I finally got my cooking blog started.
Obviously I no longer need to continue this blog for grading purposes, but I feel that I ought to continue exploring Emily Dickinson and modern media, though perhaps less formally. To that end I have found two videos that are musical interpretations of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers:"
"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—
I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
I have been doing some further reading on Emily Dickinson, and have recently looked at a book called The Music of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters. Through much of the book Carolyn Lindley Cooley, the author, explores how music both effected and is reflected in Emily Dickinson's poetry. She also has a section on musical adaptations of her poetry, and even in the 70s when the book was written there were several thousand musical adaptations, and we may safely assume that that number has increased significantly. So let us get on to some examples:
And here is one more:
You can notice immediately how different the styles are. You can also examine musicality within the poem itself. It is in alternating tetrameter and trimeter (8,6), which is a metrical rhythm common to at least two musical forms, hymns and ballads. And, as we saw it lends itself very well to music.
A.J. Morris
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Conventional Research Paper Versus Blog
General Feelings
Overall I think that a blog format allows you to introduce media that it would be difficult to provide in a research paper. You might be able to cite a video and tell where to find it in a traditional research paper, but if you are doing research on something that is media heavy it is going to become cumbersome very quickly.
However, there is an advantage to focus when you are writing a traditional paper. When you write a paper you have the reasonable expectation of the reader reading through the entire piece and seeing how all of it connects directly, as do you. A blog is more fragmented, meaning that it is more difficult to complete or even see a single unifying argument that links everything together. There is, however, the advantage of being able to focus on a very specific topic, or even to have a more gradual introduction of each topic through an epigraph.
Personal Experience
If you are a paranoid student like me, having a less set form is both a curse and a blessing. You do not have to worry as much about staying completely on topic, a blog lets you explore facets of your paper that are not necessarily directly relevant. A blog also allows you to tie in personal experience to provide perspective to your reader. It also means that you constantly worry whether you have done enough, if the format is correct, you worry about fulfilling criterion even though you are not entirely sure what they are yet.
However, there is some difficulty in not being somewhat fragmented as a class. The internet is constantly changing, that means for any class that approaches writing in this way it will be by necessity a more dynamic class than we are used to. This is good and bad. We can imagine an education system in the future that is constantly dynamic to imitate the real world, but then do we really focus properly on what we need to learn. I don't have an answer to this problem, but it will likely be something that we will have to deal with more in the future.
I did feel that this class was a better preparation for the real world, and wonder if there should be a generally required class that focuses on using the internet for research, socializing, blogging, etc...
For doing this class in the future, I do feel that the blog should be introduced on day one, especially if it is spring or summer. We will also want a somewhat more explicit set of criterion for how the blogs are to be written, though if it is too rigid we might as well be writing a formal paper. I think that is what I am seeing most; there needs to be a balance of freedom that the blog environment provides and the structure of a class and scholarly research. I think that we should also start contacting people about our blog as soon as we have a somewhat set target for the blog. We waited until it was a bit late to emphasize it in the semester and it should be done earlier.
However, let me be the first to say that even though I have a hard time with social media, etc..., that I thoroughly enjoyed this approach to our class. I think that this type of class should definitely continue into the future, just with a little bit more definition (Yes yes, I know, we were a pilot group).
Andrew Morris
(Image came from the bloghorn.com: http://thebloghorn.org/2009/03/06/artist-of-the-month-the-surreal-mccoy/)
Overall I think that a blog format allows you to introduce media that it would be difficult to provide in a research paper. You might be able to cite a video and tell where to find it in a traditional research paper, but if you are doing research on something that is media heavy it is going to become cumbersome very quickly.
However, there is an advantage to focus when you are writing a traditional paper. When you write a paper you have the reasonable expectation of the reader reading through the entire piece and seeing how all of it connects directly, as do you. A blog is more fragmented, meaning that it is more difficult to complete or even see a single unifying argument that links everything together. There is, however, the advantage of being able to focus on a very specific topic, or even to have a more gradual introduction of each topic through an epigraph.
