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 

Sickness, Zombies, and the Sublime

And as pale sickness does invade, Your frailer part, the breaches made, In that fair lodging still more clear, Make the bright guest, your soul, appear.
--Edmund Waller


I had the opportunity to be sick recently.  I know that that is an odd turn of phrase, but let me suffice to say that I am to some degree a sensualist, and while I may not enjoy all the things that happen to me I do try to understand them in context.  In my family, my father is often incapacitated with migraines.  He has had surgery on his sinuses, tried numerous medications, participated in a clinical trial, and more to try to get rid of them.  In my family, being able to massage others has become a life skill, simply because at various times we need to care for on of us who under the weather, sometimes we are all under the weather.  I and two of my brothers have also inherited the lovely sinus problems and migraines that are a part of our family legacy.  We all live here in Utah.  My brother John has had a migraine everyday for the last week and a half, a byproduct of the summer storms.  My brother Scott and I both acquired migraines within hours of each other as a summer storm rolled through on the weekend.  We both love spring and summer storm season, in fact I have very fond memories of living Tucson and watching storms during monsoon season, but it hurts sometimes.  Hurting and sickness are simply part of the human condition.

Since sickness is such a universal condition, it makes sense that we explore it literature and entertainment.  In fact in modern times, with the possibility of disease being engineered, or acquiring some new mutation, it becomes a force unto itself.  In the nature of humankind, we take something and make it larger than life in order to understand it, we make it sublime.

This connection is particularly apparent in zombie movies.  In many zombie movies, first of all, zombies are caused by some illness.  And furthermore, they exhibit disease-like behavior, spreading the infection intentionally.  In fact if you go look up zombies, you may go to a website like this one: http://www.zombiehub.com/zombie-virus.html.  It is an article which discusses the possibility of a virus that actually causes zombies and uses rabies as an example of a disease that causes behavior.  The Ebola virus does something similar, when the host is dying it causes them to flail around in order to spread the disease.  However, even though a virus like Ebola has an extremely high mortality rate, it usually kills itself off simply because it is too effective.  Truly well adapted viruses behave more like the common cold, rarely killing anyone, but always coming back.  Zombies are an exaggeration, the embodiment of our fear of disease, for when we suffer from disease we are reminded of our own mortality and that instead of recovering we might have slipped over the edge.  So you get videos like 28 days later, and this youtube clip (turn down your volume, because it is loud):



In Emily Dickinson's poetry you can also see sickness being elevated.  For an example see:

As One does Sickness over
In convalescent Mind,
His scrutiny of Chances
By blessed Health obscured—

As One rewalks a Precipice
And whittles at the Twig
That held Him from Perdition
Sown sidewise in the Crag

A Custom of the Soul
Far after suffering
Identity to question
For evidence't has been—

In this poem, Dickinson examines sickness after having recovered.  The sickness becomes a testing ground for the mind.  It is a precipice that you can examine and say what if?  It is an edge into death because you can always ask, how close was I, and as in the poem "whittles at the Twig | That held Him from Perdition."  Sickness is sublime, not just because we lose control of our bodies, reminding us how very fragile we are, but also because they embody the human condition.  And the human condition is constantly attempting to forget that we are as a person who has fallen over a cliff and is holding on by the barest thread, wondering when we will fall into the sublime arms of death (whatever that may turn out to mean).  As my father likes to say: There is one human constant, no one gets out alive.

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.