Sublime STate

The iridescent glow of burning darkness, burning worlds, burning canvas. My heart skips a beat, skips up and down with startled joy, jumps up to my throat. Too dramatic, too show-offish, too bright, too huge. Love it!

I take in the whole room. Paintings upon paintings, too huge, too dramatic, too many. I find myself moving backwards and forwards in front of each work, sometimes ending up with my back leaning against the opposite wall (and still I’m too close to see it all), sometimes almost touching the little details which give little hint of (or maybe: “a little hint to...”) the big picture.

Entitled “Sublime”, the room itself is such a sublime landscape, exaggeratingly impressive, huge, vulgarly awe-inspiring.

The burning darkness is fluorescently orange; I do wonder how one can squeeze such a color out of oil paints. Mountains scarred with painstaking detail roll and shudder and collapse, stand on edges at dizzyingly impossible angles and hover in a perpetual suggestion of movement. A hair-thin lightning bolt of infinitely white paint points the eye to the bottomless pit of eternal damnation, pitch black and falling out of the painting, somewhere below. The little people that fall with it are barely noticeable – this is more of a metaphorical abstraction of terror than a vision of real human suffering. A pleasurable terror – at least for the viewer – as a panel in the room describes the sublime. Apparently, though, this is all in accordance with the vision from the Apocalypse – where mountains were moved from their positions and humongous fires danced with orange too bright, too bright.

Such luminous silver! A drop of bloody sun drowns in the quietly roaring sea (for the night and the sea are quiet even in their roar; and a painting is quieter still, despite its eternal roar of light and shadow). Fog pours down from the sky in perpendicular torrents that slice the eerie moon in half. Like in The Great Day of His Wrath, the figures are only secondary to the scenery. But here they warrant a little more compassion on my part. The painting is entitled The Deluge, and the name refers to the biblical flood of Noah and the dove. Yes, Noah and the dove – such is the iconography I am used to. Childish animals lined up all in a row, pairs of giraffes and lions painted by people who had never seen any. Or rainbows, white wings and beaks of olive branches. What one forgets is that the flood allegedly killed all save Noah’s family. A story of hope and a compassionate God, indeed! Danby’s work, with all its pomp and glory, stays truer to the story.

Three-meter tall painted cliffs are slightly too much... Lost in the mist of light reflected off oil paint, hung another half a meter above your head, James Ward’s Gordale Scar will always be more impressive than beautiful. I like the geometric patterns of the painted rocks and the minuscule, twenty-centimeter cows you can actually come up to and comprehend.

Some of the works are of rather smaller format. Take John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui. Just a landscape. No deluge, no last judgment, no battle. Not even much of a mountain range, only some snow and pebbles. But the little pebbles bore themselves into my insides with all the drama of the last judgment. Nothing is ever that realistic. Pebbles blur before your eyes, be it in fog or in bright sunlight; and if the pebbles don’t blur, the snow behind them does. But these pebbles, this snow – they just are. Oh yes, there is the sublime in the pre-Raphaelites’ hyperrealism – in the monumentality of a pebble and a blade of grass.

I bend my fingers in all directions and am truly afraid I shall break them. John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze manages to be misty and clear at once, red and green, calming and finger-breaking.

I had never really appreciated Dante Gabriel Rosetti that much. Millais was more to my taste, with his crisply cut flower buds and blades of grass, and Rosetti’s crayon-colored odes to Christianity seemed overrated by comparison. His Beata Beatrix was in my view no exception. Yes, a pretty woman, but not much more, really. That just goes to show that reproductions and originals are two different things – for this Beatrix was something much more than a pretty woman. Drenched in sunlight squeezed into a shimmering halo by an otherwise commonplace bridge behind her head, flanked by two figures of an intense mysteriousness, her face seemed to reflect just the sublime feelings I had been experiencing here. Which isn’t exactly a good thing, as the sublime vision she was experiencing was the vision of her own imminent death.

Yes, it’s all cheap pomp and meaningless drama. No, wait, it isn’t. It’s the sublime beauty of a mountain range, a storm at sea, a sunset. The beauty’s there, no matter how kitsch repetition has made it. And how glad I am to be child enough to be moved by it!

Edited in Paint

This is about my second caving trip, from last November, way before the time of the previous text. I had also started writing this way before the previous article, but it didn't quite fit together, and I wanted to write about SRT while the memory was still reasonably fresh. Also a note - the above picture, apart from the editing, isn't mine, unfortunately I didn't take my camera to that caving trip. And as a final explanation - the last sentence of this text has no particular meaning apart from its sounding intriguing.

