david abram

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shot at Grasshopper Canyon, Santa Fe, New Mexico Louisa Gagliardi, night caps, 2022, nail polish and ink on pvc, copyright of the artist, courtesy of galerie eva presenhuber Louisa Gagliardi, breakfast in bed, 2019, gel medium and ink on pvc, copyright of the artist, courtesy of rodolphe janssen

interview

by ANFISA VRUBEL

portraits by STEVEN ST. JOHN

artwork by LOUISA GAGLIARDI

 

Coining the term “the more-than-human world,” the American ecologist and anthropologist started as a traveling magician, meeting shamans across the globe.

He promotes a revival of animism and our animality, calling it the “Spell of the Sensuous.”

 

ANFISA VRUBEL — This issue is devoted to exploring magic — not in the prevalent conception of it, but as an expanded way of seeing and participating in the world and opening up alternate realms. Your book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World weaves together ecology, philosophy, and anthropology with a thread of magic running through it. What was your entry into the field of magic?

DAVID ABRAM — It was through the practice of sleight of hand. I was a professional magician for 12 years starting in my late teens, putting myself through college by performing throughout New England. At a certain point, I became fascinated with the uses of magic in the healing arts, so I took off to study traditional uses of folk medicine among healers and shamans in rural Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal. I approached them not as a researcher or an anthropologist, but as a magician in my own right, and this proved to be a powerful skeleton key into the inner sanctum of these cultures. In Indonesia, I was invited into the homes of the dukuns, or traditional healers, and in Nepal, I became close to several djankris, or mountain shamans. As I participated in their ceremonies, I was startled to discover that they understood their abilities as healers to derive from their more primary role in their villages, which was to mediate between the human world and the more-than-human collective. The magicians were charged with communicating with a larger community of powers and ensuring that the human community was not taking more from the animate landscape than it was returning to it, whether with prayers or gestures of reciprocity or by attentively listening to the animate landscape in its multiplicative weirdness. So, I began to understand that the magician was an intermediary between realms — not between this earthly world and other supernatural worlds, but rather between the infinite number of worlds that compose this animate biosphere.

ANFISA VRUBEL — What is your definition of magic in this expanded view?

DAVID ABRAM — Magic is the experience of being alive inside a world that is itself alive, wherein the ground underfoot, the grass, the wildflowers, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the clouds overhead are all alive — all animate beings, each dancing its way into the present moment in its own style. In that sense, magic is not different from what we sometimes speak of as animism. It’s a particular mode of perception that was common to our ancestors for tens of thousands of years, and it is our inheritance as humans. From this perspective, the world that we live in appears to be a set of inert, determinate objects only when we look at it as though we were disembodied minds watching a spectacle from the outside. But when we identify with our own animal bodies and experience the world from within its depths, the world discloses itself as magic.

ANFISA VRUBEL — So, magic, then, is a sort of mystical worldview that verges on the religious or transcendent?

DAVID ABRAM — Well, every great religious tradition has, at its heart, a mystical tradition. Yet at the core of these mystical traditions, one always finds the magical tradition. Magic is a particular form of mysticism that doesn’t seek to transcend the body or the material earth, but rather stakes its claim right here in the midst of the sensuous, keeping faith with all of these different bodies and beings to the point where every creature, every plant, every stone begins to shine and become luminous, lit from within. It’s a deeply immanent relation to the sacred — seeking not to transcend the sensuous but to participate in it more deeply. Magic is all about metamorphosis, transformation, and how to engage ever more richly in the material world.

ANFISA VRUBEL — And do you see this conception of magic persisting in the present day?

DAVID ABRAM — Magical practices are usually holdovers from the pre-religious, animistic Indigenous ways that flourished for thousands of years before any formalized written religion came into being with its doctrines and dogmas. So, these magical traditions are carrying on and protecting old animistic practices. And they’re very practical practices. How do you find water in a time of drought? How do you generate heat within your body in prolonged cold? How do you go about communicating with other animals, other forms of sentience? These are magical practices that involve the body and its relation to the animate Earth.

ANFISA VRUBEL — It seems ironic that the Western world sees animism as a vestige of what was considered “primitive.” In some ways, animism and Indigenous societies are more pragmatic in their cosmologies in that they see the Earth as the sole realm of existence. There is no higher realm beyond Earth, as there is in Christianity, to which the ineffable and the unfathomable are outsourced.

DAVID ABRAM — Yes. The mysterious is not outsourced to other worlds beyond the sensuous or the bodily. The earthly world itself is experienced as a source of radiant mystery that is exquisitely enigmatic, with each being, each thing, every part of the Earth disclosing its own uncanny strangeness wherever we turn.

