The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Abram points out that Indigenous cultures do not experience space and time as separate entities but as intertwined aspects of the living world around them. Stories and narratives in such cultures are rooted in the land, and each locale has its own distinct voice and power, communicated through tales specific to each place.

Recording oral stories in written form detaches them from their specific locations, allowing tales to be transported and read in places far removed from their origins. This process gradually abstracts the stories from the land, leading to the emergence of a concept of space as a homogeneous void, separate from the place-specific experiences of oral cultures. Similarly, the cyclical, place-bound concept of time begins to give way to a linear, abstract understanding of time as a sequence of events, further distancing human experience from the immediate, animate presence of the earth.

The indistinction between space and time in oral cultures contrasts sharply with the abstract concepts of space and time in literate societies, where time is seen as linear and space as a void separate from human experience. The shift toward abstract space and time begins to diminish the sensory engagement with the world that characterizes oral cultures. Through examples from the Hopi, the Navajo, and Aboriginal Australians, Abram illustrates that these cultures perceive existence as a continuous process of becoming in which human thought and intention play a role in the unfolding of potential futures.

Abram discusses how the ancient Hebrews, as the first alphabetic culture and the first “People of the Book” (194), came to recognize a linear, nonrepeating mode of time through their engagement with alphabetic writing. This recognition marked a departure from the cyclical perception of time that characterized oral cultures, where time was intertwined with the rhythms of the natural world and the landscape. For the Hebrews, historical events, seen as manifestations of God’s will, began to have intrinsic value, leading to a new understanding of time as a sequence of unique, nonrepeating events—essentially, the dawn of historical consciousness. Abram links this shift directly to the use of alphabetic writing, which not only allowed for the recording of cultural stories, thus fixing them in their particularity and sequence, but also facilitated a relationship with an all-powerful human voice, believed to be the voice of God. Written alphabetic letters mediated this relationship, transforming the Hebrews’ engagement with the world around them and with the divine.

The narrative of exile, central to the Hebrew Bible, reflects a sense of displacement not just from a specific land but from the very possibility of being fully at home in the world. Abram suggests that this existential exile is intrinsic to the experience of alphabetic literacy. By drawing attention away from the participatory, sensory engagement with the animate earth, alphabetic literacy creates a sense of separation and yearning for a lost intimacy. Abram explores how the Greeks further developed this shift toward a linear concept of time and abstract notion of space by introducing the notion of an entirely placeless eternity and further objectifying space and time as distinct dimensions. These developments in Western thought culminated in Newton’s formulations of absolute space and time, which were eventually challenged and reimagined by Einstein’s theory of relativity and the phenomenological investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. These latter thinkers, in their attempts to return to a more direct, preconceptual experience of the world, began to question the strict separation of space and time, hinting at a more integrated, participatory mode of being in the world reminiscent of oral cultures.

Abram concludes by reflecting on his personal experiences of trying to inhabit the present more fully, an effort to reconnect with the world in a way that transcends the divisions of space and time imposed by literate culture. His explorations suggest that a more immediate experience of being, wherein space and time are intertwined aspects of engaging with the world, remains accessible, offering a path toward a more integrated and embodied way of living.

Abram explores the expansive present moment, questioning the traditional concepts of past and future. Dissolving these conventional temporal dimensions into the sensorial present, he discovers them anew as aspects of the corporeal present. Merleau-Ponty’s notes on how the visible landscape contains other moments of time within itself hint at the intertwining of space and time in sensory experience. Abram seeks the perceptual structures that lent shape to concepts of past and future, guided by Heidegger’s phenomenology of time, which suggests a reciprocal relationship between withholding (future) and refusing (past) presence.

Abram identifies two primary aspects of the perceivable landscape: the beyond-the-horizon and the under-the-ground. These realms, by their modes of absence, shape understanding of future and past, respectively. The future, analogous to what lies beyond the horizon, is characterized by withholding presence, while the past, akin to what is under the ground, is marked by refusing presence. This correspondence reveals a spatial-temporal synthesis wherein the conceptual abstractions of future and past find their roots in bodily awareness of the landscape’s horizon and ground.

This realization challenges the strict separation of time and space, suggesting that traditional temporal dimensions are as spatial as they are temporal. The future stems from awareness of the horizon, and the past from the sense of the ground, blending time and space into a unified, embodied experience of the world. This perspective aligns with Indigenous understandings of time and space as inseparable, experienced through the animate earth rather than abstract measurements.

Abram further delves into the hidden dimensions of the present, including the unseen aspects behind visible objects and the concealed interiors of entities, which resonate with the landscape’s ground and horizon. He proposes that another form of invisibility, integral to the present, is the air in which humans are immersed, highlighting a third dimension of absence within the sensory landscape. This exploration suggests the interconnectedness of time, space, and sensory engagement with the earth, urging reevaluation of how individuals perceive and inhabit the world.