… The forest on the facing slope appears to keep pace with me as I stroll, while all the nearer conifers slide past at their different rates. It’s as though all the trees on that hillside were gliding forward—or is it just the contrast with the nearby woods rushing backward that makes the distant slope seem to stride in the opposite direction?
But wait! What am I saying? None of these trees is actually moving! I alone, among all these upright bodies, am actually locomoting across the ground. All their apparent movements, fast and slow, are merely a consequence of my own physical motion, the illusory effect of my own activity in the midst of what is, in fact, a fairly quiescent and passive topography. “Motion parallax” is the technical term for this dynamism that my own movement seems to induce in the landscape, this apparent roaming of things in relation to myself as I wander.
…
… the trunks move backward in their respective gaits, the farther ones slower and the close ones swifter … and I realize that all this motion is not at all an illusion: it is the way the world lives, the way the world shows itself to itself—for there is NO view from outside! The layered dynamism of all these gliding trajectories has overcome a threshold in my self; my thoughts dissolve into my breathing body and I awaken as this striding form, this sentient flesh utterly immersed in the sensuous.
(David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage: New York, 2010, pp. 96 and 97–98)
this reminds me of being a very small child, perhaps 4 years old, and riding in a car at night...i was watching the moon through the car windows and wondering at how it seemed to be always right along with us, although we were moving. i said something about it, and my father, who has a physics degree, attempted to explain the whole thing very scientifically. not only did i not fully comprehend the explanation, i felt an internal rejection of it. it lacked connection. that was probably the dawning of a sentiment that has followed me since, a realisation that whilst science can be beautiful and evoke respect for the world, it can at times also be sterile and reductive and place us outside the narrative rather than inside where we ought to be. there is a great validity to poetry, to a sense of magic in life, just as there is in other ways of describing things. my rubric has tended to favour ways that evoke participation and unity...as the above does...
ReplyDeleteAbram says as much in his books—that we are so often expected to believe the abstract/objective 'facts' of science, which may not always accord with our direct perceptions. For instance, we say the sun rises and sets; we perceive the sun as circling around us, yet are told that in fact the earth is circling around the sun. In this case, the objective fact, while important, jars with what we actually experience. Many indigenous cultures have stories about how the sun enters the earth at sunset, and travels underground overnight, before emerging from the earth at sunrise. This may not be objectively true, yet it is perhaps perceptively true, and it is certainly poetically true.
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