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 an 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.

Copyright © 2000 Max Podstolski All Rights Reserved

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