Personal Experience
However, there is some difficulty in not being somewhat fragmented as a class. The internet is constantly changing, that means for any class that approaches writing in this way it will be by necessity a more dynamic class than we are used to. This is good and bad. We can imagine an education system in the future that is constantly dynamic to imitate the real world, but then do we really focus properly on what we need to learn. I don't have an answer to this problem, but it will likely be something that we will have to deal with more in the future.
I did feel that this class was a better preparation for the real world, and wonder if there should be a generally required class that focuses on using the internet for research, socializing, blogging, etc...
For doing this class in the future, I do feel that the blog should be introduced on day one, especially if it is spring or summer. We will also want a somewhat more explicit set of criterion for how the blogs are to be written, though if it is too rigid we might as well be writing a formal paper. I think that is what I am seeing most; there needs to be a balance of freedom that the blog environment provides and the structure of a class and scholarly research. I think that we should also start contacting people about our blog as soon as we have a somewhat set target for the blog. We waited until it was a bit late to emphasize it in the semester and it should be done earlier.
However, let me be the first to say that even though I have a hard time with social media, etc..., that I thoroughly enjoyed this approach to our class. I think that this type of class should definitely continue into the future, just with a little bit more definition (Yes yes, I know, we were a pilot group).
Andrew Morris
(Image came from the bloghorn.com: http://thebloghorn.org/2009/03/06/artist-of-the-month-the-surreal-mccoy/)
The Tulgey Wood: Krista's Blog
I will only be examining elements where I felt that Krista did an exceptional job in her Tulgey Wood Blog, or there needs to be improvement.
Focus:
Overall the focus is good, however, there are a few posts in which she talks about the dangers of the internet and doesn't tie them back to her central theme of Peter Pan, but since she is discussing the dangers of the internet they are still mostly on focus with the idea of Peter Pan being a good analogy for the dangers of the internet.
Cohesion:
Krista's main pages are directly in series to each other, and she does have a page linking them together, as well as a few discussions that she had had previously, however, I think a head page in which she showed the process of the her research, or at least what each of the blogs in the thinking process had been about that would have been helpful.
Community:
I don't see any explicit reference to how she attempted to get people outside of our class to participate in her blog, though we do get quite a bit of our class commenting and interacting. I am sure that she made attempts to contact people in the outside world, I just wish that she had talked about that a little more.
Analysis:
Krista does a very good job in her analysis. She relates the issues of Peter Pan very well with the dangers of the internet and it is very obvious that she had put a lot of thought into it to get a clearly structured analysis.
Media:
I think we all forgot to appropriately cite where we got our images from. While not necessarily a problem as our blogs are noncommercial and most people will not mind, for our next class, you should probably focus a little more on reminding people to cite where they got their images from. The images overall were well relevant, but I thought that some of them that were just placed in the center of the post should have been formatted to have the text go around them to help maintain the flow of the post.
Design:
I thought that the side panel could have been added too. I think it is very spare. By having some of the side options fleshed out a little more it would make the sire seem less sparse. (The fish are great, though, and for some reason fascinating to watch.)
Quantity:
Krista did a great job of fleshing out her content. Anyone who was reading her blog would feel more comfortable with the subject afterward, and she has provided quite a bit of good research to get them further down the road if they wished.
Overall, Krista did a great job of placing research into a blog setting. Way to go Krista!
Focus:
Overall the focus is good, however, there are a few posts in which she talks about the dangers of the internet and doesn't tie them back to her central theme of Peter Pan, but since she is discussing the dangers of the internet they are still mostly on focus with the idea of Peter Pan being a good analogy for the dangers of the internet.
Cohesion:
Krista's main pages are directly in series to each other, and she does have a page linking them together, as well as a few discussions that she had had previously, however, I think a head page in which she showed the process of the her research, or at least what each of the blogs in the thinking process had been about that would have been helpful.
Community:
I don't see any explicit reference to how she attempted to get people outside of our class to participate in her blog, though we do get quite a bit of our class commenting and interacting. I am sure that she made attempts to contact people in the outside world, I just wish that she had talked about that a little more.
