(excerpt from “The Spell of the Sensuous“, by David Abram)

The Indistinction of Space and Time in the Oral Universe.

We touch here upon one of the most intransigent barriers preventing genuine understanding between the modern, alphabetized West and indigenous, oral cultures. Unlike linear time, time conceived as cyclical cannot be readily abstracted from the spatial phenomena that exemplify it–from, for instance, the circular trajectories of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Unlike a straight line, moreover, a circle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. Indeed, the visible space in which we commonly find ourselves when we step outdoors is itself encompassed by the circular enigma that we have come to call “the horizon.” The precise contour of the horizon varies considerably in different terrains, yet whenever we climb to a prominent vantage point, the cicular character of the visible world becomes explicit. Thus cyclical time, the experiential time of an oral culture, has the same shape as perceivable space. And the two circles are, in truth, one:

The lakota define the year as a circle around the border of the world. The circle is a symbol of both the earth(with its encircling horizons) and time. The changes of sunup and sundown around the horizon during the course of the year delinate the contours of time, time as a part of space.

On high plateaus in the Rocky Mountains, where the visible horizon is especially vast and wide, are circular arrangements of stones arrayed around a central hub. It is known that such “medicine wheels,” still used by various North American tribes, once served a calendrical function. Or, rather, they enabled a person to orient herself within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely temporal–the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of the sun’s northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in time(the summer solstice) as in space. A similar unity–of that which to us are two different dimensions, the spatial and the temporal–existed among the Aztecs at the time of the conquest, according to Diego Duran, a spanish monk who arrived in Mexico in the first half of the sixteenth century:

Duran reports that among the Aztecs, who distribute their years into cycles according to the cardinal points, “the years most feared by the people were those of the North and of the West, since they remembered that the most unhappy events had taken place under those signs.

So a cyclical mode of time does not readily distinguish itself from the spatial field in which oral persons find themselves experientially immersed. We must remember, however, that this experiential space is itself very different from the static, homogeneous void that alphabetic civilization has come to call “space.” As we saw above, space, for an oral culture, is directly experienced as place, or as places–as a differentiated realm containing diverse sites, each of which has it’s own power, its own way of organizing our senses and influencing our awareness. Unlike the abstraction of an infinite and homogeneous “space,” place is from the first a qualitative matrix, a pulsing or potentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness. It is a mode of space, then, that is always already temporal, and we should not be surpsied that oral peoples speak of what to us are purely spatial phenomena as animate, emergent processes, and of space itself as a kind of dynamism, a continual unfolding. For instance, a recent book-length analysis of spatial concepts among the Dine, or Navajo, concludes that for them

[s]pace, like the entities or objects within it, is dynamic. That is, all “entities”, “objects”, or similar units of action and perception must be considered as units that are engaged in continuous processes. In the same way, spatial units and spatial relationships are “qualitative” in this same sense and cannot be considered to be clearly defined, readily quantifiable and static in essence.

The authors assert, therefore, that a complex notion of space-time(or, in their words, “time-space”) would likely be a more relevant translation of Navajo experience “then clearly distinct concepts of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space.”

A similar situation was discoverd by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in his extensive analyses of the Hopi language during the 1930s and early 1940s. Whorf found no analog, in the Hopi language, to the linear, sequential, uniformly flowing time that Western civilzation takes for granted. Indeed, Whorf found no reference to any independent temporal dimension of reality, and no terms of expressions that “refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by implication leave a residue that could be referred to as time.” What we call time, in orther words, could not be isolated from the Hopi experience of space:

In this Hopi view, [that which we call] time disappears and [that which we call] space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical newtonian mechanics.

Whorf’s fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by researchers in other disciplines, to mean, among other things, that the Hopi people have no temporal awareness whatsoever, or that the Hopi language is utterly static, and has no way of distinguishing between earlier and later events, or between occurrences more or less distant from the speaker in what we would call time. Such misreadings, doubtless encourage by Whorf’s occasional propensity for vigorous overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to decry Whorf’s findings. Several researchers, working closely with the Hopi language, claim to have refuted Whorf’s conclusions entirely. Such refutations, however, are themselves dependent upon an oversimplified reading of Whorf’s conclusions, upon a crusading refusal to discern that Whorf was not asserting an absence of temporal awareness among the Hopi, but rather an absence, in their discourse, of any metaphysical concept of time that could be isolated from their dynamic awareness of spatiality.

