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The Invisibles

David Abram

Cover article of the Spring 2006 issue of Parabola magazine (volume 31, number 1)

To live is to dance with an unknown partner whose steps we can never wholly predict, to improvise

within a field of forces whose shifting qualities we may feel as they play across our skin, or as they

pulse between our cells, yet whose ultimate natures we can never grasp or possess in thought. To

affirm our own animal existence, and so to awaken inside the world, is to renounce the pretension

of a view from outside that might some day finally fathom and figure every aspect of the worlds

workings. It is to acknowledge the horizon of uncertainty that surrounds any instance of knowledge,

to accept that our life is at every point nourished and sustained by the mysterious.

If we really are corporeally embedded in the cosmos we see and sense around us, carnally situated

in the midst of this earthly plenum, than we encounter the real only from within the depths of itself,

and hence each aspect that we meet hides other aspects behind it. Sure, there are many facets or

forces of the world that we can name -- sun, soil, and cliff, bear and bird, full moon and sickle moon,

cloud, rain, river. Yet the very presence of these beings in the same field that we ourselves inhabit

entails that there are aspects of each that we do not see; every visible facet of the world speaks to

us of dimensions that are not visible.

It is not necessary to imagine other scales of existence -- microscopic or sub-microscopic -- in order

to notice the worlds invisibility, nor is it necessary to conjure immaterial or supernatural

dimensions. It is enough, simply, to attend to the sensuous landscape that materially surrounds you,

and to the very ordinary presences that populate that landscape. There is, for instance, the unseen

character of that which is hidden behind the things that you do see. Each opaque entity occludes the

things behind it, and each has its own other side that is invisible to our eyes at this moment. We may

alter our position in order to glimpse that other side -- but now different facets have hidden

themselves, and presences that we saw clearly a moment earlier have now vanished, eclipsed by

those in front of them. Wherever we move, and however we contort ourselves, we cannot dispel

this strange invisibility of the visible world, the way it hides behind itself, withdrawing from our gaze.

In the most close and intimate sense, we encounter this curious concealment in the unseen nature

of the back of our own body; in the grandest sense we feel it in the way that the wide horizon of the

visible landscape steadily hides all those lands that lie beyond it.

Yet there is another very basic mode of concealment that lends its mystery to the visible world: that

which is hidden inside each visible thing. The inside of the many buildings we often pass on our way

to school, the woody interior of a young maple tree, the interior density of a stone or a mountain,

the internal physiology of a snake whom weve just disturbed, slithering off into the grass almost

all the visible presences that surround us bear a depth that remains hidden to us, an inner structure

invisible to our eyes. Most intimately we experience this invisibility as the concealment of our own

bodily interior. Certainly we may sometimes imagine this interior, envisioning the inside of our body

according to images that weve seen in our anatomy textbooks. Yet there is a sense of spaciousness,

and light, in these conjured images that is contrary to the obviously dark and tightly packed nature

of ones real interior, of which we have no visible experience. Only the surgeon (and the subsistence

hunter who regularly skins and butchers his prey for food) catches a furtive glimpse of this dark

interior that nevertheless remains, while were alive, almost wholly hidden from view.

In the most public sense, this second mode of invisibility is experienced in the hidden, or unseen,

nature of whatever exists under the ground. And here too, while we may dig down into the ground

to gain some sense of things, and while the geologist may have learned to partly decipher the

various layers or strata of rock rendered visible by a highway cut or an excavation, the vast bulk of

what subsists at various depths beneath the ground is entirely hidden from our awareness.

Each of these modes of invisibility that which is hidden behind the things that we see, and that

which is hidden inside the things we see lends a pervasive sense of enigma, and unknowableness,

to the everyday world of our direct experience. An intuition that, despite all our accumulated

knowledge regarding the workings of the world, we are in continual, felt relationship with unseen

realms. It is a sense of the worlds mysteriousness a feeling that is largely forgotten, in the modern

context, when many of us ponder the earthly world as though we were not entirely a part of this

world, as though we were outside of nature, staring at a satellite image of the earth on our

computer screens, or gazing at the scenery as though it were a flat backdrop. This earthly world

loses its mystery when we presume to stand apart from it, when we consider it as a determinate set

of objects to be measured and tallied, or as a stock of natural resources to be managed by

humankind. Yet as soon as we return to the immediacy of the present moment, and hence to our

ongoing, animal experience in the midst of this world, then the flatness dissolves, and the enigmatic

depth of the world becomes apparent.

