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Note: my apologies
for any typos or misrepresentations of the text - please consider
purchasing the books. David Abram: "The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth... The scale of a harvest or the size of the hunt are always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorceror is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others. And it is only as a result of her continual engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community. The sorcerer derives her ability to cure ailments from her continuous practice of 'healing' or 'balancing the community's relation to the surrounding land..." [7] THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS "The Greek alphabet was first invented -- or, rather, adapted from the Semitic aleph-beth -- several centuries before Plato, probably during the eighth century B.C.E. The new technology did not spread radily through Greece; rather, it encountered remarkable resistance in the form of a highly developed and ritualized oral culture. That is, the traditions of prealphabetic Greece were actively preserved in numerous oral stories regularly recited and passed along from generation to generation by the Greek bards, or 'rhapsodes.' The chanted tales carried within their nested narratives much of the accumulated knowledge of the culture. Since they were not written down, they were never wholly fixed, but would shift incrementally with each telling to fit the circumstances or needs of a particular audience, gradually incorporating new practical knowledge while letting that which was obsolete fall away. The sung stories, along with the numerous ceremonies to which they were linked, were in a sense the living encyclopedias of the culture -- carrying and preserving the collected knowledge and established customs of the community -- and they themselves were preserved through constant repetition and ritual reenactment. There was thus little overt need for the new technology of reading and writing..." [104] THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS "When the Homeric epics were recorded in writing, then the art of the rhapsodes began to lose its preservative and instructive function. The knowledge embedded in the epic stories and myths was now captured for the first time in a visible and fixed form, which could be returned to, examined, and even questioned. Indeed, it was only then, under the slowly spreading influence of alphabetic technology, that 'language' was beginning to seperate itself from the animate flux of the world, and so becoming a ponderable presence in its own right... The scribe, or author, could now begin to dialogue with his own visual inscriptions, viewing and responding to his own words even as he wrote them down. A new power of reflexivity was thus coming into existence, borne by the relation between the scribe and his scripted text... | By asking the speaker to explain himself or to repeat his statement in different terms, Socrates forced his interlocutors to seperate themselves, for the first time, from their own words -- to seperate themselves, that is, from the phrases and formulas that had become habitual through the constant repetition of traditional stories. Prior to this moment, spoken discourse was inseperable from the endlessly repeated stories, legends, and myths that provided many of the spoken phrases one needed in one's daily actions and interactions. To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one's closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one's own mouth. Such, as we have said, is the way culture preserves itself in the absence of written records..." [107|109] THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS "As we have also discerned, the ancient aleph-beth, as the first thoroughly phonetic writing system, prioritized the human voice. The increasingly literate Israelites found themselves caught up in a vital relationship not with the expressive natural forms around them, nor with the static images or idols common to pictographic or ideographic cultures, but with an all-powerful human voice. It was a voice that clearly preceded, and outlasted, every individual life -- the voice, it would seem, of eternity itself--but which nevertheless addressed the Hebrew nation directly, speaking, first and foremost, through the written letters. While the visible landscape provides an oral tribal culture with a necessary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for remembering its ancestral stories intact even when the people were cut off, for many generations, from the actual lands where those stories had taken place. By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories earlier carried by the terrain itself, the written text became a kind of portable homeland for the Hebrew people. And indeed it is only thus, by virtue of this portable ground, that the Jewish people have been able to preserve their singular culture, and thus themselves, while in an almost perpetual state of exile from the actual lands where their ancestral stories unfolded. Yet many of the written narratives in the Bible are already stories of displacement, of exile... Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be dis-placed, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to yearn, to hope, that such contact and conviviality may someday return. 'Because being Jewish,' as Edmond Jabes has written, 'means exiling yourself in the word and, at the same time, weeping for your exile.' The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what has been lost, the intimation of a forgotten intimacy. The narratives in Genesis remain deeply attuned to the animistic power of places, and it is this lingering power that lends such poignancy to the motifs of exodus and exile. The stories of the patriarchs are filled with sacred place-names, and many of these narratives seem structured so as to tell how particular places came to have their specific names... the trajectory of time, for the ancient Hebrews, was by no means entirely linear..."[195-196] THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS "For example, unlike texts written with the Greek or the Roman alphabets, a Hebrew text simply could not be experienced as a double -- a stand-in, or substitute -- for the sensuous, corporeal world. The Hebrew letters and texts were not sufficient unto themselves; in order to be read, they had to be added to, enspirited by the reader's breath. The invisible air, the same mystery that animates the visible terrain, was also needed to animate the visible letters, to make them come alive and to speak. The letters themselves thus remained overtly dependent upon the elemental, corporeal life-world -- they were activated by the very breath of that world, and could not be cut off from that world without losing all their power... The absence of written vowels in ancient Hebrew entailed that the reader of a traditional Hebrew text had to actively choose the appropriate breath sounds or vowels, yet different vowels would often vary the meaning of the written consonants... The reader of a traditional Hebrew text must actively choose one pronunciation over another, according to the fit of that meaning with the written context, yet the precise meaning of that context would itself have been determined by the particular vowels already chosen by that reader. The traditional Hebrew text, in other words, demanded the reader's conscious participation. The text was never complete in itself; it had to be actively engaged by a reader who, by this engagement, gave rise to a particular reading. Only in relation -- only by being taken up and actively interpreted by a particular reader -- did the text become meaningful. And there was no single, definitive meaning; the ambiguity entailed by the lack of written vowels ensured that diverse readings, diverse shades of meaning, were always possible... the purely consonantal structure of the Hebrew writing system rendered this participation -- the creative interaction between the reader and the text -- particularly conscious and overt. It simply could not be taken for granted, or forgotten. Indeed, the willful engagement with the text that was necessitated by the absence of written vowels lent a deeply interactive or interpretive character to the Jewish community's understanding of its own most sacred teachings... The reader, that is, must actively respond to the Torah, must bring his own individual creativity into dialogue with the teachings in order to reveal new and unsuspected nuances. The Jewish people must enter into dialogue with the received teachings of the their ancestors, questioning them, struggling with them. The Hebrew Bible is not a set of finished stories and unchanging laws; it is not a static body of dogmatic truths but a living enigma that must be questioned, grappled with, and interpreted afresh in every generation..." [242-244] THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS Note: Also highly recommended would be his sequel book - quotes to follow at a later date - given how utterly out-of-touch modern-man has become with respect to his true identity - Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology |