the visible horizon for all of Merleau-Ponty’s interrogations can lead us to realize that the “world” to which he so often refers is none other than the Earth, that the coherent unity of the “visible” which slowly emerges through Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception—the “field of all fields,” or the “totality wherein all the sensibles are cut out’’(11) —is not the abstract totality of the conceivable universe but the experienced unity of this enveloping but local world which we call Earth.

By Earth, then, I mean to indicate an intermediate and mediating existence between ourselves and “the universe,” or, more concretely, between humankind and the Sun, toward whom our “pure” ideas seem to aspire directly, forgetful that it is not we, but rather the Earth that dwells in the field of the Sun, as we live within the biosphere of the Earth. Much of Merleau-Ponty’s work implies a growing recognition of this enveloping existence, which is only local by current scientific standards, but which is truly total for our perception. Hence, in his later writings, he begins to speak not just of the “world” but of “this world” or “our world”:

Universality of our world…according to its configuration, its ontological structure which envelops every possible and which every possible leads back to.(12)

Indeed all of phenomenology, with its reliance upon the Husserlian notion of “horizon,” is tacitly dependent upon the actual planetary horizon that we perceive whenever we step outside our doors or leave behind the city. As Merleau-Ponty has written, “it is by borrowing from the world structure that the universe of truth and of thought is constructed for us.’’(13) His thesis of the primacy of perception suggests that all of our thoughts and our theories are secretly sustained by the structures of the perceptual world. It is precisely in this sense that philosophies reliant upon the concept of “horizon” have long been under the influence of the actual visible

horizon that lies beyond the walls of our office or lecture hall, that structural enigma which we commonly take for granted, but which ceaselessly reminds us of our embodied situation on the surface of this huge and spherical body we call the Earth.

Yet we should not even say “on” the Earth, for we now know that we live within the Earth. Our scientists with their instruments have rediscovered what the ancients knew simply by following the indications of their senses: that we live within a sphere, or within a series of concentric spheres. We now call those spheres by such names as the “hydrosphere,” the “troposphere,” the “stratosphere,” and the “ionosphere,” and no longer view them as encompassing the whole universe. We have discovered that the myriad stars exist quite far beyond these, and now recognize these spheres to be layers or regions of our own local universe, the Earth. Collectively these spheres make up the atmosphere, the low-viscosity fluid membrane within which all our perceiving takes place.

While science gains access to this knowledge from the outside, philosophy has approached it from within. For once again, the entire phenomenological endeavor has taken place within a region of enquiry circumscribed by a tacit awareness of Earth as the ground and horizon of all our reflections, and the hidden thrust of the phenomenological movement is the reflective rediscovery of our inheritance in the body of Earth. We can glimpse this trajectory most readily in certain essays by Husserl such as his investigations of the “Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” in which Husserl refers again and again to “Earth, the original ark,” and speaks enigmatically of Earth as that which precedes all constitution,(14) as well as in the later essays of Heidegger which are a direct invocation of “earth” and “sky” along with “mortals” and “gods” in “the fourfold.’’(15) Nevertheless, it is in Merleau-Ponty’s work that the full and encompassing enigma of Earth, in all its dense, fluid, and atmospheric unity, begins to emerge and to speak.

This new sense of Earth contrasts with Heidegger’s notion of “earth” as that which remains concealed in all revelation, the dark closedness of our ground which he counterposes to the elemental openness of “sky.” The Merleau-Pontian sense of Earth names a more diverse phenomenon, at once both visible and invisible, incorporating both the deep ground that supports our bodies and the fluid atmosphere in which we breathe. In discovering the body, or in discovering a new way of thinking the body and finally experiencing the body, Merleau-Ponty was also disclosing a new way of perceiving the Earth of which that body is a part. To assert, as he did throughout the course of his life, that the human intellect is a recapitulation or prolongation of a transcendence already underway at the most immediate level of bodily sensation—to assert, that is, that the “mind” or the “soul” has a carnal genesis—is to suggest, by a strange analogy of elements that stretches back to the very beginnings of philosophy, that the sky is a part of the Earth, to imply that the sky and the Earth need no longer be seen in opposition, that this sky, this space in which we live and breathe, is not opposed to the Earth but is a prolongation, even an organ, of this planet. If the soul is not contrary to the body, then human beings are no longer suspended between a dense inert Earth and a spiritual sky, no more than they are suspended between Being and Nothingness. For the first time in modern philosophy, human beings with all of their thoughts and their ideas are enveloped within the atmosphere of this planet, an atmosphere which circulates both inside and outside of their bodies: “there really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being….”(16) Although Merleau-Ponty never quite gives the name Earth to this unity, he does write of “the indestructible, the Barbaric Principle,’’(17) of “one sole sensible world, open to participation by all, which is given to each,”(18) of a “global voluminosity” and a “primordial topology,’’(19) and of the anonymous unity of this visible (and invisible) world.(20) He writes of “a nexus of history and transcendental geology, this very time that is space, this very space that is time which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh,”(21) but without calling it by name. In another luminous passage he writes of “the prepossession of a totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly.(22) But again, this totality remains anonymous.

I suspect that Merleau-Ponty had to write in this way because what was anonymous then did not finally lose its perceptual anonymity until a decade after his death, when the first clear photographs of the Earth viewed from space were developed, and our eyes caught sight of something so beautiful and so fragile that it has been known to bring a slight reordering of the senses. It is a picture of something midway between matter and spirit, an image for what Merleau-Ponty had written of as the “existential eternity—the eternal body.”(23) Of course, in one sense such images of the Earth present the ultimate pensée de survol, that non-situated “high-altitude thought” of which Merleau-Ponty was so critical (and indeed these images have become the worst kind of platitude in recent years, used in globalizing advertisements for everything from automobiles to detergents). But we should not be tricked into thinking that he would have brushed them aside on that account. For this philosopher of perception, such photographs (and their proliferation in the world) would undoubtedly have been disturbing indeed, but decisive, like catching sight of oneself in the mirror for the first time.

