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dust_and_shadow:spell_of_the_sensuous [2019-08-28 20:36] nikdust_and_shadow:spell_of_the_sensuous [2019-08-30 08:47] (current) maja
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 +<blockquote>
 +Grandiose guilt will not do; we need to learn to notice what we were blind to, a humble but difficult art. (...) [L]earning this art also means allowing oneself to be touched and induced to think and imagine by what touches us.
 +<cite>Isabelle Stengers, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet</cite>
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +----
 +
 ==== The Spell of The Sensous ==== ==== The Spell of The Sensous ====
  
-by **David Abram** //[excerpts] from "The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a more-than-human world"//+Excerpts from //[[https://doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abram-david_the-spell-of-the-sensuous.pdf|"The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a more-than-human world"]]// by **David Abram**
  
 +----
  
 Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth. Our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth. Our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
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 If we listen, first, to the sounds of an oral language—the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of an oral culture-we will likely find that these elements are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape, to the depth of its valleys or the open stretch of its distances, to the visual rhythms of the local topography. (...) Human language arose not only as a means of attunement between persons, but also between ourselves and the animate landscape. (...) By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience.  If we listen, first, to the sounds of an oral language—the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of an oral culture-we will likely find that these elements are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape, to the depth of its valleys or the open stretch of its distances, to the visual rhythms of the local topography. (...) Human language arose not only as a means of attunement between persons, but also between ourselves and the animate landscape. (...) By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. 
  
 +----
  
 +{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/deziluzija/34697237725/ ?maxwidth=1000}}\\
  
- +----
-<blockquote> +
-Grandiose guilt will not do; we need to learn to notice what we were blind to, a humble but difficult art. (...) [L]earning this art also means allowing oneself to be touched and induced to think and imagine by what touches us. +
-<cite>Isabelle Stengers, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet</cite> +
-</blockquote> +
- +
-{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/deziluzija/34697237725/}}\\ +
  
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
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