Intermediaries

There is a post on the JSBlog, Shamanic Shamuses (Feb 15, 2009), posted by Ray Girvan where he comments on a linguistic discussion of the connection between the words ’shaman’ and ’shamus’ from Language Log. What starts as a linguistic investigation of what was (maybe? probably?) a typographical slip, in Ray’s post, turns into an investigation of ties and similarities between the the nature of what is encompassed by the meaning of the two words.

Both words, ’shaman’ and ’shamus’ — and especially the combination of the two — reminds me of art and artists. Yes, I have a one-track mind. But I think my response is valid. This artist/shamus/shamans connection in turn reminded me of author David Abram and his book, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). As a college student, Abram worked as a sleight-of-hand magician in Alice’s Restaurant (yes the Alice’s Restaurant). He became interested in investigating (shamus-ing) the magic of the shamans of traditional cultures in Southeast Asia — Sri Lanka, various parts of Indonesia, and Nepal. And he did. His book is about what he learned there.

The quotes below are taken from The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram by independent journalist Scott London. My quotes start somewhere in the middle of the interview. From them, you should be able to see why I find parallels between the shamans and artists: 

London : You have used the phrase “boundary keeper” to describe the magician. What do you mean by that?

Abram : I discovered that very few of the medicine people that I met considered their work as healers to be their primary role or function for their communities. So even though they were the healers, or the medicine people, for their villages, they saw their ability to heal as a by-product of their more primary work. This more primary work had to do with the fact that these magicians rarely live at the middle of their communities or in the heart of the village. They always live out at the edge or just outside of the village — out among the rice paddies or in a cluster of wild boulders — because their skills are not encompassed within the human modality. They are, as it were, the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community — the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings. Everything is animate. Everything moves. It’s just that some things move slower than other things, like the mountains or the ground itself. But everything has its movement, has its life. And the magicians were precisely those individuals who were most susceptible to the solicitations of these other-than-human shapes. It was the magicians who could most easily enter into some kind of rapport with another being, like an oak tree, or with a frog.

London : What sort of rapport?

Abram : Every magician that I met had a number of animals or plants or forms of nature that were their close familiars. Just as we speak of the witch’s black cat as her “familiar,” so in these animistic societies the magician might have crows and frogs and perhaps a certain kind of rubber plant as his familiars. It might also be a certain kind of storm — a thunder-storm — a being that, when it appeared in the sky, would tell the magician that it was time to go outside and just gaze at those clouds and learn from them what they might have to teach.

London : In the same way, perhaps, that horses can sense an impending earthquake.

Abram : Right. Other animals function for the magician as another set of senses, another angle from which he can see and hear and sense what’s going on in the surrounding ecology, because we are limited by our human senses, our nervous-system, and our two arms and our two legs. Birds know so much more about what’s going on in the air, in the invisible winds, than we humans can know. If we watch the birds closely, we can begin to learn about what’s going on in the sky and in the air simply by watching their flight patterns

London : Where do they draw the boundary between magic and reality?

Abram : That boundary is not drawn in traditional cultures. In indigenous, tribal, or oral cultures, magic is the way of the world. There is nothing that is not in some way magic, because the fact that the world exists is already quite a wonder. That it stays existing, that it continually keeps holding itself in existence, this is the mystery of mysteries. Magic is the way of the world. It’s that sense of being in contact with so many other shapes of awareness, most of which are so different from our own, that is the basic experience of magic from which all other forms of magic derive.

Abram also has some interesting views on reading; in particular, on children and the written word: 

London : You pointed out that the more we enter into the world of the alphabet, as you called it, the more we close ourselves off to the living world. Perhaps teaching kids to read when they are three or four is not such a good idea after all?

Abram: It’s terrible. Also, children are now being encouraged to get on-line and onto the computer as rapidly as possible. It’s funny because we don’t realize that the astonishing linguistic capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer, nor even in relation to written texts. Rather, it evolved in relation to stories that were passed down orally. For countless millennia, stories and story-telling were the way we humans learned our language. Spoken stories are something that we enter into with our bodies. We feel our way around inside a story.

I think children really need to experience stories and to hear their parents and their uncles and their aunts telling them stories. And I don’t mean reading stories to them, but simply improvising stories face-to-face with a child. Or stepping outside and pointing to the forest edge and saying, “Do you know what happens inside that forest every full moon?” Or, “Look at the river. Do you know how the river feels whenever the salmon returns to its waters? It feels this way, and this is the story that tells why.”

Rejuvenating oral culture is necessary because to enter so directly into the literate world of texts, and now into the world of the computer screen, is to enter all too rapidly into that purely cognitive dimension of symbol and symbol-manipulation. What a child needs first is to enter into language bodily, and to have a sense that all of his senses can be engaged within the language. That’s something that stories and oral story-telling alone can do for us.

And this last bit from the end of the interview:

London : What I hear you saying is that we need to expand our modes of awareness to include not just language and the alphabet, but also the magical realm of the senses.

Abram : That’s right. I’m not trying to demonize the alphabet at all. I don’t think the alphabet is bad. What I’m trying to get people to realize is that it’s a very intense form of magic. And that it therefore needs to be used responsibly. I mean, it’s not by coincidence that the word “spell” has this double meaning — to arrange the letters in the right order to form a word, or to cast a magic. To spell a word, or to cast a magic spell. These two meanings were originally one and the same. In order to use this new technology, this new play of written shapes on the page, to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to exercise a new form of power in the world.

But it also meant casting a kind of spell on our own senses. Unless we recognize writing as a form of magic, then we will not take much care with it. It’s only when we recognize how profoundly it has altered our experience of nature and the rest of the sensory world, how profoundly it has altered our senses, that we can begin to use writing responsibly because we see how potent and profound an effect it has.

No culture with the written word seems to experience the natural landscape as animate and alive through and through. Yet every culture without writing experiences the whole of the earth — every aspect of the material world — to be alive and intelligent. So what is it that writing does? It has a very powerful effect upon our experience of language and meaning.

London : What are some of the ways that we can bridge these two frames of reference?

Abram : One way is to simply let things be alive. Or, if you don’t want to let things be alive, just to allow that things have their own active agency, their own influence upon us, whether it be a slab of granite, storm clouds, a stream, a raven, a spider.

There is a little poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that captures this in a gentle way:

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars
The inner — what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

There is much, much more in the interview that is very interesting, but I’ve already quoted too much. Read it all if you like the above. Highly recommended. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/