In any case, it is enough here to recognize (1) that Merleau-Ponty sensed that there was a unity to the visible-invisible world that had not yet been described in philosophy, that there was a unique ontological structure, a topology of Being that was waiting to be realized, and (2) that whatever this unrealized Being is, we are in its depths, and of it, like a fish in the sea, and that therefore it must be disclosed from inside. These points are clear from his published notes, where, for example, in a note from February 1960, he writes of his project as “an ontology from within.”(24)

NATURE

It suffices for us for the moment to note that he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless …he is one of the visibles, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them.(25)

Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother.(26)

In the book on which he was working at the time of his death, published posthumously, with working notes, as The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty makes a significant terminological shift. He refers much less often to the body—whether to the “lived-body,” upon which he had previously focused, or to the “objective body,” from which it had been distinguished—and begins to speak more in terms of “the Flesh.” Indeed he no longer seems to maintain the previously useful separation of the “lived-body” from the “objective body”; rather, he is now intent on disclosing, beneath these two perspectives, the mystery of their non-distinction for truly primordial perception. The singular “objective body,” had lingered quietly in Merleau-Ponty’s writings—a residual concept, and a minor concession to the natural sciences, that was necessary as long as the rest of sensible or “objective” nature remained unattended to in his work, as long as nonhuman nature remained the mute and inert background for our human experience. However, with the shift from the “lived-body” to the “Flesh”—which is both “my flesh” and “the Flesh of the world”—Merleau-Ponty inaugurates a sweeping resuscitation of nature, both human and nonhuman.

As a number of commentators have suggested, it is likely that Merleau-Ponty’s move from the lived-body to the Flesh constitutes less a break than a logical continuation of his earlier stylistic move to de-intellectualize transcendence in The Phenomenology of Perception.(27) In the language and argumentation of that earlier work, Merleau-Ponty managed to shift subjectivity from the human intellect to the body-subject. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty follows through on that first shift by dislodging transcendence as a particular attribute of the human body and returning it to the sensuous world of which this body is but a single expression. Merleau-Ponty accomplishes this by describing the intertwining of the invisible with the visible—by demonstrating that the invisible universe of thought and reflection is both provoked and supported by the enigmatic depth of the visible, sensible environment:

…the visible is pregnant with the invisible,…to comprehend fully the visible relations one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible.(28)

Thus, the invisible, the region of thought and ideality, is always inspired by invisibles that are there from the first perception—the hidden presence of the distances, the secret life of the Wind which we can feel and breathe but cannot see, the interior depths of things, and, in general, all the invisible lines of force that constantly influence our perceptions. The invisible shape of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, or the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. For Merleau-Ponty our own reflections are supported by the play of light and its reflections; the mind, the whole life of thought and reason is a prolongation and expansion, through us, of the shifting, polymorphic, invisible natures of the perceptual world. In the words of Paul Elouard, “there is another world, but it is in this one.”(29) Or as Merleau-Ponty himself writes in one note, all the “invisibles,” including that of thought, are “necessarily enveloped in the Visible and are but modalities of the same transcendence.”(30) The “flesh” is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to this sensible-in-transcendence, this inherence of the sentient in the sensible and the sensible in the sentient, to this ubiquitous element which is not the objective matter we assign to the physicists nor the immaterial mind we entrust to the psychologists because it is older than they, the source of those abstractions:

There is a body of the mind, and a mind of the body….The essential notion for such a philosophy is that of the flesh, which is not the objective body, nor the body thought by the soul as its own (Descartes), [but] which is the sensible in the twofold sense of [that which is sensed and that which senses](31)

The “flesh” is the animate element which Merleau-Ponty has discovered, through his exploration of pre-objective perception, to be the common tissue between himself and the world:

The visible can thus fill me and occupy me because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself….(32)

With this terminological move from the “body” to the common “flesh” Merleau-Ponty dislodges creativity or self-transcendence as a particular attribute of the human body and returns transcendence to the carnal world of which this body is an internal expression.(33) If we now consider the world to which Merleau-Ponty’s work refers to be this world—that is, the Earth—this move from the “body” to the communal “flesh” suggests that for a genuine perception the human body is radically interior to the “lebenswelt”—the life-space, or biosphere—of a worldbody which is itself in transcendence, self-creative, even—with us—alive:

One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside.(34)

Here Merleau-Ponty’s investigations anticipated recent work in the sciences and converge with new findings in biology, psychology, and global ecology. I will here mention only one of these developments. The “Gaia hypothesis” was first proposed in the mid-nineteen-seventies by scientists striving to account for the actual stability of the Earth’s atmosphere in the face of a chemical composition recently discovered to be very far from equilibrium. Geochemist James Lovelock and microbial biologist Lynn Margulis have hypothesized that the Earth’s atmosphere is being metabolically generated and sensitively maintained by all of the organic life on the planet’s surface acting collectively, as a single global physiology. The Gaia hypothesis (named for the mother of the Gods in Greek mythology, she whose name is at the root of such words as “geology” and “geography”) provides a ready explanation, as well, for the newly recognized evidence that the Earth’s surface temperature has remained virtually constant over the last three and a half billion years despite an increase in the Sun’s heat of at least thirty percent during the same period. The hypothesis, in short, maintains that the Earth’s biosphere is a coherent, living entity regulating its temperature and internal composition much as one’s own body metabolically maintains its own internal temperature and balances the chemical composition of its bloodstream.(35) The sensible world that surrounds us must, it would seem, be recognized as a sensitive physiology in its own right.(36)

