Barbara Christian urges us to write, to remember women’s writing, and to remember why we write: “I can speak only for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me, literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense.”
(Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, Spinifex Press: North Melbourne, 1992, p. 137)
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… a story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And “making sense” must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.
(David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books: New York, 1996, p. 265)
this seems so true to me. often, human thought has been so abstracted from the physical reality of the world, so fixated on transcending the physical and making concrete an imagined otherworld (whether of religion or economics or philosophy) that it becomes a vehicle of death. keeping things anchored in the body, in the senses, in the daily gift of life and its sensuality---with all the pain and delight that brings---keeps us safe and sane. abstract thought and its productions may be brilliant in many ways, and may be characteristic of humanity, but if it forgets or seeks to leave its physical envelope it becomes corrupt. the lotus must have its roots in the earth and leaves in the water, as well turning its petaled face to the sky...
ReplyDeleteYes! We must try to keep our words and thoughts as close to sensuous reality as possible, so that they reflect what is, rather than abstractions that may not have much anchorage in reality at all. It's not an easy thing to do.
DeleteDavid Abram is a philosopher, yet I find his thinking resonates with me because it is so rooted in the real. I love his idea of a different kind of materialism — matter-realism.