Spell of the Sensuous

I just got David Abram's new book, Becoming Animal. I am a huge fan of Spell of the Sensuous. My copy is marked up and tagged with post-its notes. Ants that take rice and spiders in caves are two of my favorite memories from this book. A few years back I assigned Spell to my advanced sculpture class. Each week we read a chapter and discussed in class. In addition to discussion, students were asked to make a small, visual piece that responded to the chapter. All the work produced was reflective and thoughtful visual interpretations of the chapter. For one of my students, a love affair with using rice in her work began with this book.

"In prose at once poetic and precise, Abram demonstrates that our most cherished human attributes - from the gift of language, to the awareness of past and future, to the rational intellect itself - all emerge in interaction with the animate natural world, and remain wholly dependent upon that living world for their coherence. Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this astonishing and intensely ethical work." Source is Wild Ethics. Link here.

"The book touches on a wide range of themes, from our perception of the natural world to the way we use of language and symbols to process our experience." The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram by Scott London. Link here.