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Chasing Sublimity: Nature, Self and Art
Max Podstolski
In a silent way
There is that one pink cloud - a long, horizontal bread roll -
hanging over the mountains in the fading light. Down on the flat a
similarly-shaped ribbon of water echoes the cloud, reflecting shiny
pink in the dominant blue-grey of dusk. Urban / suburban / rural lights
stretch out as far as the plains meeting the hills rising into mountains.
I am walking in solitude, seeing the luminous landscape as if for
the first time, heart leaping to embrace the crescent moon. I am aware
of striding legs carrying me forward on automatic pilot, as thoughts
connect the dots of multiple fragments of consciousness into one.
There was a corner back there somewhere that was turned, when the
myriad chattering voices of society within me suddenly became silent,
and only stillness remains. I am remembering and reliving the sublime
landscape, the ineffable beauty of being-here-and-now-in-the-world,
that every time fades from memory just as this twilight is fading
into night.
And then you go back into the real world
Down there the lights have grown brighter, a web of artificial
stars mirroring the real ones I know are shining above the clouds.
Down there amongst that electricity lies the everyday reality
of work, home, society and proliferating Internet connections
positioning innumerable virtual souls in cyberspace. "I
am not an automaton, I am a free man." Am I? From here (elevated,
imaginary, solitary, unrelenting) people look like extensions
of computers and televisions, serving Hermes, winged messenger
of the electronic, electrified cybergods of instantaneous gratification.
Caught up in glowing screens the sublime has receded before you
know it. Gaze into one screen by day and another by night. Lose
yourself in countless images of other people's superficial projected
manifestations, just so long as you never have to face the gaping
chasm of emptiness where your own soul should be.
Try just a little bit harder
How do you put experience into words? You can't. So how do
you put the experience (of not being able to put experience into
words) into words? How do you put the experience (of not being
able to put the experience of not being able to put the experience
[and so on, ad infinitum] into words) into words? If remaining
silent and wordless is not an option, you could utter profoundly
nonsensical zen-like koans, speak in fashionably unfashionable
clichés, or "try just a little bit harder"
(à la Janis Joplin) to communicate exactly what
you mean at this point in time. You can and do, on the other
hand, put words into experience, attempt to identify and make
sense of experience by attaching words to it. But how do you
know they're the right words? Maybe there are no right words,
only choices made whereby one meaning, or set of possible meanings,
is selected or 'privileged' over others. And every word you write
and communicate forges an identity which somehow belongs to you.
Let's play a game called hide and seek: you hide, I find
you, with the words I speak
You can try using words like sublime, ineffable, epiphany,
mystical, mysterious, divine, transcendental, numinous, awe-inspiring,
surreal: whatever you hope will gloss over the illogical, paradoxical,
self-contradictory position of having to use words to describe
the indescribable. But then you're faced with the fact that scholars
have been arguing about the nuances of words like these for centuries,
and they're still arguing. You confront the limitations of your
own scholastic knowledge, and have to admit that you're no philosopher,
theologian, historian of ideas, or post-structuralist adept.
To be honest, you don't actually give a damn about the Kantian
sense of a word as opposed to the Kierkegaardian - you only care
about finding words that can communicate your own experience.
But even if you seem to succeed, you know it's a lie.
Unintentional, well-meaning, sincere, but a lie nevertheless.
The experience, all experience, is just nameless. When you get
down to it.
Are you experienced?
Let's get one thing straight: I'm not referring to unreal
artistic or photographic landscape which frames the land, obeys
principles of aesthetically-pleasing design, is detached, reproduced,
framed, and hung on the wall like a fake window onto a picturesque
scene. This one you have to exit society for, physically step
into, experience with all your senses and faculties, move about
in, merge with, and withdraw from as it fades from consciousness.
This landscape call it a seascape, urban jungle, the world
or universe if you prefer is your own territory,
belonging solely to you in one sense and to everyone and no-one
in another. Enter as Alice stepped through the looking-glass,
into an alternative and mind-expansive reality: it is not a virtual,
multimedia, vicarious, psychedelic, or otherwise-artificial experience
I'm alluding to, but the real and simple act of walking in solitude.
With your own two feet touching the ground. You can't get any
more connected than that.
You are what you is
Casper David Friedrich's and Turner's romantic depictions
of turbulent landscapes and seascapes, paintings in which humanity
is revealed as dwarfed by the potentially uncontrollable forces
of nature when unleashed, evoke what is typically considered
'the sublime'. In Rothko the human element has disappeared from
the field of vision, leaving only an image of some kind of sublime
or intense experience no longer a depiction of humans having
an experience as with the Romantic painters. And Pollock identified
himself with nature, implying that the sublime is no more
an outer manifestation than an inner one. All that has changed,
in this regard, between the Romantics and Abstract Expressionists
is their different takes on the sublime, from 'out there' to
'in here'. Of course it is just as rational to internalise as
externalise, for the human experience of the natural world as
an objective phenomenon is registered subjectively. The sublime
is a synonym for nature, which all living things are part of,
mankind included. It is not an objective fact but a state of
perception, dependent on the receptivity of the beholder. So
the sublime turns out to be you, underneath the layers
of words, identities, constructed selves: the bride stripped
bare by her bachelors, even. At least that's the way this writer
is telling it.
When you go chasing rabbits
When you go looking for the sublime, you end up finding yourself
and your own limitations. You see the great divide between yourself
and nature and want to cross it. And you think you succeed, in a sense,
but you have to come back to tell the tale. A tale that dies in the
telling. A memory that may be evoked by the trace of a representation,
but a will-o'-the-wisp nonetheless. A vision that can be photographed
or painted, and admired for its beauty, but the reproduction's not
what you saw at the time. That vision the one you experienced
and were part of no longer exists. But another one will come
into existence at the exact moment you find it. And find yourself
within it. Perhaps it's been there all along, waiting for you.
This article originally appeared in *spark-online issue 11.0,
August 2000, at:
http://www.spark-online.com/august00/miscing/podstolksi.html
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