Start Making Sense

Book Report - The Spell of the Sensuous

What an incredible book this is. Abram begins by stating that any sort of experience we have is at its very base, derived from us being embodied experiencers. This goes beyond just experiences, then, but also to any concepts or thoughts or ideas we can conjure. Everything, really, has its basis in our bodies. We have developed the ability to think from our experiences with the outside world, and then this ability to think turns itself backward and makes us believe it’s the only real, true part of us, and the rest is stupid meat.

Not at all, writes Abram. This is only a trick of our thinking that can occur once we have separated ourselves from the land to such an extent that

it no longer speaks to us; or better yet, that we no longer understand its language. If somebody talks always but we do not understand a word they say, 1 of two things will happen. Either we’ll begin to understand them, or we’ll tune them out. If we continue to listen to them, we’ll begin to understand. But if we’re surrounded by a person always speaking that we never come to understand, it’s a statement that we’ve stopped listening.

We’ve stopped listening by doing exactly what I’m doing right now.
Using words. We once read nature, in a great web of meaning where every part was connected with the next. Our broad understanding of language took this morphism, so that language in its most meaningful sense is understood as this web, where each part takes its meaning from the rest. The entire web is constantly shifting, blowing, moving. 

But not only have we shut nature off by our use of language, but we’ve further reduced our use of language to ready-made words, acting from memory of where meaning once was rather than having any experience of where the world is, or where meaning might actually be. 

Truth is derived from the earth, and once we lose this connection to the earth, we lose our standard of truth. Truth goes up into outer space and becomes only a vague thing that at best is self-consistent with some other associated terms, just as one can say that such-and-such a star is 200 light years beyond another star, but no absolute position can be determined. Space is the isomorphism for how the crazy PoMo philosophers of epistemology have come to determine meaning. It’s no coincidence that post-modernism is said to have begun in the ‘70s and the moon landing was in ’69.

Whether or not there is meaning to be found in outer space is not important to us as terrestrial animals. To us, earth is absolute. Earth stays still under our feet, the sun moves through the dome of the sky, and so does the moon. Stars are pinpricks around us. Truth can be discovered in the same absolute way if the earth is used as the standard for knowledge & understanding. Always, some scientist will be able to come along and say that something has been ignored or that our view is incomplete. Let them.

Science is a persuasion that insists it’s shameful to know that there is more to know, and to not know it. 

Life, nature, the universe, is a play. For the last five hundred years scientists have been up in the aisles and crawling in the gangplanks trying to find clues about the equipment used to put on the production. But knowing the atomic composition of a shoelace in Willy Loman’s boot isn’t going to teach a person about desperation or hopeless dreaming. I say, stay in your seat. There’s a play to be enjoyed, if only you’re willing to attend to it.

The problem though, is that now the scientists in the aisles are so many that it’s becoming truly difficult to see the stage. They’re crowding in and around the few still remaining in their seats, and making it difficult to find one’s way back to sit down once those of us perk up our ears or feel for the ticket in our pockets and remember what we’re here for. And quite frankly there are precious few of these scavenging scientists-if any at all-who really know what they’re searching for or why they’re searching.

And now we’re reaching the added problem when people are fantasizing about leaving their earthy bodies behind, to become a pure abstraction, pure consciousness, information apart from a document. Hey, it worked with telegraphing and we now laugh at the people who took bundles of sausages to the telegraph offices wanting to send them to distant relatives. Will the same mockery resound for those of us unwilling to round ourselves off to the nearest point of consciousness, to the nearest character in a 26-letter alphabet, to the nearest bit in a Kurzweilian hard-drive?

The reason this is truly scary is because we are a society who has been building stronger and stronger scaffolding around abstract information and I wonder how real it may be. 

The last point: time. What you read affects your notions of time. To literary man, time moves in a straight line just as lines of text in a book do. There are weeks, or years, and those repeat but ever move closer to the end. But until something can be documented, can be fixed & remembered, there’s no way to really say that time doesn’t move in cycles. It’s only when we have documents that were created at such-and-such a time that we can then point back and say hey, Descartes and Einstein didn’t come at the same time! Look at the year on the Descartes document, it’s not the same as the Einstein year. But who’s to say, when you’re reading nature as your document? The cycles go round, and is there really anything determinate to say this isn’t the same point? The nature of a book is linear, it moves in one direction, and then time takes that character. The nature of nature is a cycle, and time takes that character. We’ve gradually divorced ourselves from the earthly one which has bred all our further understandings.

In conclusion, this is an incredible book. Don’t for a second think this is finished. This is a book to read again, or to revisit the notes again, or to think about it again. This book makes sense.