But let us turn back to Merleau-Ponty, whose work on the “ontology from within” was cut short more than two decades before these developments. There is another, equally important implication of Merleau-Ponty’s move from the lived-body to the flesh, for by shifting transcendence, which had been thought to be an exclusively human domain, to the whole of the world of which we humans are but a part, Merleau-Ponty dissolves the traditional division between the human animal and all other organisms of the Earth. The human sentience is indeed unique, but if we follow closely Merleau-Ponty’s final writings we will begin to suspect that there are other sentient entities in the biosphere—indeed, that each species, by virtue of its own carnal structure has its own unique sentience or “chiasm” with the flesh of the world.(37)

Why then, one might ask, do we not read much more about the flesh of other animals in the pages of The Visible and the Invisible? I would answer first that, given the interrupted nature of Merleau-Ponty’s text, this absence is not crucial. Since a new recognition of other animals follows directly from his thesis, such a recognition would eventually have emerged. It is clear, nevertheless, especially from our own reluctance to affirm this implication of Merleau-Ponty’s work, that to confront and accept this implication twenty-five years ago was to move against the accumulated bias of the entire Western philosophical tradition—a literate tradition that has its origins in the exaltation of a divine ideality beyond the sensory world, a tradition that continues, in the scientific age, as an exaltation of the divine human existent over and above the “mute” and “chaotic” world of nature. It is a tradition that has been formulated almost exclusively by male scholars working within those havens of literacy—the academy and the city— that have been increasingly removed from all contact with the wild and coherent diversity of nonhuman nature. As a result, it is hardly surprising that Merleau-Ponty himself had difficulty accepting the most subversive implication of his phenomenology. It is his reticence on this point—the fact that his thought never quite leaves the city—that is the real stumbling block of his unfinished work.(38)

Let us examine this point more closely. In his course on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Merleau-Ponty asserts that his progenitor, Husserl, was unable to abandon the Cartesian conception of a pure transcendental consciousness, the Cartesian cogito which Husserl returns to or “recalls each time we would believe him to be on the verge of a solution.”(39) In a similar way we may now discern that Merleau-Ponty, having dropped the Cartesian postulate of a pure consciousness in favor of an embodied subjectivity (which he sometimes calls intercorporeality), found himself caught within the more tacit Cartesian assumption of a massive difference between the human body, which for Descartes was open to the intervention of the soul, and all other animal bodies, which for Descartes were closed mechanisms incapable of any awareness.(40) In Merleau-Ponty’s final writings we witness him on the threshold of opening his own rich conception of an embodied intersubjectivity to include the incarnate subjectivity of other animals, although never explicitly crossing this threshold— at least not in the fragments we have. Merleau-Ponty comes upon this deep Cartesian opposition between humans and other animals, begins to dismantle it, but at the time of his death had not yet stepped through this opposition into a genuinely ecological intercorporeality.

Or had he? In his final working note—the note from which I have taken the plan for this paper—Merleau-Ponty writes that his discoveries

must be presented without any compromise with humanism, nor with naturalism [that is, the naturalism of the “natural” sciences], nor finally with theology.(41)

Humanism is the key word here. To accept no compromise with humanism was difficult for Merleau-Ponty, for he was, in many ways, a committed humanist, and we can witness him grappling with this compromise throughout his late notes. But then in that same instruction to himself he writes:

Precisely what has to be done is to show that philosophy can no longer think according to this cleavage: God, man, creatures….(42)

This is a powerful statement. From this last note it seems clear that Merleau-Ponty knew that he was out to heal the deep wound between humans and the other animals. However, his recalcitrant humanism was letting this happen only very slowly in his writings.

A single example may serve to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s dilemma. In a note from May 1960 he writes that

the flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—it is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh. nonetheless, in order to say…that it is absolutely not an object

He then goes on to assert that it is only

by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis we can understand the lived body.(43)

Here we are left with an immense and ultimately untenable gap between the flesh of the world which is “sensible and not sentient” and my flesh which is “selfsensing.” It is Merleau-Ponty’s recalcitrant humanism that strives to maintain this distinction at the same time that his emerging ecological realism is struggling to assert the primacy of the world’s flesh: “it is by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis we can understand the lived body.” But it is simply because he is neglecting to consider other animals at this juncture that Merleau-Ponty is still able to assert that the flesh of the world is not self-sensing, for clearly other animals are a part of the perceived flesh of the world, and yet they have their own senses; following Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the reversibility of the sensing and the sensed, they are clearly self-sensing. As soon as we pay attention to other organisms we are forced to say that the flesh of the world is both perceived and perceiving. It is only by recognizing the senses of other animals that we can begin to fill up the mysterious gap Merleau-Ponty leaves in this quote. Or, to put it another way, only by recognizing the full presence of other animals will we find our own place within Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. (Plants, as well, will come to assert their place, but our concern is first with the animals because they are our link, animal that we are, to the rest of the Flesh.) In this regard, it is essential that we discern that Merleau-Ponty’s thought does not represent the perpetuation of an abstract anthropocentrism, but rather the slow and cautious overcoming of that arrogance. It is only by listening, in the depths of his philosophical discourse, to the gradual evocation of a densely intertwined organic reality, that we will fully understand how it is that the flesh of the world is “absolutely not an object.”