While Whorf did not find separable notions of space and time among the Hopi, he did discern, in the Hopi language, a distinction between two basic modalities of existence, which he terms the “manifested” and the “manifesting.” The “manifested” corresponds roughly to our notion of “objective” existence, and it comprises “all that is or has been accessible to the senses…with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future.” The “manifesting,” on the other hand,

comprises all that we call future, but not merely this; it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental–everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature, in the heart of nature [itself]

The “manifested,” in other words, is that aspect of phenomena already evident to our senses, while the “manifesting” is that which is not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed to be psychologically gathering itself towards manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena. One’s own feeling, thinking, and desiring are a part of, and hence participant with, this collective desiring and preparing implicit in all things–from the emergence and fruition of the corn, to the formation of clouds and the bestowal of rain. Indeed, human intention, especially when concentrated by communal ceremony and prayer, contributes directly to the becoming manifested of such phenomena.

While the language of the Hopi belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, the neighboring Dine, or Navajo, speak an Athapaskan language–like the Koyukon and other tribes of the far Northwest, from whence the ancestors of the Apache and the Navajo first headed south many centuries ago. (The nomadic Navajo first came into contact with the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande valley around six hundred years ago, and ultimately adopted a range in the Arizona desert less then two hundred years ago.) Nevertheless, the navajo language also seems to maintain a broad notion of the influence of human desire and imagination upon a continually emergent world, a notion very analogous to that found by Whorf among the Hopi. In the 1983 study of navajo semantics alluded to earlier, the authors claim that “existence,” for the Navajo “should be understood as a continuous manifestation…[as] a series of events, rather then states or situational persistences through time.” They then go on to suggest that what Western people call “the future” is experienced by the Navajo to be

like a stock of possibilities, of incompletely realized events and circumstances. They [these circumstances] are still most of all ‘becoming’ (rather then being) and involved in a process of ‘manifesting’ themselves. A human being can, through his thought and desire, exert an influence on these ‘possibles.’

Thus, in place of any clear distinction between space and time, we find, in examples of both the Uto-Aztecan and the Athapaskan language groups, a subtle differentiation between manifest and unmanifest spatiality–that is, a sense of space as a continual emergence from implicit to explicit existence, and of human intention as participant with this encompassing emergence.

The indistinction of space and time was also evident in our discussion, in the last chapter, of Aboriginal Australian notions of the Alcheringa, or Dreamtime does not refer to the past in any literal sense(to a time that is finished and done with), but rather to the temporal and psychological latency of the enveloping landscape. Different paths through the present terrain resonate with different stories from the Dreamtime, and indeed every water hole, every forest, every cluster of boulders or dry creekbed has its own Dreaming, its own implicit life. The vitality of each place, moreover, is rejuvenated by the human enactment, and en-chant-ment, of the storied events that crouch within it. The dreamtime, then, is integral to the spatial surroundings. It is not a set of accomplished events located in some finished past, but is the very depth of the experiential present–the earthly sleep, or dream, out of which the visible landscape continually comes to presence. And once again human dreaming, human intention, human action and chanting participate vividly in this coming-to-presence.

Numerous other examples could be cited. These few instances, from opposite sides of the earth, should suffice at least to demonstrate that separable “time” and “space” are not absolute givens in all human experience. It is likely that without a formal system of numerical and linguistic notation it is not possible to entirely abstract a uniform sense of progressive “time” from the direct experience of the animate, emergent environment–or, what amounts to the same thing, to freeze the dynamic experience of earthly place into the intuition of a static, homogeneous “space.” If this is the case, then writing must be recognized as a necessary condition for the belief in an entirely distinct space and time.

This post was about: apache, books, Hopi, human worldviews, Koyukon, language, Navajo, oral history

(excerpt from “The Spell of the Sensuous“, by David Abram)

The Abstraction of Space and Time

As the technology of writing encounters and spreads through a previously oral culture, the felt power and personality of particular places begins to fade. For the stories that express and embody that power are gradually recorded in writing. Writing down oral stories renders them separable, for the first time, from the actual places where the events in those stories occurred. The tales can now be carried elsewhere; they can be read in distant cities or even on alien continents. The stories, soon, come to seem independent of any specific locale.

Previously, the power of spoken tales was rooted in the potency of the particular places where their events unfolded. While the recounting of certain stories might be provoked by the specific social situations, their instructive value and moral efficacy was often dependent (as we saw with the Western Apache) upon one’s visible or sensible contact with the actual sites where those stories took place. Other stories might be provoked by a direct encounter with the species of bird or animal whose exploits figure prominently in the tales, or with a particular plant just beginning to flower, or by local weather patterns and seasonal changes. In such cases, contact with the regional landscape–and the diverse sites or places within that landscape–was the primary mnemonic trigger of the oral stories, and was thus integral to the preservation of those stories, and of the culture itself.

