Becoming Animal

It was not the encounter with a supernatural dimension that unfurls somewhere beyond my everyday awareness, into which I might elevate myself now and then, but with a dimension always operative beneath my conventional consciousness,

Contrary to modern assumptions, sleight-of-hand conjuring probably originates not as an illusory depiction of supernatural events, but as a practical technique for unlocking, and activating, the fluid magic of nature itself.

We talk, after all, only by shaping the exhaled air that rushed into our lungs a moment earlier. Human speech, too, is really the wind moving through …

Awareness, or mind, is in this sense very much like a medium in which we’re situated, and from which we are simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist.

Upon hearing an alarm call, even birds from other, neighboring species halt whatever they’re up to,

Never having separated their sentience from their sensate bodies—having little reason to sequester their intelligence in a separate region of their skull where it might dialogue steadily with itself—many undomesticated animals, when awake, move in a fairly constant dialogue not with themselves but with their surroundings.

For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings.

We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous.

Within the humanities, some of the key theorists drew inspiration from the writings published at midcentury by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had analyzed, with stunning lucidity, the body’s influence upon even our most rarefied cogitiations.

The scientific intellect, which sometimes prides itself on having vanquished the belief in God from much of the rational populace, regularly situates its gaze in the very place (or rather, the very same non-place) recently vacated by that God.