Looked at in this way, a great deal of The Visible and the Invisible is already about other species, whether or not Merleau-Ponty was aware of their influence. No thinker can really move from his/her bodily self-awareness to the intersubjectivity of human culture, and thence to the global transcendence that is “the flesh of the world,” without coming upon myriad experiences of otherness, other subjectivities that are not human, and other intersubjectivities. Indeed, the immediate perceptual world, which we commonly forget in favor of the human culture it supports, is secretly made up of these others; of the staring eyes of cats, or the raucous cries of birds who fly in patterns we have yet to decipher, and the constant though secret presence of the insects we brush from the page or who buzz around our heads, all of whom make it impossible for us to speak of the sensible world as an object—the multitude of these nonhuman and therefore background speakings, gestures, glances, and traces which impel us to write of the transcendencies and the “invisibility” of the visible world, often without our being able to say just why. It is likely that Merleau-Ponty, had he continued writing or had he written this text a few years later and witnessed the growing cultural respect for the nonhuman world as both active and interactive, would have had much less difficulty describing his experience of the “invisible” nature of the visible world and the reversibility between humanity and being.

But Merleau-Ponty did not live to read Rachel Carson’s revelations about pesticides and the natural world, or the more recent disclosures about animal vivisection and the infliction of animal pain and terror on a grand scale that goes on within contemporary agribusiness and the cosmetics industry—the violent pain and death that unfolds throughout the technological world in its forgetfulness of what he called “Wild Being.” It is possible that these disclosures would have been as unsettling to his thought, and as crucial for his rethinking of philosophy, as were the revelations concerning Stalin’s purges when these were disclosed in Europe.(44) They would have accelerated his recognition of the nonhuman others and have helped him to welcome these wild, mysterious perceptions into an ontology that was already waiting for them.

LOGOS

It is the body which points out, and which speaks; so much we have learnt in this chapter….This disclosure of an immanent or incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression .(45)

…that the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things….That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being.(46)

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty carefully demonstrated that silent or pre-reflective perception unfolds as a reciprocal exchange between the body and the world. Further, he showed that this constant exchange, with its native openness and indeterminacy, is nevertheless highly articulate, already informed by a profound logos. These disclosures carried the implication that perception, this ongoing reciprocity, is the very ground and support of that more explicit reciprocity we call “language.”(47) Merleau-Ponty’s continued focus upon the gestural genesis of language, and upon active speech as the axis of all language and thought—a focus which, as James Edie has written, distinguishes Merleau-Ponty from all other philosophers “from Plato on down”(48) —further served to ground language in the deep world of immediate perception, in the visible, tangible, audible world that envelops us, and of which we are a part.

In a more recent paper Edie maintains that Merleau-Ponty had no place, in his philosophy of language, for a depth linguistic structure such as that which Noam Chomsky has discovered in the years since Merleau-Ponty’s death.(49) Now it is true that Merleau-Ponty did not discern any surface and deep structure in the fashion of Chomsky’s investigations, but I believe that this is because he was in the midst of uncovering a more primordial structural depth within language — one which has yet to be understood by other linguists and philosophers. It is that dimension in language correlative to the actual depth of the perceptual world, the deep structure of the sensory landscape.

By starting to show, as he does in his final chapter on “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,”(50) how thought and speech take form upon the infrastructure of a living perception already engaged in the world, Merleau-Ponty carefully demonstrates that language has its real genesis not inside the human physiology but, with perception, in the depth—the play between the expressive, sensing body and the expressive physiognomies and geographies of a living world. If we follow Merleau-Ponty’s argument and agree that language is founded not inside us but in front of us, in the depths of the expressive world which engages us through all our senses, then we would not hunt for the secret of language inside the human physiology. We would not hunt, as Chomsky has suggested, for the ultimate seed of language within the human DNA,(51) for this is merely to postpone a recognition that we feel is inevitable. For if the sensible world itself is the deep body of language, then this language can no longer be conceived as a power that resides within the human species, at least no more than it adheres to the roar of a waterfall, or even to the wind in the leaves. If language is born of our carnal participation in a world that already speaks to us at the most immediate level of sensory experience, then language does not belong to humankind but to the sensible world of which we are but a part. That, I believe, is how we must read Merleau-Ponty’s parting note on language: “Logos…as what is realized in man, but nowise as his property .”(52) If we set this insight alongside what we have already found regarding the Visible and Nature—(1) that man, or woman, is entirely included within the visible, sensible world, and (2) that the sensible world which we are within and of, and which we may suspect is this Earth, is itself sensitive and alive, constituted by multiple forms of embodied awareness besides our own—then some interesting conclusions emerge. We begin to recognize, for instance, that our language has been contributed to, and is still sustained by, many rhythms, sounds, and traces besides those of our single species.

Since its inauguration in the Athenian polis, European philosophy has tended to construe language as that power which humans possess and other species do not. From Aristotle to Descartes, from Aquinas to Chomsky, “language” has been claimed as the exclusive and distinguishing property of humankind; man alone has privileged access to the Logos. Yet this exclusivity rests upon a neglect of the experiencing body, a forgetting of the gestural, carnal resonance that informs even our most rarefied discourse. In this way, it has fostered an abstract notion of language as a disembodied, purely formal set of grammatical and syntactic relations.

