The Manifold Literary Other
Alphabetic consciousness and the value of reading
“If we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation. It is the written text that provides this new locus.” — David Abram1
“And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing.” — Gertrude Stein2
It could be argued that the character or quality of showing—criticism, appreciation, explication, defense—is what consummates the dialogic encounter3 that is literature. But the truth, we all know in our revolutionary hearts, is far more instantly secure in its realization: when we truly read, it is as though we go to our inner room, where understanding is immanent and, by some miracle, mutual. (The prayer made in secret is the only prayer that matters, though it may never “count” on the temple ledger.)
Well enough into the 21st century, it’s fair to say that we’ve exceeded all of literature’s topical boundedness—that when it comes to the potential subjects of what we read, anything goes. But a familiar question arises with the hegemony of device, its slick new microchip powered and pixelated iteration: What exactly is a literary encounter in this “new dark age,” this deluge of content and data, connectivity and distraction? What counts as reading in light of what the digital realm proffers?
In a relentlessly human landscape, opportunities to know and be known in what ecological philosopher David Abram calls more-than-human terms are increasingly scarce. And in his eloquent and troubling ecopoetic treatise, The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram convincingly situates the relentlessness of our current episteme in alphabetic writing, the very matter of literature itself.
“For to read is to enter into a profound participation, or chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page. In learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order to recouple those senses upon the flat surface of the page.
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.
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.”
The alphabetic soul, however, is not entirely lost, as Abram circles back to acknowledge4 on the book’s penultimate page: “the written word carries a pivotal magic—the same magic that once sparkled for us in the eyes of an owl and the glide of an otter.”
“Our task,” he continues, “is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land.” The idea of taking up the word is, to my mind, a fundamentally readerly act, somewhat clouded by Abram’s emphasis—being the author of the text—on writing.
“Reading is art” submits that in order to follow this wisdom and liberate what Abram calls the “earthly intelligence of our words” we must find a way, systemically, to celebrate the agentive reader as readily as we celebrate the writer.5 This would mean seeing people for their creative imagination before it is demonstrated, before it is made anywhere other than in attention or, ideally, in being. Put another way, we need an epistemology not of consciousness but sentience.
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Thank you for lending your attention to this project, and for your support of the community bookshop it calls home. We’re still trying to find a sustainable way to celebrate the wonderful things that happen here, especially the Readers in Residence, without overindulging the digital realm and its yawning call to produce and consume, produce and consume. How to write like a reader? That’s a question worth answering again and again.
Coming soon: A recording with past resident Seth Braverman, on manifold selves, syncretism, and conversing beyond our time; and a new series—biweekly? monthly?—featuring the titles that make their way into special piles on Perelandra’s desk. — Joe
“Animism and the Alphabet,” p.131, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996)
“Portraits and Repetition,” p.177, Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1988)
When considered metaphysically, the hemispheres of literary experience—writing and reading—begin to look less dualistic than unified, less transactional than cooperative. Every written word is simultaneously read; reading is no less present than writing at the word’s conception. The so-called active and passive aspects coinhere.
“Animism was never, in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters begin to come alive and to speak. ‘Written words,’ says Socrates, ‘seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent….’ Indeed, today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word without seeing, or rather hearing, what ‘it says.’ For our senses are now coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon. As the hills and the bending grasses once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so these written letters and words now speak to us.”
Reading is no less performative or constative than writing, since in reading we complete the ontological correspondence. “Reading is art” sloganizes this idea as a provocation—a reminder to read like the imaginative being you are.