Dear Life

Since I enjoyed Runaway so much I thought I'd try another book of Alice Munro short stories.  Dear Life is actually her most recent short story collection (2012), and given that she's 89, probably the last one.  While these stories are still finely crafted, with the same understated and allusive rural canadian drama, I think I enjoyed Runaway more.  Munro seems to have moved further in the direction of short and inconclusive sketches.  They are models of economy and implication, as I think a short story should be, but somehow many of them left me wishing for more exploration or elaboration -- not an ending maybe, but perhaps more of a clear direction.  Most of these stories tail off like a trail that got washed away.  If this sort of thing interests you, it's worth noting that the last few stories, including the title story are announced as mostly autobiographical.  Strangely, these actually struck me as the weakest stories in the whole collection.  

The Spell of the Sensuous

Sometimes, paradoxically, a book is so obviously an ally that our discussion of it can end up sounding like one long critique.  I think this happens when the ideas are close enough to our own that we feel a strong need to distinguish ourselves from them as from our double.  No one finds as many problems with an idea as the person who, having had it yesterday, woke this morning to a realization of its partiality.  Before we start then, I should make clear that David Abram's The Spell of the Sensous is a wide-ranging, insightful, and thought provoking book.  It's beautifully written (though at times he takes the poetry a bit overboard for my taste).  The main idea is something I am entirely sympathetic to -- the development of civilization has changed the way we think about and even perceive the world in deep and fundamental ways.  And I learned a lot about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Pintupi and Koyukon stories, and the history of the alphabet.  So, overall, I highly recommend the book.  

Now I'm going to tell you about all the things that are wrong with it.  Abram's basic thesis is pretty simple.  He thinks the alphabet fucked us up.  You can see that the thesis has two parts.  

1. We're fucked up.
2. It was the alphabet that did it.

If that sounds overly simplistic to you, you've identified the first problem with the book.  

Abram's tries to show us how human consciousness of our environment has shifted over time.  We've moved from our ancestor's intensely local, physical, and sensous participation in an enveloping animistic environment, to our current more global, cerebral, and detached interaction with an environment we see as merely a mechanical entity we can exploit.  He illustrates this older way of looking at the world by examining how various oral cultures that survived into the 20th century tell stories about their direct sensuous participation in their particular environment.  In the meantime, he denounces our more recent idea that we are an immaterial consciousness merely imprisoned in a physical body, because he sees a direct line between that idea and our current (as of 1996) environmental crisis.  Then he attributes the shift between these two mindsets to the invention of the alphabet.  

Which, as a historical thesis, is just ridiculously oversimplified.  No doubt the technology of the alphabet, and the way it lends itself to a more universal literacy, has had a profound impact on human society.  In fact, for as much as we talk about it all the time, I think we dramatically underestimate the impact of simple technologies on the shape of our world.  Language.  Agriculture.  Writing.  The alphabet.  The printing press.  Double entry bookkeeping.  Corporations.  Radio.  The internet.  These technologies all changed the world in profound ways, and generally we don't even think of most of them as technologies.  But if it's a clear oversimplification to draw a straight line between even the radio and Hitler, how much more tenuous is laying global warming at the footsteps of the first written vowel?  This is when history starts to verge on conspiracy theory.  In his conclusion, Abram admits to the problem, and acknowledges that there were many causes of the shift in worldview he discusses, not the least of which would be the shift to sedentary agriculture.  To wit, every single "oral" culture he discusses in the book turns out to also be a nomadic hunter-gatherer-pastoralist culture as well.  So much for the control group.  He also tells us that he wasn't trying to present a historical thesis but merely to "tell us a story" about how we lost our connection to nature, a just so story akin to the Aboriginal one about how Little Wallaby Man pissed the Ooldea soak into existence.  This disclaimer would have been a lot more convincing if he'd put it at the beginning of the book.

While soft-pedaling his historical argument seems disingenuous, he's right that we can get more out of the book by reading it in allegorical and poetic fashion.  There are quite a few lovely and provocative images meant to upend our modern techno-scientific worldview.  These all center on the way our embodied physicality comes before our ability to represent the world and our inner self.  So, for example, instead of thinking of our perception as picking out discrete objects in the world, he encourages us to see our senses as participating in an ongoing exchange with an entirely animate environment, which, "... ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth"(62).  Merlau-Ponty's ideas about the reciprocal sensing and sensibility of the perceiving 'flesh' then dovetails with the animism he attributes to all oral cultures who don't see themselves as fully separate from their environment.  Likewise, before we see language as a representational or propositional code specific to humans, we can appreciate its kinship with the expressive music of our environment, the songs of birds and insects and streams.  Even our seemingly innate notions of homogeneous empty space and linearly passing time can be seen as reductions of a more originary embodied space-time.  We began in a local and heterogeneous space we call the landscape, filled with particular formations, each with a story that connects us to them as we literally move through the space.  On the other hand, our sense of time is just a metaphor for hidden dimensions of our immediate sensual world -- the past lives hidden underground, the future is just over the visible horizon, and even the present is filled with the mystery of the air, hidden in plain sight.  I don't think these metaphors we live by make for compelling history, cognitive science, or philosophy because they are simply too reductive.  But they do provide some different ways of conceptualizing our experience, which makes them hugely valuable.  

