OF A GOLDEN AGE

in Tom’s class we’re reading Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown books and discussing language games. to supplement this, Tom had us read Codifications of Reality by linguistic anthropologist Dorothy Lee, whose studies centered on the Trobriand Islanders and their language. they use no tense, for instance, and emphasize concepts in a wholly different way than the western world does. as another language game, Tom made a list of rules for an unindividuated language — that is, in which there were no references to anyone personally. this reminded me of the “Bugger” race in Orson Scott Card’s famous, timeless Ender’s Game. any concept of individuality was simply irrelevant and nonsensical.

to abruptly switch topics, my friend Erica and I talked about crowd control when we were at the Roger Waters concert last weekend. she went to Italy last summer and saw the Colosseum (originally known as an amphitheater!), where there are enough exits that the entire place — fifty thousand — could be emptied in eight to ten minutes. we contrasted this with the Tweeter, where about twenty thousand people have to file out through two exits. in an age of security and safeguarding and prepaid tickets, we endanger our lives so that we might be entertained. interesting!

our discussion in Monday’s class of “sublime” versus “beautiful” reminded me, unsurprisingly, of things from my other classes. first, Theodore Roethke’s poem “Root Cellar,” which we read for Tom last week: in it, the narrator is both drawn and repulsed by the impressive way in which gross basement life-forms cling to life. he feels connected to them by the “breath” of the dirt and gives human characteristics to the growths. it’s an intriguing poem in that it meta-fies itself by inspiring feelings of attraction and revulsion to the narrator AND the narrator’s attraction and revulsion.

second, in philosophy class we’ve started to wade into Kierkegaard (a very literary philosopher who uses language in beautiful ways). Kierkegaard spent most of his career assuming different pseudonyms in order to write from entirely varying world views, fitting into one of his three “spheres of existence,” which would be boring to explain here. the piece worth noting, though, is written from the “aesthetic” life, one in which large dichotomies and extremes are valued, as is pleasure and selfishness. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic persona is only known as “A,” and A emphasizes in “his” writings that the most important part of life is to maintain distance. this struck me in its opposition to the concept of the sublime, and here’s what I thought: the beautiful can be appreciated by an aesthete like A, but the sublime can only be appreciated by someone with investment and vulnerability.

furthermore, I looked up “sublime” in the OED, the closest thing to a religious text in my life. it gave a number of predictable definitions and then this one: “Of muscles: Lying near the surface, superficial. Also applied to the branch of anatomy treating of superficial muscles.” how interesting! the opposite of the deep, involved sense of the sublime that we generally have! actually, there are a number of conflicting definitions. god bless the English language.

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