ANFISA VRUBEL — So, in your view, the magical centers on the body as the primary tool of receptivity to and participation in the world, and everything stems from that, including language. We see it as a mysterious faculty, but actually it’s rooted in the sensuous embrace of the world. Could you speak about what you mean by the sensuous and how this links to the magical?

DAVID ABRAM — I would say that the body — this two-legged, two-armed form — is my access to every other body and every other shape of palpable existence: plants and animals, but also storm clouds and boulders with lichens encrusted onto their hard surfaces. And the body is always in relation to the larger body of the animate Earth itself. So, one could speak of my body as the smaller body, and the Earth — this immense spherical metabolism — as our larger flesh that we share with all the other beings around us. We’re all participants in this dynamic mystery we call Earth.

ANFISA VRUBEL — That’s beautiful. Often, it seems as though we’re living under the illusion of separateness. Humanity considers itself impervious to natural forces, but then you see how a global pandemic can quickly destabilize everything. Everything is interconnected, and the boundaries between what is natural and what is man-made are permeable. How has humanity distanced itself from participating and being in this sensory reciprocity with nature that you speak of? Is this something more fundamental that predates our postindustrial world?

DAVID ABRAM — The biggest difference between the modern Western mindset and the felt experience of our Indigenous ancestors is that we moderns participate in a kind of participatory animistic relation, but with our own technologies. Take written scripts and texts — we wake up in the morning and turn on the computer and open the newspaper, focusing our eyes on these ostensibly inanimate bits of ink on the page. And straightaway, we hear voices and see visions of events unfolding in other parts of the world. This is animism, too. But our Indigenous ancestors were hearing the expressive speech of spiders, patches of lichen, broken twigs, cloud shapes, animal tracks, and pretty much anything in the surrounding world. We in the modern, overcivilized, overeducated world participate in this magical way only with our own signs and creations, and hence only with ourselves and with extensions of the human nervous system. So, we’re caught in a kind of closed-loop speciesism wherein we rarely, if ever, enter into participation with the more-than-human otherness of our world in its manifold forms.

ANFISA VRUBEL — It goes back to the human tendency to anthropomorphize many aspects of life, including technology. I think that’s at the heart of our fundamental anxieties about AI: we ascribe humanlike qualities or a humanlike intellect to it. Do you think animism is a built-in feature of humans, which drives us to fill in the perceptual blanks of what we observe by ascribing anthropomorphic features to things?

DAVID ABRAM — You said it beautifully. We have this inborn impulse to creatively exchange with everything we perceive, and this animistic impulse is endemic to the human creature. I do agree with you that this propensity to participate is a very basic aspect of being human or being an animal. The French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl spoke of a participation mystique common to Indigenous peoples, a sort of mystical participation with things. Yet this animism impulse was construed by many early anthropologists as a misplaced projection of human intelligence onto otherwise inanimate objects or inert entities that don’t have any subjectivity of their own. But we now know that other animals are richly subjective creatures, and that plants, too, have their own felt experience of the world, that even mountains and rivers are composed of countless beings — plants, animals, fungi, bacteria — each with their own angle or perspective on the world. When we think of them as entirely mechanical systems, it impedes our felt attunement and relational exchange with those mountains and those rivers. And this hugely interrupts our ecological capacity for reciprocal engagement with the living landscape around us.

ANFISA VRUBEL — So, there is an innate reciprocal dialogue between beings.

DAVID ABRAM — Yes, indeed. We’re born with this impulse. Our animal senses — our eyes, our ears, our skin, our tastebuds — function to bind our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. They do this by participating creatively in the things they encounter. After all, everything we perceive has aspects that we see directly and other aspects that are hidden from us, like the other side of a tree trunk or the roots hidden beneath the ground. Each thing we encounter has facets that we cannot perceive directly — gaps, lacunae. The imagination spontaneously fills in these gaps. Perception is this active, participatory, gregarious engagement in the things that we perceive.

ANFISA VRUBEL — Do you see parallels between this conception of the magical and magic as it is generally thought of?