Analysis:
Krista does a very good job in her analysis. She relates the issues of Peter Pan very well with the dangers of the internet and it is very obvious that she had put a lot of thought into it to get a clearly structured analysis.
Media:
I think we all forgot to appropriately cite where we got our images from. While not necessarily a problem as our blogs are noncommercial and most people will not mind, for our next class, you should probably focus a little more on reminding people to cite where they got their images from. The images overall were well relevant, but I thought that some of them that were just placed in the center of the post should have been formatted to have the text go around them to help maintain the flow of the post.
Design:
I thought that the side panel could have been added too. I think it is very spare. By having some of the side options fleshed out a little more it would make the sire seem less sparse. (The fish are great, though, and for some reason fascinating to watch.)
Quantity:
Krista did a great job of fleshing out her content. Anyone who was reading her blog would feel more comfortable with the subject afterward, and she has provided quite a bit of good research to get them further down the road if they wished.
Overall, Krista did a great job of placing research into a blog setting. Way to go Krista!
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
It seemed somewhat apropos that one of my favorite stories has a perfect title for my ending piece. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, by Joyce Carol Oates is a great story I suggest you read it. It is just downright disturbing, and it is definitely somewhat sublime. I, at least, find that I understand the the main characters action's on some instinctual level and can find no rational reason for them, this disparity in my mind produces all sorts of strange emotional responses.
Where Have You Been?
The Landscape of the Mind and Emily Dickinson
This blog originally started on the subject of the Emily Dickinson and the Landscape of the Mind, which admittedly is a wonderful topic. I hope to come back to it at sometime in the future, because internal landscapes bear an innate characteristic of the sublime, they are like our ideas and thoughts, we can never seem to get them completely across to other people. (Notice that the divide between people is obliquely stated in the word across. If you are trying to get your ideas across, you are noting the divide between you. You are trying to cross the gap that you see between you.) I am completely aware of this because I have no talent at most forms of art and so little outlet for the images that I see in my head. I am sure that we all have some element of this problem of communication. I have a few ideas for what I might do with this in the future, but we will get to that in the next section. One of my classmates, Neal, actually did his blog on landscape, and it merits further reading if you are interested.
New Media as a Medium of Intellectual Exchange
I also wanted to to incorporate new media. This at least I was able to do. I actually throughly enjoyed being able to create a more interactive experience with my reader. One of the great benefits of blogging is the ability to add new content. I think I seized upon this idea almost immediately, this is most likely because I love imagery almost more than anything else in a text and the ability to show my audience even more directly what I mean is a glorious opportunity. There are also new mediums of communication that we can use and that we as a class used to some extent, such as Diigo, commenting on each others blog, and I suspect that most of us emailed those we tried to get involved in our projects, though commenting on the blogs of others can sometimes also get them to respond. There is a great little article on the effects of New Media on the Old Media that I pulled the picture to the right from. If you look at it the end of the article it might give you a sublime experience.
The Sublime, In the Beginning...
I actually switched from the idea of Emily Dickinson and the Landscape of the Mind to the sublime after I started doing research. I was no doubt somewhat inspired by the project of one of my peers, Katherine, who has done her project on the perception of the sublime in the Digital Age, as well as simply the sublime nature of the internet as an accomplishment, you should read more about it.
I found that abundance of the sublime in her writing to be incredible until... I think it hit me that the sublime just is a part of the human experience. We as human beings cannot get away from it as long as we have a finite perspective. At first I thought it would be more difficult to find depictions of the sublime in popular media, and while it certainly does take time, usually I will have a movie or two that I want a clip from and the hardest part is finding that exact clip. Sometimes I find something else that I like as much or more as what I was looking for in the first place. My point, that the sublime is everywhere, and that I think is what I have taken the most out of this experience. However, I think I need to keep going.
I explored a few ideas on my way to actually discussing my topic in a more argumentative way. I explored, for example, the counter sublime, and the dark sublime. Both of these altered how I looked at the sublime later. The counter sublime, which is the attempt to make the sublime understandable, is inherently a paradox. If you can make someone understand something then is it really sublime anymore? However, we as humans cannot help but try to explain, and sometimes we will even manage to convey the sublime. Most of the time, though, we find something that makes us feel the sublime and try to show that same thing to others. I have kept this idea in mind through out my project and it has made me more aware of the method by which we try to convey the sublime. The dark sublime did not enter as much into my discussion, though it was helpful to know how far Emily Dickinson went into the range of the human sublime.