Abram is also right that we can learn a lot by exploring the new metaphors that come with the act of writing.  The first of these is covered in Plato's famous discussion in Phaedrus of the impact of writing on memory.  Written symbols form a kind of portable and external memory that can come to supplant our own internal memory palace.  This severs the connection between oral memory and spatial location, and encourages a culture like the Hebrews to conceive their entire history as contained in the book rather than the land.  The Greeks of course take the system a step further than the Jews by adding written vowels.  This takes all the participatory guesswork out of reading a sea of consonants and creates a perfect synesthesia where the marks on the page literally speak to us.  And lo, the voice of the author, with its concomitant linear internal subjectivity, is born!  Finally, how could the identity of the written symbol, and the particularly arbitrary identity of the letter with a syllable, not lend itself to thinking of signs in the world as an immaterial code that represents what it codifies?  This metaphor will eventually turn all of nature into a book, albeit written in the language of mathematics (though this is still mostly Greek to me).   

So we are left with the question of what to make of all these metaphors.  If we leave aside the dubious historical thesis about the role of the alphabet, we are still left with "original" metaphors about our continuous sensuous interaction with the world and later "derived" metaphors that qualitatively separate our mind from our body and our self from the world.  Which means that story has the narrative arc of The Fall, and the alphabet figures as Original Sin.  This is exactly where I start to have deep philosophical problems with the book.  Not just because of the moralistic christian pessimism of its unquestioned assumption number 1: we're fucked up.  But because the desire to turn the narrative into a morality tale leads to all kinds of irreparable philosophical blind spots.  It commits Abram to seeing phenomenology as a science of direct or immediate non-conceptual experience.  It commits him to romanticizing this experience as "ab-original" just as it commits him to romanticizing the Aborigines.  It blinds him to the incredible creativity of the new evolutionary processes set off by the technologies of language and writing.  And, most fundamentally, it commits him to knowing what it means to be human, knowing that the only true and authentic way to happiness is through the life of the land, back to the Garden of Eden we have so despoiled.  This sort of certainty is philosophically and pragmatically problematic.

There is no original experience.  There is no direct and firm bedrock of what your experience is "really like" that you can arrive at through introspection of either the phenomenological, scientific, or buddhist sort.  And so there are also no invalid experiences.  None of experience is second class or derived or illusory.  None of those categories make any sense without their opposite.  All experience is just experience.  We can gain a great deal from inspecting it, but what we can't do is get back to its root or ground or origin.  We can't recognize with certainty any of those starting points, for certainty is itself just another experience.

Those observations may sound depressing or limiting, but I see them in exactly the opposite light.  Because without an origin, we escape from the narrative of The Fall.  Which means we also escape from its sin and its end, always our present infamy.  The lack of origin liberates.  It opens up the possibility of continuing to discover more experience.  It makes the question of what is valuable in experience open-ended, does not foreclose in advance on new possibilities in the name of an authentic and aboriginal way of life.  This may rob us of our moral high ground on environmental degradation, but in its place, it gives us the ability to sift through all our modern experience and evaluate what works and what doesn't.  What we lose in Good and Evil, but we gain in good and bad.  

We can phrase this thought in the more concrete terms of the book.  In a sense, it is one long expression of the idea that we are just animals, enmeshed in an animistic world where everything lives and breathes with an animal power.  This idea immediately makes me hear Spinoza's great protest against the limits of our knowledge: "we don't even know what a body can do".  Spinoza wanted to remove the limits we arbitrarily place on the body to circumscribe its possibilities.  Who knows, maybe a body can even think.  The same question, though, applies to any concept we want to use as the origin point for our thoughts.  We're just animals, but we don't even know what an animal can do.  An animal invented writing and everything else that now "artificially" separates it from the rest of the animate world.  Maybe technology itself is an animal, reproducing itself just like a virus.  If it's fine to breathe life into the rocks and streams, then why deny it to anything a particular hairless chimp did after 800 BCE?  What's more, it's clear than the phonetic alphabet does not create the power of abstraction and representational codification that so incenses Abram.  It merely accelerates a possibility that has been there from the beginning of language.  So maybe the more authentic animal state is the entirely pre-linguistic one, in which case we're going to disqualify birds and dolphins because they possess at least some power of representative communication.  These arbitrary dividing lines define a concept that will serve as an essential origin point and limit for what it means to be a human animal.  But these sorts of lines can never be understood as anything other than phase transitions in some ongoing process.  We need to explore this process that defines 'animality' by linking up various animals as they transform into one another.  Instead, Abram offers us a definition of animal that relies on little more than a howl of moral outrage whenever we transgress the lines he happens to have in mind.