Edna St. Vincent Millay is a poet with a spirit
so free it bursts from the pages and shatters one's skepticism. I love most her
unique descriptions of nature, because she does not perceive the natural world
to be a thing of beauty or escape, at least not uniformly. Instead, Millay
paints a picture of nature as sublime.
Sublime, in everyday conversation, simply means
really really good. Bloody brilliant, smashing, cheerio! Recently I thumbed
through a book I happened upon in the library, titled 'Landscape as
Photograph'. I approached it because I really like the sweet escape of
photo-books, but since there seemed to be a great many intellectual essays
interrupting my pretty pictures, I decided to take a gander at some analysis.
And I was struck, because the authors revealed a whole different, esoteric side
to the word sublime, and the concept was transformed in my mind. Sublimity is
not a sweet escape, does not capture a thing of beauty or enrichment or even
sheer visceral pleasure: sublimity is a sight that wracks you to your bones,
makes your soul dive inside you a little bit like you're on a horror
rollercoaster, sucking in your breath so that the spirits of divinity who
create the sublime cannot steal it from you.
Edmund Burke, philosopher and naturalist,
described the Alps as terrible and scary, ugly and unfathomable. Not beautiful,
but sublime. He saw beauty and sublimity as mutually exclusive qualities, where
the sublime was a thing unfathomable and mysterious, its terror and shock
accentuated by pitch darkness, while, say, a smooth, rolling green hill might
be beautiful in the light that silhouettes it against the horizon. Other
philosophers have a sometimes more forgiving idea of what constitutes the
sublime, and the one that caught me the most was that of Kant; who, though I
dislike, seems to have some twisted method behind his madness. He wrote: 'beauty "is connected with the form of the
object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be
found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness"
(Wikipedia: Sublime (philosophy)).
I interpret in this that we,
and not any other person, entity, or supernatural power, decide what seems
boundless or bounded, and therefore what is sublime. This is the same
subjectivity that I think underlies perceptions of beauty and what is 'great
art', though some philosophers assign definitions even to these sorts of
qualities; or at least try to. For instance, Mill attempts to make a
distinction between the higher and lower pleasures in life, but he refrains from
providing any examples, saying that one who has experienced both will
intuitively know which is the rarefied sort, and never turn back to the other.
I think that he probably had some concrete ideas of what 'great art' and
'intellectual activities' might constitute higher pleasures, but was too scared
to put these to paper. Rightly so, for he would have had his ass kicked.
The argument of higher and
lower forms of art and life and thinking is contentious, and I think the
sublime escapes being lumped into either distinction. I think that the concept
of the sublime is empowering because it reaches into an aspect of human emotion
that is more than animalistic but pretty elusive to characterize in any other
way; and in this way, it elevates us. The sublime in nature elevates us by
exercising that part of us which lies dormant through everything else, good or
bad; and initiates those rare senses or, as Kant would argue, faculties of
reason, because he does not think that sublimity is a sensory quality but a mathematical,
analytical one; that deliver a shock, a thrill, and often inspiration. It
is easy to criticize what another person might think of as beautiful or an
instance of great art as a fault in taste, but I think that it is near
impossible to condescend something that strikes them as sublime. Perhaps this
is because it is just a more elusive quality in general, or perhaps it is
because of the almost supernatural mystery that shrouds things that are
sublime; and we don't condescend, openly or with any authority, what one person
or another might consider as supernatural or divine.
Religion and political
correctness are only part of the picture, because while there is a divine and
unfathomable aspect to things we consider sublime, the actual consistency between
sublimity and divinity is that both involve very personal experiences. We tend
to respect people who have had very personal experiences with God and emerge
from the experience with some sort of epiphany. Most recently, Snoop Lion isn't
the most credible example of this sort of an experience, but he is an example
nonetheless (I had to do it). And in the same way that we do not touch or
denigrate other peoples' personal experiences with God (mostly; stop thinking
about Snoop Lion already) we cannot denigrate the experiences they describe as
sublime, because it is a personal experience drawing on vicissitudes of
emotions and perceptions that cannot be understood or perhaps even captured by
an outsider to this personal experience; in the same way that it is often hard
for people to explain, or understand, a personal experience with the
supernatural. When Edmund Burke tried to empirically quantify the sublime in
terms of his physiological reactions to stimuli he thought were sublime (e.g.
'tension caused by eye strain'), he was not taken seriously.
I think that it is probably
near-impossible, by the descriptions of some philosophers, for a human to
create a work of art that can be considered sublime, as opposed to beautiful or
technically sound or profound in meaning. In the particular poem by Edna St.
Vincent Millay that I found to be sublime, I think that it was the pictures of
nature that she captured amazingly with her words, rather than the poem itself,
that I considered sublime. In the same way, photographs in the book 'Landscape
as Photograph' expertly capture, rather than create - even through photographic
manipulation - sublimity in nature. Perhaps sublimity is only a quality that can be found in nature; the sheer philosophy that what is
sublime is not a creation of human emotion and sensibility but of mathematical
dynamics and reason might place it out of the reach of highly emotional artists
such as humans; except perhaps by accident (Kant, Wikipedia).