Sparks draw white, orange, and green space-time diagrams across the faces of the figures encircling the bonfire. With the twist of a wrist on a mouse, someone’s editing a brown, autumn photograph in Paint. He or she is using such warm colors that the heat of the subtly shaded flames dries the continuously pouring rain even as it reaches our jackets.

That day we had visited a cave popular in Victorian times. The floor, once caressed by hundreds of hands and feet, now slid away from us in cold, slippery disgust. We slide down on a huge slab called “the tombstone”, into the depths of the underworld, laughing as we go.

Presently it is time for the lamb. Roasted whole above the second, smaller fire – how can I adore these animals when they appear in the spring, so naive and beautiful, and adore the taste of that cold lamb burger? But oh, it is so good, so primitive; I rip it to shreds with my carnivorous teeth, the ritual of fat on fingers and succulent roughness between fangs. The ritual of fire.

The fire is something like twice my height. It hypnotizes. Like a television set, you can’t help but stare in its direction. Waves of heat hit me; behind me the rain pours in an endless wall of movement; I am standing on – or rather forming – a boundary between two opposing worlds; the flames fly up in an endless wall of movement.

The next day we went through a “duck”. My newly acquired understanding of the meaning of the word did nothing to lessen my wetness behind the ears in matters of caving – for a “duck” (a partially submerged passage) tends to get one’s ears completely wet (one ear on the way in and one on the way out)...

Some more ridiculously tight tunnels and an amusing spirally slide-staircase type thing. Then – someone edited a brown, caving photograph in Paint. He or she must have been dreaming of Christmas. White, glistening icicles, patches of crystalized snow carpeting the ground...

The world is so unreal that either it was edited in Paint or...?

Dangle from a Tangle (of Hellish Enjoyment)

Something between parachuting and skiing. You’re suspended between nothingness and nothingness, like when parachuting. But you can stop almost when you want to, like when skiing. If the rope breaks, you die, like in a parachute. But the chances of it breaking are closer to the chances of your falling off a cliff when skiing than of your falling off a parachute when parachuting.

That was just about the worst metaphor I had ever thought of. It came to my mind when doing the thing it describes – single rope technique. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the sort of experience SRT is – it’s scary. It gives you weird thoughts.

Why parachuting? Probably because I had never done it. Why skiing? Because my family happened to be in Austria doing just that while I dangled from a rope somewhere below the mountains in Wales.

But my adventure with SRT started not in Wales, but in England, in my own lovely Oxford (yes, that claim of ownership is almost completely unfounded). It began on a gloomy Saturday afternoon on Wolvercotte Bridge. “Gloomy” being a bit of a euphemism (and “a bit” being a euphemism also), as there was howling wind and a fair amount of rain. But I didn’t really notice. I was too preoccupied with putting on a fiendishly complicated harness and attaching some loathsome caribiners and other such confusing thingamajigs onto it.

Three months and n miles later, time had erased any grasp of single ropes I might have acquired on that Saturday afternoon. But this time I learned more quickly – for caves tend to be more fun than bridges, and contrary to the beliefs of countless soulless teachers, one does learn better while having fun.

“I can see you’re enjoying yourself” – says Tim at the end of my descent. Enjoying myself? Suspended somewhere between amazement and terror, hatred and love, hysterical laughter and tears of relief, swinging to and fro between these emotions on a thirty-metre long rope – yes, I am enjoying myself like hell.

Thanks, Tim, for that reassurance. Nothing makes me enjoy myself more than someone who tells me that I am clearly enjoying myself – and lately people seem to be telling me that quite a lot in situations in which they are clearly both absolutely right and sorely mistaken. Just the day before coming to Wales, my philosophy tutor greeted me with the joyous reassurance of “I can see you are enjoying this logic course very much”. After half the night spent on a ridiculously difficult problem set, followed by that indescribable dawn of new ideas sometime around daybreak, when like sunrays of enlightenment and trills of freshly awoken birds, the only possible solution sprang to mind without warning – yes, I was enjoying the logic course like hell.

Where was I? Ah, above the thirty-metre drop already, clambering out of the cave as fast as possible. Why the rush? We were due to miss our callout – the time we said we would be back, and the time after which those back in the hut could begin to organize a rescue party. Darn, how’d that happen?

If it weren’t that stressful, getting out at such a speed and such levels of adrenaline would have been great fun. As it actually was that stressful, the above sentence is really rather meaningless, and it was great fun nonetheless. At least for me, probably not for the leaders, for whom it really was that stressful.

The sky was so clear, the silence and starriness so intense that I thought for a moment that it would have been a better idea to have spent the day above ground, in the magnificent mountainous rooftops of the caves we had been exploring, below their own ceiling of blue sky. But then there have been many mountains and blue skies in my life, and only one first-ever SRT, only one hell of tangled up enjoyment.