In the thrall of language and story, the fog of truth and lies, it helps to break the spell. To blink and snap the fingers and take a step back, looking at these squiggles on a screen, this apish primate gazing fixedly.
It’s part of The Problem, you may rightly say. These squiggles on the screen, substituting for reality. This ape on a chair, clicking his life away. We went virtual way back when, between Hebrew and Greek. We went into the cave to look at shadows and tell tales about the Sun.
David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, ponders our shift in consciousness and laments the corresponding separation from nature. While making sense, in words, we have lost the exercise of our physical senses. Yet, perhaps it’s not all language’s fault.
Or at least, we can, stepping back, take note of what’s at stake, and redirect how the ensuing scene is to unfold. We might, for instance, click to another channel. We might power out and take up pencil and pad, or charcoals, to sketch what we dreamed might have been. We might drop the simulations altogether and go out to the land, the forest, the river.
We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human… A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world. (Abram)
Language, used consciously, can attempt to sketch the visible and invisible contours of Truth… instead of blindly consuming and reciting recycled slogans and catchphrases, especially the so-called news churned and regurgitated through the daily feed of the propaganda machine. Original language, free language, can connect us directly to ourselves and to our fellow human beings who share the journey of discovery.
We choose the right to be who we are. We know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom. There is a way to live with the earth and a way not to live with the earth. We choose the way of earth. —John Trudell in role of Jimmy Looks Twice in the film Thunderheart
What do you experience, with your own senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and intuition?
What does your world feel like? What would it feel like, if you were free?
Claiming the freedom that is your birthright, what do you aspire to cocreate?
This post appeared previously as part of the longer essay “Freedom, Slavery, and Magic Spells” at Nevermore and my Substack channel, New World Dreaming.
