Amazing that this book should come into my life as I'm looking to expand upon my original thesis on how humans' philosophy affects their interaction with their landscape--physically and visually. Now I can play with cells, seeds, animism, and linguistics. A dream park.
"...the traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer." 8 Healing as rebalancing
"His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations--songs, cries, gestures--of the larger, more-than-human field." 9 ...like stories, art
Change/rebalancing comes from the edge of cultures, the edge of civilization, existing on the periphery: "even there, moving along those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely--only, that is, if the margin he frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else." 29 Time and space and their constant relation and flux.
On embodiment in a perceptually shifting world: "It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world." 39 ...thus the sensuous.
A "primordial life-world" of our perceptions, our "immediate lived experience." 40
The correlation between reading and hunting--"reading traces", "hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other." 96 Again the power of interaction and edges to make meaning. Perhaps why people of so many different varieties are drawn to the colossal land-sky-water edge which is the beach/ocean.
In an oral culture "To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one's closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one's mouth." 109 no alphabet=greater interpretive and connective power
"For only when a qualitative term is written down does it become ponderable as a fixed form independent of both the speakers and of situations." 111 rigidity of form and alphabet
"For the letters of the alphabet, like the Platonic Ideas, do not exist in the world of ordinary vision." 112 outside the life-world, the realm of human-to-nonhuman perception.
"Chiasm" is Greek for "crisscross", neurobiological idea of the interwoven optical fibers. Also relevant to the interwoven, "reciprocal participation...between one's own flesh and the encompassing flesh of the world." 127-8
The "visual gaze explores the reflective surfaces of things, their outward color and contour...the ears, meanwhile, are more inward organs; they emerge from the depths of my skull like blossoms or funnels, and their participation tells me less about the outer surface than the interior substance of things." 128 Resonance and radiance...paired opposites?
The life taken on by reading the written word: "This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is an animism nonetheless--as mysterious as a talking stone." 131
"To spell...seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled. Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses." 133
Apache oral culture and location-centered-ness: "a topographic place becomes the guarantor of corrected behavior, the visible presence that reminds one of past foibles and that ensures one's subsequent attentiveness." 159 Attentiveness!!
"We ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visible unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world." 163
On songlines: "The song is thus a kind of auditory route map through the land." 166 Again the pairing of visual and aural. A set of directions, instructions, bringing order to chaos. Concept of Ancestors going "back in" to the landscape, embodying the natural world--or it embodying them.
Dreamtime "is an ongoing process--the perpetual emerging of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into full, waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret depths of silence to articulate song and speech." 169
"An unsung land is a dead land." Bruce Chatwin 171 Humans and natural world both need this interaction.
"Stories hold, in their narrative layers, the sedimented knowledge accumulated by our progenitors." 181 Stories = Grand Canyon!
Curvature of time: Read Eliade's Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return
"The letters of the alphabet...begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves...short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land." 187 "reflection" as "loop"
Time = circular trajectory of moon and sun and stars, "demarcates and encloses a spatial field", like the horizon-- "the same shape as perceivable space." 189
"manifested" vs "manifesting" and the "power of human intention" to catalyze this process 192
"Eternity lies not in a separated heaven...but in the promise of a future reconciliation on earth." 197
Heidegger (Being and Time) time = not just "now points" but "ecstatic". Fundamental realities, "opening us to what is outside ourselves", connecting different layers of existence and perception 205
"There belongs to each ecstasy a 'whither' to which one is carried...a particular 'horizon'." 209
Horizon = future, promise, receding, withheld. underground = past, support, refused. Both hidden from present moment/perceivable landscape. 214
Story of the Emergence, people "climbing up a reed or a tree, mimics the emergence from the soil of the corn and other plants...from the depths in search of sunlight." 218 humans = seeds, "gestation" periods, wombs
"the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself." the "mind" not as something inside us, but as something we are all, collectively, inside of. 227
Language as a "veil" 255
" 'the inner--what is it, if not intensified sky?' " 262
"Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself." 263
"To make sense is to enliven the senses." 265
