Literary hollows: rare sublīmis

I urge you to change. Auerbach insists ‘the sublime and the everyday are inseparable’, yet I disagree. Nor do I agree with Augustine’s ‘veiled over in mysteries’, as if the sublime finds us wanting and seeks to remove us from ourselves, like a white ball plucked from a black hole or blameless angels hovering in the firmament. It takes one to know one. Least of all am I inclined to concur—o phrasing!—with that most abstruse of philosophers, Emmanual Kant, who considers the sublime a brief excursion into the ‘supersensible’ (like the aforementioned golf ball or angels) before normality reasserts: ‘the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before his apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension’. Oh officious baloney! Reason is the trundler dragged along at our heels. Let’s call it greyscale, life in bits.

                     If black and white blend, soften, and unite
                     A thousand ways, are there no black and white?  
                                                              (Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Man’)

Instead let me side with craftsman Blake’s ‘minute neatness of execution’, a deft precision, whereby the ordinary is impregnated with something without anything or anyone needing to head off anywhere else or play host to a godly visitation. Probably it was Longinus who got us into this hole we can’t quite escape, seeking an inventive spark of transcendence or fleeting respite from our own ordinariness. The best that can be hoped for. There’s also something curiously compelling in Wordsworth’s pressure-cooking of everything into everything else, as if the smallest detail absorbs the enormity of the possible. A fitting question: does the sublime endure or does it depend on its own vacuity?

                    A motion and a spirit, that impels
                    All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
                    And rolls through all things.                  
                                                              (‘Tintern Abbey’)

Four all’s in all; five th’s, but no definite article. The alphabet and its myriad concoctions have much to answer for. No one need go anywhere.^[1] A hollowing: a plonk, we tumble into the empty hole.

note

[1] Think of Alice’s Cheshire Cat. Or of Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or else just another mulligan. Or take a listen to the Small Faces, Itchycoo Park: ‘What will we do there? We’ll get high / What will we touch there? We’ll touch the sky / But why the tears there? I’ll tell you why: // It’s all too beeauutiful’ (1967).