Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

Why is this simple and rather obvious intuition—this recognition of matter as generative and animate—so disturbing to civilized thought? It’s as though there’s an ancient dread of what is palpably dense, an old and unspoken taboo against acknowledging the creativity of matter—as if by such a recognition we risk waking a slumbering power that intend

As though by dissolving my detached cogitations into the sensory curiosity of my body, I had slipped into alignment with the sentience of the land itself.

freeing my awareness to witness the unique intensities of particular textures, smells, and sounds as these registered along my skin or in the depths of my viscera.

Dr. Stibbe’s book, The Stories We Live By, and free online course are full of real-life examples: of economics textbooks that describe people as “consumers” who are driven by an insatiable need to buy; the government documents that position cows and horses as “units” as though they are as lifeless as a kitchen cupboard; and the United Nations’ Sust

There is a vivid imagination at work in the tale, although it’s an imagination steadily nourished by our senses, and one that nourishes them in turn.

I mean only to point out that the detached stance proper to science is itself dependent upon a more visceral reciprocity between the human organism and its world.