Indeed, the two modes of concealment that weve just noticed have everything to do with depth; in

fact, they each reveal a unique meaning of the term depth. The hiddenness of that which lies

behind visible things, and ultimately beyond the horizon of the visible landscape, is a function of

horizontal depth, which photographers call depth of field a dimension we explored at length in a

previous chapter. It is that deep dimension to which we allude whenever we speak of the relative

closeness or distance of perceived things.

Meanwhile, the concealment of that which rests inside the visible bodies around us within the

tree-trunk, and the stone, and ultimately within the solid earth itself, under the ground of the

perceivable landscape is also a matter of depth, in this case inward, vertical depth: that precipitous

dimension that we allude to when we speak of the depth of a dark lake, or the local depth of the

bedrock, or the yawning depth of an abyss.

Both of these depths the enigmatic depth of the distances and the alluring depth of the abyss

become evident and operative only for a creature that is materially embedded in the landscape that

he or she perceives, carnally situated in the midst of the sensuous. Each lends its unique mystery to

the world, ensuring that theres a recalcitrant otherness to the things we perceive, a certain

resistance of the world to our human desires and designs.

Of course there are other unseen dimensions the unseen character of sounds, for instance, or of

smells, or even of thoughts. But while it is quite possible (even simple) to imagine a visible world

that lacks these various dimensions a field of visible things unaccompanied by sounds, or smells, or

thoughts -- it is impossible to imagine a visible field without the invisible dimensions that weve been

discussing. They are entirely necessary to the worlds visibility.

There remains, however, a third form of invisibility that is integral to the visible world, a third mode

of concealment entirely necessary to the visual surroundings.

In concert with the unseen presence of what lies, at any moment, behind the visible things, as well

as the hidden existence of that which dwells within those visible bodies, there is also the invisible

presence of that which moves between the visible things the unseen atmosphere, the air.

Itself invisible, the air is the medium through which we see all visible things. And here as well, this

third dimension of invisibility corresponds to a particular aspect of depth. It is the third and most

profound meaning of depth: the depth of immersion.

This is the most primordial sense of depth, a dimension to which we refer whenever we say that we

are in the depths of something -- wandering in the depths of a great sadness, or caught up in the

depths of an all-consuming task -- as thoroughly as fish are immersed in the sea. Or as thoroughly as

our breathing bodies are immersed in, and permeated by, the unseen atmosphere of this world.

The other side of things, the inside of things, and the medium between things. Three aspects of

depth, each of which corresponds to a unique form of invisibility that haunts the visible world. The

secret presence of that which lies under the ground; the unknown character of that which waits

beyond the horizon; and the mysteries carried by the invisible air itself.

For the human animal, there is no place, no region of the earth that is not triply haunted in this way.

Yet the specific quality of these three enigmatic dimensions, and the precise manner in which they

intersect and inform one another, is curiously different in each locale. It is this unique conjunction of

invisibles, we might say, that defines the genius loci, the particular power of any place.

It is obvious, then, that from the perspective of our gazing bodies, the sensuous world is riddled with

uncertainty. Our most immediate experience of the earth around us brings at the same time a felt

awareness of obscure and ambiguous realms. Indeed, the very visibility of our world implies, from

the first, an array of unseen dimensions whose reality we can sense yet whose enigmatic invisibility

simply cannot be overcome.

A feel for the mysterious and the unseen, in other words, is entirely proper to our experience of the

material surroundings. Invisibility is not, at first, an attribute of some immaterial or supernatural

domain beyond the sensuous, but is integral to our encounter with visible nature itself. While there

are, to be sure, many shapely and richly colored things that we can point to or specify with some

precision, the relations between these visible things the ways that they influence one another, and

influence us, remain hidden. We know that plants at a distance from one another nevertheless

exchange pollen between themselves, and that they attract insects and other pollinators who

approach them from afar -- yet the precise vector of these exchanges, or the atmospheric gradients

that effect such distant attractions, remain unseen. The abundance of trees in certain regions seems

to affect the prevalence and density of the visible clouds that sometimes gather above them, yet the

operative tensions and flows that enact this influence remain invisible. So, too, the rains that fall

from those clouds upon the ground seem to deepen the green and leafing life of those trees, yet the

paths taken by rain once it vanishes into the earth the precise pathways whereby that water is first

drawn into a lattice of rootlets and then up through the thicker roots into the trunk, and finally

distributed among those many leaves -- are concealed from our blinking eyes. Countless flows,

torsions, and tensions structure and transform the breathing terrain we inhabit, yet the vast

majority of those flows are hidden from our direct apprehension.

Nonetheless, by virtue of our carnal enmeshment in the same field as those trees and those clouds,

we can sometimes intuit or feel the pull of these unfoldings as they subtly play across our flesh.

