Eleven Fragments on Sublimation
By Nicholas H
1
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”
Someone reprehensible.
What is Caspar searching for along the small streams of the Uttewalde forest in the middle of the night? Nearly slipping on the pebbles of this stream, almost cutting himself onto these sharp rocks despite the thick moss, wandering through this humid land innervated by the Uttewalde Grund and Polez rivers, bathed in the light of this beautiful and foolish moon? A felt hat covers his blond hair, combed forward, concealing his bald spot. His intense gaze shines like the pupils of nocturnal animals. Nature seems to shed its diurnal allure to take on an appearance conducive to the painter's prayer, to share its calm.
This man dressed in black, this monk in front of the sea, this man in the forest at night : they turn their backs to us, but also on Time as a common regime of historicity. Their contemplating of an inscrutable object compels us to look past them, to look for it too — only to find out that the effects of the endless search for an object one cannot recognize or identify is to uphold the position of the melancholic. Caspar Hauser Friedrich’s landscapes loom like sublime events for the ego, alternating between a before or an after of man, of history. Melancholia as a mental disposition for the Sublime attacks stabilized forms of historicity. This becomes a way to unmoor ourselves from the present, to find or discover unexpected resources and a passion that might have the power to reignite thought.
2
With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.
We turn even the young child around,
making her look backward
at the forms we create,
not outward into the Open.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eighth Duino Elegy
One could say that before stripping the veil of nature, one must disfigure her with a capital letter. Made feminine, Lady Nature can be stripped and understood, rationalized and conceptualized. This is the tension between the rationalist approach to nature and the romantic one, which constructs it as a support for projection. Here, man finds transcendence in connection to a wider whole. There, rational man has unveiled nature and is left with anxiety and fragmentation. We have moved from Friedrich to Agnes Martin, from Goethe to Beckett. And yet, we do more than understand Friedrich and Goethe; we have nostalgia for solutions to problems that were never fully ours. Today, whether we understand our period as modern, post-modern, or meta-modern, we are twice, thrice, or quarce removed from Friedrich’s expression of the Sublime, and yet, unsublimated melancholia is still here. Its strange fruits, resentment and nostalgia in politics and culture, are as present as ever on the Left or the Right, in popular and elite culture. As Adorno and Horkheimer both thought, this situation was one of horror, but there was always hope, if solely as a category. Hope against resentment towards ourselves and others. There is still the possibility of catching ourselves and others before the fall. Before the neurosis runs too deep and turns into psychosis. The happiness in our resentment, this protection and our clinging to our material, affective, and ideational fetishes go hand in hand with our inability to turn towards what Rilke called the Open, what the theologian Rudolph Otto called the Numinous, what Lyotard conceptualized as the moment of the Sublime - the moment before crystallization, what the Vajrajanan and Tantric Buddhist call the carnal baseless ground of Nirvana, what the Christian point to in the move towards salvation as desire for acceptance of what we fear.
3
Maybe all complex discussions should be introduced by a caveat on the fallibility of the writer. Hegel believed Chinese thought not to be philosophical because it didn’t present a complete system of thought. Today we know better and recognize a coherence and a tone which is sometimes eerily close to his. I’ll quote The Writings of Chuang Tzu, the infamous chapter 2, to introduce my position as a speculative one :
“Now I am going to make a statement here. I don't know whether it fits into the category of other people's statements or not. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn't, it obviously fits into some category. So in that respect, it is no different from their statements. However, let me try making my statement.
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between this being and nonbeing, I don't really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.”
4
The French psychoanalyst Jean-Baptiste Pontalis wrestled his whole life with Freud’s concept of sublimation, writing a whole book on the subject. Pontalis, when writing about painting, credits Friedrich with allowing him to understand the function of painting as “making visible the invisible, and allowing our visual field, so restrained, to have no limits”. By using the melancholic disposition, which seeks to find the lost object through the abolition of Time and reaching toward Infinity, one might have the opportunity to create. The value of melancholia as a disposition making creation possible was already recognized by Freud. Marc Berdet in his review of Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia, asserts that Freud saw “in Michelangelo a melancholic visionary, capable of sublimating his melancholy into extraordinary innovations for humanity.[...] When it becomes cultured and channeled, melancholy could well be productive, revelatory, even revolutionary.” But who could ever desire this for themselves? No one reasonably could desire the life of Michelangelo, Friedrich, Bakounine, or Uchiyama Gudō. Yet between 1800 and 1840, the forests around Dresden filled with men who came to sketch, draw, and seek the tone of light to paint their rejection of French Rationalism and plumb their depths… Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Richter, Adrian Zingg, and Carl Gustav Carus are the best-known, but they are numerous. Turner himself stopped in the Uttewalde forest to make four sketches of a small rock formation called the Teufelsküche, the Devil's Kitchen.
