Myth, art, and language in the phenomenological presence of the landscape
Excerpt from: “Singing the World into Existence”
In my dissertation research, I investigated the nature of language as an articulation of the animistic quality of perception, that far from being exclusive to humans, belongs primarily to the more-than-human world. Here, landscape is understood through the work of David Abram not as the pictorial scene, but rather as the living ecosystem and natural environment in which a culture is situated, and thus part of. With reference to the phenomenological perspectives of Merleau-Ponty and the work of David Abram. This is an extraction of broader research which considers potential structural differences underlying the artistic framework between literate Western cultures and oral, indigenous societies from North America and Australia. I argue that such differences manifest due to the divergent modalities of construction and expression of meaning through the use of language.
Before Western civilisation locked itself in the literary matrix of self-reflectivity, as discussed in the previous chapter, human experience directly responded to entities dwelling in the surrounding living land, or bioregion, still almost untouched by self-regarding human activity and the structural imposition of the human mind. And so, the channel of communication between the land and humankind was active and sound. The perceivable world, as I have argued, carries meaning within its sensuous presence, ready to be revealed to attentive sentient awareness. And when the act of perception, as articulated by Merleau-Ponty, discloses its reversibility, or exchange with the world, a proper attunement with the object uncovers its animateness. This still happens within indigenous cultures, also named ‘oral cultures,’ for they have never fully transferred their sensory participation to the structures of a formal writing system. The landscape is still alive, aware, and expressive to them, every element carries a meaning ready to be revealed. Abram writes: As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone. The language spoken by the natives of a land is not something separate from it. The bird song and the human call are no more than diverse voices of the same terrain, different expression of a vibrating bioregion. Human language is just the last song created, informed and thought by David Abram (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world.
“And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals dumb.”
Furthermore, the human field of discourse is situated in the natural landscape and the latter remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning. At the end of the day, our rivers still rush to the sea, they wash and splash on the banks, gushing and crushing on sturdy rocks. To oral people, who live in onomatopoeic resonance with the world, speech remains as much a property of the animate landscape as of the humans who dwell and speak within that terrain. So, the linguistic discourse is commonly bound, in specific and palpable ways, to the expressive earth. In the territory enclosed between the Koyukuk and Yukon rivers, the Kuyokon people speak a language in which words uttered by human mouth are so similar to the bird’s cry that the sound and pronunciation of some sung phrases maintains its integrity, so that it happens that a cross-species exchange of meaning takes place.
Outer and Inner Landscape
Absence of writing also implies that language in oral cultures cannot be objectified as a separate entity by those who speak it. The experience of language is that of fleeting sounds felt bodily and not conceptually, distinct blocks of ideas arranged to direct to a specific meaning. Abram argues that “[the] 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. And consequentially their endeavours and behaviours as a culture in itself.”This is firstly manifest in an inclusive self-awareness – rather than an exclusive self-reflectivity – as regards the hosting terrain.
Society itself, Joseph Campbell explains, acts as an organ of a larger organism, which is the bioregion, the world in which the tribe moves.Such landscape, however, does not end on the surface of the body’s skin. On the contrary, it permeates such membrane to extend inwardly into the non-physical subjective experience of emotion and thought. The boundaries of a living body are a surface of metamorphosis and exchange between an outer and an inner zone of experience. The body in between is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, an organism where physical and psychological phenomena are in active, reciprocal interplay. This interwoven connection between the presence of the subject and the presence of the earth, nurtures a felt web of meaning, an embodied psychological state, sustained by the fabric of ancestral stories, which constitute a keystone in the healthy life of the tribe.
Rather than a system of belief, secluded to the conjectures of anxious imagination, these stories are present within each moment. They are lived and lived again in the continuous re-enactment of rites and ceremonies; for a rite, as Joseph Campbell clarifies, is the enactment of a myth.“The main theme in ritual”, as Campbell explains, “is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure [the society and the land—a more-than-human society] than that of his own physical body.” The means to perform the rites are in themselves creative activities. The creation of art and the art object are invested with a ritualistic meaning of spiritual or psychologically relevant depth, and charged with conscious intention, usually directed towards the restoration of harmony and balance.
This is visible in Navajo culture, where the activity of sandpainting accompanies most major ceremonies (Image of Navajo Sandpainting). Sandpainting is done by letting dry pigment trickle through the thumb and index fingers onto a cleared and smoothened earth floor. The pigment is obtained from red, yellow and white sandstone, as well as from corn meal, plant pollens, crushed flower petals and charcoal. The composition ranges from a few inches to twenty feet in diameter, and is made exclusively by Navajo elders engaged in the activity of sandpainting...
Photo of Navajo Sandpainting “ to create a space ‘where the gods come and go’.
Source: https://balkhandshambhala.blogspot.com/2013/03/hozho.html
1 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. (New York: Vintage Books, Penguin Random House LLC, 2017 [1996])p. 139; p. 13 “And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals dumb.”
2 Richard Nelson, “Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 109: “Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words, their meanings derived from events in the Distant Time, events recalled in stories that make the birds’ phrases clear. What is striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s pattern, so that someone who knows birdsongs can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in Koyukon. Not only the rhythm comes through, but also some of the tone, the “feel” that goes with it.”
3 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 72.
4 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live by (London: The Guernsey Press Co. Ltd, 1973), 112