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Apr. 10th, 2011 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionFrom Anatomy of Influence, page 21:
Kant defined the sublime as that which defies representation. To which I would add that the turbulence of the sublime needs representation lest it overwhelm us.
Hence "Double rainbow! What does this mean?" You have to say what what you can't say what it is is. So you look for things that it isn't that it's nevertheless present in, and if you do this well enough you have...the sublime again. But a different one! The double rainbow speech is nothing like a double rainbow, as proven by their juxtaposition, but both are sublime.
My invisibility obsession doesn't have much to do with the special, ultramimetic powers of writing as compared to, say, drawing or photography; yes, only language can make anything happen (though Escher is a bit beyond Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks"), but these are meaningless anythings except as they're able to carry over high, elusive thoughts resisting more continent representations. "2005 was a lizard, 2006 an infusion" is a sentence you can put meaning into, but not one that already has it. Invisible things, since necessarily surrounded by visible ones, are a mixed metaphor. You should avoid these where possible, sure, but properly managed they can represent the distinctions within how things hit us quite well, the discontinuities between our own separate, simultaneous modes of awareness. People, faces, animals, houses, tools, vegetation - the brain processes these as distinct categories as well as as objects in space. That little shock of difference-within-the-same (not that there's another kind) provides a head start for eerier effects, so it's these that go invisible best.
Whether the sublime is a feeling that slips in where only facts should be, or vice versa, the sudden perception of a difference between two modes of awareness is probably part of its definition. Often the heightened state supplants the one it's higher than (shut door no rainbow / open door rainbow) so the difference isn't one of comparison - the earlier state survives mostly as the element of shock pervading the later. But sometimes the first state haunts the second, and sometimes that haunting is the shock, the red in the ink. Or they haunt one another. Attempted comparison combined with a failure of commensurability preventing genuine comparison is pretty much the definition of metaphor - this kind of sublime is a self-aware one, and whatever else it does it's also evoking perhaps the most basic of sublimities: the shock knowledge that metaphor is even possible. Making felt the subject/object split, then the splits in that split (the it in us, the us in it)...some path or map of shocks to show us what we are, that's what the invisible sublime is after.
I say invisible but any unexpected inadequacy of a sense or faculty, from the subject end, or essential quality from the other will do: it's there but it's not. Gatsby's house was and was not what it was - its windows lit, not its rooms. The mountain disappears in mist above and below, mists that disappear in further mists, so the mountain could be anywhere, even inside your legs. You fail to see it - and what are you if you can't see - or it fails to end - and what then is it, is any it? The answer here isn't 'everything' or 'nothing,' which are cardboard blinders we use to protect ourselves from sublimity, but neither is it postmodern sloojimajiggle (which also is). A new place you have one foot in but not yet the other, a new set of facts that's the old with a difference where you don't yet know how different the difference is, or in what differently different ways, or differences different from ways. But in art the point isn't to drive there and park, but to drive there and then step - whether the last step is forced by the art or just invited as the proper reaction, some notion of our stepping just there and why we're doing it is needed. A certain experience of a very specific impossible as a bridge to lost and crucial probabilities.
Kant defined the sublime as that which defies representation. To which I would add that the turbulence of the sublime needs representation lest it overwhelm us.
Hence "Double rainbow! What does this mean?" You have to say what what you can't say what it is is. So you look for things that it isn't that it's nevertheless present in, and if you do this well enough you have...the sublime again. But a different one! The double rainbow speech is nothing like a double rainbow, as proven by their juxtaposition, but both are sublime.
My invisibility obsession doesn't have much to do with the special, ultramimetic powers of writing as compared to, say, drawing or photography; yes, only language can make anything happen (though Escher is a bit beyond Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks"), but these are meaningless anythings except as they're able to carry over high, elusive thoughts resisting more continent representations. "2005 was a lizard, 2006 an infusion" is a sentence you can put meaning into, but not one that already has it. Invisible things, since necessarily surrounded by visible ones, are a mixed metaphor. You should avoid these where possible, sure, but properly managed they can represent the distinctions within how things hit us quite well, the discontinuities between our own separate, simultaneous modes of awareness. People, faces, animals, houses, tools, vegetation - the brain processes these as distinct categories as well as as objects in space. That little shock of difference-within-the-same (not that there's another kind) provides a head start for eerier effects, so it's these that go invisible best.
Whether the sublime is a feeling that slips in where only facts should be, or vice versa, the sudden perception of a difference between two modes of awareness is probably part of its definition. Often the heightened state supplants the one it's higher than (shut door no rainbow / open door rainbow) so the difference isn't one of comparison - the earlier state survives mostly as the element of shock pervading the later. But sometimes the first state haunts the second, and sometimes that haunting is the shock, the red in the ink. Or they haunt one another. Attempted comparison combined with a failure of commensurability preventing genuine comparison is pretty much the definition of metaphor - this kind of sublime is a self-aware one, and whatever else it does it's also evoking perhaps the most basic of sublimities: the shock knowledge that metaphor is even possible. Making felt the subject/object split, then the splits in that split (the it in us, the us in it)...some path or map of shocks to show us what we are, that's what the invisible sublime is after.
I say invisible but any unexpected inadequacy of a sense or faculty, from the subject end, or essential quality from the other will do: it's there but it's not. Gatsby's house was and was not what it was - its windows lit, not its rooms. The mountain disappears in mist above and below, mists that disappear in further mists, so the mountain could be anywhere, even inside your legs. You fail to see it - and what are you if you can't see - or it fails to end - and what then is it, is any it? The answer here isn't 'everything' or 'nothing,' which are cardboard blinders we use to protect ourselves from sublimity, but neither is it postmodern sloojimajiggle (which also is). A new place you have one foot in but not yet the other, a new set of facts that's the old with a difference where you don't yet know how different the difference is, or in what differently different ways, or differences different from ways. But in art the point isn't to drive there and park, but to drive there and then step - whether the last step is forced by the art or just invited as the proper reaction, some notion of our stepping just there and why we're doing it is needed. A certain experience of a very specific impossible as a bridge to lost and crucial probabilities.
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Date: 2011-04-11 01:37 am (UTC)