There's Always Something New
I both love this project and getting extremely frustrated. Love it because it keep s revealing new thing to me, constantly getting me to discover new material and idea. Frustrating because I don't have time to fully understand these new things. I now have less than 2 months (way less if you take into consideration the days that I am working or volunteering).
Anyway, I have just found a new book that I wish I had found ages ago but there you go! It's called "Sticky Sublime" Edited by Bill Beckley. Backley assembles 18 essayists to assess the question of how one can stand to behold the sublime in this apres/post technological culture.
"The sublime is not simply sublimity. It is the loss of self, which first must be acquired- through study, connoisseur-ship, through one's varied relations to other people- through the impulses, memories, principles, and energies that evolve into a sense of self. It is possible that in acknowledging varieties of culture (so homogenized through global commodification, and pretensions of all-encompassing ideologies), we have neglected the possibility of multifarious self. Sublime obliteration defies category- be it genus, gender, ethnicity, author, reader, reviewer- not necessarily when you critique it as Kant did, but when you write it as Whitman or O'Hara did, or when you experience it as anyone can.
To acknowledge the sublime is to admit that there is something, God or nature, that defies and transcends human culture and what it means to be human. If some definition of the sublime endured, it will depend on whether humans write future dictionaries. It will also rely on a sense of the human self in all it's variety, however transformed, and at least a begrudging acknowledgement that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy." Bill Beckley.
I will be reading elements of this as I am still deciding how to create my final piece and figure any reading around this will help in some way.
Anyway, I have just found a new book that I wish I had found ages ago but there you go! It's called "Sticky Sublime" Edited by Bill Beckley. Backley assembles 18 essayists to assess the question of how one can stand to behold the sublime in this apres/post technological culture.
"The sublime is not simply sublimity. It is the loss of self, which first must be acquired- through study, connoisseur-ship, through one's varied relations to other people- through the impulses, memories, principles, and energies that evolve into a sense of self. It is possible that in acknowledging varieties of culture (so homogenized through global commodification, and pretensions of all-encompassing ideologies), we have neglected the possibility of multifarious self. Sublime obliteration defies category- be it genus, gender, ethnicity, author, reader, reviewer- not necessarily when you critique it as Kant did, but when you write it as Whitman or O'Hara did, or when you experience it as anyone can.
To acknowledge the sublime is to admit that there is something, God or nature, that defies and transcends human culture and what it means to be human. If some definition of the sublime endured, it will depend on whether humans write future dictionaries. It will also rely on a sense of the human self in all it's variety, however transformed, and at least a begrudging acknowledgement that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy." Bill Beckley.
I will be reading elements of this as I am still deciding how to create my final piece and figure any reading around this will help in some way.
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