Analysis and Transfiguration
This reference is probably one that noone will get, but I am referring to a lovely musical piece called Adagio and Trasfiguration, by Elliot Goldenthal. I am not sure how to load a piece of music or I would do so here. However, suffice it to say that music often is a sublime experience to me, with my skin getting goosebumps that rise from my arms and I get sensation of cold that goes up my entire body.
And here my project also gors through a transfiguration, which is. "A marked change in form or appearance; a metamorphosis." - FreeDictionary.com. I can also hope that it meets the second definition, a "change that glorifies or exalts," but time will tell. This sections main movements are mainly composed of contrast and exploration of aspects of the sublime. Usually I examined a particular element of the sublime and showed its presence in both modern media examples and in Emily Dickinson's poetry. As aspect of the sublime is something like faith, which I explored in relation to the conversion in Contact and Emily Dickinson's "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —" Overall I am fairly satisfied with where I have gone in this blog and have stayed mostly on track, though there have been some minor diversions into other things like the Emily Dickinson conference (which I still think was a good idea, maybe someone else will be able to tell me how it goes).
Where Are You Going?
Potential for Landscape in the future.
I have a few examples of landscape that I think would work well for the sublime and for internal landscapes. These are two depictions of the afterworld. One is What Dreams May Come, which is in reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet "To be or not to be" soliloquy. This is actually very relevant to the story as the story is about what happens after death, and Hamlet's contemplation of suicide is also relevant. I would also like to take a look at the landscape in The Lovely Bones. Both of these films have the landscape as a changing and very dynamic player in its own right. I would also like to look at dreamscapes, which appear in a number of films, though I think that the Youtube video "Her Morning Elegance" would be one especially appropriate example. This exploration could become another whole subject in itself.
Upholding the Status Quo
One option is simply to continue to do what I have already been doing so far. Emily Dickinson's poetry is vast and I am not likely to run out anytime soon. The gamut of human emotion and experience is also vast, just look at how many books have been written, the realization of how vast human experience is can be a sublime experience. If you wanted to live one day in the life of everyone else, assuming there are six billion people it would take almost 16.5 million years. There is still much to do with this subject.
Distilling the Sublime
It hit me when I was doing my blog about zombies and sickness, that we exaggerate human emotion in modern media, especially video. Disaster movies are another great example. We can see the peaks of human emotion in a simple drama, but there is a part of us that craves something beyond. We desire the exceptional and the unimaginable. And movies deliver this to us, they give us what we are looking for. I think that this might be a worthy topic of discussion for the future.
The End
And just because I can, I also want to include a picture from wordle of my project so far. I am even going to post this first and then create the wordle as a full summary of my project. It has been wonderful, I might even can it sublime, to share with you. I hope to continue in the future.
Andrew Morris
The Landscape of the Mind and Emily Dickinson
This blog originally started on the subject of the Emily Dickinson and the Landscape of the Mind, which admittedly is a wonderful topic. I hope to come back to it at sometime in the future, because internal landscapes bear an innate characteristic of the sublime, they are like our ideas and thoughts, we can never seem to get them completely across to other people. (Notice that the divide between people is obliquely stated in the word across. If you are trying to get your ideas across, you are noting the divide between you. You are trying to cross the gap that you see between you.) I am completely aware of this because I have no talent at most forms of art and so little outlet for the images that I see in my head. I am sure that we all have some element of this problem of communication. I have a few ideas for what I might do with this in the future, but we will get to that in the next section. One of my classmates, Neal, actually did his blog on landscape, and it merits further reading if you are interested.
