The things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network – a "biospheric web" wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others – has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty's late description of sesnuous reality, "the Flesh," as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and "prolongs unto the invisible" the wild, interpenetrating, interdependent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things..." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 85