I would like to try and get a handle on what sets a piece of art apart from the good or even great, and ask under what circumstances art can reach the level of the sublime. I refer to art that raises the hair all along one’s spine, makes one feel a cosmic shiver, burns itself instantaneously into the depths of one’s soul. In my case, my principal sensitivity is to words, so it is there that I should look for my examples. I assume that what I shall try to do here could be repeated for visual art, music and so on.I will begin with Henry Miller. I wrote the following in a dissertation for a creative writing certificate a few years ago:
“As for Miller, the Colossus of Maroussi involves a meander through some of the great themes of existence, but is primarily a portrait of Greece and, in particular, Katsimbalis, the eponymous central figure. Miller, here, seems to me close to being a (Dylan) Thomas in prose, both in vision and in melody. The ‘Colossus’ is exuberant, oratorical, elliptical, scatological, overflowing with sheer zest for life and language:
‘To begin you begin anywhere, and since he [Katsimbalis – 94S] had just been dreaming he talked dream. The dream was unimportant, forgotten in a moment, but the remembrance of the dream led him back to the word which had been bothering him, which he had been tracking down for days, so he said, and which was becoming clearer as he himself became clearer, as the cobwebs fell away. The word, whatever it was, led to language and language led to honey and honey was good for one, as were other things, rezina for example, especially rezina, good for the lungs, good for the liver, good for anything that ailed you, especially too much of it, which one should not do, not take too much of it, but which he did anyway regardless of the doctor’s orders, particularly if it were a good rezina such as the one we had the other night at the taverna in Piraeus. The young lamb was good too, had we noticed? He made the gesture of licking his fingers, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, sniffed the air as though to breathe again the aromatic smoke from the oven. He paused a moment and looked about him, as though searching for something with which to wet his tongue before going into the monologue full tilt. Nobody said anything. Nobody dared to interrupt now just as he was getting into his stride. The poems were lying on the table; Seferaides was expected any moment and the captain with him. I could feel that he was growing a bit frantic inwardly, that he was making a rapid calculation to see if there were time enough to get it off his chest before his friends arrived. He was fluttering a bit, like a bird whose wing is caught. He kept on mumbling and muttering, just to keep the engine going until he had decided on his direction. And then somehow, without being aware of the transition, we were standing on the aerial veranda overlooking the low hills, on one of which there was a lone windmill, and Katsimbalis was in full flight, a spread-eagle performance about the clear atmosphere and the blue-violet hues that descend with the twilight, about the ascending and descending varieties of monotony, about individualistic herbs and trees, about exotic fruits and inland voyages, about thyme and honey and the sap of the arbutus which makes one drunk, about islanders and highlanders, about …..’ ”
It feels to me that, in the above passage, Miller is able to re-experience the feelings of that occasion, then to parallel with his own written words the sense of Katsimbalis preparing for flight; as he gets airborne, so does Miller, until at the end, both the speech and the writing that shadows it are soaring aloft, borne up on a great thermal of words. In this same essay, I go on to quote from another writer who, for me, reaches moments of sublime writing – but this time in a very different way. The work of Laurens Van der Post comes, often, from some deep well of sense, where the power of the language is able to mainline us into the great Mystery of being. This is in a long text describing a particular great hunter who has an obsession, lasting forty years, with tracking down and shooting one extraordinary elephant – Sway-Back. One day, he catches up with him.
‘People spoke of midnight blue; but he thought often of Africa’s noonday black. It was that colour on this fateful day, and the slumber of nature around him was more profound than any he had ever experienced. If sleep at night was natural…. sleep at so brilliant and seething an hour was supernatural. For instance, he walked by a black mamba coiled on the edge of the narrow track like the spring of a great clock. His foot had come down not a yard from the head of this most vigilant of snakes. Yet so deep was its sleep that not a quiver went through it….
And so he continued through a silence composed of that simmering shimmer of silver sound without movement of air or life of any kind ……… Never on the darkest night had he known so eerie a moment as this hour when the great wheel of the sun was poised for its roll down the steep slope of day into abysmal night.