New Media as a Medium of Intellectual Exchange
I also wanted to to incorporate new media. This at least I was able to do. I actually throughly enjoyed being able to create a more interactive experience with my reader. One of the great benefits of blogging is the ability to add new content. I think I seized upon this idea almost immediately, this is most likely because I love imagery almost more than anything else in a text and the ability to show my audience even more directly what I mean is a glorious opportunity. There are also new mediums of communication that we can use and that we as a class used to some extent, such as Diigo, commenting on each others blog, and I suspect that most of us emailed those we tried to get involved in our projects, though commenting on the blogs of others can sometimes also get them to respond. There is a great little article on the effects of New Media on the Old Media that I pulled the picture to the right from. If you look at it the end of the article it might give you a sublime experience.The Sublime, In the Beginning...
I actually switched from the idea of Emily Dickinson and the Landscape of the Mind to the sublime after I started doing research. I was no doubt somewhat inspired by the project of one of my peers, Katherine, who has done her project on the perception of the sublime in the Digital Age, as well as simply the sublime nature of the internet as an accomplishment, you should read more about it.
I found that abundance of the sublime in her writing to be incredible until... I think it hit me that the sublime just is a part of the human experience. We as human beings cannot get away from it as long as we have a finite perspective. At first I thought it would be more difficult to find depictions of the sublime in popular media, and while it certainly does take time, usually I will have a movie or two that I want a clip from and the hardest part is finding that exact clip. Sometimes I find something else that I like as much or more as what I was looking for in the first place. My point, that the sublime is everywhere, and that I think is what I have taken the most out of this experience. However, I think I need to keep going.I explored a few ideas on my way to actually discussing my topic in a more argumentative way. I explored, for example, the counter sublime, and the dark sublime. Both of these altered how I looked at the sublime later. The counter sublime, which is the attempt to make the sublime understandable, is inherently a paradox. If you can make someone understand something then is it really sublime anymore? However, we as humans cannot help but try to explain, and sometimes we will even manage to convey the sublime. Most of the time, though, we find something that makes us feel the sublime and try to show that same thing to others. I have kept this idea in mind through out my project and it has made me more aware of the method by which we try to convey the sublime. The dark sublime did not enter as much into my discussion, though it was helpful to know how far Emily Dickinson went into the range of the human sublime.
Analysis and Transfiguration
This reference is probably one that noone will get, but I am referring to a lovely musical piece called Adagio and Trasfiguration, by Elliot Goldenthal. I am not sure how to load a piece of music or I would do so here. However, suffice it to say that music often is a sublime experience to me, with my skin getting goosebumps that rise from my arms and I get sensation of cold that goes up my entire body.
And here my project also gors through a transfiguration, which is. "A marked change in form or appearance; a metamorphosis." - FreeDictionary.com. I can also hope that it meets the second definition, a "change that glorifies or exalts," but time will tell. This sections main movements are mainly composed of contrast and exploration of aspects of the sublime. Usually I examined a particular element of the sublime and showed its presence in both modern media examples and in Emily Dickinson's poetry. As aspect of the sublime is something like faith, which I explored in relation to the conversion in Contact and Emily Dickinson's "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —" Overall I am fairly satisfied with where I have gone in this blog and have stayed mostly on track, though there have been some minor diversions into other things like the Emily Dickinson conference (which I still think was a good idea, maybe someone else will be able to tell me how it goes).
Potential for Landscape in the future.
I have a few examples of landscape that I think would work well for the sublime and for internal landscapes. These are two depictions of the afterworld. One is What Dreams May Come, which is in reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet "To be or not to be" soliloquy. This is actually very relevant to the story as the story is about what happens after death, and Hamlet's contemplation of suicide is also relevant. I would also like to take a look at the landscape in The Lovely Bones. Both of these films have the landscape as a changing and very dynamic player in its own right. I would also like to look at dreamscapes, which appear in a number of films, though I think that the Youtube video "Her Morning Elegance" would be one especially appropriate example. This exploration could become another whole subject in itself. Upholding the Status Quo
One option is simply to continue to do what I have already been doing so far. Emily Dickinson's poetry is vast and I am not likely to run out anytime soon. The gamut of human emotion and experience is also vast, just look at how many books have been written, the realization of how vast human experience is can be a sublime experience. If you wanted to live one day in the life of everyone else, assuming there are six billion people it would take almost 16.5 million years. There is still much to do with this subject.
