ng the unknown in terms of the known.”
If we consider the effort required to turn “a vague feeling into a clear thought” we may gain a new respect for the language that is so casually used, and how necessary it must have been for the mind to shift its engagement from the outer phenomena of the living world to the inner realm of reflexive thought in order to have something to say about it.
Here it may be important to understand exactly what we are turning away from when we begin to give precedence to the human world of thoughts, ideas and emotions. How did humans, in the first place, come to define their world through words? Unlikely as it may seem, an ecologist has something to say on the matter.
David Abram asserts in Spell of the Sensuous that spoken language evolved from our relationship with the “more-than-human-world.” It was our physical interaction with the terrain that sustained us which generated the first human sounds that became words with meaning. “For meaning…remains rooted in the sensory life of the body—it cannot be completely cut off from the soil of direct, perceptual experience without withering and dying.” And so, at a certain point in history, the human voice began to echo and amplify the sounds of their animate environment in a way that must have been entirely participatory with the terrain.
A friend in India once told me that his grandmother can tell him what time it is down to the minute based on the quality of sunlight. As we become more removed from the sensate realities of the earth we are funneled into the void of abstraction. It is here that we are lost, for our greatest compass lies in our senses: the threshold between inner and outer. A living language requires a continuously renewed relationship with the physical. One need only glance at the morning newspaper to see what happens to a materialistic culture with no conscious relationship to the matter it is using to build its empire.
The history of language, described by British philosopher and poet, Owen Barfield, is a painful process of introversion. Before the advent of written language, the word psyche was understood to mean something akin to breath or wind. After the written word created the possibility of a timeless, independent self that can exist outside of the context in which words were generated, psyche was torn from that larger presence and squeezed inside the human skull. It was only after the psyche migrated from the all-pervasive power of wind to the interiors of “mind” as we know it that mental illness began to be seen as an individual pathology instead of a collective issue.
Indigenous cultures seem to recognize an individual’s sickness as a symptom of a larger problem that the entire culture plays a part in. The traditional medicine man or woman negotiated the space between human sickness and nature’s woes, since the sickness was thought to be brought on by a trespass of the people with the land. To heal an individual was to repair the damaged bond with the earth itself. And so, I wonder if personal healing can be expected without addressing the broken bond with the wild, given that one’s individual health is helplessly contingent on the health of the place one inhabits.
It may be hard for us to imagine what life felt like for people whose language did not contain distinctions between physical forms, internal states and celestial beings. Most of us are nested deeply inside the comfort of our protected homes where air temperature is regulated, water is mechanically funneled in and out without any thought on our part, and walls block out sound to create an isolated container. We are allowed to choose to what extent we interact with the forces of nature. If we were exposed to the full ferocity of every dense thunderstorm, a winter full of frigid nights, and the blistering mid-summer sun then we might begin to feel the presence of something larger than ourselves inside these phenomena. If our water needs were completely dependent on the frequency of rain, we might even begin to pray when we felt the desert drought in our own dry