Despite his training he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder feeling himself to be followed, and not concentrating enough on the ground ahead. Yet it was well he did so, because there came a moment when, turning to look over his right shoulder, something to the east of him caught his eyes. He stopped and with the utmost care turned slowly to face east, his rifle ready.
A bare twenty yards away, he saw the high, broad forehead of an elephant ….. Prepared as he was by all he had heard over forty years of the proportions of this elephant, even the little that he could see of it surpassed any picture he had been able to imagine. It was Sway-Back, of course, and with recognition of the elephant, his rifle was at his shoulder and his finger on the trigger, since knowing the animal’s reputation he expected it either to whirl about and make off at high speed, or charge. But the great head, still and immovable as some giant bust from the Valley of the Kings carved by a sculptor of Rameses the Great out of black granite, and the long dark back, remained still and immovable. Only the immense ears rhythmically fanned the melted platinum air.
Sway-Back, too, was fast asleep.…..
Sway-Back had made his final pact, his last peace treaty with life. No more evasion, no more travail or travel. Whatever was to come, he was back home where he had begun, to accept all. Sleep, the daily surrender to the will of life, the greatest act of trust possible to its doubting and questing children, was there to demonstrate the completeness of Sway-Back’s acceptance. And what a sleep it was! Indeed so much of life was there asleep in the gun-metal being of this, the greatest animal on earth, so deep and heavy was he with it, that de la Buschagne felt he was looking at the still, immovable centre of a vortex in the stream of existence, drawing all around it from far and wide, down, down, down, like flotsam and jetsam in the maelstrom of a deep sea, to a depth of dreaming never before attained.
He found himself so hypnotised by this colossal example of sleep that even his own eyelids dropped, his gun wavered and his head felt like lead about to drop on his chest. For the first time he experienced what African hunters had told him, that animals protect themselves by inducing sleep in their hunters; and the greater and more dangerous the animal, the more powerful the temptation to sleep in the hunter…..’
For me, it is all the more remarkable that these two writers can reach what I feel to be sublime moments, given that they are using prose. I have the impression that poetry is the supreme writing art, since it can accommodate such a degree of compression that every syllable, every fragment of punctuation can be polished as in a stone-grinder, until they are perfectly smooth.I started to think of this post on waking, and another piece of writing that flashed into my mind, carried there no doubt by Julien Temple’s film Pandaemonium,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/09/10/pandaemonium_2001_review.shtml It’s not possible to capture the full force of this in a short quote; what makes it in the end mesmerising is its relentless quality – the regular metre and rhyme scheme roll forward for stanza after stanza, reinforcing the poem’s sense of the inexorability of fate and doom. Once the mariner has killed the albatross – why? Apparently for no significant reason, since none is given – a chain of events is set in motion in which retributive justice plays out, line by line
‘All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.’
The mariner’s betrayal of the natural order destroys the bond between man and nature, these two being intimately linked as in the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The mariner’s story is told to a guest just about to go into a wedding. He is transfixed by the power of the mariner’s obsession, and forced to listen to the retelling which the mariner, ever since the incident, finds himself obliged to carry out. The poem ends with the other well-known lines describing the ultimate effect of the tale upon its unwilling listener ‘He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.’
Finally, I’d like to choose an example of the monumental which has nothing in common with any of the previous, because there are no linguistic pyrotechnics and there is no earth-shattering theme. ‘Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it’s queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I do admit to feeling a bit embarrassed about quoting Robert Frost to all you Americans. On the other hand, its accessibility is the point I’m making. You can hardly get simpler than this, and it seems to me that this very simplicity is what produces the extraordinary force of the last line, which comes, as it were, out of nowhere. There are no women in the above – I hope someone is going to sort that out by producing their version of this with an all-woman short-list, and in the process introduce me to wonderful writers I likely don’t know. I’m going to end this section by saying that I was tempted to quote something from a young woman blogger which moved me very much – indeed, that’s happened at least once with each of you writers who I’m in contact with. One reason not to get into that area is that maybe one needs to go back to something some years after the first reading, to see if the power of the initial effect is still there. If it is, I guess you can begin to think it might have that quality of the extra- extra- special. I think this has got so long that I’m going to split it: make this into part 1 and do the discussing in part 2 – so I can publish this right now. Hang on, I’ll get there as soon as I can!