DAVID ABRAM — The sleight-of-hand magician exploits, in a playful way, this participatory quality of sensory perception. I leave gaps in the trajectory of a coin through my fingers, and the people watching spontaneously fill in those gaps with the creativity of their senses. And this is what creates the magic. The magician startles us with what we ourselves have created. In this hypermodern moment in the world, we tend to not be very creative in the ways that we perceive the things around us. We take the material beings of this world for granted, speaking of them as inert or mechanically determinate objects. It’s very hard to engage with something that you’ve decided is inanimate or mechanical because, defined in that manner, it can’t reciprocate your attention. When we speak of the world in such objectifying terms, it frustrates the creative and gregarious participation of our own animal senses. So, we tend to withdraw from our senses and into our heads, encountering the world through a set of concepts without perceptually engaging in the world at all. The sleight-of-hand magician, by inducing us to participate very creatively in the dynamism of his or her objects, reawakens our senses to the magic of the outrageous dynamism and creativity of earthly reality.

ANFISA VRUBEL — So, how do we participate in the world of the senses, and how do we regain the sensuous, reciprocal outlook on the natural world, especially in a world that is increasingly enveloping us in technological and virtual abstractions? How can we practically reestablish that connection to the ephemeral, to the magical, to the sensuous?

DAVID ABRAM — Well, first and foremost, by starting to trust our senses once again. For several long centuries, we’ve been taught that the senses are deceptive and that the real truth of things is hidden behind the scenes — whether in the complex of neurons and synapses, or in the breaking of the initial symmetries in the first moments after the Big Bang, or in the subatomic dimension of quantum interactions. As a result, most of us have stopped trusting our senses and are living more in our heads in a complex of abstract concepts.

ANFISA VRUBEL — How do you link this disengagement from the senses to the ecological crisis we are facing?

DAVID ABRAM — The ecological crisis demands that we start trusting our animal senses once again. Because if we don’t trust our senses, we cut ourselves off from our most intimate access to the world of the other animals, the plants, the soil, and the weather patterns. You can’t trust your senses without trusting your own animality and identifying with your body. Not thinking of yourself as a pure spirit that just happens to be housed in a material body, but rather thinking of yourself as this animate two-armed, two-legged form that is able to speak only by virtue of the tongue moving between your teeth and lips. Just like that spider or that coyote loping through the field, I, too, am an animal born of this Earth, co-evolved with the spiders, with the coyotes, with the oak trees. I am entirely of this earthly world, an expression of Earth engaging with other facets of this animate, breathing biosphere. So, we need to start to identify with our animality, and begin to celebrate it.

ANFISA VRUBEL — I love how you bring magic back to this realm because in looking for magic somewhere else, it’s easy to forget just how magical this world is. Reality is stranger than fiction and our cosmologies.

DAVID ABRAM — When we look for it somewhere else, we rob this world of its outrageous weirdness and mystery. The earthly world of forms is inexhaustibly magical, filled with shadowed wonders. It’s a world of worlds within worlds. There are so many different styles and rhythms pulsing through our world, really an infinitude of dynamic forms. And we have, within us, an echo of every other body in this earthly biosphere. My body is a variant of that anthill and that aspen grove and that apple tree, just as that apple tree is a variation of my own flesh. So, this creaturely body grants me a capacity to feel into a storm cloud as it’s gathering and work out what the weather might be, simply by virtue of being a body myself, a thickening of cloud stuff into flesh.

ANFISA VRUBEL — Do you think the ecological crisis is a crisis of empathy and perception as much as, if not more than, a crisis of institutions and our entrenched ideologies?

DAVID ABRAM — When we look at the world as a set of objects, we can’t engage with it with any open-ended creativity, and so we stop sensing the earth at all. It begins to seem like a mute, unintelligible backdrop against which human actions unfold. That blindness to the Earth’s creative dynamism has created this crisis that threatens our lives as much as any other. It’s very much a crisis of participation.

ANFISA VRUBEL — Well, one hopes that more and more people are waking up and sharing these ideas and trying to forge new ways of participating with the world and each other. Hopefully that can be a counterweight to what is happening.

DAVID ABRAM — Yes. Our ways of speaking profoundly influence our ways of seeing, hearing, and even tasting the earth around us. My sense is that human language is born in a kind of call and response, not just with other humans but also with the world that itself speaks in a myriad of tongues — birdsong, of course, but also cricket rhythms or the splashing speech of waves on the beach are kinds of voices. Similarly, the wind in the willows is filled with meaning for our animal body. What if we begin speaking with more attention to the voices of all these other beings? Because if all these beings speak, then they are also listening to one another and to us. How would it affect our voices to feel that the world itself speaks in an infinitude of tongues? We might begin speaking
with more attention to the sound spell of our words, with more attention to the full-bodied resonance and rhythm and texture and tonality of our speaking — that is, speaking as full-bodied animals to other full-bodied animals, oral poetics as re-enchantment, word magic as a way of waking ourselves up again to the uncanny weirdness of the “real.”

END