Other unseen flows can be sensed only by extending our bodily imagination outward, into the

voluminous depths of the living landscape.

Yet while such invisible forces and torsions may make themselves felt, we almost never perceive

them directly and hence we cannot delineate them with any precision, can hardly define or even

describe them without violating their ephemeral quality, without falsifying their constitutive

invisibility. Although we sense that such enigmatic unfoldings make up a large part of our world, we

can allude to them only obliquely, indirectly, wielding figures of speech that are purposely -- even

playfully -- ambiguous.

Such, for instance, are the multiple intelligences, powers, and spirits that populate the oral

discourse of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Every community that lives in close and

intimate contact with undomesticated nature -- whether hunters and gatherers, or subsistence

horticulturalists acknowledges the myriad energies that move in the invisible depths of the

sensuous, honoring these powers with regular gestures of offering in return for the steady provision

of earthly sustenance. Cultures whose reliance upon the animate earth is not, as yet, mediated by a

crowd of technologies cannot help but experience the seasonal nourishments upon which they

depend as gifts that offer themselves from the unseen heart of the mysterious. The plants we

consume for food quietly emerge from the dark depths underground; the bison or caribou arrive

each year from distances hidden beyond the horizon; the water that quenches our throats is

replenished by clouds that somehow gather and materialize from the invisible depths of the

medium.

Only mistakenly, then, do we interpret the unseen spirits honored by indigenous, oral peoples as

wholly disembodied, supernatural entities -- immaterial phantasms conjured by a nave and

primitive imagination. Are the streams and vortices in the invisible air disembodied? Is there no

materiality to these jostling surges and subsidences that compose the fluid expanse in which were

immersed? Or to an unseen cloud of lichen spores riding those currents like a transparent silken

cloth? Is the hidden sap rising within the trunk of a Ponderosa pine, or the infection spreading

through the body of a young elk, supernatural? The spirits or invisibles spoken of by oral,

indigenous peoples are not a-physical beings, but are a way of acknowledging the myriad dimensions

of the sensuous that we cannot see at any moment a way of honoring the manifold invisibilities

moving within the visible landscape -- and of keeping oneself and ones culture awake to such

unseen and ungraspable aspects of the real. They are a way of holding our senses open to what is

necessarily obscured from view, a way of staying in felt relation to the unseen waters that sustain us,

to the invisible tides in which were immersed. As such, an acknowledgment of the spirits is part of

the practice of humility. It is a practice necessary to avoid endangering ones community -- a simple

and parsimonious way of remembering our ongoing dependence upon powers we did not create,

and whose activities we cannot control.

In truth, it is only we of the literate, technological West who tend to construe the spirit as

something utterlyinsubstantial, entirely beyond all sensory ken. It is only literate, Christian

civilization that assumes the spirit is something entirely outside of the world that our breathing

bodies inhabit. The word spirit, of course, derives from the Latin spiritus a word that originally

signified wind and breath an ancestry it plainly shares with the English term respiration. By

severing the term spirit from its very palpable, earthly provenance as the wind, alphabetic

civilization transformed a mystery that was once simply invisible into a mystery that was wholly

intangible -- incapable of being felt by any of the bodily senses. By thus pushing the spirit out of the

sensuous sphere, civilization divested the material world of its enigmatic depths, of its distances and

its concealments. Stripped of its constitutive strangeness, voided of its obscurities and invisibilities,

the material world could now be construed as a pure presence, a pure object capable of being seen,

at least in principle, all at once. Capable of being known, at least in principle, in its entirety without

any hindrances or ambiguities. And we, the pure knowers, no longer experienced material reality

from within its own depths; we now hovered apart from the palpable world, surveying this grand

object with the impartial gaze of a disembodied spirit a pure mind without any physical qualities or

constraints.

Only when we pretend to look upon the world from this bodiless vantage does the world appear as a

wholly determinate and defineable presence, capable of being known in its entirety. Whenever we

speak of nature in strictly objective terms, whenever we consider the material world as a

compilation of determinate events entirely susceptible to quantitative description, we tacitly lean

upon this curious notion of nature as a sheer plenum that can be known from every angle all at once

-- a plenum from which we, the knowers, are necessarily absent. Sure, our animal bodies may be

included within that measureable and mechanical nature, but our conscious, knowing selves are not.

We float apart from that nature, pondering the material plenum from outside.

