I had a long walk around the cliffs at home last week and rather than taking endless photos of them and the sea which is what normally happens I suppose I was starting to look at their context and the rolls of the land and natural shapes that happen on agri fields and settlement areas etc...man & landscape... there are always little highlights like where the plough has turned in the field creating a circular swoop with rusty brown set against lush green and the light highlighting all of its depth, just wonderful. Then the simple way that a stream will fight for release into an ocean wriggling through the land like an energetic teenager who's been cooped up for too long.. Then there's the classic Tintern Abbey/Romantic shot of an old chapel, lit up from behind, picturesque in it's ruins, stoical in its stance; and that really sums up our relationship with the land, our desire to live in it, worship by it, locate our spiritual monuments where our spirits are lifted by a dramatic landscape, turn it so that it aligns with the sun, and hey, life suddenly has meaning if it were not only for understanding our own insignificance in relation to the cycles of the earth and the elements that we live amongst.
There is something that is definitely to be said about the Romantic's investigation into the Sublime, we may call it nostalgic, fearful even of the unknown, but so far the description of the sublime falls short rather it is more those tingles that are felt when something is seen to be greater than yourself, something that has been created, or that sits without inspiring words but openness, allowing a smooth tidal flow of nothing, of something into our minds.
Whenever we say that something is good or beautiful they are just that but it is when these words are uttered with the eyes shining brightly and the face relaxed do we know for certain that this really is good, that this really is wonderful, that this really is beautiful. These moments we can link with so much, with the Roman Catholic warmth and inspiration of the worship of Mary Magdalene to the quiet and all absorbing meditation peaking on top of some great temple, to the pushing of our own body’s boundaries, the astonishment of our own awareness of self and our own physicality apart from or more greater felt than our own consciousness which we have lead to believe that rules. I think therefore I am. Bullshit. i breath therefore I am and we all know this. I think therefore I am may set us apart from the bestial world but where in this world now hierarchy is little appreciated, aligning ourselves and finding and respecting our own physicality is something that should release us from the domination that is our minds.
Our over active minds, stimulated heavily, all the time, the drag and drop the switch and swap the busy and the chaos has now no way of escape, our minds instead become like computers, the successful ones functioning like good programming, with organization of thoughts and flow the absolute paramountal key to living a modern, successful existence. But herein lies this problem our minds again bombarded and bombarded are asked to take over again. And wherein lies then our own physicality? Our understanding of our own physicality? In our wardrobe, in our clothes where they act as an integrated barrier into the outside world, as a contextual insertion, fashion acting as much like the way a chameleon blends to fit, we too blend to fit, and we too express our anger, our emotions, our mood too through colour and even shape. It is those people then who dress and who run, who understand their own existence and relate their own existence to the outside world that can function through release and contact into and with the outside world, who then can go on to become a success, who can organize who can breath in this chaos because for brief moments they understand the greatness and the magnificence of the physical world and the context in which we live.
This and these necessary actions happen in the city alone, where bombardment and activity and hardscape are non stop. Those countryside folk, their distinction not necessarily in their upbringing or heritage but more to do with the fact that they don't have to strive to connect to understand, to make room for their own physicality, as they are given it then and there on their doorstep, and what is more there is room for its domination over the busyness of the mind and therefore these 'countryfolk' are able to attain a sense of ongoing peace, they have the knowledge, the knowledge that the city folk forget and that is that there is no knowledge enough like knowing that we need know nothing to be happy, that happiness is more often reached by the lack of thoughts, by the openness of the mind, by the connection between ourselves and the outside context and landscape. Yet we need more.
We become saddened instantly if we feel this moment to be threatened, for the Romantics it was industry careering through the countryside, for us it is often now the fear that this moment can't be shared, in other words that it may be forgotten, that if it wasn't recorded for others, if it wasn't communicated then we may not remember it or indeed that it may not even have happened at all. Somehow or another we have become reliant upon the picture image, of the moving image as another form of storytelling, the act of telling it or showing it makes it live again and perhaps even stronger, or more vividly more wonderfully we think sometimes than the actual moment itself. Partly it is because potentially these moments are often experienced on our own and the fear that is induced by the sublime moment, is potentially partly to do with one’s very keen awareness of oneself against the world, or in more gently, oneself in the context of the world. This is very rarely ourselves against the great world, unless of course we are watching a cinematic picture and there is that clip where the characters we have been watching become part of a crowd, made to look small against whatever natural disaster looks to be about to take them over.. This collective grouping...is of course used as a device, a double whammy, we are small individuals in the context of the human landscape and we are even smaller in comparison to the natural one.
Why we want to share that moment with someone else, why we feel that sense of lack when we see awe, perhaps it is that ultimate sense of solitude inspired in us at that moment and the need to anchor, the desire for intimacy with another apart. Ultimately a shared experience is a comforting experience, it allows the eyes to shine again at recollection, for our minds to rush back to the time when the outside was more important than the interior furnishings of our head.
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