Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. The interview with an ecologist David Abram appeared in the 16th issue of the paper (January 2021).
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I heard about David Abram first from Merlin Sheldrake. Merlin talked about their family friend who had worked as a sleight-of-hand magician in his youth. This particular story happened in Alice’s Restaurant, a place memorialised by an eponymous blues song by Arlo Guthrie. David performed his coin tricks there. As usual in this case, a piece of metallic money disappeared between his fingers, only to reappear in the most unexpected places. One day the patrons had come back from the street and asked David: “What the hell have you done with us?” The things was that once they had left the restaurant, the world had seemed a little different: the sky was bluer, the lawn greener, the sidewalk had a richer texture. It took a while for David to realise, his tricks had cut through the chains of memory and left the customers at the mercy of pure perception. Suddenly they saw the sky, the grass, and the sidewalk as they were, not as they thought they were. Magicians, wizards and artists work in the empty space between expectations and perception, says David.
More than forty years have passed since. David Abram has meanwhile become an internationally renowned ecologist and philosopher whose dexterity with words is as impressive as that of his fingers. “David Abram is a true magician,” says a biologist Stephan Harding, “who is superbly skilled in both sleight-of-hand magic and the literary art of awakening us to the superabundant wonders of the natural world. He is one of America's greatest Nature writers... The language is luminous, the style hypnotic. Abram weaves a spell that brings the world alive before your very eyes."
After graduating David takes off travelling as an itinerant magician through Asia. For a year and a half, he lives in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Nepal among the indigenous people and meets numerous shamans, healers, medicine men and sorcerers there. “One aspect of this was quite unique. I was approaching these folks, not outwardly as an anthropologist, as a researcher, but rather as a magician in my own right. At least they saw it in a more benevolent manner as, wow, here is somebody who, with his own craft, seems to have some access to the spirits, some access to the Invisibles. And so I was invited into their homes, asked to trade secrets with them and even participate in their ceremonies and curing sessions,“ reminisces he in our interview.
The return to North-America was tough. “The cultural shock was immense,” says he. He goes back to university and focuses on the no-man’s land between ecology and philosophy. His essay “Perceptual Implications of Gaia” from 1984 is well-received and puts him into contact with the primary advocates for the Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
At the beginning of 1980s he meets a Jungian psychologist James Hillman who is fascinated by his versatile past. They both participate in a series of symposia under the aegis of Esalen Institute, which establishes a new scientific discipline - ecopsychology.
In 1996 he comes out with his first books “The Spell of the Sensuous”. The subtitle “Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World” introduces a new term into the vocabulary of ecologists and environmentalists. “What I call the more-than-human world, is the world that includes us, the two-legged, but includes as well all of the other walking and crawling and slithering animals, as well as the flapping and flying folks who swoop overhead and the swimming peoples in the waters. It includes also all the rooted powers. This world is so much more than us, and yet the human sphere is a wonderful participant, an inhabitant, a citizen of this huge Commonwealth. That's sort of the context where most of my thinking unfolds,” explains he his take on the more-than-human world.
Since then David Abram has given lectures and courses in universities all over the world but at the same time kept his healthy distance from the academia. The collection “Visionaries of the 20th Century” which presents the lives and works of 100 ecological, social and spiritual leaders includes chapters on James Lovelock, David Bohm, Mahatma Gandhi, John Maynard Keynes, Jane Goodall, Rupert Sheldrake, as well as on David Abram.
With best wishes,
Hardo