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SOH19 States of Nature 'Sun Enlightenment' |
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| SOH19 States of Nature / Sun enlightenment / Sublime / Pressrelease / Webcam SOH19 States of Nature 'Sun Enlightenment' THE SUBLIME Robert Greene Fyodor Dostoyevsky was an epileptic. His seizures were preceded by feelings of an imminent darkness; he had the sensation his head was being folded into two. Suddenly, he would lose all sense of scale—objects that were large could seem small, a book would have the dimensions of a house. There was no logic or order to this. It was a nightmare. Then, a rush of light would pour into his head, and he would experience this as an intense flooding of reality: for an instant, everything in the world appeared exactly as it was—nature, mankind, civilization. And then it would be over. In the aftermath, he was forced to contemplate the world in relation to what he had just experienced. All he saw in the streets of Saint Petersburg—so ordered, so familiar and human. It is all convention and illusion. The reality is that the world is intensely chaotic, and that we are the puniest of creatures at sea in a vast ocean of empty space. From a divine source emanates this flood of light. That is all that is real. For the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky was obsessed with these flashes, and tried to give them voice in his novels, through a succession of characters—Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Myshkin, Kirilov…. Several of the astronauts who landed on the moon, found themselves confronted by something that they later could not quite put into words. It had to do with the intense oldness of the moon. Its geology is so well preserved because because of the lack of atmosphere, that what they saw on the moon was what had been there for billions of years, without the slightest change. The footprints they were making would stay there forever. This oldness obliterated the normal scale of time, in which our lives seem long, and the present enfolds us in constant change and movement. In a flash, the impossible smallness of mankind was self-evident. A dizzying sensation, only heightened on the return journey, when they could see the tiny earth swallowed up in the endless darkness of space. The French have an expression for the orgasm—“le petit mort.” What it connotes is that in that moment of supreme pleasure, there is almost something too much; we are taken beyond ourselves. There is an intimation of death inside of it. The Sublime is nothing more than a mental equivalent of the orgasm. It could be sparked by a landscape, a moment of emptiness or danger that has passed. Our minds are transported away to something preverbal, chaotic, and dark. We lose our powers of comparison. We have a sensation of something that is too much, too big to be contained by words. It is a mix of pleasure and fear. Once experienced it is haunting, and we wish to repeat it. It is as if all of the normal conventions of life—how words dominate us, how the scale of things is ordered for our eyes, how sight becomes deadness and repetition—are reversed in this mental orgasm, and for a brief moment, reality floods in. In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud described an experience he had as a young man. He was wandering the streets of a small Italian town, lost in thought, when he suddenly realized he was walking down the one street that comprised the town’s red light district. He did not want to be there, so he quickly walked away and resumed his thoughts. Lo and behold, minutes later he had somehow turned back on to the same street, gaining the attention of the whores who now assumed he was on the prowl. He took a different exit to get away, continued walking, and to his disbelief, found himself there a third time. He later included this in his catalog of uncanny moments. The Uncanny is an experience that can be an odd parallel or coincidence, a déjà vu moment, a possible omen hidden in irrational events. But what makes it uncanny is that the feeling of strangeness is mixed with something familiar. We have had this feeling before. It is something we know but don’t know. The Uncanny is the return of the repressed, of sensations in earliest childhood, but in disguised form. The Uncanny, however, is a part of the Sublime. Children are bathed in the Sublime. Not yet socialized by language, small things will trigger the sensation. This could be a glimpse into mirrors on both walls in a barber shop, where the reflection is infinite. It could be intimations of the future. A glance of recognition in the eye of a cat or dog. The world of the senses is not ordered, the personality not yet formed, and the trauma of birth is near enough that many things remind them of death. Whenever we have a Sublime moment we are returning to childhood, to what is repressed, to the emptiness we were once familiar with. In his journals that were later published, the Huguenot pastor Jean de Léry, described his voyage to the strange land of Brazil in the mid 16th century. He and two other fellow voyagers could not help but be repulsed at the pagan practices of the Tupinamba tribe with whom they lived for several years. Then one night, de Léry heard a frightful howling, and moved closer to the quarters from which it emanated. The howling of tribesmen had turned into song, and the harmonies were so strange and wondrous that, “I stood there transported with delight. Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears.” These and other experiences he catalogued were so beyond what he was familiar with, he lost his critical powers. He could not frame them in Christianity. He could not ascribe to them any meaning. His moral scale was broken and he was confronted with something beyond good and evil, something truly ecstatic. The opposite of the Sublime is the Banal. In the Banal, everything is equal. Your comment about the weather is on the same level as her critique of a Tarantino film, and his recommendation of a wine, and their analysis of the latest trend, or a serial killer who wears the flesh of his victims, and the price of oil, and the existence of witches. It is easy to bring everything down to the level of banality—a joke, some sarcasm, and voilà, what was serious or elevated is now banal. The banal is literal, it has no patience for symbols or analogies. It wants things that are familiar and cute and warm. It is chatty and relaxed. We live in the era of supreme banality, where appearances are the only reality. But opposites reach each other in their extremity, and so a world that is dominated by the banal, is haunted in every encounter by the Sublime. Just like now, as you read these words. Painting, literature, drama, music—for centuries they were governed by Beauty. Within the frame of the painting, or the beginning and ending of the drama or music or novel, an order was created that was aesthetically pleasing, even if it allowed for some discordant notes in the middle. Such works may have contained surprises, yet the overall form was comforting and familiar. But over time, this machinery broke down and we were confronted with its decrepit artificiality. We started to make paintings that went beyond the frame, novels without end or beginning, atonal music—Scriabin, Beckett. We embraced empty space and rupture. We went in search of the Sublime, a new aesthetic. In the Sublime work of art, scale is broken, and too much is poured into a mold that cannot contain it. It is orgasmic, and it is the future. Robert Greene, author of “The 48 Laws of Power” |
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