It has proved itself a very useful illusion, this view from outside the world. Yet it is now evident that

by treating the material world as an object from which we ourselves are absent, we are rapidly

wrecking the ability of the earth to support our human presence. The topsoils, forced to produce

ever more abundantly, are rapidly becoming exhausted, depleted of nutrients. The waters, long a

convenient dumpsite for our industrial wastes, have become toxic. The torn atmosphere no longer

veils smooth-skinned creatures like us from the incoming fire of the sun. The earth shivers ever more

rapidly into a fever, while numerous other species -- whole styles of sensitivity and earthly sentience

-- tumble helter-skelter into the gaping maw of extinction. It will not likely be long before our own

clever species follows them.

Unless, that is, we wake ourselves from the long delusion of our detachment from the bodily earth

to find ourselves included, once again, in the breathing body of the world. Unless we begin to

engage the land around us as attentive participants within its vast life, letting our actions draw

guidance from the other participants the other beings whose sentience is so richly entangled

with ours. Unless we emerge from our technological cocoon, shaking our senses free from their

stunned immobility, stretching open our eyes to receive the suns glint off the wing of a peregrine

circling above the city buildings, and opening our ears past the play of words toward the voices of

silence.

For its not just our technological entrancements that hold us aloof from the earthborn world, but

ways of speaking and thinking that have arisen in tandem with those technologies, and which now

have an inertia all their own. How to hold our intelligence down here in the thick of things when our

language keeps dragging us out of the sensuous, when our words and the way we wield them keep

freezing the things, deadening their dynamism, closing them up within themselves as fixed and

finished commodities?

Each of us has our moments of startling sensorial clarity moments when the ever-cycling surge of

abstract thoughts dissolves into the liquid eloquence of a brook made swollen by new rainfall, its

waters frothing and tumbling over the guttural stones. Yet we rarely hold ourselves in such animal

alertness; as soon as we turn toward our friends and begin to talk, our tongue seems to tear our

awareness out of the foam and flux of the present moment. As literate persons, were wedded to

the protective fold of reflection, wherein our language loops recursively back upon itself -- the

speaking self dialoguing inwardly with its own words, verbal thoughts provoking and then playing off

of other verbal thoughts, around and around, to the cool exclusion of the wind upon our skin.

Hence, if we wish to renew our solidarity with the sensuous earth, then we shall have to learn to

speak in some new ways. We will have to learn how to speak more in accordance with our animal

senses.

It rained long and hard last night. Walking in the old orchard this morning, stepping across the bare

patches of dirt between the trees, I look closer and notice a small, delicate leaf emerging from under

a clump, and then looking closer I notice another, suddenly realizing that the ground is full of the

tiny green shoots pushing up from the dark earth. So many seeds mustve been sleeping within the

dry topsoil, waiting so patient for the magic of rain! I grasp the thick branch of an apple tree and lean

back against it. It bends, then flexes back, springing

me back to my vertical stance. I reach toward a leafing twig from another branch and gently tug on

one of its leaves. The branch arcs toward me for a moment, and then tugs back. I can feel the

adamant life in the leaves, the limber muscle of sap-infused wood. As though merely to bend the

branch of an apple tree is a simple experience of reciprocity, a casual meeting between two

divergent lives.

Later, I hike up the hill behind the house, walking beneath cottonwoods and then picking my way

among juniper and pinyon, then finally up among the tall Ponderosas and a small grove of aspens.

Across from me is a south-facing hillside thick with juniper and pine, both the shorter-needled

pinyons and the long-needled Ponderosas, a deep green blanket punctuated here and there with the

brighter foliage of some low deciduous trees. I know well, from my readings, that deciduous leaves

have cells on their surface that are sensitive to the entire spectrum of visible light, and I suspect that

needles have the same gift. I learned the complex chemistry of photosynthesis back in high-school,

and studied it much more intently in college, suitably impressed by the elegant efficiency of the

process. But still I wonder: what does it feel like to be so rooted in a place, sipping minerals through

root filaments that extend themselves, by taste, through the dark density underground, while

drinking the sunlight, by day, with your needles? What is the sensation of transmuting sunlight into

matter? Surely, we dont really believe that such a metamorphosis happens without any

concomitant sensation -- that there is no experience whatsoever accompanying this transformation!

It seems clear that leafing trees lack a central nervous system, and hence are probably far less

centralized than we in their experiencing. Nonetheless, that sensations are not referred to a central

experiencer does not negate the likelihood that sensations are being felt in the leaves themselves.

Experience, for most plants, is simply a much more distributed and democratic affair than it is for

more hierarchically organized entities like us.

