In the Realm of the Senses

Feeling New and Blue

Older, but Blue at Heart

Realize that you're not just a mind, but an embodied presence. Realize that who you are, what you sense, what you feel, are interwoven with the active environment that swirls about and through you. Realize that your health and that of your world depends on those half-realized connections. These are the insights, the Emersonian-transparent-eyeball-I-See-You moments of a) some Hollywood Sci-Fi Blockbuster in 3-D with hypothyroid Smurf-Cat-People on Pandora;  b) a poetic reflection on self and nature by a phenomenologist, a Shellyean sensitive plant, to be devoured by those who have heard of a place long ago and faraway called "Walden."
It was pure coincidence that I finally saw James Cameron's film Avatar as I was reading David Abram's Becoming Animal.  Both Cameron and Abram have magical powers: one using technology to create a paradise and the other practicing sleight-of-hand tricks to support himself as he traveled the world.  The title of Abrams' book intrigued me, but it is not about specific parallels between species like dogs and humans. (For that, seek out crazy-for-neolgisms Donna Haraway, or Watcher of Ape Sex Frans de Waal.) Rather, it rejects the remnants of mind-body dualism to immerse the embodied self in "the inherent dynamism of the present moment." "This is a book," Abram writes, "about becoming a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us. It seeks a new way of speaking, one that enacts our interbeing with the earth rather than blinding us to it."
Well said for any Na'vi, and not a new realization for Abrams, whose previous work, The Spell of the Sensuous, draws upon the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Calling the latter a French "thinker" seems problematic because it sounds so--heady, and Merleau-Ponty stressed the role of physical sensation in human cognition and human awareness as embedded in a physical environment. The phenomenologist understands how the mind experiences a green thought in a green shade.  The Spell of the Sensuous takes a more theoretical approach to these issues, while Becoming Animal opens with lovely evocations of the writer moving through and in landscapes as he imagines animals must. He is his own Avatar. Later in the book, Abrams invokes like-minded figures who eschew Rene Descartes' emphasis on abstract reason for a "turn toward the body": besides Merleau-Ponty, the list includes Spinoza, biologist Francisco Varela, cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Antonio Pamasio.
In one chapter, "The Real in Its Wonder," Abram begins with a quotation from a "Carrier Indian, from British Columbia," a passage that could pass as advice from a Na'vi to former Marine Jake Sully embodied in Blue: "The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another." Abrams, by expressing and gently analyzing his own entanglement with earthly energies and materials, tries to move from romanticized nostalgia to potential experience. He does not, however, seem to have sensors at the end of a braid that interweave with other beings of the planet.
A planet where there seems to be no need for plumbing or dieting, no winter or rough weather. The question posed by Cameron's Avatar is, can technology recover what technology destroyed? Sully, with useless legs, recovers bodily life through extremely high tech movie-science in which (what would Descartes say) his mind seems to detach from the body that limits his spirit, to soar in a new blue form that is a wonder of genetic engineering.  Now a Na'vi blueblood, he can use sensors at the end of a warrior braid to connect with sacred ground and flying dino-dragons. And, on the meta-level, can a film that lives and breathes the artifice of special effects connect people to an earth, where to paraphrase another sensitive soul, Nature is oft without her diadem? The film was wildly popular, but as Na'vi-tale escapism or as influence on mundane habits?
The premises of David Abram's book are valid, but not new. He breathes the spirit of Wordsworth, Thoreau, John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams. It is an extended prose poem employing the abstractions of words to enliven the flesh, and may be a thoughtful companion to read chapters at leisure. (It seemed to have much sameness for a steady read-through.) Abram is not exactly preaching to the choir, but more broadly to those who think they might like to hear this choir.
As for James Cameron, can he continue to use Hollywood tech and marketing to return our embodied essences to sustainable bliss?