PALIMPSESTUOUS INTERTEXTUALITY!

the sublime

I wrote this nearly 2 years ago, the December I was in grad school. I still feel the same way.

In one of my seminars last week, we watched Crossroads - not the Britney movie; a 1970s experimental documentary made entirely of footage of atomic bomb explosions. The professor asked us if we were familiar with the concept of the sublime in aesthetics and gave a rudimentary explanation, saying that most simply, it's beauty so great in magnitude that it defies intellectualization, it exceeds language. You can't communicate it, replicate it, imitate it. Then she said offhandedly, as though to a stranger in passing, "Imagine how frustrating that must be, to not be able to put your reaction into words!" And moved on.

Two things about this struck me. First, I was interested in how she managed to so aptly describe how I feel about everything we discuss in each of my seminars every single week through an explanation of the sublime. Secondly, I was moved by how unbelievably tragic this simplistic description of the sublime sounded. If the sublime can't be intellectualized or put into words, then in a sense, an individual can never experience the sublime independently and then share that experience with others -- except through art, I suppose. Maybe that's why some visionary artists are so compelled to create images -- maybe they feel like they need to find a way to communicate their experience. Maybe they're just trying to diffuse the inherent tragedy of the sublime.

I think I deeply sympathize with that need.

I found out. And I kind of wish I hadn't.

My level of self-worth may be dismal, but I at least know I am more than just a "nice girl". I'm sorry you had to forget that. If only I could forget you.

Loss scares me. I hate growing attached to people, places, because I know inevitably, I will lose them - and in one sense, that loss will be forever. What leaves us, often does not return, and even if it does return, it's never the same. We are left with only with the memory. What was is what was and can never be again.

Once in a while, though, that loss is not entirely permanent. Sometimes, if we let go despite our attachments, the wild and unpredictable return to us. We find ourselves in the same places, with the same people. But the circumstances have changed - we have changed. The attachment can't be recreated, but in some cases we can move forward and grow together. In other cases, we can only cling to that memory of the attachment as it was, and let it die gracefully. A new chapter does not begin, and the book closes forever.

Sometimes I like that things come full circle, that we, in ways, occasionally regain what we have lost.

Sometimes I wish that what is lost, like a pail and shovel caught in the surf, is lost forever.

Came across this at work today.

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it."

David Foster Wallace