Sublimity
Words go out of style, but the feelings behind the words also may go out of style. “Out of style” of course doesn’t express precisely how large matters somehow disappear below the societal surface. I am thinking of such a feeling as the title of this essay. It is fair to say that sublimity isn’t a word one hears much in daily conversation or reads in articles in journals or papers or hears from the mouths of pundits and broadcasters. If sublimity is about a sort of rising, modern times would seem to have witnessed a massive leveling and sinking.
A Dictionary of the English Language, also known as Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, defines the sublime as “that which arouses sentiments of awe and reverence and a sense of vastness and power outreaching human comprehension.” From the modern perspective, there are many difficulties here. “Awe” tends to be used in the colloquial “awesome,” meaning not much more than “cool” and applicable to a TV show or a new pair of jeans. To feel true awe about anything, whether in the natural world or man-made, would put one’s self in the position of a suppliant, which isn’t a happy position for a modern person set on controlling as much as a person can control. “Reverence” falls into the same situation. What is there to revere, particularly that isn’t squarely in the realm of religion? As a feeling, reverence admits a sort of dependency that goes against the modern temperament.
The point of modern times, so to speak, is that nothing outreaches human comprehension. Everything can be accounted for one rational way or another. This can be viewed as an exalted enterprise or a mischievous one or a mundane one in the way that scientific concepts get dragged down to a sort of street understanding as when we say “Big Bang” or “relativity.” In all cases, the human mind feels up to the task of measuring the infinite spaces and origins, whether inside the human psyche or outside this mere planet. Such an attitude once had something Faustian about it—a fearless, impetuous striving—but too many people have proffered too many compelling explanations of too many phenomena to impute pride to their endeavors. One of the beauties of science is how humdrum it is. I mean the phrase almost literally: the universe hums and we take notes.
That sense of “vastness and power” may bring up nothing more than superstition and often has. Awe easily becomes a magnified finitude. Our smallness leads us to understandable fear. Fear leads to imputations that rest uneasily or, with time, easily about the power of the life force. Magic easily swallows awe.
Sublimity is no place for human beings to rest and that may be one clue to its decline in modern annals. Even as it has increased the complexity of day-to-day living, modernity has given people a powerful sense of managing that living. There is nothing managerial about the sublime. The nineteenth century was glad to look backward, however sentimentally (given the raptures about telegraphs and railroads), at the vista of “vastness and power.” The twentieth century subjugated that vista.
What the sublime does best of all is to simply and greatly exist. Nothing in the sense of eventfulness occurs. A waterfall may be sublime but it is only being itself. Nor is there anything to compare it to. The fact of our being perpetual spectators gazing upon the Creation or the Evolution (depending on your point of view) leaves us to our own modest devices. The enthusiasm that accompanies a sense of sublimity may buoy us, but doesn’t help us make any informed decisions of the sort modernity favors. Or the decisions may be quiet and solitary ones. One by one, we may go off to commune with what cannot be readily communicated to others. When we speak, we may feel only our insufficiency.
To create sublimity is to enter the precincts of what dwarfs yet enlivens us and to testify to something wholly intuitive. The endeavor isn’t so much Promethean but rather a suspension of the human ethos in hopes of deepening the human ethos. Thus when Mark Rothko, to cite one of the most important modern artists of the sublime, painted his canvases that showed one large rectangle seeming to float over another, he was broaching the sense of awe in a way at once primitive and self-aware. His paintings don’t ask to be admired and they certainly have no comments to make on the society the artist lived in. They ask to be felt. They are knocking on the door of the totemic but they are purely created. They allude to nothing but themselves. Much modern art does that but in Rothko’s case the painting expands toward the viewer in its self-allusion. It encompasses. What is being encompassed is very hard to say, but the feeling remains for anyone who has spent some time with Rothko’s paintings: something is occurring here that I need to be with and heed. Perhaps what Rothko touched was the truest sense of creation, of conjuring harmony—the hum of the universe—on a canvas. We always come later in this world but in viewing Rothko’s work, we are right there at the beginning of everything.
Rothko’s endeavor was not a sustainable one. That goes without saying but such reality carries a definite melancholy. He pursued variations on the theme and may have lived for a time in a kind of impossible grace. Beyond the imputations of beauty, which reside for better or worse in the social notions of the day, he broached a sense of outreaching that, however inadvertently, mocked social notions. The paintings are profoundly un-hectic. The busyness of much modern art, as it seeks to announce itself, is missing utterly in Rothko. We are with that which can be evoked but can never be controlled or, for that matter, explained. Awe is present in the painting and awe is elicited in the viewing. And the viewing is a passive act that is not passive at all. Before such an emanation we quiver. Sublimity does exist. Inside ourselves, we stand on tiptoes, gawking at grandeur, humbled yet ardent.
This theme is making me think of a book I am just beginning: The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas. The brother, a “simpleton”, stands outside his house at dusk and is thrilled that a woodcock has chosen his roof as its flight path. With all of the description of the light, the lake and the mist, here is a work that seeks to capture the sublime.
I appreciate this essay, so dear to me. "We are with that which can be evoked but can never be controlled or, for that matter, explained." Thank goodness for that. The natural world, poetry, children - these are all sublime. Thank you for expressing the ineffable beautifully.