Becoming Animal by David Abram

Author:David Abram
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307379313
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-06T10:00:00+00:00

Despite a few thunderstorms last month, this land is dry—too dry. All around my home the piñon pines are desiccating and dying from the deepening drought. Most of the fish once endemic to the Rio Grande that waters this valley have now vanished; the river’s flow usurped by too many industries, too many developments, too many golf courses. Sometimes clouds arrive, bringing hope of rain that hardly ever falls. Like today, a rare overcast afternoon in late spring—cloud cover stretching from the Sangre de Cristo peaks behind me to the Jemez Mountains on the western horizon, with nary a stitch of blue visible to the eye. The underside of the clouds is more defined than is common here in the high desert, the furrowed texture of that gray ceiling unusually clear. Here and there in the distance are small spots where a wispy, feathered blur slants down toward the ground: light rains falling on the far-off earth.

It is strange, this broad overcast extending its wings like a huge bird over the whole valley. The dense topography overhead seems as solid and palpable as the ground underfoot. And so the beings I meet as I walk between these two densities—rabbitbrush and sage, a red-shafted flicker testing with a few knocks the rotting shutter of an old window, a hare ducking under a sapless piñon, and the dry piñon snags as well—all seem curiously familiar today, as though we are co-conspirators in the same scheme, vital characters in the same broad story.

The dissolution of the concentric, crystalline spheres of the Aristotelian cosmos had opened the way for the very slow, gradual discovery of a new collective interior, less exalted than that earlier cosmos yet far more wondrous. After three and a half centuries spent charting and measuring material nature as though it were a pure exterior, we’ve at last begun to notice that the world we inhabit (from the ocean floor to the upper atmosphere) is alive. The feelings that move us—the frights and yearnings that color our days, the flights of fancy that sometimes seize us, the creativity that surges through us—all are born of the ongoing interchange between our life and the wider Life that surrounds us. They are no more ours than they are Eairth’s. They blow through us, and often change us, but they are not our private possession, nor an exclusive property of our species. With the other animals, as with the crinkled lichens and the river-carved rocks, we’re all implicated within this intimate and curiously infinite world, poised between the tactile landscape underfoot and the leaden sky overhead, between the floor and the ceiling, each of us crouching or tumbling or swooping within the same big interior. Inside the world.

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