We may wish to assume that a cottonwood tree is utterly void of sensation, and hence that a

summer sunrise makes no impression within its flesh. We may convince ourselves that there is no

feeling within its leaves that might distinguish an afternoon of steady overcast from an afternoon

without clouds, no sensation at the tip of its roots when a drenching rain penetrates the soil, or

within the woody sheath of the cambium as the sap rises within the trunk, and that indeed all the

daily and seasonal shifts within a trees metabolism unfold according to a purely mechanical

causality, without any need of sensation and indeed in a complete absence of impressions (in a

blank, vacant expanse of mute materiality). But such a notion commits us, once again, to the belief

that awareness originates outside of the body and the bodily earth.

For it implies that our own capacity for experience is a sudden arrival in the material field. It entails

that our sentience cannot be the elaboration of a sensitivity already inherent in organic matter a

responsiveness already present, for instance, in the myriad microbial entities whose activities

collectively enable much of the metabolism of plants and animals -- and hence must be a power that

abruptly breaks into bodily reality from elsewhere.

If, however, I allow that this wild-fluctuating sensibility I call me is born of this upright body as it

dreams its way through the world if I allow, for instance, that my sentience is supported by the air

streaming in through my nostrils, and by the manifold sensibilities that move within me (by the keen

responsiveness of the bacteria in my gut, and the skittishness of each bundled neuron within my

spine) -- then a new affinity with the sensuous world begins to blossom. For now the other bodies

that I see around me, whether blackbirds or blades of grass, or the iridescent beetle currently

crawling across my shirt, all give evidence of their own specific sentience. The emerald leaves

dangling like wings from the near branch of an aspen attest by their very hue to a kind of ongoing

enjoyment along the fluttering periphery of the tree -- an exaltation of chlorophyll. As though ones

breathing lungs were flattened out and spread across the smooth surface of ones skin, and the days

warmth brought a tingling transmutation along that surface, ones outermost membranes being

ravished by the rays, from dawn until dusk.

Looking up, I notice the needled hillside across the valley now as a curving field of sensations for

my skin feels the variegated green of all those trees as a quiet ecstasy riding the hill. It is an ecstasy

of which I myself regularly partake by receiving the radiance of that color within my eyes, a gentle

edge of pleasure that has always been there for me in the green hue of leaves and of needles -- a

subtle delectation in the sight of green, felt much more intensely whenever sunlight spills across the

visible grasses or the leafing trees -- but which Ive become fully conscious of only now, a kind of

empathy in the eyes.

Just where is this empathic contact taking place? Am I slipping out through my eyes and plunging

across the valley to meet and feel the pleasure in those needles? Is there some force pouring out

from those branches and striding through the thickness of air to meet and join my body here where I

stand staring? Somewhere between there and here (perhaps at every point between us), there is

contact and a kind of blending. This simple instance of perception, this momentary meeting across

the expanse of the valley, cannot help but be influenced by the mood of the medium between us,

encouraged or obscured by the many happenings unfolding within that invisible depth by its local

turbulences and eddies, by condensations and warm updrafts and the cool, pellucid calms that

briefly open or close within the unseen river of air as it rolls between my body and that breathing

hillside.

Our perception of the things around us is everywhere mediated by such invisibles. The reciprocity

between our body and the earth is enabled by a host of unseen yet subtly palpable presences, fluid

and often fleeting powers whose close-by presence we may feel or whose influence we can intuit yet

whose precise contours remain unknown to us. Felt presences whose lives sometimes mesh with or

move through us so seamlessly that they cannot be rendered in thought, but only acknowledged. Or

honored with simple gestures of greeting, and sometimes of gratitude.

And so, if we wish to open our awareness to the actual place we inhabit, freeing our senses to

perceive the terrestrial reality that so thoroughly enfolds us, it is likely that we will have to welcome

the spirits back into our speaking.

Whether we allude to them as spirits, or powers, or presences (or even in keeping with oral

tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, or other invisibles) it is only by addressing these unseen

elementals that we begin to loosen our senses, waking minute sensitivities that have lain dormant

for far too long. By allowing such enigmatic phenomena back into our discourse -- acknowledging

them neither as wholly objective entities nor as purely subjective experiences, but (like whiffs

carried on the breeze) as ambiguous realities that move both around us and within us, and

sometimes move through us -- we rejuvenate the participatory sentience of our bodies. By speaking

of the invisibles not as random ephemera, nor as determinate forces, but as mysterious and

efficacious powers that are sometimes felt in our vicinity, we loosen our capacity for intuition and

empathic discernment, unearthing a subtlety of sensation that has been buried in the modern era.

And it is by means of such subtle sensations that the living land tunes our bodies, coaxing our

communities and our cultures into a dynamic, dancing alignment with the breathing earth. The

spirits are not intangible; they are not of another world. They are the way the local earth speaks

when we step back inside this world.

Extended Forays in Depth Ecology

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