Once the stories are written down, however, the visible text comes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stores–the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly traces left by the animals, and by one’s ancestors, in their interactions with the local land. The places themselves are no longer necessary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human events that might just as easily have happened elsewhere. The trans-human, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely, In this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, per formative character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing stories that once sprouted from every cave and stream bed and cluster of trees on its surface, begins to lose its multiplicitious power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually, the felt primacy of place is forgotten, superseded by a new, abstract notion of “space” as homogeneous and placeless void.

Of course, many factors other then, but linked to, writing, contributed to the loss of a full and differentiated sense of place. The development of writing in the Middle East, as in China, and Mesoamerica, was accompanied by a large increase in the scale of human settlements, as well as by a concomitant growth in the human ability, or willingness, to manipulate and cultivate the earth, although the earliest shifts from hunting and foraging lifestyles to more sedentary, agricultural modes of subsistence are very ancient, and may have been prompted by climatic changes at the end of the last ice age, once the agricultural revolutions began to accelerate, writing began to play an important role in the stabilization and subsequent spread of the new, sedentary economies. The ability to precisely measure and inventory agricultural surpluses, itself made possible by numerical and linguistic notation, enabled the new, highly centralized cities to survive and perpetuate themselves–especially through times of climactic extremity–and ultimately enabled the commercial trading of surpluses, and the rise of nation-states. The new concentration of persons within permanent towns and cities, and the increased dependence upon the regulation and manipulation of spontaneous natural processes, could only intensify the growing estrangement of the human senses from the wild, animate diversity in which those senses had evolved. But my concern in this work is neither with agriculture nor urbanization–the enormous influences of which have been elucidated in numerous volumes–but rather with the curious question of writing; that is, with the influence of writing upon the human senses and upon our direct sensorial experience of the earth around us.

We have seen that alphabetic writing functions to undermine the embedded, place specific character of oral cultures in two distinct but related ways. One basically perceptual, the other primarily linguistic. First, reading and writing, as a highly concentrated form of participation, displaces the older participation between the human senses and the earthly terrain (effectively freeing human intention from the direct dictates of the land). Second, writing down the ancestral stories disengages them from particular places. This double retreat, of the senses and of spoken stories, from the diverse places that had once gripped them, cleared the way for the notion of a pure and featureless “space”–an abstract conception that has nevertheless come to seem, today, more primordial and real then the earthly places in which we remain corporeally embedded.

But if alphabetic writing was an important factor in the emergence of abstract, homogeneous “space”, it was no less central to the emergence of abstract, linear “time.” To indigenous, oral cultures, the ceaseless flux that we call “time” is overwhelmingly cyclical in character. The senses of an oral people are still attuned to the land around them, still conversant with the expressive speech of the winds and the forest birds, still participant with the sensuous cosmos. Time, in such a world, is not separable from the circular life of the sun and moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the animals–from the eternal return of the greening earth.

Today it is easy for most of us, living amid the ever-changing constructions of literate, technological civilzation, to conceive and even feel, behind all of the seasonal recurrences in the sensuous terrain, the inexorable thrust of a linear and irreversible time. But for cultures without writing there is simply no separate vantage point from which to view and take note of the subly emutations and variations in the endless cycles of nature. Those changes that we noticed are often assumed to be part of other, larger cycles. For the overall trajectory of the visible, tangible world–the world disclosed to humankind by our unaided senses–is circular. Thus, in the words of Hehaka Sapa, or Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux:

“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle…The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round…Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves…”

The curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articulate on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line. Yet to fully engage, sensorially, one with one’s earthly surroundings is to find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles. The ancestral stories of an oral culture are recounted again and again–only thus can they be preserved–and this regular, often periodic repetition serves to bind the human community to the ceaseless round dance of the cosmos. The mythic creation stories of these cultures are not, like WEstern bibilical accounts of the world’s creation, descriptions of events assumed to have happened only once in the faroff past. Rather, the very telling of these stories actively participates in a creative process that is felt to be happening right now, an ongoing emergence whose periodic renewal actually requires such participation, Mircea Eliade, in his important and enigmatic work Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, has shown as well as any scholar the extent to which indigenous peoples inhabit a cyclical time periodically regenerated through the ritual repetition of mythic events. Within “archaic” cultures (Eliade’s term), every effective activity–from hunting, fishing, gathering plants, to winning a sexual partner, constructing a home, or giving birth–is the recurrence of an archetypal event enacted by ancestral or totemic powers in the mythic times.

By performing such activities with care, employing the very phrases and gestures disclosed in the Mythic Time, one actually becomes the ancestral being, and thus rejuvenates the mergent order of the world(just as the Pintupi tribesman on Walkabout, walking in the footsteps of his totem ancestor, is singing the world itself back into existence).

