Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders Here
September 6, 2024
from “The Ecology of Magic”
in The Spell of the Sensuous
by David Abram
“Living in a little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali, David Abram found himself ‘falling in space.’”—THE
David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher who lectures and teaches widely on several continents. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997). In our paragraph of the week from The Spell of the Sensuous he considers the role of the shaman as the intermediary between humans and the natural world.
The Paragraph of the Week
The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and "journeys," he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it—not just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale of a harvest or the size of a hunt are always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others.
—David Abram
Commentary
Living in a little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali, David Abram found himself “falling in space.” A river of stars glowed above and their reflection in water seemed like “the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever.” Then, fireflies! It was magical. In The Spell of the Sensuous he explains that he earned spending money in college by doing sleight of hand tricks and travelled Europe as a street magician. Later. as a student of the psychology of perception, he studied the ways of the shaman from his hut in Indonesia. He learned that the tribal shaman “acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field.” Through rituals and ecstatic “journeys” he ensures that nature and humanity maintain a “balanced and reciprocal” relationship. In the West we view nature mechanistically because the “inner world...like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth.” The shaman does not seek to transcend the earth, but to propel “his awareness laterally” “into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface.”
—THE
~ ~ ~
Subscribe to The Humble Essayist
Due to the toxic nature of much social media, we no longer promote our site on X and only once or twice a week on Facebook. The best way to keep up with us is to add your name to our growing list of subscribers, and we will send free, brief, weekly reminders of our features with a link to the page directly to your email. Please click on the blue button to subscribe.
~ ~ ~
Announcements
News from Great River Review
Three lyric essays by Steven Harvey appear in the newest edition of Great River Review. The first piece, called “Oakleaf Hydrangea” begins this way:
"The oakleaf hydrangea winking at me over the top of my book carves a saucy shape in the mind standing boldly as itself between me and the rest of the world, hands on hips as it were, the woody bush a swirl like the vessel of water it is named for..."
Learn more here.
Listen to the Dan Hill Podcast on The Beloved Republic
at The New Books Network
Dan Hill interviews author Steven Harvey about politics, family, race, and being The Humble Essayist on his radio program at the New Books Network.
Here.
Return to main feature here.
News from The Humble Essayist Press
Beware poets writing prose? Nah. Check out the new releases from The Humble Essayist Press! Essay collections by two award-winning poets. Learn more here.
The Beloved Republic Review
Thanks to Tarn Wilson for her review of The Beloved Republic at the River Teeth website. She writes: “In his titular essay 'The Beloved Republic,' Harvey makes this heartening promise to those who feel worried and wearied, helpless in the face of 'war and tyranny,' that by devoting ourselves to lives of steady kindness, creativity, and friendship we are joining an invisible, benevolent army.” Read the full review here.
Brevity
Thanks to Brevity magazine for publishing the short prose piece “The Hermit Thrush.”
You can read the entire piece at Brevity here.
Hunger Mountain
Thanks to Hunger Mountain for publishing “Aubade,” my exploration of perception in lyric prose. It begins with this epigraph from the artist Paul Cézanne: “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”
You can read the entire brief piece here.
Zone 3 Interview on The Beloved Republic
Thanks to Amy Wright and the folks at Zone 3 for granting me an interview about my new book. Amy reads with discernment, asks great and surprising questions, and listens carefully to the answers. Check out the question she opens with in the sidebar--it goes right to the heart of the matter! See the full interview here.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
Trailer One
Trailer Two
~ ~ ~
The Beloved Republic
I am pleased to announce that my fourth collection of personal essays won the Wandering Aengus Press nonfiction award and has been nominated for two Pushcarts. Thanks to the Press for this honor.
What is the Beloved Republic? E. M. Forster, who coined the phrase, called it “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who “have the power to endure” and “can take a joke.” Pitted against authoritarianism, the Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. Taking Forster’s phrase for its title, my book can be read as dispatches from that besieged land.
Available online and at bookstores. Learn more at the author's website
~ ~ ~
Folly Beach
Folly Beach is a book-length personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. It never loses sight of the inevitable losses that life brings, but doesn't let loss have the last word. In the face of the grim, Folly Beach holds up the human capacity to create as our sufficient joy.
—THE
“In a world of loss, creativity is the best revenge.”
You can learn more about the recent work of Steven Harvey at his author's page here.
THE Mission
We at The Humble Essayist are in love with the paragraph, that lowliest of literary techniques. A sentence stands out as a noble thing: a complete thought. But what is a paragraph? And what, in particular, is a good one? You know it when you read it--that is our article of faith. So on Friday of each week, beginning on Independence Day 2014, the very day 169 years earlier that Henry Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, we will select a single paragraph from an essay or a reflective memoir and print it here along with a paragraph of commentary. We will choose paragraphs that are surprising, beautifully written, and, above all, thematic--illuminating the author's comment on life. Each paragraph of the week is, in short, a concise review of the writer's work. We hope that this page will introduce you to many exciting authors and their ideas.
The Humble Essayist thanks Clipartpal for the public domain artwork of "The Old Man Reading" that is the logo for the site.