Distilling the Sublime
It hit me when I was doing my blog about zombies and sickness, that we exaggerate human emotion in modern media, especially video. Disaster movies are another great example. We can see the peaks of human emotion in a simple drama, but there is a part of us that craves something beyond. We desire the exceptional and the unimaginable. And movies deliver this to us, they give us what we are looking for. I think that this might be a worthy topic of discussion for the future.
The End
And just because I can, I also want to include a picture from wordle of my project so far. I am even going to post this first and then create the wordle as a full summary of my project. It has been wonderful, I might even can it sublime, to share with you. I hope to continue in the future.
Andrew Morris
Reaching Out
Attempting to communicate is an integral part of our experience. We are born, grow, and die, never quite saying what we want to say. Our language is powerful and astonishing for its range of possibilities. That being said, we still feel its inadequacies sharply. Language is in many ways a central part of the sublime, because language is insufficient to communicate what we feel, including the sublime. Language is also one of the ways we conceptualize the world. I have had the experience of both attempting to remember something and not finding it (Tip of the Tongue Syndrome - Notice that we created an expression to tell what this feeling is) as well as just finding that I had no word for what I wanted to say.
Language is almost a sublime experience in itself. Language is ever expanding and there are more words in our language than I will ever know. I have also tried to learn other languages and there are definitely some sublime moments when you see all the facets of the language spread out before you and realize that language is far more complex than you had realized. Language, even all the standard languages for speaking on earth are still insufficient. If we really tried we could maybe create a language that would tell more, combining posture, sign language, and intonation as well as words to add emotional and social value to our speech. I have had the experience of emotion communicating more through music than through language, but it is harder to communicate ideas with music. This actually makes me think of Swift's Gulliver's Travels which I have read for one of my classes. In Laputa one of the scientists is trying to have people communicate with objects instead of words, and while the idea is ridiculous there are no doubt advantages to that form of communication as well. I have been known to draw examples both on paper and from other objects in order to communicate.
I have been discussing communication because of my own attempts to communicate lately. I have been sending out emails to various Emily Dickinson scholars, attempting to get them to comment on my blog, as yet I have no responses. If you too would like to attempt communication, I recommend examining the scholars registry at EDIS (Emily Dickinson International Society). The registry provides information on each of the scholars, including a way to contact them, when you click on their names. Also, EDIS is hosting a conference at Oxford in August, and they have a number of speakers listed who are not on their registry, so I recommend attempting to connect with them as well, especially if they will be discussing a subject that you are interested in.
To be fair I have only communicated with them in the last week, and most are probably busy. I have also been considering the issue of much of the scholarly world's feelings about new media; it is possible that many of them are simply not interested. So I will continue to hope for a big response from someone who is in the field.
Andrew Morris
This article is part of a continuing theme on Emily Dickinson, modern media, and the sublime, if you would like to know more read here.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Cohesion in Purpose
First I think we should start with something fairly simple like grouping together subjects by emotional content. First we have the dark sublime. I have discussed it previously but I will restate it here. It is, most simply, the darkness that we see inside ourselves magnified, which I discuss briefly here. It pairs well with the sentiments of terror and awe of nature that Edmund Burke discusses in the early approach to the sublime that I covered here. I also have discussed sickness (and zombies) and the precipice that sickness places you upon, confronting your own mortality here. These would all be what I would call dark emotions. Not necessarily bad emotions: self reflection after sickness, fear and respect of nature, and awareness of the potential darkness of the human soul are healthy conditions for feeling.
We also have the positive emotions. We have love in Avatar, as well as a host of other traits. We also have our view of mankind and emotion in relation to eternity (not sure this really counts as positive emotion) which I discussed in relation to Contact. I have also discussed faith, conversion, and religion in Contact in relation to the sublime experience.
