The Spell of the Sensuous

The Spell of the Sensuous

The Road Not Taken

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This book, by David Abram, is proposing that our civilization, to save itself & the non-human world, must take the road less travelled – the sensuous world where human and non-human intermingle as one. His writing is sensual in this way: you have to immerse yourself totally in the experience of how he writes to extract the marrow of his message. He writes to arouse the human senses – stirs emotion, challenges the intellect, evokes smells and colours and the touch of a gentle breeze. Yes, it has its challenging bit so I would definitely not call it light reading; but honestly, what in life of real value is easy, except in retrospect when what you have learned and experienced lightens your heart and soul?

The book is too dense with imagery and ideas to explore more than one dimension, so let’s only focus on Abram’s ideas on the written word. I communicate to you with the written word, in an alphabet and vocabulary which both frees and restricts me. So, right away, I must clarify the key word in his book: sensuous: not be confused with sensual – yes, there is a difference!

sensuous is an adjective that means relating to the five senses. These senses, as we know, are sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. It’s about immersing yourself in a subjective experience like listening to a babbling brook, feeling the wind on your skin, smelling the pine needles… becoming one with the world around you.

Sensual specifically refers to gratification of the senses. The word sensual has taken on sexual connotations.

Abram’s makes the case that our language, our vocabulary, the written word, even the abstraction of our alphabet have contributed to a severing of our relationship with the non-human world. Our language, when used as it is now, is an abstraction which serves only to reinforce our limited view that only the human made world has true value – as it speaks – but the non-human world has none – except, of course, to serve as resource, a ‘thing’, for humans to use and enjoy. We do not hear the language of the non-human, because it does not speak, most especially it does not speak the language of the abstract. It is the abstraction of language which is its greatest power and greatest downfall. How it explain? Here is a story about St. Francis of Assisi that I hope clarifies.

Francis was asked what he thought of a monk who wanted to study at the new University in Paris to learn all the various aspects of God’s love. His reply something was this: “If his intellect learns all the ways to love, but does not actually LOVE God and his creation in ALL its forms, his study, instead of helping, is a hindrance. Instead, I choose the path to choose to love – every day, to love every being, human and non-human, that I meet. It is in the meeting that I learn to love, not by study. For while studying can feed the mind, if it severs the mind from the body, it undoes what it had first desired to do, and becomes a counterfeit.”

Here’s a few words from Abram’s that give you a taste of how he seeks to find way towards the “road less travelled” – to save our forgetful, suicidal civilization:

 THE FIRST PART OF THIS BOOK RAISED THIS QUESTION: HOW did Western civilization become so estranged from nonhuman nature, so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems— whole forests, river valleys, oceans—and to the extinction of countless species? Or, more specifically, how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciprocity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal peoples? How did civilization break out of, and leave behind, the animistic or participatory mode of experience known to all native, place-based cultures? In the last chapter, however, we showed that animism was never, in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters begin to come alive and to speak. “Written words,” says Socrates, “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent.…” Indeed, today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word without seeing, or rather hearing, what “it says.” For our senses are now coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon. As the hills and the bending grasses once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so these written letters and words now speak to us.

How does all this relate to our mission at the Club of Rome? I think Abram’s goal and ours are the same: to find the road less travelled that can bring us back from the brink of disaster and then to find another way. Our current challenge though for us is that we seem overly focused on technology and all things number oriented. We often miss the “meaning between the lines”, our intellect and language cannot help but desire to be explicit and focus on what can be managed… when, according the Abram’s, this focus on control and number is itself the problem. He puts it this way:

Galileo had already asserted that only those properties of matter that are directly amenable to mathematical measurement (such as size, shape, and weight) are real; the other, more “subjective” qualities such as sound, taste, and color are merely illusory impressions, since the “book of nature” is written in the language of mathematics alone. In his words:

This grand book the universe … is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. Yet it was only after the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, in 1641, that material reality came to be commonly spoken of as a strictly mechanical realm, as a determinate structure whose laws of operation could be discerned only via mathematical analysis. By apparently purging material reality of subjective experience, Galileo cleared the ground and Descartes laid the foundation for the construction of the objective or “disinterested” sciences, which by their feverish and forceful investigations have yielded so much of the knowledge and so many of the technologies that have today become commonplace in the West. The chemical table of the elements, automobiles, smallpox vaccines, “close-up” images of the outer planets—so much that we have come to assume and depend upon has emerged from the bold experimentalization of the world by the objective sciences.

Yet these sciences consistently overlook our ordinary, everyday experience of the world around  Our direct experience is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns. The everyday world in which we hunger and make love is hardly the mathematically determined “object” toward which the sciences direct themselves. Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses.

The fact is, my life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; I do not live an “objective” life. So, what can you do with all this? First, read the book! It is available for free as a pdf at

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/retreat/files/abram_the_spell_of_the_sensuous_perception.pdf

This quote may help you become more sensuous. Try admitting that you really aren’t that different from the non-human world and can imagine yourself to be just a walking, talking version of, let’s say, a tree. This will shift your perspective.  You grow only when connected with deep roots to earth and intertwine with the roots of the trees around you – for only together can you and your neighbours withstand the force of a gale. You thrive only when you raise your branches to the sun and to greet the raindrops. You breath slowly, a giant breath out during the day, a giant breath in during the night – you breath deep and the air becomes your body. The slower you grow, the stronger you become. The fires and droughts and floods and winds and diseases of life come and go but you remain. This is your place. Be content there and you and the dirt and the sun and the wind are one. You can be that tree. That is one way you choose the road less travelled and save the world. Be that tree. Be that bird. Be that babbling brook.

I leave you with a poem with a poem by a Wendell Barry whose focus is on how we can live connected with the land, how we can become intertwined so much with the Earth, that we become inseparable.

Always in the distance

The sound of cars passing

On the road, that simplest form

Going only two ways,

Both ways away.   And I

Have been there in that going.

But now I rest and am

Apart, a part of the form

Of the woods always arriving

From all directions home,

This cell of wild sound,

The hush of the trees, singers

Hidden among the leaves  —

A form whose history is old,

Needful, unknown, and bright

As the history of the stars

That tremble in the sky at night

Like leaves of a great tree.