As I mentioned in the earlier article, Abram presents a thorough explanation of the history of phenomenological thought, applying in particular the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to explain how tribal cultures and other creatures appear to see, feel, and perceive the world in a fundamentally different, and more profound way, than we do in our modern Western culture. He goes on to explain why this is, by describing how the invention of the written alphabet, and through it the invention of the concepts of absolute space and separate, linear time, and our conception of the air which surrounds us as merely empty space — allowed Western man to create a separate, thoroughly plausible, abstract reality, that, in the civilized world, with its need for hierarchy, laws, instructions, rules, and restrictions, was (and is) a more useful reality than the ‘real’ one. Over time, this abstracted reality and its artefacts have dulled our sensitivity, our awareness of and ability to reconnect with the ‘real’ world, the sensual world of which we are inextricably a part, and upon which our survival utterly depends, but which we are ever more unaware of, indifferent to, and detached from.

Abram describes the following exercise for reconnecting with the sensuous, for sublimating the abstractions that interfere with our ability to relate to the Earth:

Abram finds this exercise immensely increases his awareness, his ability to perceive the here and now. Indeed, this exercise seems to me not unlike many meditation, relaxation, hallucinogenic and spiritual ‘stand still and look until you really see‘ exercises I have tried before, always, as this time, alas, without success. If this works for you I am envious. Abram paints some lovely pictures of what he senses after this awakening:

As much as I appreciate the beauty of this poetry, it describes to me only another person’s experience, one somehow inaccessible to me. “Today the speaking self looks out at a purely ‘exterior’ nature from a purely ‘interior’ zone, presumably located somewhere inside the physical body or brain,” Abram writes. “Within alphabetic civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual ‘interior’, a private mind or consciousness unrelated to the other minds that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside. There is no longer any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness, and all that exceeds or subtends this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the unconscious. Between civilization and wilderness.”

So here we are, unable to remember the way home, unable to escape the prison, the solitary confinement into which our minds have been so seductively and systematically lured by the culture and language of civilization that now forms and informs the very neural structures of our brain. Only in art, in poetry, in wilderness, in music, and in the rare book that attempts to liberate us with those very abstract words and text-images that carried us away in the first place, those clumsy tools that are simply not up to the task, can we even hear the echoes of the world we have left behind: