- We are human only in conviviality with that which is not human → getting back in contact with the sensuous world is essential to orient ourselves with new technological tools
- Phenomenology — the study of direct experiences
1. The Ecology of Magic (A Personal Introduction)
- Studied relationship between magic and medicine among indigenous people in Indonesia
- Those who practiced magic maintained some level of suspicion about their intentions to ensure only those who truly needed help sought healing
- Seen as managing reciprocal balance between humans and nonhuman world; both in terms of material exchange and praise, honor, etc.
- Allegiance of magician/shaman not to the human, but wider web of interconnection
- Ethnocentric idea that the shaman’s work is “supernatural” denigrates nonhuman life, rivers, etc. to inert— in reality, “magic” manifests from nature in all these forms
- Tribal magician defined by ability to shift out of perceptual boundaries & awareness, to be able to experience without bias those of other powers of the land
- Magic = experience of living in a world of multiple intelligences (all entities are experiencing forms)
- Experienced deeper attunement with the wider world through encounters with fireflies, ants, spiders
- Current intensity of physical and psychological distress in society has as its source our imbalance with the natural world— destruction of biodiversity, climate change → need to turn our focus from our own technologies, which only reflect ourselves back to us, to nature
2. Philosophy on the Way to Ecology
- Idea that things we can perceive— ex. a tree— exist when we aren’t directly there seeing it, because of all the other entities that are perceiving it, including the cells of the tree itself
- Life-world = our default experiences, primordial and collective, before the cognitive layer of theorizing and conceptualizing
- Inherently subjective, but when we talk about it, easy for science to overlook our active role
- Reciprocity of senses: we can experience things only because we are entirely part of the sensible world we are in (and in turn can be sensed by all else)
- Reflected in indigenous language— speaking to, not about, the environing earth (rocks, water, etc.)
3. The Flesh of Language
- What is language? Difficult question, because the only way to define language is with language itself
- Language = gesture, no more ideal than physical sounds or movements— we learn our native language bodily, not mentally, figuring out what the meaning of words feel like
- Eur philosophy → preoccupation with “what makes humans unique” → often point to language, removing this conception, but this overlooks the many other species with sophisticated vocal communication
- Redefining language as gesture…
Thus, at our most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks.
4. Animism and the Alphabet
- How, then, have we become so disconnected from nonhuman nature?
- Not an inevitable happening— evidenced by thousands of years that indigenous people inhabited North America without ecological destruction
- Sep between human and environment → roots in ancient Hebraic and Hellenistic philosophy… both cultures which used the technology of the alphabet
- Shift from pictographic writing to phonetic alphabet → opens distance btw human culture and nature: creates link btw written character and vocal gesture bypassing completely the sensible phenomenon
- Contrasts with the participatory, animate earth depicted in Homer’s epics— clouds, ocean, sun, all instructive or symbolic of gods
- Early example of permanent, unchanging human technology
- Inert letters have replaced nonhuman animals, plants, rivers in “speaking” to us— written letters = magic that cast a spell
- Socratic dialectic → ask a speaker to explain what they said — separate themselves from the formulas and habitual phrases
5. In the Landscape of Language
- Examples of cultures that still live within an animate environment, not replaced by written word
- Much more attuned to and observant of surroundings, interact with other animals (ex. communicate w each other and other animals with bird calls)
- Arctic Koyukon → highly onomatopoeic language, names for birds sound like their calls
- More careful with their words, the power of language— since other animals speak, they can also hear and understand us talking
- Apache → land itself is a guardian of the right behavior— “moral efficacy of the landscape” to ensure mindful, respectful behavior
- Aboriginal Australians → we ourselves are participants within the vast imagination (Dreaming) of the world
- Stories embedded in landscape: visible and tactile, but also auditory; ancestral tracks with distances measured in lengths of songs
- Inherent, at birth, a particular stretch of song and corresponding land → responsible for keeping it as it was when initially sung into existence
- Songs/stories = mnemonic for remembering location of important geographic locations (ex. water!), and vice versa (transmission of cultural knowledge)
6. Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth
- When stories began to be written down, letters replaced the land & place as mnemonic activator → gave way to idea of abstract, homogenous space and abstract, linear time
- In contrast to very cyclical nature of time in oral cultures, place-based conception of space; integrated time-space
- Written text in the form of the Hebrew Bible → “portable homeland” for the Hebrew people, only way they have been able to preserve their culture while in perpetual exile
- Where can we locate the past and the future within the visible landscape? How do we perceptually distinguish them?
- Both existing just beyond the horizon? (Literally)
- Heidegger → the future withholds its presence, the past refuses its presence
- Sensory phenomena are continually appearing out of, and vanishing into, two invisible realms: vast openness (beyond the horizon, the future) and packed density (hidden underground, the past)
- Ultimately the two are one and the same → cyclic nature of time
7. The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air
What the plants are quietly breathing out, we animals are breathing in; what we breathe out, the plants are breathing in. The air… is the soul of the visible landscape, the secrets realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment.
- Invisibility and omnipresence of air → very sacred in indigenous oral cultures
- Identification of air with awareness: overlap in meaning of words derived from psyche, animus, atman
- Hebrew scripts omitted vowels → reading still required active participation, interpretation, which was lost when Greeks included vowels in their alphabet/texts… “dissolving the primordial power of the air”
- Languages evoke boundaries, membranes between groups of people, between people and the terrain(different degrees of permeability)
- Pollution of the atmosphere symbolizes our disconnect with the air and lack of acceptance of interdependence
Coda: Turning Inside Out
- Human language evolved in an animatic context, connecting us with each other and the wider world → cutting off the latter is stifling our direct experiences
[A] story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And “making sense” must be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses.
- Only at the scale of our direct, sensory intx with the land can we respond to the needs of the living world— vs centralized, top-down programs
- Change taking place with people who have “fallen in love outward” (Robinson Jeffer’s phrase)
- Our job now is to write language back into the land— “to plant words like seeds, let language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.”