At least one contemporary linguist has called this entire tradition into question. Harvey Sarles, in his book Language and Human Nature, asks, “Is language disembodied, or just our theories about language?”(53) Sarles argues forcefully that the assumption that language is a purely human property, while providing a metaphysical justification for the human domination of nonhuman nature, nevertheless makes it impossible for us to comprehend the nature of our own discourse. Sarles asserts that

to define language as uniquely human also tends to define the nature of animal communication so as to preclude the notion that it is comparable to human language.(54)

However, Sarles claims

Each ongoing species has a truth, a logic, a science, knowledge about the world in which it lives. To take man outside of nature, to aggrandize the human mind, is to simplify other species and, I am convinced, to oversimplify ourselves, to constrict our thinking and observation about ourselves into narrow, ancient visions of human nature, constructed for other problems in other times.(55)

Independent of Merleau-Ponty, yet entirely congruent with Merleau-Ponty’s investigations twenty years earlier, Sarles outlines the basis for a more genuine linguistics grounded in a recognition of the “knowing body,” (56) or elsewhere, the “body-as-expression in interaction.”(57)

Any such Merleau-Pontian approach to language—any approach, that is, that discloses language’s gestural, soundful basis in bodily receptivity and response to an expressive, living world—opens us toward an understanding of the subtle relationship between language and landscape. If it is this breathing body that speaks, writes, and thinks—if it is not an immaterial ego but rather this sensible, sensitive body that dwells and moves within language—then language is at no point a structure of wholly abstract, ideal, or mathematical relations. For it is haunted by all those carnal things and styles to which our senses give us access. Language that has its real genesis in the deep world of untamed perception is language that is born as a call for and response to a gesturing, sounding, speaking landscape—a world of thunderous rumblings, of chattering brooks, of flapping, flying. screeching things, of roars and sighing winds…. That is why Merleau-Ponty could write, in the last complete lines of The Visible and the Invisible, that

language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests….(58)

It is even possible that this language we speak is the voice of the living Earth itself, singing through the human form. For the vitality, the coherence, and the diversity of the various languages we speak may well correspond to the vitality, coherence, and diversity of Earth’s biosphere—not to any complexity of our species considered apart from that matrix.

In any case, we can now hypothesize, following this unique philosopher, a fundamental dynamic behind the ecological and psychological crisis in which human culture now finds itself. As long as humankind continues to use language strictly for our own ends, as if it belongs to our species alone, we will continue to find ourselves estranged from our actions. If as Merleau-Ponty’s work indicates it is not merely this body but the whole visible, sensual world that is the deep flesh of language, then surely our very words will continue to tie our selves, our families, and our nations into knots until we free our voice to return to the real world that supports it—until we allow it to respond to the voice of the threatened rainforests, the whales, the rivers, the birds, and indeed to speak for the living, untamed Earth which is its home. The real Logos, after Merleau-Ponty, is Eco-logos.

CONCLUSION

Can this rending characteristic of reflection come to an end? There would be needed a silence that envelops the speech anew….this silence will not be the contrary of language.(59)

What then does Merleau-Ponty bring to the new field of ecology? He brings it a clarified epistemology, and the language of perceptual experience. His work suggests a rigorous way to approach and to speak of the myriad ecosystems without positing our immediate selves outside of them. Unlike the language of information processing and systems theory, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology provides a way to describe and to disclose the living fields of interaction from our experienced place within them.

The convergence of Merleau-Ponty’s aims with those of a genuine philosophical ecology cannot be too greatly stressed. I have shown the equivalence between the dimensions of the “world” he discloses and the actual Earth. His Lebenswelt is identical to the biosphere of a truly rigorous ecology. He anticipated, I believe, that his perceptual analyses would lead to a clarified description of other embodied forms, other presences which move at rhythms altogether foreign to our own. In one note he writes:

…it would be necessary in principle to disclose the ‘organic history’ under the historicity of truth….in reality all the particular analyses concerning Nature, life, the human body, and language will make us progressively enter into the Lebenswelt and the ‘wild’ being, and as I go I should not hold myself back from entering into their positive description, nor even into the analysis of the diverse temporalities.(60)

Finally, Merleau-Ponty points directly to an Eco-logos by repeatedly referring to the autonomous “Lebenswelt Logos,” to that “perceptual logic” which reigns underneath all our categories and “sustains them from behind”:

…the sensible world is this perceptual logic…and this logic is neither produced by our psychophysical constitution, nor produced by our categorial equipment but lifted from a world whose inner framework our categories, our constitution, our ‘subjectivity’ render explicit.(61)

It is this mute perceptual logic, recovered in language, that gives birth to ecology. Until today’s fledgling ecological science addresses itself to the experience of perception it will remain uncertain of its motives, and unable to find its voice.

NOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

2. Ibid., p. 130.

3. Ibid., p. 219.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1962).

5. Ibid., p. 256.

6. Ibid., pp. 230-233.

7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception , ed. James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

8. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p.231.

9. Ibid. p. 130.

10. This common visual experience of the horizon, so rarely attended to, is, I believe, the primary source of Merleau-Ponty’s unique metaphor of the two leaves in “The Intertwining-The Chiasm” and in his working notes: “Insertion of the world between the two leaves of my body; insertion of my body between the two leaves of each thing and of the world” (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 264). Merleau-Ponty is here affirming Husserl’s assertion that, phenomenologically, the perceptual field or landscape has numerous “internal horizons” as well as the “external horizon” that envelops it.

11. Ibid., p. 214.

12. Ibid., p. 229

13. Ibid., p. 13.

14. Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. ed. M. Farber (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1940).

15. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

16. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p. Ivi.

17. Ibid., p. 267.

18. Ibid., p. 233.

19. Ibid., p. 213.

20. Ibid., p. 233.

21. Ibid., p. 259.

22. Ibid., p. 42.

23. Ibid., p. 265.

24. Ibid., p. 237.

25. Ibid., pp. 134-135.

26. Ibid., p. 267.

27. See, for instance, Gary Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981).

28. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p. 216.

