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... animism was never, in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the (visual and auditory) senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters begin to come alive and to speak. "Written words," says Socrates, "seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent ..." Indeed, today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word without seeing, or rather hearing, what "it says." For our senses are now coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon. As the hills and the bending grasses once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so these written letters and words now speak to us.
We have seen as well that iconic writing systems - those that employ pictographic, ideographic, and/or rebuslike characters - necessarily rely, to some extent, upon our original sensory participation with the enveloping natural field. Only with the emergence of the phonetic alphabet (by the Hebrews), and its appropriation by the ancient Greeks, did the written images lose all evident ties to the larger field of expressive beings. Each image now came to have a strictly human referent: each letter was now associated purely with a gesture or sound of the human mouth. Such images could no longer function as windows opening on a more-than-human field of powers, but solely as mirrors reflecting the human form back upon itself. The senses that engaged or participated with this new writing found themselves locked in a discourse that had become exclusively human. Only thus, with the advent and spread of phonetic writing, did the rest of nature begin to lose its voice.
The highly anthropocentric mode of experience endemic to alphabetic culture spread through Europe in the course of two millennia, receiving a great boost from the calligraphic innovations introduced in the monastic scriptoria by the English monk Alcuin (732-804) during the reign of Charlemagne, and a major thrust from the innovation of movable type by Johan Gutenberg (c. 1394-1468), in the fifteenth century. The printing press, and the dissemination of uniformly printed texts that it made possible, ushered in the Enlightenment and the profoundly detached view of "nature" that was to prevail in the modern period. In recent centuries the industrial and technological practices made possible by this new distance from the natural world have carried alphabetic awareness throughout the globe, infiltrating even those cultures that had retained iconic, ideographic writing systems.
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.
... yet even more along the language theme:
(David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous)
... do you get the pun in the title yet?
So in Abram's estimation, "alphabetic awareness" was simultaneously an awakening to human interiority and an unawakening to human ties to nature ... a swing of the pendulum, if you will ... my guess is that he sees phenomonology as a component of another mode of human awareness that can swing us back to a middle ground - one that reconnects us with nature without disconnecting us from our (newfound) selves ... (I get this feeling based upon all of the quotes thus far taken from the unfinished works of Merleau-Ponty).
Anyhoo, a short poem that opens the latest chapter:
(Tomas Transtromer)
I am not so sure I was disagreeing with him as pointing out that it is across the board for all forms...
