{"id":121,"date":"2021-08-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/?page_id=121"},"modified":"2022-02-24T16:34:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T16:34:05","slug":"shadow-by-david-abram","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/?page_id=121","title":{"rendered":"“Shadow” by David Abram"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Shadow<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

David Abram<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

(Full essay available in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo the human animal, sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it…\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 David Abram<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a patch of woods of spruce boughs and firs, a red-tail hawk, a dragonfly and other animals populate our senses. An undefined time span occurs in the writing as Abram turns to the sunset in detail, describing it until \u201cthe sun is gone\u201d (24) as other senses intervene, settling in the afterglow, with all the smells and all the textures in the air. The idea of a \u201cmammalian intelligence\u201d emerges from this description as Abram considers his own consciousness attuned to the natural environment he found himself in, giving a name to this realm of blurring awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have entered the country of shadow. And a vast and brooding presence that had been hiding, moments earlier, behind the gauze of light is now slowly walking toward you through the clarified air. It is the breathing body of the mountain itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This insight touches on the estrangement of our thinking minds from the \u201cintelligence of our sensing bodies,\u201d an argument that sustains his meditation on shadows as more than \u201cthis flatness, this kinetic pancake, this creature of two dimensions\u201d. Shadows emerge as something living, symbiotic with the natural world and its species. He describes the flight of a bumblebee to illustrate how ensnarled the elements and the species are in this realm of shadows\u2014as he himself is as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suppose, however, that on the same afternoon a bumblebee is making its way from a clutch of clover blossoms on one side of the road to another cluster of blooms in an overgrown weedlot across the street, and that as it does so the bee happens to pass between me and the flat shape that my body casts upon the pavement. The sunlit bee buzzes toward me, streaking like an erratic, drunken comet against the asphalt sky, and then it crosses an unseen boundary in the air: instantly its glow dims, the sun is no longer upon it \u2013 it has moved into a precisely bounded zone of darkness that floats between my opaque flesh and that vaguely humanoid silhouette laid out upon the pavement \u2013 until a moment later the bee buzzes out the opposite side of that zone and emerges back into the day\u2019s radiance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These musings evoke the question of whether we\u2014as animals\u2014notice how indistinguishable our shadows are from our beings. \u201cDo we feel somehow different at high noon, when the darkness has seeped into us?\u201d. Reflecting on such questions, he observes himself reacting to the course of the sun along an ordinary day, all the while perceiving the natural world in detail, in shades and nuances, with blades of grass and a beetle swaying along them as they become engulfed in shadows. He goes on to describe another sunset and its shadow play, with his own shadow elongating \u201clike a slender giant of a man\u201d. The shadow, \u201cthis elegant enigma, is always with us\u201d\u2014it is \u201can inescapable consequence of our physicality\u201d. While there are some elements, such as winds, that do not cast shadows, for material beings \u201cthe shadow is part of our makeup\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on different shades and shapes of shadows, Abram settles on a mountain shadow as the template for a broader awareness of shadows, pointing to the fact that the Earth itself is always half-shrouded in shadows in its rotation, or day-night cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To step into the shadow of this mountain is to step directly under the mountain\u2019s influence, letting it untangle your senses as the rhythm of your breath adjusts to its breathing, to the style of its weather. To step into its shadow is to become apart, if only for this moment, of the mountain\u2019s life. Just as shadows are not flat shapes projected upon the ground (but rather dense and voluminous spaces), neither are they measurable quantities, mere consequences of sunlight and its interruptions. Shadows are qualitative attributes of the bodies that secrete them. \u2026 To find oneself in the shadow of a mountain is to abruptly find oneself exposed to the private life of the mountain, to feel its huge and manifold influence on the local world that lies beneath it, to enter the gravitational power of its intelligence, a sagacity no longer dissolved in the dazzling radiance of the sun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This awareness of celestial bodies and their own shadows concludes the chapter as Abram alternates perspectives between the micro\u2014the human and nonhuman species living in habitats\u2014and the macro\u2014the \u201cfabric of space-time\u201d where celestial objects arrange themselves according to the music of the spheres, and the Earth itself is part of that dance of light and shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works by David Abram<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Abram has published two influential books: The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human<\/em>, in 1996; and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology<\/em>, in 2010. More about David Abram<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Return<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shadow David Abram (Full essay available in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology) \u201cTo the human animal, sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it…\u201d \u2014 David Abram In a patch of woods… Read More »“Shadow” by David Abram<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"on","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-121","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildspirits.ualberta.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}