5.
We lose our illusions about our peers, having become like rabid, resentful beasts attacking their own and themselves, and become delirious about Nature in silent contemplation. Is it this absence of divinity in others and animality in ourselves that incites us to religious sentiment? Is it this respite and this bliss that Caspar David is seeking tonight? Something that will allow him to transcend or endure these financial problems, his obsessions, and his health issues? Paradoxically, it is when the artist returns indoors to paint that the landscape so typically swallows the viewer, now barely considered by the moon, the sea, or the clouds. It invades them with impassive exteriority, and the landscape reflects the painter's interiority: "The painter must not paint only what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees within himself". The following year, Caspar David is struck down, like Rousseau before him, by a persecutory delirium. The spirit left the eye. An eye following him around was all that was left. This is the danger in our frailty.
If we seek to reduce the gap between our idealism and our material reality, a melting of our usual categories of thought will happen. Syncretism arises. A new attention to the situation. A betrayal of the past. Maybe a fidelity to the spirit. This might be the true creative melancholic path. The resistance to it is understandable. Our libidinal investments are threatened by the increasing liquidity of our lives. The rigidity and flexibility we seek signal our need for protection from the very real plastic changes that might affect us. Our physical and mental senses seek a harmony that the contemporary world threatens.
6.
Maybe Marxism ought to be thought of as a fully-fledged religion with its rites and cults, be fully and consistently recognized as something of the spirit and the mind, something respectable, a sublimation of social thought (maybe unmatched today), something that allows and constrains thinking and spirit. Something one converts to through apprenticeship more than something one experiments intellectually with in practice. I will propose another tale from The Writings of Chuang Tzu to illustrate my point about the literary quality of Marxism and its relation to life :
“Duke Huan, seated above in his hall, was once reading a book, and the wheelwright Bian was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, Bian went up the steps, and said, 'I venture to ask your Grace what words you are reading?' The duke said, 'The words of the sages.' 'Are those sages alive?' Bian continued. 'They are dead,' was the reply. 'Then,' said the other, 'what you, my Ruler, are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.' The duke said, 'How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book which I am reading? If you can explain yourself very well, if you cannot, you shall, die!' The wheelwright said, 'Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither too gentle nor (too) violent, the idea in my mind is realized. But I cannot tell how to do this by word of mouth; there is a knack in it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, nor can my son learn it from me. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am still making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and what it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone: so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!'”
Of course, one has to have read a lot to be able to forget reading… or avoid reading at all. Plato advised against philosophy before a certain age. In Jewish mystic circles, the Kabbalah was not to be read before marriage and status had been achieved. Psychoanalysis was to be undertaken by people in the same situation. The practice of deconstruction has to take place on a previous construction. Similarly, practice and experience were the foundation for theory. What is acquired in experience is tacit knowledge, experience, and sensoriality. The materiality of the world comes through the senses - the conditions for orienting oneself through speech.
In a debate about psychoanalysis, Octave Mannoni once concluded a talk in front of Lacan with the point that the existence of psychoanalytic theories might have their sole motivating factor in the protection of the psychoanalyst, not the patient. When curing and healing a patient, one might be courageous enough to forget everything, to be able to act in full capacity of one’s senses, mental and physical. Similarly, one might even say that there is an unmistakable jouissance to the difficulties and objections that intellectuals throw at each other in discussions that find their solutions, their forgetting, their silencing in situations through unseen means.
As I write, I find this related quote by Agnes Martin in her notes: “Not being intellectual and giving up the intellect are understood to be very different when in reality, they are the same. We can hardly imagine giving up the intellect. To be an intelligent person has been the thing from the beginning. But the intellectual way and the inspired way are two different ways. If you are an artist, this intellectual way must be given up. [...] A really inspired work is not like us.”