29. Cited in Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the Wor/d (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 147.

30. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p. 257.

31. Ibid., p. 259 (translation amended).

32. Ibid., p. 114.

33. The issue is in fact far more subtle and complex than this admittedly surface analysis suggests. What is immediately evident, however is that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty supplements his earlier perspective—that of a body experiencing the world—with that of the world experiencing itself through the body. Here he places emphasis upon the mysterious truth that one’s hand can touch things only by virtue of the fact that the hand, itself, is a touchable thing, and is thus thoroughly a pan of the tactile landscape that it explores. Likewise the eye that sees things is itself visible, and so has its own place within the visible field that it sees. Clearly a pure mind could neither see nor touch things, could not experience anything at all. We can experience things, can touch, hear and taste things, only because, as bodies, we are ourselves a part of the sensible field and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. Indeed, to see is at one and the same time to feel oneself seen; to touch the world is also to be touched by the world. Merleau-Ponty coins the term reversibility to express this double or reciprocal aspect inherent in all perception: surely I am experiencing the world; yet when I attend closely to the carnal nature of this phenomenon, I recognize that I can just as well say that I am being experienced by the world. The recognition of this second, inverted perspective, when added to the first, leads to the realization of reversibility: “I am part of a world that is experiencing itself,” or even, “I am the world experiencing itself through this body.”

34. Ibid., p. 136.

35. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

36. For a much more in-depth study of the relation between the Gaia hypothesis and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, see David Abram, “The Perceptual Implications of Gaia,” in The Ecologist 15, 3 (1985), and “The Mechanical and the Organic: On the Influence of Metaphor in Science” in Scientists on Gaia, edited by Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (Boston: MIT Press, 1991).

37. Chiasm is the term Merleau-Ponty selects to describe the blending, the reversible exchange between my flesh and the flesh of the world that occurs in the play of perception. This interweaving, this ongoing communion between divergent aspects of a single Flesh, is to be found at every level of experience; it exists already in the body’s own organization as the synaesthetic intertwining between one sense and another, and even within each sense, between the left and the right side of that sense—as in the “optic chiasm.”

38. That Merleau-Ponty’s thought was searching for roots beyond the confines of the city is attested by his increasing fascination with the painter’s relation to the natural landscape. See “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), and also “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception.

39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans Hugh Silverman and with a foreword by James Edie (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 43.

40. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Laurence Lafleur (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 36-38.

41. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit.. p.274

42. Ibid., p. 274.

43. Ibid., p. 250.

44. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), and Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1973)

45. From the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech,” in Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit., p.197.

46. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p. 194.

47. Ibid.

48. See James Edie’s “Foreword” to Merleau-Ponty, 1973, op. cit., pp. XVII-XVIII.

49. James Edie, “Merleau-Ponty: The Triumph of Dialectic over Structuralism,” a paper presented at a conference of the Merleau-Ponty circle at SUNY Binghamton, NY in 1982.

50. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit.,pp. 130-155.

51. Cited in Edie, 1982, op. cit. Note that Chomsky is the major contemporary proponent of the view that language belongs to the human species alone.

52. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p 274.

53. Harvey Sarles, Language and Human Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 228.

54. Ibid., p 86.

55. Ibid., p. 20.

56. Ibid., p. 249.

57. Ibid., p. 20. More recently, the bodily infrastructure of language has been forcefully demonstrated by the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. See especially their joint volume, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Lakoff’s excellent book, Women, Fire and Other Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). The research of these authors is definitive, I believe, in establishing the centrality of non-verbal perceptual and kinesthetic experience in the genesis and development of human language.

58. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit., p. 155.

59. Ibid., p. 179.

60. Ibid., p. 167.

61. Ibid., pp. 247-248.

Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician

From: The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum, 2005.

Although the term “animism” was originally coined in the nineteenth century to designate the mistaken projection of humanlike attributes — such as life, mind, intelligence — to nonhuman and ostensibly inanimate phenomena, it is clear that this first meaning was itself rooted in a misapprehension, by Western scholars, of the perceptual experience of indigenous, oral peoples. Twentieth-century research into the phenomenology of perception revealed that humans never directly experience any phenomenon as definitively inert or inanimate. Perception itself is an inherently relational, participatory event; we say that things “call our gaze” or “capture our attention,” and as we lend our focus to those things we find ourselves affected and transformed by the encounter — the way the blue sky, when we open our gaze to it, reverberates through our sensing organism, altering our mood and even the rhythm of our beating heart. When we are walking in the forest, a particular tree may engage our awareness, and if we reach to feel the texture of its bark we may find that our fingers are soon being tutored by that tree. If the bark is rough and deeply furrowed our fingers will begin to slow down their movements in order to explore those ridges and valleys, while if the trunk is smooth, like a madrone, even the palm of our hand will be drawn to press against and caress that smooth surface. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his classic work, Phenomenology of Perception, suggests that the primordial event of perception is always experienced as a reciprocal encounter between the perceiver and the perceived, a open dialectic wherein my sensing body continually responds and adjusts itself to the things it senses, and wherein the perceived phenomenon responds in turn, disclosing its nuances to me only as I allow myself to be affected by its unique style, its particular dynamism or active agency.