What we can get out of this separation is first a small range of the human experience and emotion. I think that we can also argue that human emotion and experience has the power to be overwhelming and indeed sublime in any emotional form. We are capable of experiencing love, hate, grief, etc... to a degree that we cannot express. However, we have looked at a number of different modern examples of the sublime each very different. One of my classmates said that aestheticism and the sublime are considered to be dead in literature analysis. However, as long as it is this obvious that it continues to be a part of human emotion, how can we abandon it as a valid approach? What I find in the classic works of Emily Dickinson is more important because I can also find it in the modern works of art. My brother periodically asks my jokingly, "Who cares about Emily Dickinson?" If what was in Emily Dickinson was not relevant towards our current emotions today, then we could easily say that in full truth. So, why does Emily Dickinson matter, because all our emotions as humans continue to be relevant. Emily Dickinson was a recluse who still felt the full range of human emotions, from the view of her house she showed what we all feel.
This article is part of a continuing theme on Emily Dickinson, modern media, and the sublime, if you would like to know more read here.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Terror and Awe - A Return to the Early Sublime
--Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
I went camping over some of the weekend with two of my brothers, Scott and John, as well as John's son, John. This weekend was not an especially good one for camping, it rained and rained etc... It did however, cause me to look at the beauty of the mists over the mountains, and the clouds, and the valley stretched out below. In many aspects it returned me to some of the early historical aspects of the sublime. The sublime was seen as a kind of terrible awe, usually in relation to nature. While I do not claim that my camping trip was really enough to fill me with horror or pain, it did cause me to think about how we use it in our culture.
The disaster movie takes this terrible awe and makes it the center of the action. Any number of scenes in a disaster movie may not even show the characters at all. Instead they are filled with destruction and awe, and often they are nature scenes where nature's power has become overwhelming. In the 18th century when this idea of the sublime as a terrible force, or rather a transcendent experience as the result of terror, nature was coming into the fore in preparation for the Romantic Period. However, the sublime tends to be exaggerated in modern media, so that we get the zombie movie which I discussed previously.
-Spoiler Alert- Movie Knowing
We also get movies like Knowing. Knowing, while somewhat odd in its treatment of aliens and biblical allusions is actually a good example of the disaster movie. We have the warning signs, which are ignored or only appear until it is too late, etc... We have a central figure(s) which we follow and who usually survive the disasters (because we need a human perspective on the dangers). We have salvation from the danger by some means, a shelter, an ark, aliens, etc... We also usually see or know about the scientists who are making the discovery and rescue from the disaster. These are all tropes of the disaster genre. The way that I feel Knowing elevates this theme is that both the characters and the audience don't know what is going on. In fact, for much of the movie we do not know that it is a disaster movie. It starts out much like a thriller or drama and builds all the way to its apocalyptic conclusion. In the last scene even the Earth (or at least the surface) is destroyed.
Notice the way that the scene builds this terror and awe. First we have a characteristic of the sublime that Edmund Burke describes in On the Sublime and the Terrible, that is "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful." In other words, distance. We achieve a certain amount of this simply by not actually being present and only watching it, and usually this is sufficient. In this ending scene, however, the main character (played by Nicholas Cage) dies along with his family. To achieve an additional separation there is music, and it replaces the other sounds completely (at least at first) creating a feeling of distance between the imagery and the sound. I had mentioned previously that sound was mentioned in Aesthetics of Film as one of the most overlooked artistic aspects of a movie, but I would argue it is also very effective when used properly.
While Emily Dickinson doesn't have aliens coming down to save mankind from a global disaster, she still could capture the power of nature. For example:
AN AWFUL tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre’s cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.
The word mashed is very powerful here. The word mash implies a tension and destruction, even as it applies to something intangible like air. The word awful is especially interesting as it goes back to the very definition of the sublime as it simultaneously means both horrible and to be filled with awe or wonderment. This stanza also makes reference to dark imagery with the "gaunt" clouds and the "spectre's cloak." The stanza ends with a reminder of the power of nature, as it started with the mashing of the air. The tempest (which also has darker connotations than simply storm) hides "heaven and earth," reminding us of the scope of natures power.
Andrew Morris
This article is part of a continuing theme on Emily Dickinson, modern media, and the sublime, if you would like to know more read here.
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