Being a witch

A while ago, years back, I bought David Abram's book... Becoming Animal I think it was called. I didn't like it. After a few years, I picked it up again and I liked some of it. I bought it because a lot of people had referred to his other book, The Spell of the Sensuous, but that was more expensive and besides I liked the title of the other one.

This was a mistake. Recently, I downloaded the Sensuous book and it's really good.

Abram, as well as a philosopher, is a sleight of hand magician. I did a project on whether indigenous magicians connected magic and medicine, but in the end he became more interested in the way that they, the shamans, were like negotiators between the human world and the more-than-human world.

The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined. Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture—boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language—in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations–songs, cries, gestures–of the larger, more-than-human field.

So this is exciting because it kind of relates to my whole borderland/borderline way of thinking! No wonder I want to be a witch!!!

Abram considers the difference between how me "moderns" view the world and how indigenous communities do.

When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself—the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

But in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life.

I find this... kind of consoling... I mean that how I experience the trees and so on is not crazy, it's rather a return to an original or at least older way of being.

The book is very interesting. He delves into phenomenology and as he explains it, he explains how the world participates with us in the act of perception. It is always a dance between active parties, not a view from an objective nowhere. We cannot get nowhere, because we are here, with bodies and senses. However many technological prosthetics we have, we can still only perceive and understand as embodied beings. He makes the felt sense of being primary. And I just don't believe that anything else can ever be as important as this. To be in the world, to contribute to the pleasures and pains, to experience the pleasures and pains, that is it. That is what matters. All... or most of... our tragedy comes from thinking of ourselves as separate.