Merleau-Ponty’s careful analyses of perception revealed, contrary to our common ways of speaking, that the perceiving self is not a disembodied mind but rather a bodily subject entirely immersed in the world it perceives. His later work underscored the reciprocity of perceptual experience by pointing out the obvious (yet easily overlooked) fact that the eyes, the visual organs by which we gaze out at and explore the visible field, are themselves entirely a part of that field; they have their own colors, like the color of the sky or the grass. Similarly, the hands with which we touch things are entirely a part of the tactile field that they explore — since, of course, the hand has its own textures, its own smooth or rough surfaces. Hence, when we are touching another being, feeling the texture of a tree-trunk, or caressing a boulder with our fingers, we may also, quite spontaneously, feel our hand being touched by that tree, or our fingers felt by that stone. Similarly, when we step outside in the morning and gaze across the valley at a forested hillside, if we attend mindfully to the vision we will sense our own visibility, will feel ourselves exposed to those trees, perhaps even feel ourselves seen by that forested hillside. Perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is nothing other than this reciprocity, this mutual reverberation and blending in which the surrounding terrain is experienced by me only to the extent that I feel myself caught up within and experienced by those surroundings.

Such a description neatly echoes the discourse of many indigenous peoples, such as the Koyukon people of central Alaska, who claim that they live “in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes.” (Nelson, p. 14). Oral, indigenous peoples from around the world — whether hunters or rudimentary horticulturalists — commonly assert that the land itself is alive and aware, that the local animals, the plants, and the earthly elements around them have their own sensitivity and sentience. They claim that the earthly world we experience also experiences us. And hence that we must be respectful toward that world, lest we offend the very ground that supports us, the winds and waters that nourish us.

If the phenomenological study of perception is correct, however, then these claims need not be attributed to a “projection” of human awareness onto an ostensibly inanimate and objective world; they are simply a way of speaking more in accord with our most direct and spontaneous experience of the perceptual cosmos. Far from being a distortion of our actual encounter with the material world around us, the animistic discourse of so many indigenous, place-based peoples is likely the most practical and parsimonious manner of giving voice to the earthly world as that world discloses itself to humankind in the absence of intervening technologies.

When the natural world is perceived not from the spectator-like position of a detached or disembodied intellect, but rather from an embodied position situated entirely within that world, one encounters no aspect of that world that is definitively inert or inanimate. “Animism” remains a useful term for this highly embodied, and embedded, mode of perception. In this sense, “animism” may be said to name a primordial mode of perception that admits of no clear distinction between that which is animate and that which is inanimate. Rather, every phenomenon that draws our attention is perceived, or felt, to be at least potentially animate. Each perceived thing has its own rhythm and style, its own interior animation. Everything moves — although, clearly, some things  move much slower than other things, like the mountains, or the ground underfoot.

A short, haiku-like poem by Gary Snyder neatly illustrates this style of awareness:

As the crickets’ soft, autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.

Each entity in this poem has its own dynamism, its own rhythm– and yet each rhythm is vastly different, in the pace of its pulse, from the others. Nevertheless each entity is also listening, mindful of the other rhythms around it.

To such an embodied, and embedded, perspective, the enveloping world is encountered not as a conglomeration of determinate objects, but as a community of subjects — as a relational field of animate, active agencies in which we humans, too, are participant.

Such an understanding of the animistic style of perception common to indigenous, oral cultures is necessary for comprehending the vital role played by shamans, the indigenous magic practitioners endemic to such place-based cultures. For if awareness is not the exclusive attribute of humankind — if, indeed, every aspect of the perceivable world is felt to be at least potentially alive, awake and aware — then there is an obvious need, in any human community, for individuals who are particularly adept at communicating with these other shapes of sensitivity and sentience. The shamans are precisely those persons who are especially sensitive and susceptible to the expressive calls, gestures and signs of the wider, more-than-human field of beings, and who are able to reply in kind. The shaman is an intermediary, a mediator between the human community and the more-than-human community in which the human group is embedded. This wider community consists not only of the humans, and the other animal intelligences that inhabit or migrate through the local terrain, but also the many plant powers that are rooted in the local soils — the grasses, and herbs (with their nourishing and medicinal characteristics, their poisonous and mind-altering influences), the trees with their unique personalities, and even the multiform intelligence of whole forests; it consists as well of the active agency and expressive power of particular landforms (like rivers, mountains, caves, cliffs), and of all the other elemental forces (the winds and weather-patterns, the radiant sun and the cycling moon, stormclouds and seasonal patterns) that influence, and effectively constitute, the living landscape.

The magic skills of the shaman are rooted in his or her ability to shift out of his common state of awareness in order to contact, and learn from, these other powers in the surrounding earth. Only by regularly shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the shaman hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of her senses is she able to make contact and communicate with the other shapes of sentience and sensitivity with which human existence is entwined. And so it is this, we might say, that defines a shaman; the ability to readily slip out of the collective perceptual boundaries that define his or her culture — boundaries held in place by social customs, taboos, and especially the common language — in order to directly engage, and negotiate with, the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local earth.

As a result of the his or her heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations of the wider community of beings, the shaman tends to dwell at the very periphery of the human settlement, at the very outskirts of the village or the camp. The indigenous magician’s acute sensitivities often render him unable to dwell, or even linger, in the midst of the human hubbub; only at the edge of the community is he able to attend to the exigencies of the human world while living in steady contact with the wider, and wilder, field of earthly powers. The shaman is thus an edge dweller, one who tends the subtle boundary between the human collective and the wild, ecological field of intelligence, ensuring that that boundary stays a porous membrane across which nourishment flows in both directions — ensuring that the human community never takes more from the living land than it returns to the land, not just materially, but with prayers, with propitiations, with spontaneous and eloquent praises. To some extent, every adult in the human community is engaged in the process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. Yet the shaman is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with these earthly powers. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and “journeys,” the shaman ensures that the relation between the human and more-than-human realms remains balanced and reciprocal; that the living membrane between these realms never hardens into a static barrier shutting out the many-voiced land from the deliberations of the human collective.

