Book Review - The Spell of the Sensuous
o talk about this book, I have to talk about how I got it. Over the past few months I’ve been trying to make a habit of what I call “spirit walks”, walking around my neighborhood and really focussing on engaging my senses, listening to the world around me, and active visualization of the spirits and energies around me. At dusk on a day shortly before the Summer Solstice, I was on one of these walks that took me a bit further afield than my usual route. had been feeling capricious and energetic, and just kept walking north, saying goodbye to the day and hello to the night, and my attention was drawn to a Little Free Library that was built into a set of mailboxes. I usually make a point to peek into new ones when I notice them, so I did. It was a good haul at first glance; I found a book on urban homesteading that I knew one of my housemates would enjoy, and I noticed there was a second row of books behind the first. Then I got a very distinct and playful mental ping, just about as much “in words” as anything I’ve ever heard: “Look closer, you might find a nice surprise…” I looked, and I found a copy of Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, a book that had been on my to-read list for ages, but never quite rose to the top. My response was an immediate, out loud, “You have got to be kidding me,” followed by gratefully taking the book and having a very happy walk home after the sunset.
Such an experience seemed especially appropriate for a book that I knew had something to do with subjective experience and re-enchanting the world. I suppose I first heard of the book during one of my deep dives into the philosophy of animism. Having been written in 1997, it’s one of the first books I know of that looked at the topic from a perspective other than pure academia. In the book, Abram spends a while describing the pre-modern world in a way that’s familiar to anyone who reads about animism or earth-focused spirituality in general; descriptions of those who see the world as full of persons, only some of whom are human, and with social roles for the intercessors between humans and the others. And then, Abram points out, many cultures moved away from that perspective. The central question of the book is “why?”
Abram takes the approach of phenomenology, centering the subjective experience of a particular person or culture rather than trying to break it down into a more objective framework. He provides an overview of philosophers who focused on this perspective (such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) to provide a basis for that sort of analysis, but spends most of the time on interpretation of cultures which he sees as embodying that contact with the living animist world. A hallmark of those cultures that Abram returns to is their sense of embodiment and enmeshedness with the world. He contrasts their perspective of the world as being full of “subjects”, beings that sense and are sensed in turn, with modern culture’s tendency to treat it as full of “objects” to be analyzed and abstracted.
In Abrams’ perspective, it’s specifically that abstraction that’s the culprit for the apparent disenchantment and disconnectedness of the modern world, and he makes an argument that traces it to written language, especially alphabetic language, taking that experience of communing directly with the world and translating it into symbols that have little direct connection, but can instead be recorded and transmitted. There are parts to this that I found a bit frustrating; there’s valorization of a pre-modern perspective that seems simplistic and easy-to-do from a remove, and the overarching question of “well, what are you saying we should do about it, burn our books and go back to the forest?”
A fascinating side-note to this too is how much Abram’s description of the effects of writing feels like the exact same argument that “words are magic”, that you might see in a fantasy novel or role-playing game, but with a sort of inverted value judgment: “words are magic and that’s bad, actually.” I spent most of the time reading this being by turns fascinated and frustrated, wondering what this was all leading to, and this experience was definitely enhanced by the fact that my copy of the book had been marked up, sometimes with simple underlines, sometimes with notes connecting back to previous points, sometimes with wry asides like “feels like a stretch” or “modest, no?” This itself felt like a great meta-example of a subjective sensory experience that was enhanced by the persistence of the written word.
I approached the end of the book still waiting for the “what do we do about it?” question to be resolved, and being pretty sure that how it was resolved would determine pretty much all of how I felt about the book. It took Abram until the last handful of pages to address this, in a way that nearly turned the book on its head. In the close, he acknowledges that the central argument of “alphabet = disenchantment” is too simplistic, that it is a lens for thinking about problems rather than a diagnosis, and also finally provides the flip-side. The last few paragraphs challenge us, the users of written language, to use it with that knowledge of its power and risks, and to connect them back with the world, stories that remind us to engage our senses and get beyond mere words.
In retrospect, it was an obvious resolution, but one I found satisfying nonetheless, despite the tension I felt for most of the book. I was left thinking that the book could have been just as effective, and perhaps a better for for my particular sensibilities, if he’d tipped his hand earlier that this analysis of writing was less an anthropological argument than a poetic one. Still, I’m glad I stuck it out; getting into this perspective was a singular experience, and one I’ll remember if only for how it managed to take a path that’s very alien to me, and still arrive at a very familiar destination.