What the Ecology of Perception Can Teach Us About the Magic of Writing
‘If we don’t recognize writing as magic, we tend to fall under its spell.’ – David Abram
“I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly.”
– David Abram
David Abram is an American environmental philosopher and ‘cultural ecologist’ best known for his landmark book, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, which bridges phenomenology – the philosophical study of experience – with environmental studies.
I remember when I first read Spell of the Sensuous over 15 years ago. It’s one of those books where each paragraph makes you perceive the environment – and your relationships with it – a little, and sometimes, a lot differently. At the time I first read the book as a new college student, the book felt like a psychological windshield wiper clearing away the baggage of modern society that blurred my connection to what Abram calls the “more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.”
In this way, Abram’s work is not so much about helping us see the world in a new way. It leaves a more profound mark on its reader than that. More so, it induces the feeling that our anthropocentric thinking, sedimented over centuries through our immersion in the written word, has made us forget our fundamental interconnection with the natural world.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram develops a way of writing grounded in the ecology of perception (more on that below): a field of study that seeks to repair our broken sensory and perceptual connections with nature through a new kind of environmental writing that it suggests, a little paradoxically, writing itself has broken.
When I first read Abram’s book, I understood his main argument to be that the technology of writing has enraptured our human senses since it was invented, with the effect of plunging us into an increasingly human-centered world. Writing has us under its anthropocentric spell, leading us to look deeper into our own human machines ––books — instead of reading the language of the Earth as oral cultures have for millennia.
In other words, when I first read this book, I viewed it as an unconventional self-help guide to ‘unlearning’ the power of literacy to narrow our sensorial perceptions of the natural world.
But I was wrong.
Like many who also read the book, I later learned, I misunderstood Abram’s argument. The point Abram was trying to make was not that writing is bad (he is a writer after all) it’s that writing is a powerful form of magic.
“I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly.” – David Abram
Writing’s effect on the ecology of perception
In a fascinating recent interview, David Abram not only delves into his research on the ecology of perception but also seeks to debunk a pervasive myth about his argument that can only literacy only lead to human disconnection with nature
First, for Abram, it all begins with research on the ecology of perception: the study of how our senses are enmeshed in a ‘more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.’
Abram puts it this way:
I think as a cultural ecologist, what I’m primarily known for is research, investigations, into the ecology of perception or the ecology of sensory experience; that is, the way the activity of our eyes, of our ears, of our tongue, our nostrils, functions to bind our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem, as though our animal senses actually work almost like a kind of glue binding our individual neural system into the wider ecology, the wider ecosystem.
Second, in his book, the Spell of the Sensuous, one of Abram’s main arguments is that the written word often operates on our psyche like a potent form of magic that pulls us more strongly into its grip from childhood onwards.
For much of human history, the cultural evolution of the human species involved a rich oral tradition, where human speech and nonhuman speech were seen as inherently interconnected. But the written alphabet disrupted these interconnections. As writing spread like a viral technology around the world, the voices of nature our once oral cultures were so familiar with steadily receded into the background until one day we woke up in a silent world, where nature, and even the planet itself, had become merely an inert stage for human dramas to unfold. In other words, we have lost our ancestral knowledge and experience of Nature in the Active Voice.
For many who (mis)read The Spell of the Sensuous, the key takeaways ––and key misinterpretations — have been that writing is bad for us.
In sum, I assumed Abram was telling us that:
- Writing has robbed us of our more primary perceptions of the natural world.
- Writing has diminished our capacity to orient ourselves in the natural world.
- The magic of writing is to put us under its powerful ‘spell.’
- Finally, this has led to our situation today, where we are increasingly enraptured with our own human inventions. Like smartphones, social media, and the concrete-sprawl of our cities, we increasingly surround ourselves in a human-made world. And writing is a key technology aiding and abetting this anthropocentric project.
If we don’t recognize writing as a very potent magic — that is, as something that has much more than rational effects upon our experience — if we don’t recognize it as a magic, we tend to fall under its spell. The word “spell” has that double meaning, both to cast a magic within the world and also simply to arrange the letters. But those two meanings were once one and the same, because to learn to read with this new magic was to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses.
— David Abram
What does this all mean for environmental writers?
Should I abandon writing, and instead invest more time in my (pretty bad) oratory skills to tell the kind of stories I believe we need to tell to improve human-environment relationships?
Fortunately, this isn’t at all the argument Abram had in mind with his book, the Spell of the Sensuous, even though many have interpreted it that way.
For Abram, the potential for literacy to promote both human and ecological well-being depends, like any technology, on how we use it. And, like any technology, we can use it in both responsible and irresponsible ways.
In addressing this common myth concerning his argument about writing and literacy as ‘bad,’ Abram says:
“one of the most common misreadings of my work and of my research has been to say, ‘Oh, Abram is suggesting that writing is bad and that the alphabet is the cause of all our problems.’This is a terrible misreading, because I’m a writer and I love the written word and I love to read, and I’m deeply given to the exquisite power of the written word to open wonders. I’m not at all claiming — and this is quite important — I’m not at all suggesting that writing is bad, but, rather, that writing is magic, and that the alphabet is a very potent form of magic, a very concentrated form of animism.”
The Magic of Writing
What does it mean to say that writing is ‘magic.’
Magic, Abram tells us, is the experience of recognizing that your existence in the world is accompanied by ‘multiple intelligences’ experiencing the world with you: “the intuition that every form one perceives — from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.”
Abram’s idea of magic reminded me of what a much earlier perceptual ecologist, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, called Umwelt.
Umwelt literally means “surround-world” but Uexküll used it to talk about the “experienced environment”: the environment perceived by a creature through its unique sensory adaptations the environment.
Interestingly, Uexküll also used another phrased to describe the ecology of perception that different flora and fauna inhabited: their “magical environments.”
Uexküll compares ‘magical environments’ to the magical world children experience in play when they imagine characters from a fairy tale to appear in their room, or when dogs see, smell and react to something that’s invisible to human senses.
Uexküll believed the investigation of nonhuman beings’ magical environments would only be accomplished through a combination of rigorous science and the ‘reattunement’ of our own senses to the multitude of plant and animal umwelts that surround us and interweave with our own umwelts. Only then could we come to know the radical otherness of nonhuman worlds.
But more importantly, Uexküll suggests that each species’ magical environment is not an isolated bubble, but intersects in complex ways with that of others. Yet these other environments will always remain invisible to our human ‘umwelt’ unless we can take ‘forays’ of sensation and perception into the magical environments of those many nonhuman beings that share in earthly existence with us.
We might look at the magic of writing as its potential, through language, to help us make these forays into the magical environments of nonhuman others.
Or, as David Abram eloquently says,
“For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land…Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs — letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.”
— David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
