Sublime

"It's easy to remember (and so hard to forget)"

“I thought you did well with your teaching presentation. But I have to say, I disagreed with your definition of the sublime.”
“Really?” I thought about it for a moment. What had I said? Something like, ‘Had you ever had a moment when you saw something so horrible you couldn’t look away.’ How would you have defined it?” I asked.
“I think of it in terms of an awe and wonder of God’s creation, something like the feeling evoked in one of the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church or Thomas Cole.”
“I guess I think of it as more of an emotional reaction, not one necessarily tied to God or the divine.”
“I’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia when I get back to my office” he joked.

“I don’t like lightening, Papa. It’s loud.” Her voiced rising to punctuate the effect. I pulled S. in close to me, to let her know that she was safe.

Kant said of the sublime "We call that sublime which is absolutely great." I imagine it to be the beautiful, naturally, but also the tragic, the ugly and the terrible. After all, the overwhelming sense of awe that we feel, what we call the sublime, is one that causes spectacle to dwarf our understanding of our own existence, to threaten our understanding of what is reasonable with destruction. I suppose in these moments one might get a glimpse of the awesome power of the divine, or from terror to turn to the divine as a means of salvation.

“Papa!” S. shouted excitedly. “It’s raining outside!” It would seem that S. has not yet connected Blitzen and Donder with rain.

I remember the first time I noticed the long fingers of sunlight beaming down through the clouds after a storm. I felt the sudden revelation and knew exactly why people believed Heaven was in the sky. I had the exact same feeling the day a looked at a crescent moon and recognized it as a pair of cow’s horns. I knew, knew, why people had fashioned a golden calf. The sublime is an absolute, god is an absolute. If A=B and C=B, does that mean that A=C? Where do those ideas of absolute come from?

The natural state of man, argues Rousseau, is neither good nor bad. Men knew neither vice nor virtue. Mankind’s bad habits are the products of civilization. I wonder, does our sense of awe and wonder come from a realization of the vastness of nature compared to our construction of civil society, its fragility, or both?

A final thought, pulling at threads, is there a sense of moral or spiritual transcendence in the sublime? Does it, perhaps, make more sense to ask how do we approach the divine?

Watching to a video in Sunday school, Marcus Borg described 3 central stories Of the Old Testament: Exodus (bondage and liberation, journey and destination); Exile (alienation and loss of connection and the return home); and the Priestly story (sin, guilt, forgiveness). Each of these stories, he says serves as a model for avenues of moral or spiritual transcendence. While Christianity, he says, has focused chiefly on the third, each of these stories serves as a model for how an individual can restore their contact with the divine.

I think I get from this that every experience with the divine is different, and that we need a variety of tools to understand our relationship with God.

Thinking back on it one more time, I am pretty sure I can’t even say that A=A. That is to say, that no one experience of the absolute, i.e. absolutely great or absolutely terrible, is quantifiable and that to make comparisons between absolutes is meaningless. Rather we are meant to be overwhelmed, and in so being are terrified and bedazzled by the experience, and that, to me, is the sublime. Everything else is just the stuff we bring to the experience, to help sort it out and make sense of it.

Do Be Do Be Do

In a recent post on painting my sister-in-law asks if I have suggestions for those who lack that drive to create, for whom it doesn't come naturally. “Do you or any of your readers have ideas about how we artistically-challenged might become less so?”
I want to assure her and let her know that this inquiry hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. Still, I am not sure if I am the person most qualified to answer this question. What do I know about making art except that art does not make itself? I know about the making of art, though I don’t know as much as I would like. I know about painting, but not everything there is to know about that.

I suppose when it comes to making art I am of the “To be is to do” variety. You have to make art, and develop those skills through practice. No amount of thinking about it is substitution for the act itself.

Hmmn. My little inner voice just rang and said “I think I heard somewhere recently that a study was conducted comparing people who thought about practicing the piano with people who actually practiced and that the results between the two groups were negligible.”

I was talking to a professor of mine once who said, that in a typical painting class there is usually only one or two artists in the group, and that he concentrates his efforts on those few. I remember my reaction being something along the lines of shock mixed with indignation. It is tantamount to teaching only to the A students, and it made my blood boil.

Can’t anyone be inspired to make art? Inspiration is at the heart of any endeavor after all. The equation ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration is equal to hard work, plus a tap from the muse.

Plato says as much in his Ion. Poets and their performers, the rhapsodes, are divinely inspired. The performer is not guided by rules of art, but is an inspired person who derives a mysterious power from the poet; and the God in like manner inspires the poet. The poets and their interpreters may be compared to a chain of magnetic rings suspended from one another, and from a magnet. The magnet is the Muse, and the ring which immediately follows is the poet himself; from him are suspended other poets; there is also a chain of performers and actors, who also hang from the Muses, but are let down at the side; and the last ring of all is the spectator.

Plato’s argument confuses poiesis with praxis, making with doing, or production with action. Plato uses examples like cobblers and painters who, like an historian deals in specifics, while the artist like the philosopher deals in universals. Plato would have you believe that a shoe maker works in a vacuum, where leather and nails magically appear, while the artist focuses on the interconnections (like strings of logic tied together?).

There is no easy way to explain why an artist makes or even what it is that the artist wants to make (do). I suspect that those answers are found the hard way by each and every artist; by making art, by failing and trying again, stumbling forward with every attempt through writers block, with schedules, and life and everything else trying to interfere till at you emerge victorious or defeated and then you try again…

Can you smell the Dum Dum's?

My New Hero