For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the deep connection between language and the natural world.
David Abram highlights that for many indigenous cultures, human language is not just a means of communication but is intimately tied to the ecology and environment surrounding them. It suggests that the natural world speaks through its own vitality and that human expression is merely a fragment of a much larger conversation that includes all living things and the earth itself.
In practice
In a speech about environmental preservation, one might quote this to emphasize the relationship between language and ecology.
As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.
Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?
There is an interesting scientific dispute about realism and optimism. Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If 'is' means 'is and never has been' that's one thing - if it means 'there is none', that was a completely true statement.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.
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