Naturalist and
Philosopher Edmund Burke did not seem to think that a rarefied form of
sublimity exists in nature, separate from any other mediums or means of
creation: 'The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure
in knowing that the perception is a fiction.’… Fiction is, after all, something
that humans can create. Fabrication is one of my everyday hobbies.
Burke set out to categorize the ‘properties of
things’ and the ‘laws of nature’ that inspire in us perceptions of sublimity;
and he used physiological reactions to beauty, which he said is mutually
exclusive with sublimity, in order to make the categorization more clear.
Through categorization, Burke intended to ‘supply a reliable hierarchy of
subjects from which artists can select guaranteed effects’ (25, Landscape as
Photograph); basically, he wanted to teach artists how to create works that
were sublime, rather than merely beautiful. As such he came up with a series of
words to describe the emotions that we associate with sublimity, and he even
went so far as to suggest that blacks, browns, and deep purples were accurate
colors for creating sublime artwork.
I have a hard time believing that it is possible
for an artist to capture their own feelings
of sublimity in a piece of artwork; but, if the sublime is, as Kant suggests, a
work of reason rather than an explosion of emotion (that some more cultured
individuals might categorize as a stream of consciousness rather than actual high
art anyway), then Burke’s empirical descriptions of the sublime should indeed
enable artists to create works that others
perceive as sublime.
Throughout this piece I have tried to sidestep
God, only to come to the conclusion that the sublime is a feeling inseparable
from the idea of God. If I had to describe some aspect of religious feeling
that I have any grasp of, it would be that religion thrives upon that which
humans cannot fathom, or understand within the pitiful throws of our minds. In
my esteemed scientist’s opinion, I’d say that many of the unfathomable
physiological experiences that we associate with the sublime or with religious
experiences are just misplaced messages from our subconscious; perhaps even
basic misfires of our fight-or-flight reflexes (hey Gordon). I’d risk saying
that part of the reason that we experience feelings of ‘terror, obscurity,
darkness, astonishment, and vacuity’ (Burke) when viewing sublime art or nature
is precisely because we are not creatures of nature anymore. Nature arouses a more
animalistic aspect of ourselves, a return to atavistic emotions that we cannot
categorize in our modern technological contexts; and certainly even in Burke’s
time this would have been true, though perhaps less so. I venture to say that
if we, who spend all our time in concrete jungles and virtual realities, were
to sit in nature and let it bore its way through our surface protection and
deep into our intuitions, we would be vastly more unsettled than even the
horrified Mr. Burke.
There are two basic reactions that we have to
things that bother us because we cannot physically understand them. One is to
scramble hopelessly to satisfy the gnawing urge by attacking the phantom
phenomenon from all possible angles and contexts, trying to pin it down and
categorize it. Sublimity has prompted just this reaction in naturalists and
philosophers (those most prone to this sort of reaction in the first place) for
centuries; in Landscape as Photograph,
the authors describe how one Thomas Burnet was ‘so devastated by the chaotic
spectacle of the Alps that he spent three years writing a book to explain their
existence’ (22). Edmund Burke’s feverish categorization conquest seems like a
similar sort of reaction to his disturbed soul.
The other basic reaction to the unfathomable is
to cultivate and thrive upon the feeling; and at most, try to turn the
experience into something meaningful and symbolic. We see this often with
religion, where in crazy Southern Baptist churches devotees seek to multiply
the rise in their spirits by screaming and singing and gyrating, all
expressions which wrack themselves and their peers in the vicinity with goose bumps;
a sure sign that they possess the Lord in goodly amounts. And we’ve all read
those young adult fiction novels that describe Native American youths who
escape into the wilderness and smoke peyote in hopes of procuring a spiritual
experience, perhaps seeing an eagle that talks to them and becomes their
spiritual symbol for the rest of their life. Not to sound as cynical as I know
I do, but in every culture there are echoes of propagation and symbolization
associated with the unfathomable; and in fact I find it perfectly rational and good.
After all, it is this same phenomenon that inspires us to be more than human,
either in pursuing the reason and logic behind the world or nurturing the
secret desire to experience divinity that resides within all of us, and
inspires us to surpass the discomfort of the present for a promise of the
immaterial. The most productive and good members of society have been those
driven by perturbed souls, by divinity and sublimity; but it can conversely be
argued that this same gnawing insatiety can inspire extreme bigotry or
destructiveness.
After all, look what I just spent the last hours
of my life doing: trying to scratch the uncomfortable, irrevocable itch that
the mere idea of the sublime (which I still can’t really wrap my mind around,
and I’m too lazy to read any of the verbose primary sources that Wikipedia drew
from) procured in me; trying to analyze it from every context and angle that I
might be remotely familiar with, and yet still falling short of even defining
my objective. This is the beauty of the boundlessness of human curiosity: we
will never satisfy that itch. In fact, we will probably never even be able to
track it down.
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