A short introduction to the Sublime through a short story of how I was inadvertently introduced to the Sublime

Or also, a story about how children are already so intimately familiar with some of the most profound concepts of what the world has to offer

Jun 08, 2023

What is the Sublime if not a spectacle of the landscape, and nature, and human emotion?

Image is a painting of the aurora borealis at night over dark mountains and an ice-covered sea, with an icebreaker ship at the bottom left that is diminished by the magnitude of its surroundings. — Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865, oil on canvas, 56 x 83 1⁄2 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum

When I was 5-ish, my grandparents took me to see what I later learned (in my 30s) was a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian of historical art. There’s quite a lot I remember from that exhibition in precise detail, specific works from specific artists that I wasn’t able to identify until after I graduated from art school at 31 but looking back, I’m pretty amazed that I’ve stood in front of some of these monumental works. But one piece in particular stopped me in my tracks, and I was frozen there in time. I stood, captivated, in front of Frederic Edwin Church's Aurora Borealis. My grandparents thought they lost me, because they kept going through the exhibition but I was still there in front of that painting when they retraced their steps and found me.

By the time I was 5, I’d had a very hard life, and the imagery of Aurora Borealis hit me somewhere deep that my 5 year old self could feel beyond explanation—a profound sense of loneliness, isolation, and smallness amidst the greatness of the world. I didn’t feel any fear, horror, or anguish. I felt an embodied sense of comfort; the painting was the depiction of truth, the world as I knew and understood it, full of aching beauty and wonder but also hardship and peril. And though I couldn’t articulate this at five I could instinctively perceive the feeling of humanity’s place as not the center, but just one part of a multitude. It just felt honest, and right.

I chased that painting my entire life and could describe it in perfect detail to people which I did, all the time. But I didn’t know how to research or look things up until after graduation, and even then it was a struggle to figure out that this painting was probably housed in some institution somewhere. Finally, after an innumerable amount of failed Google searches, I was rewarded with the result—a high resolution image of the painting in all its splendor, and every emotion I felt at that moment when I was 5 came flooding back to me again at 30-something. But this time, I knew what it was. It was the Sublime.

What follows are two paragraphs from other essays I’ve written that I don’t think I can really improve on, but which I feel set the tone for what I want to explore over the course of the month:

In his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 18th century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. Burke’s notions of beauty ultimately relate to perceptions of possessive form—aesthetically pleasing and delectable; diminutive. Beauty inspires a quality of love or passion through a controlled enjoyment of tempered, and temperate, pleasures1. Beauty is pleasing without threat. The sublime, on the other hand, provokes excitement explicitly through the pain or anxiety of threat. The vastness of the threat we behold is so large as to become incomprehensible. Though beautiful, this beauty cannot be controlled or possessed, creating tension or torment. The pleasure we derive from such torments comes not from experiencing them, but from a controlled distance through which we may perceive them. But in this state of bemused analysis we are only intellectually dislodged. To me, this seems like an opportunity to examine the sublime through a premise of re-embodiment and forced rooting, or rootedness, to describe these senses beyond the theoretical.

The historical sublime reflects the deep influence of colonial capitalist mythologies that sever humans from nature, forming a chasm. Nature, as an Othered entity, disrupts humanity’s idea of belonging or place within it. The sublime occurs because we become fearful that we are unnecessary. We’re confronted with our mortality at the prospect that nature endures, beyond us, without us, irrespective of us; a colonial, patriarchal, and disconnected reaction. In an attempt to control and subdue this fear, we create a false reassurance of safety through the illusion of order and hierarchy.2

The history of European landscape painting regards nature with a reverence offered up to be devoured, conquered, tamed, and restrained. There is a formula, rooted in a circular composition: the mountain, the valley, the forest and bodies of water, the light, the storm, the distant blue sky. We view this scene from some safe vantage point to see the complete work of nature’s terrible glory. Meanwhile, bearing witness to the spectacle, we remain unaffected. What it does not show is how the land itself changes us.3

Here is the crux of it. The spectacle of the sublime is designed to make us feel diminished, and separate. The spectacle of the sublime creates a sense of helplessness, of an inability to effect change, or impact. It convinces us that we are small, and our efforts are futile. We are left overwhelmed with a feeling of being awe-stricken, or a false sense of reverence in the face of great magnitudes. Little matters of what we do. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ll stop here for now, but as always, let’s talk here and/or in the Discord! Where have you encountered the Sublime, what did it feel like, where did it leave you?

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