Even highly unusual, extraordinary events are spontaneously assimilated to recurrent mythic prototypes. Thus, Cortes’s arrival on the shores of Mexico is interpreted by the Aztecs as the return of the minor god Quetzalcoatl to his kingdom (an interpretation instantly encouraged and exploited by the sly Cortes himself) similarly Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii is construed by Native Hawaiians as the return of the deity Lono. To oral cultures, and even to a partially literate society like the Aztec (whose largely pictorial writing remained perceptually bound to the visible forms of surrounding nature), human events take on meaning only to the extent that they can be located within a storied universe that continually retells itself; unprecedented events, singular encounters that have no place among the cycling stories, can have no place, either, among the turning seasons or the cycles of the earth and sky. The multiple ritual enactments, the initiatory ceremonies, the annual songs and dances of the hunt and the harvest–all are ways to whereby indigenous peoples-of-place actively engage the rhythms of the more-than-human cosmos, and thus embed their own rhythms within those of the vaster round.

The alphabet alters all this, in order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth. The letters of the alphabet, each referring to a particular sound or sound-gesture of the human mouth, begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves. They thus establish a new reflexivity between the human organism and it’s own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land(the “reflective intellect” is precisely this new reflexive loop, this new “reflection” between ourselves and our written signs). Human encounters and events begin to become interesting in their own right, independent of their relation to natural cycles.

Recording mythic events in writing establishes, as well, a new experience of the permanence, fixity, and unrepeatable quality of those events. Once fixed on the written surface, mythic events are no longer able to shift their form to fit current situations. Current happenings are thus robbed of their mythic, storied resonance;when the myths are written down, contemporary events acquire a naked specifity and uniqueness hitherto unknown. As some of these naked occurences come to be de-scribed or written down, they, too, are thereby fixed in their particularity, and so assume their singular place within the slowly accreting sequence of recorded events. Thus does oral story gradually give way to written history. The cyclical shape of earthly time gradually fades behind the new awareness of an irreversible and rectilinear progression of itemizable events. And historical, linear time becomes apparent.

But now let us step back for a moment. For by discussing in this somewhat cursory manner the influence of alphabetic writing upon the emergence of homogeneous “space” and linear “time”, I have perhaps left the impression that space and time were always–for oral peoples as for ourselves–distinguishable dimensions of experience, and that the literate revolution simply altered the experiential character of these two, already distinct, phenomena. In truth, however, the very differentiation of “space” from “time” was itself born of the same perceptual and linguistic changes that we are discussing. For a time that is cyclical, or circular, is just as much spatial as it is temporal.

Read on in…
Part 3: The Indistinction of Space and Time in the Oral Universe.

This post was about: books, human worldviews, language, oral history

(excerpt from “The Spell of the Sensuous“, by David Abram)

Part I: Abstraction

Stories hold, in their narrative layers, the sedimented knowledge accumulated by our progenitors. To hear a story told and retold in one’s childhood, and to recount that tale in turn when one has earned the right to do so(now inflected by the patterns of one’s own experience and the rhythms of one’s own voice), is to actively preserve the coherence of one’s culture. The practical knowledge, the moral patterns and social taboos, and indeed the very language or manner of speech of any non writing culture maintain themselves primarily through narrative chants, myths, legends, and trickster tales–that is, through the telling of stories.

Yet the stories told within an oral culture are often, as we have seen, deeply bound to the earthly landscape inhabited by that culture. The stories, that is, are profoundly and indissolubly place-specific. The Distant Time stories of the Koyukon, the ‘Agodzaahi tales of the Western Apache, and the Dreaming stories of the Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara present three very different ways whereby tribal stories weave the people who tell them into their particular ecologies. Or, still more precisely, three ways in which earthly locales may speak through the human persons that inhabit them. For meaningful speech is not–in an oral culture–experienced as an exclusively human capacity, but as a power of the enveloping earth itself, in which humans participate.

The stories of such cultures give evidence, then, of the unique power of particular bio regions, the unique ways in which different ecologies call upon the human community. Yet these stories often provide evidence, as well, about specific sites within those larger regions. In the oral, indigenous world, to tell certain stories without saying precisely where those events occurred(or, if one is recounting a vision or dream, to neglect to say where one was when “granted” the vision), may alone render the telling powerless or ineffective.

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site, and indeed to participate in its expressive potency. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there–to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, installing particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personalty, its own intelligence.
Read on in…

(this won’t be live until tomorrow!)
[Part 2] The Abstraction of Space and Time

This post was about: books, human worldviews, language, oral history

He writes a lot about his relationship with wealth. Go glance at it =) It’s neighborwealth.com.

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this guy has some awesome moves! i’ve never seen anyone lay down on a slackline before…not to mention a HIGHLY sick location. i’ll have to keep m eyes open, i feel like mexico probably has some good rock spots like this, i’ve never even considered it before…usually i just look for trees.

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