7.
Caspar's friend, the painter, and physician Carl Gustav Carus had asked his son in his Second Letter on Landscape Painting: "What feelings take hold of you when climbing to the mountaintops, you contemplate from there the long succession of hills, the course of the rivers, and the glorious spectacle that unfolds before you?" — you collect yourself in silence, you lose yourself in the infinity of space, you feel the limpid calm and purity invade your being, you forget your self. You are nothing, God is everything.” Before publishing the Letters, Carus made sure to have Goethe's approval, who would respond with a letter that he would publish as a foreword as if to protect himself from future criticism of his ultimately boring contribution. This feeling, described by Carus, that Nature in its magnificence dispossesses us of our melancholic selves, that the Sublime annihilates us and forces us to kneel before God, finds a response fifty years later… in a voice tinged with Russian, deep and strong, emerging from the Königstein Fortress and crossing the distance between it and the Uttewalde Forest. It is Bakunin's voice. He replies to Carus: "We cannot, we must not make the slightest concession, neither to the God of theology nor to that of metaphysics. Whoever, in this mystical alphabet, begins with God, must inevitably end with God; whoever wants to worship God, must, without childish illusions, bravely renounce his freedom and his humanity." Caspar and Carl's forest, the one where they exchanged opinions on Schleiermacher and Kant, the paths Caspar walked to find a clearing, these little holzwege - these paths that lead nowhere - Bakunin is very close to them. Ten short kilometers away. Two hours of walking distance. Maybe even less since he is not yet as fat and aloof as in the two portraits taken at Nadar's in 1860 or the one by Carjat and Legé where he looks above the lens, to the left, in the distance.
Neurologists propose that each eye movement is correlated with a specific cognitive action. Here, following that model, I can suppose that Bakunin's gaze can be understood as recalling an image that is fixed and evasive. Perhaps it's the case that he can't forget this image. He has that same gaze in May 1849. But this time, he's looking at us in this lithograph made by an unknown artist. He's still a young man. Back in Dresden after fleeing it once, six years earlier. Dresden allows him to temporarily transgress the rules. Revolutionary situations attract him. The constitutional project pushed by the German democratic movements incites King Frederick Augustus of Saxony to counterrevolutionary measures. He dissolves Parliament and accepts Prussian military aid. Rumors of a Prussian military intervention in Dresden sparked a popular uprising that lasted a few days. Crushed in blood, thirty-one soldiers died, two hundred revolutionaries were killed, and five hundred were wounded. Bakunin made a name for himself during the uprising. He was courageous and was on every barricade. Like Richard Wagner, then director at the royal court of Saxony II, he incited combat through articles, made hand grenades, and stood guard. When the city fell, they fled south with a few others.
Between Dresden and Chemnitz, there was a two-day march, which I imagine took place at night. They may have passed through the Weisseritztalhänge forest. Perhaps they avoided Freiberg but crossed its forest further south. At the time of this seventy-kilometer flight through a turbulent Germany, Novalis had been dead for half a century, Caspar for a decade, and Goethe for seven years. Bakunin was thirty-five, Wagner thirty-six, and Nietzsche six. During these nights of escape, would they experience the "solitude of the forests, the moonlit nights," as Tieck Ludwig, seventy-five, the last avatar of Romantic art, asked? Did Bakunin, during his journey, experience the same sense of terror as Caspar, painting in his last nocturnal canvases beneath oblivion and impotent anger?
Romanticism and philosophical idealism had had their day. The worldly figure of the philosopher had become suspect following Hegel's death twenty years earlier. The words of The German Ideology, published five years later, were already on people's minds but still in the inkwell. Artistically, the Sturm und Drang movement was decimated. Tieck, since Goethe died in 1932, had been alone. But was he still a Romantic? According to Marcel Brion, "despite their extreme longevity, Goethe and Tieck are also Romantics who died young." During these last fifteen years, Tieck had been sliding towards classicism. Had the Sublime slipped in this mid-century back from the wooden frames of the canvas to the beams and joists of the barricades?
8.