Further, it is only as a result of continually monitoring and maintaining the dynamic equilibrium between the human and the more-than-human worlds that the shaman typically derives his or her ability to heal various illnesses arising within the human community. Disease is commonly conceived, in such animistic cultures, as a kind of disruption or imbalance within a particular person, and yet the source of this disequilibrium is assumed to lie not in the individual person but in the larger field of relationships within which that person is entwined. A susceptible person, that is, may become the bearer of a dis-ease   that belongs not to her but to the village as a whole. Yet the ultimate source of such community disequilibrium will commonly be found in an imbalance between the human community and the larger system of which it is a part. Hence the illnesses that beset particular individuals can be healed, or released, only if the healer is simultaneously tending, and “healing” the relative balance or imbalance between the human collective and the wider community of beings. The shaman’s primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded — it is from this that his or her power to alleviate human illness derives — and this sets the local shaman apart from most other persons.

The term “shamanism” is regularly used, today, to denote the belief-system, or worldview, of such cultures wherein the shaman’s craft is practiced. Yet this term is something of a misnomer. For it implies that the person of the shaman stands at the very center of the belief-system and of the culture itself; it suggests that the shaman is revered or perhaps even worshiped by the members of such a culture. Yet nothing could be farther from the case. We have seen that the shaman is quintessentially an edge-dweller, a marginal figure, one who straddles the boundary between the culture and the rest of animate nature. It is not the shaman who is central to the beliefs of that culture, but rather the animate natural world in all its visible and invisible aspects — the expressive power and active agency of the sensuous and sensate surroundings. And thus the worldview of such a culture is not, properly speaking, “shamanistic,” but rather “animistic.” It is first and foremost in animistic cultures — cultures for whom any aspect of the perceivable world may be felt to have its own active agency, its own interior animation — it is in such cultures that the craft of the magician first emerges, and it is in such a context that the shaman (the indigenous magician) finds his or her primary role and function, as intermediary between the human and more-than-human worlds.

Finally, a few words should perhaps be said, here, about the role of the magician in modern, technological societies. After all, the modern conjuror’s feats with rabbits, doves, or tigers harken back to the indigenous shaman’s magical rapport with other species. Indeed, virtually all contemporary forms of magic may be shown to derive, in various ways, from the animistic mode of experience common to all of our indigenous, hunting and foraging ancestors — to the experience, that is, of living within a world that is itself alive. Moreover, it is likely that this participatory mode of sensory experience has never really been extinguished — that it has only been buried beneath the more detached and objectifying styles of perception made possible by a variety of technologies upon which most moderns have come to depend, from the alphabet to the printing press, from the camera to the computer. In the course of our early education, most of us learn to transfer the participatory proclivity of our senses away from the more-than-human natural surroundings toward our own human symbols, entering into an animistic fascination with our own humanly-generated signs and, increasingly, with our own technologies. And as we grow into adulthood, our instinctive yearning for relationship with an encompassing sphere of life and intelligence is commonly channeled beyond the perceptual world entirely, into an abstract relation with a divine source assumed to reside entirely outside of earthly nature, beyond all bodily or sensory ken.

Yet even a contemporary sleight-of-hand magician still makes use of our latent impulse to participate, animistically, with the objects that we perceive. Magicians — whether contemporary sleight-of-hand conjurors or indigenous, tribal shamans — have in common the fact that they work with the participatory power of perception. (Perception is the magician’s medium, as pigments are the medium for a painter.) Both the modern sleight-of-hand magician and the indigenous shaman are adept at breaking, or disrupting, the accepted perceptual habits of their culture. The indigenous shaman practices this in order to enter into relation and rapport with other, earthly forms of life and sentience. The modern magician enacts these disruptions merely in order to startle, and thereby entertain, his audience. Yet if contemporary conjurors were more aware of the ancient, indigenous sources of their craft (if they realized, for instance, that indigenous shamans from many native cultures already used sleight-of-hand techniques in their propitiatory and curative rituals), then even these modern magicians, too, might begin to realize a more vital, ecological function within contemporary culture.

For in an era when nature is primarily spoken of in abstract terms, as an objective and largely determinate set of mechanisms — at a time when eloquent behaviour of other animals is said to be entirely “programmed in their genes,” and when the surrounding sensuous landscape is referred to merely as a stock of “resources” for human use — it is clear that our direct, sensory engagement with the earth around us has become woefully impoverished. The accelerating ecological destruction wrought by contemporary humankind seems to stem not from any inherent meanness in our species but from a kind of perceptual obliviousness, an inability to actually notice anything outside the sphere of our human designs, a profound blindness and deafness to the more-than-human earth. In such an era, perhaps the most vital task of the sleight-of-hand magician is precisely to startle the senses from their slumber, to shake our eyes and our ears free from the static, habitual ways of seeing and hearing into which those senses have fallen under the deadening influence of abstract and overly-objectified ways of speaking and thinking.

Yet perhaps such magic is also, now, the province of all the arts — the province of music, of painting, of poetry. Perhaps it falls to all our artists, today, to wield their pigments and their words in such a way as to loosen the perceptual habits that currently keep us oblivious to our actual surroundings. In any case, the craft of magic is as necessary in the modern world as it was for our indigenous ancestors. For it is only by waking the senses from their contemporary swoon, freeing our eyes and our ears and our skin to actively participate, once again, in the breathing cosmos of wind and rain and stone, of spider-weave and crow-swoop and also, yes, the humming song of the streetlamp pouring its pale light over the leaf-strewn pavement, that we may have a chance of renewing our vital reciprocity with the animate, many-voiced earth.