Stray Attention

Notes from a sentient planet

Hello,

I recently ordered The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, based on a recommendation on Freya Rohn’s brilliant Substack, The Ariadne Archive. It’s a beautiful book, delving into the call and response between the human world and nature. ‘Humans are tuned for relationship,’ it begins, and goes on to show how we live as fluid communicators with the world around us. In this language, words are certainly important, but so is sensory experience. Through Abram’s eyes, we’re acrobatic, multidimensional beings of connection.

Or at least, that’s our potential; much of the book points to how much we’ve lost. ‘Today,’ he writes, ‘we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape.’ Our reliance on technology is often getting in the way of the direct conversation we once had with the landscapes around us. 

This makes me think of Julian Jaynes and his ‘bicameral mind’ - a brain so thoroughly divided that one half hears the thoughts of the other, and thinks it’s the voice of God. When we evolved away from this, argues Jaynes, we lost our sense of direct contact with the divine. It is poignant to think that we lost another sense of contact with the living flow of things, when we stopped believing in the sentience of the planet, and our equality with the creatures who share it with us.