Landscape.

“Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses.  A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.  It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.” – David Abram

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NOAO

http://www.noao.edu/icarchives/all.php

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“Whenever we of literate culture seek to engage an understand the discourse of oral cultures, we must strive to free ourselves from our habitual impulse to visualize any language as a static structure that could be diagrammed, or a set of rules that could be ordered and listed.  Without a formal writing system, the language of an oral culture cannot be objectified as a separate entity by those who speak it, and this lack of objectification influences not only the way in which oral cultures experience the field of discursive meanings, but also the very character and structure of that field.  In the absence of any written dialogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visible counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning.  The land, in other words,  is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates.  In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed the two matrices are not separable.  We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.” – David Abram

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Language.

“In indigenous, oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks.  The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participant with the voices of wolves, wind and waves – participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth.” – David Abram

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Near Providence Mountain

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/33785086

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“….the synaesthesia between the human eyes and ears is especially concentrated in our relation to other animals, since for a million years these “distance” senses were most tightly coupled at such moments of extreme excitement, when closing in on prey, or when escaping from others…..Yet our ears and eyes are drawn together not only by animals, but by numerous other phenomena within the landscape.  And strangely, wherever these two senses converge, we may suddenly feel ourselves in relation with an expressive power, another center of experience.” – David Abram

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Clipper Valley

http://www.mojavenp.org/clipper.htm

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“Trees, for instance, can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind.  Different forms of foliage lend each tree a distinctive voice, and a person who has lived among them will easily distinguish the various dialects of pine trees from the speech of spruce needles or Douglas fir……Certain rock faces and boulders request from us a kind of auditory attentiveness, and so draw our ears into relation with our eyes as we gaze at them, or with our hands as we touch them – for it is only through a mode of listening that we can begin to sense the interior voluminosity of the boulder, its particular density and depth.” – David Abram

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Providence Mountain

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/33785084

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There is an expactancy to the ears, a kind of patient receptivity that they lend to the other senses whenever we place ourselves in the mode of listening – whether to a stone, or a river or an abandoned house.  That so many indigenous people allude to the articulate speech of trees or of mountains suggests the ease with which, in an oral culture, one’s auditory attention may be joined with the visual focus in order to enter into a living relation with the expressive character of things.” – David Abram

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Providence Mountains

http://www.geolocation.ws/v/P/33785082/providence-mountains-state-recreation/en

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“Far from presenting a distortion of their factual relation to the world, the animistic discourse of indigenous, oral peoples is an inevitable counterpart of their immediate, synaesthetic engagement with the land that they inhabit.  The animistic proclivity to perceive the angular shape of a boulder…..as a kind of meaningful gesture, or to enter into felt conversation with clouds and owls – all of this ‘could be brushed aside as imaginary distortion or hallucinatory fantasy if such active participation were not the very structure of perception, if the creative interplay of the senses in the things they encounter was not our sole way of linking ourselves to those things and letting the things weave themselves into our experience.  Direct, prereflective perception is inherently synaesthetic, participatory and animistic, disclosing the things and elements that surround us not as enert objects but as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies.” – David Abram

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