Becoming Animal

A obra do filósofo David Abram (1957-), inserida na corrente da ecologia profunda, distingue-se pela sua notória originalidade, designadamente no que concerne a aproximações a uma animalidade assumida, posicionamento traduzido em textos como Waking Our Animal Senses: Language and the Ecology of Sensory Experience (1997). Neste âmbito, destacamos um trecho do livro Becoming Animal que traduz precisamente essa linha de pensamento e que, paralelamente, aborda um assunto que nos é particularmente caro (apesar da sua elementar gratuitidade!*): andar a pé descalço...

«On some mornings I step outside before pulling on any socks or sliding my feet into their shoes. The soil presses up against my bare feet and shapes itself to them; the clumped grasses massage and wake up my sole. Sharp pebbles stab the thick skin. Drier, more resistant grasses prick and sometimes break under my weight – ow! – sending my feet back onto the smoother stones. Pale stones are cool to the toes, dark rocks warmer. My feet receive directives from the ground, turning away from the brown, brittle grasses, seeking the press of those green blades that tickle and play against the callused skin and then spring up again, slowly, after I pass. It feels good to bring my life into felt contact with these other lives, even if only for a moment.

But how does my weight feel to those grasses; how do my steps feel to the terrain itself as I walk upon it? As this question rises, I begin to sense the carelessness with which I’m commonly clomping around, greedily amassing sensations. My legs inadvertently slow their pace as the sensitive presence of the land seems to gather beneath my feet, the ground no longer a passive support but now the surface of a living depth; and so my feet abruptly feel themselves being touched, being felt, by the ground. My steps slow down further. Flat rocks and rough rocks, needles cast off by the pines, grit that clings between the toes as they flex against the land: each patch of ground requests a different kind of step, which my legs discover only in the doing. My feet are like ears listening downward, and a dark rhythm rises up into me from this contact – a pulse that slows down and deepens the private beat within my chest.

(…) An old, ancestral affinity between the human foot and the solid ground is replenished by the simple act of stepping outside without shoes.

Shoes, of course, are necessary accoutrements of civilization, eloquent in their simplicity; a number of Vicent’s canvases pay honor to their humble practicality. But we overuse them, and so forget that our feet – those downturned hands and the end of our hind legs – are sense organs as well as tools for transport.»

David Abram (2010): Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology; New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 58-60

*Será digno de nota salientar que em língua inglesa "gratuito" e "livre" se expressam pela mesma palavra ("free"); essa coincidência leva-nos a pensar/questionar: essa gratuitidade não será precisamente uma forma (ou a forma) de nos conduzir a uma verdadeira liberdade?