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David Abram

David Abram Biography

Philosopher

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“We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys.”

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Book:Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
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“...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

WorldCharacterStoriesDreamImaginationAnimalTreeHugeStonesCloudsUnfoldingParticipantsAbram
Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”

WorldTakenPerceptionStructureVulnerableOngoingSensoryReciprocityRenderingTerrainSensuousAbramSensory Perception
Book:Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
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“Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons.”

SpaceAttentionSunAirLandRocksColorBattleShadowRainBlueCloudsSeedsLoudGesturesShelterOrganizeRetreatSpidersShoutingWhisperingSpillsConversesCanyonsAbram
Author:David Abram
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“A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.”

HumansMayCultureFeltVirtueLandEventsParticularSourceVariousActiveSettingSettingsPrimariesPassiveParticipants
Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.”

SpiritSpeakLanguageVoiceWrittenAirWindRiversBreathsAncientInvisibleForestsAssociationFadesAbram
Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.”

HumansStoriesSeemsHappensEarthCultureSpeakLanguageEventsPrayingSpeechSingingAncientLocationHuman LanguageAbramRootedness
Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.”

HumansEarthSpeakLanguageExpressionSpeechAustraliaDiverseEcologyDiscourseVitalityIndigenousInseparableExpressiveTerrainAboriginalCoherenceIndigenous PeopleHuman Language
Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.”

WritingTwoLanguageNaturalEnvironmentWrittenLandFieldsSpeechRemainsAbsencePrimariesLandscapeVisualsSensibleSiteDiscourseFreezeEmbeddedUtteranceNatural EnvironmentMetamorphosisCounterpartsAnalogue
Author:David Abram
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“No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.”

WorldFirstsHumansActionFormLanguageMysteryDangerousEventsFieldsCurrentsMeaninglessSpontaneousIndigenousSpoken WordRavensIndigenous PeopleSensuousHuman ActionsPredeterminedTricksters
Author:David Abram
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“There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree...their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground”

NeedsWellsHeartKindEyeFallWaterGriefWonderTreeCenturyTearsKeysSorrowPressesOpeningEncountersRisingSoilGatesFrightenedChestsLockedDroppingPulseForeheadsBarkResonanceSustainingNumbnessDrummingElixirOld Trees
Author:David Abram
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“The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity”

WorldEarthScienceJoyDarkLove IsResultsGriefRichEmotionalReturnRemainsPoisonSoilRootedSpontaneousIntuitiveSubjectiveObjectivityTerrainMoodyNutrients
Author:David Abram
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“Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.”

WayMindHumansStatesTogetherCertainSkyParticularSummerRedRainBlueWinterScalesStreamsZoneShoreValleysState Of MindFogSpidersOaksHawksSalmonCoyotesFernsTopographyBobcatsSandstone
Author:David Abram
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“If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged. To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.”

IfsWorldBodyHandsWishParticularDirectExperienceDepthActiveEngagedPhenomenonPassiveEntityOngoingOur WordsReciprocityAffirmingSensing
Author:David Abram
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