an outline and synopsis of each section of Abram’s two books. Becoming Animal and The Spell Of The Sensous

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An outline and synopsis of each section of Abram’s two books. Becoming Animal and The Spell Of The Sensous
David Abram’s writing of The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry casts an invocation of its own as he takes the audience through a thoroughly researched piece that moderately addresses such apparently scary subjects as where there are past and future, the connection between time and space, and the way the written word helps in protecting or separating human beings from their primal source of sustenance, which is the earth.
Abram writes that only as the written text started to speak would the sounds of the rivers and that of the forest start to wane. He further writes that only then would the language slacken its primal connections with the imperceptible breath, the spirit separates itself from the wind, the spirit also separates itself from the environing air, regarding the severing brought about by the propagation of the written word.
In his writing of The Flesh of Language, Abram consulted an appealing collections of individuals and pieces. He makes use of indigenous song lines, tales from the Koyukon people who reside in the northwestern parts of Alaska, the concept of phenomenology, and the Socrates’ speech to portray a poetic setting, which would illustrate the way people become delinked from the earth in the first place. Nevertheless, with the least environmental doomsaying, we find that the writer talks about how human beings can start covering a sustainable association with the earth together with the nonhuman beings that live among us, in the world that is just more than human.

How did the Western civilization turn out to be so alienated from the nonhuman nature such that the humanity tolerates the continuing damaging of valleys, ecosystems, forests and rivers? In his writing of Philosophy on the Way to Ecology: A Technical Introduction to the Inquiry, Abram, who is a philosopher and ecologist searches for an answer to this issue and this led him to engage with the shamans in Nepal and the Indonesian sorcerers, whereby he researched about how the traditional medicine men monitor connections between the community of human beings and that of the animate. In this inspiring search, he also goes into the concepts of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty that replaced the traditional perception of a single, entirely determinable actuality with a fluid image of the body and mind as a partaking organism, which mutually interacts with its environment.
In Animism and the Alphabet, the writer communicates that the disconnection of human beings from the natural world is to some extent at fault with the alphabet, also claiming that alphabets come from the natural world. Abram backs his reasoning by citing some several popular philosophers all through history like Socrates, Plato among others. Also, he makes comparisons between present day ways to the cultures of Aboriginal individuals.
In the Landscape of Language, Abram describes an exploration of language, together with the power that words may have in enhancing or even smothering the impulsive life of the senses. Abram puts blames on the creation or formation of the phonetic alphabet for introducing a trend toward the rise or enhancement of abstraction and separation from nature. He gathers insights into the best way of healing the fissure from Australian indigenous’ philosophies of the Dreamtime; that is the continuous emergence of the world from conflicts, the Navajo theory of a Holy Wind as well as the significance of breath in Jewish spirituality.
In Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth, conflicting the spoken tales of diverse traditional oral traditions with means of speaking common to the literate civilization, the text unravels the intense impact that writing has had on the experiences of human beings as regards space, earthly place and time.
In The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air, Abram’s topic of discussion is wind and air. He epitomizes the air as the means through which people see all else in the current terrain and a medium to the forgotten earth’s existence. Furthermore, he talks about aboriginal cultures and the manner in which they perceive the air. According to the writers, atmosphere, wind or air pervades nature. In other words, it is within everything. It is actually not only the air around people but also the air that swirls within human beings as they take in the air. Therefore, it is a presence that moves between every individual and provides life all the living things.
In Coda: Turning Inside Out, Abram once more tries to trace the process of separation starting with the ancient Hebrews, as being the first individuals to have a consistent use of phonetic kind of writing, via the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Socrates, the era of Christianity. According to him, the air, initially the very means expressive interchange took place, would turn out to be a more empty and unnoticed issue, substituted by the strange new means of the written word
Becoming Animal by David Abram
Becoming Animal highlights the polysensory lived encounters of the research of Abram. He takes the reader through the forest, sojourning with some gray whales, sea lions as well as extended stay in the area of Himalayas together with shape-shifting magicians. Most of the encounters of Abram are within the framework of the average mind. Others are just beyond any imagination within the Western comprehension. This text much more that the first one by this writer, was a test of his reliability. The boundaries of the systems of the reader’s belief remain chafed and leaving some raw more than just a few times with the way the shape of the shifting humans were described. Towards the pinnacle of the experiences of the writer in the “other than human” jurisdictions, it leaves the reader just wondering if maybe he had taken a side step off the noodle, but continue reading.
In the chapter, “Wood and Stone” Abram expounds on the strength of a large mountain to plainly knock people off their feet, then eventually moves to outline the strength of the painting of Van Gogh’s to stir people (40).
In the chapter “Moods”, the writer wants the reader to comprehend how deeply the states of their feelings or moods are entrenched and instigated by the weather, immobility, rain, wind, rationality and exploring torpor. According to Abram (50), moods are not the internal things, but instead passions given to them by the capricious terrain.
In the chapter “Sleight of Hand,” Abram recollects his experiences studying with ethnic magicians and medicine men in the region of Southeast Asia. Being a sleight of hand artist himself when he was still studying, he moved to Asia for the study of magic but turned out to study about perception that starts as soon as he comes across influential instructors for the first time, and this makes him feel unfit physically, only to realize that he was misinterpreting feelings that were just new to his system (207). Magic is all about insight and the writer notices that his instructors, who are also intermediaries because they are between the two worlds of human and nonhuman, are industrious students of some other creatures.
In the chapter “Mind” the writer encourages people to loosen their idea of mind for locating it out in the world instead of just inside them. He says that sentience was not the private possession of human beings, but live engrossed in intelligence concealed and informed by a formation that cannot be gauged. The writer also explains the structure of taking part in a non-verbal, and more than human creativity, in trying to recall his first long stay camping along in the woods when he was still a college student several years ago.
In the chapter “The Real in Its Wonder,” Abram urges the renewal of the oral-story telling cultures in the traditions that have lost it. He perceives this as an ecological imperative. He believes that when oral culture wades, the mediated minds also loses its demeanors, which makes it forget its continuing debt to the body as well as the breathing earth.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Print.
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Print.