The Language of Birds.

From my friend, Julie Rothschild on a dance video project.  I highlighted the text that made me think of our work.  

"In the video, I refer to this text in this not yet published chapter by David Abram (from 1993).  His book, The Spell of the Sensuous, was published in 1996.  http://www.wildethics.org/david_abram.html

Chapter 5 In the Landscape of Language

a few excerpts:

"In this chapter, then, we will glance at just a few of the very diverse ways in which the common discourse of an oral culture may open, directly, onto the expressive sounds, shapes, and gestures of the surrounding ecology." 

 

"The Language of Birds"

"Whenever we of literate culture seek to engage and understand the discourse of oral culture, we must strive to free ourselves from our habitual impulse to visualize any language as a static structure that could be diagrammed, or a set of rules that could be ordered and listed."

"The land, in other words, is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates."

"If we listen, first, to the sounds of an oral language, to the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of an oral culture, we will likely find that these elements are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape, to the depth of its valleys or the open stretch of its distances, to the visual rhythms of the local topology.  But the human speaking is necessarily tuned, as well, to the various non-human calls and cries that animate the local terrain."