You, for whom freedom was the supreme good, will pass into the jails of the powerful of Europe. Infamous scurvy will make you spit out all your teeth. They will break you, but they fear the streets if they kill you. You will age thirty years in ten, in a journey prefiguring Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Brought back to Dresden prison. Transferred to the Königstein fortress. Sentenced to death. Commuted to life imprisonment. Handed over to the Austrians. Imprisoned in Prague. Transferred to Olmütz. Retired. Sentenced to death. Commuted again to life imprisonment. Handed over to Russia. Imprisoned in the Alexis Ravine of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, like Dostoyevsky. Transferred to the prison on the fortified island of Shlisselburg with three thousand others. Deported to Siberia. Approved for traveling salesman status. Escaped to Japan, then San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris, where we find you in the photographers' workshop, staring at an empty spot in the studio.
9.
If the feeling of the Sublime is as certainly on the side of Man and not of the trunks, the rocks, the mud, the leaves rotting in water, the droppings of deer and rabbits’ Friedrich is walking in tonight, I wonder if it is not shared by animals when escaping death or as a general disposition like Rilke suggests. Nonetheless, the frightening discovery of human freedom from Church and State is an experience of the Sublime. The history of the Sublime is one of our evolving attempts at wrestling with our fears and lost hopes. But what would constitute the Sublime today? Symbolic revolutions have easily been co-opted and historicized. Adam Curtis said somewhere that if one had to do something radical, one would have to do it in anonymity and never talk about it. Artists might choose to go underground to practice their art for a generation, someone else said.
There is no straight line from Marx to us. There is no pure position or centrality that would only feed on the good, the respectable, the true, or the beautiful. Our profoundest humility might be to reduce ourselves to that. Accepting that beauty whether in nature or art will inevitably be hard to achieve. Whereas the Sublime for Barnett Newman was to be found in the present, the machismo of abex is not available to us. The long straight lines of Sol Lewitt might be impossible too. So might be the grids of Agnes Martin. The monochrome might be too kitsch. Our task might, and I say this sadly, be closer to Kurt Schwitters’s : assembling used pieces of trash of the Old world into the possibilities for a New world. As unappealing to us as the trash it was, but at least assembled.
10.
In one of his texts on reading, Pontalis talks about his experience of plunging into this feared monument of literature, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholia. All of a sudden, the previous writers and researchers crowd his psyche. It becomes too impressive to follow in their footsteps. Mustering his courage, he decides to jump in, chooses a specific entry, “Melancholic love” and reads the 1621 entry. It falls flat. He doesn’t get it. Quotes, quotes, and more quotes by various classical authors. He’s frustrated. He thinks to himself, “Has this person ever left his Oxford Library?” Is that it? Yet he continues and begins to sense something : “It seems as if he’s having fun, it seems as if he’s playing a game he’s invented. A game which he is inviting us to join in.” Melancholia becomes a theme within a game, which allows him to steer away from melancholia. “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, "no better cure than business”.
11.
If labor sublimates itself in capitalism, sexuality into narcissism, speech into poetry, and writing into literature, Burton is playfully collecting information on melancholia to sublimate it into a plaything, extracting medical and non-medical texts to achieve literature which soothes momentarily, therefore humanely, the problem. Similarly, the path is not beside postmodernism but through until it solidifies. One has to create new forms of expression that might respond to the very specific instantiation of the crisis, new forms that will soon be recuperated by the curators, the historians, and other obsessive neurotics. The opinions of men are to be judged in their usefulness for living better. An ethical commitment one must make is not to confuse political writing, theory, and literature with reality, and even more so, not to compare them. The former always has more vibes than the latter. Accepting a loss of pleasure but receiving in exchange an increase of actual, real pleasure might be another path towards sublimation today. As a paradoxical open invitation, I will finish with a quote by this reclusive Robert Burton describing his relation to the outside world :
“I hear news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, strategems, and fresh alarms. […] Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news. Amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities, and cares, simplicity and villany; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on in a private life; as I have still lived, so I now continue, as I was content from the first, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestick discontents: saving that sometimes, not to tell a lie, as Diogenes went into the city, and Democritus to the haven, to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, lookinto the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, not so wise an observer as a plain rehearser, not as they did to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.”