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Rocks alive? Yeah, right!

As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Steve Paulson (Executive Producer of WPR’s “To The Best of Our Knowledge“) reflects on a book with “its own kind of magic.”

Each year, I seem to have the good fortune to read one book that absolutely mesmerizes me. Last year, it was “The Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes. It’s a riveting account of how science and art converged in early 18th century England, not only shaping the Romantic movement but also launching a second scientific revolution. This year, the book has been David Abram’s “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.”

Abram is a cultural ecologist and environmental philosopher…with a twist. He’s an animist. I confess, I’ve always been intrigued by animism, but I never gave it serious thought until I read Abram’s book. Sure, we may think of our dog – or even our house – as having some kind of personality or living presence. But it’s all just metaphor, right? Not according to Abram. He wants us to feel the presence of grass, wood, the wind, even the buildings we live in. He writes, “Confronted with animistic styles of discourse, most of us moderns can only imagine it as a sort of childlike ignorance, a credulous projection of humanlike feelings onto mountains and rivers, which surely amounts to madness for any adult soul. Rocks alive? Yeah, right!” Abram is urging us to think with our entire bodies, to experience the world through all of our senses, not just our heads. And for several weeks after I read the book, I found myself listening intently to the sounds around me and feeling the wind on my body. Of course, it’s awfully hard to hold onto that level of awareness!

Abram is a sleight-of-hand magician by training. In his early twenties, he spent a lot of time roaming around Southeast Asia and the mountains of Nepal as an itinerant magician. He’d wander into a village, hoping to meet – and learn from – the local shaman. Actually, he doesn’t like the word “shaman.” He prefers to call these people “traditional magicians.” And he sees a strong connection between his own work as a conjuror with what traditional magicians do. In Abram’s view, magic isn’t really about trickery; the goal is to alter our ordinary perceptions by shifting the perceptual field.

Abram tells a remarkable story about meeting an especially powerful sorcerer in Nepal named Sonam. When his local translator brought him close to Sonam’s house, the translator became so spooked that he begged to leave. Abram says his own body felt changed when he finally met Sonam. It was like coming into the presence of a human animal, someone who would sniff the air around him and even sit on his haunches. Sonam eventually instructed Abram to try to experience the world like a raven. He spent hours at a stretch staring at a raven, trying to sink into the raven’s body. Then one day, as he was communing with his raven, he watched the raven fly over a river gorge, and Abram felt himself suddenly aloft and soaring over the gorge, flying like his raven. Abram says the experience changed his life.

What’s fascinating about Abram’s account is that there’s nothing supernatural in it. He’s not invoking elves or nature spirits. But he does think nature is alive in ways we barely notice. In fact, he calls himself a “materialist,” but it’s nothing like the materialism we usually associate with modern science. There’s also a fascinating paradox at the center of Abram’s work. He celebrates the oral cultures of native peoples and believes we lost something essential once our ancestors came to rely on written language. Yet Abram is also a beautiful writer, with a gift for poetic description. In fact, he considers the written word to have its own kind of magic. To sum up, I’ll just say this book wields its own magic on several levels.

Steve Paulson is Executive Producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge” and the author of “Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion & Science.” He is a recipient of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion. He has written for Salon, Slate, and other publications, and has produced feature stories for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

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