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What must I do (and why me)? | 89
within the density of a closed and bounded object, for as we shall see,
the boundaries of the living body are open and indeterminate; more
like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis
and exchange.” The meaning of life is this mutual and universal
sensitivity, resonance and desire-driven intertwining, which for
Merleau-Ponty form “the flesh of the world”. Abram explains this thus:
“To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to
experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. (...)
We can experience things — can touch, hear and taste things — only
because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and
have our own textures, sounds and tastes. (...) We might as well say
that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is
perceiving itself through us.””
In language the sounds, music and thundering of an audible world
reverberate. Man is not merely speaking of the world: the world speaks
in his speech and the context of what it says is formed by the universal
dialogue of the living. This is the main thought of Abram’s book The
Spell of the Sensuous. Through a multitude of tribal examples, he
demonstrates the organic connection — deemed to be inseparable and
perhaps truly so — between spoken word and deed, speech and landscape,
upon which all magical practices are formed. He tracks how language
gradually moves away from nature through the cultural history of
literacy. In parallel, he introduces the process of separation of a spiritual
universe maintained for concepts, numbers and immaterial divine
beings. It is to this process that he traces the fatal alienation towards
nature that characterises the human being of Western civilisation and
which ecophilosophy is dedicated to reversing. “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 (...) then surely our very words will continue to tie ourselves,
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 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.””
3 Ibid. p.46.
4 Ibid. p.68.
% David Abram: Merlau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth. Environmental Ethics 10.2.
1988.