Richard's lecture today began with a clip from Apocalypse Now (Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando 1979). It was an example of a sublime landscape; a frightening, dark and impenetrable place. A landscape under destruction. The Jungle viewed during a time of was as a frightening place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkrhkUeDCdQ
One way of describing the sublime is to say that it is on the edge between sanity and madness. The characters in the film begin as sane people but time spent in the jungle during this war time has meddled with their minds until they have become mad with the threat and fear of what they see and experience.
David Bate's "Notes on Beauty and Landscape" (from Shifting Horizons ed by Wells. L et al) describe the sublime as having an aura of danger. Avalanches and huge water falls like the Niagara Falls can make us as individuals, feel threatened. This is nature as something to be feared as opposed to being colonised.
Edmund Burke (1729 -1797) wrote a book called "Delightful Horror"
Delight at that time in history meant something different to what we understand the word to mean today. When this book was written delight meant horror, the meaning has changed, to us it means pleasurable.
Some people enjoy an aspect of danger, an activity like bunji jumping is a kind of delightful horror. It has an element of danger, and yet to some it is exciting and thrilling.
PICTURESQUE - control, accuracy, the world in order
SUBLIME - subversive irrationality
Each of us has an element of madness within us. For example many can stand on the edge of a cliff and wonder what it would be like to fly or jump off. There is a temptation within us to want to find out for ourselves what it would be like to be at the edge of death. But most people do not succumb to this madness, they behave in a rational way, knowing that if indeed they were to jump off the edge of the cliff, they would die. This madness or irrationality is something we all keep hidden within ourselves. It is undoubtedly a part of us. It is the controlled element of our being that allows us to behave rationally.
The idea of being as one with nature is a sentimental idea, a fantasy. You can only know nature if you step over the edge, over the threshold of the invisible. It is but a fantasy to think about jumping off the edge of the cliff. We are only dabbling with irrationality in that moment.
David Casper Friedrich's painting "The Monk by the Sea" (1809) is a picture of obscurity, showing the mist and nothingness.There is a small figure who stands alone, but is not in control of anything. Nature is uncontrollable.
Another painting "The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist" (1818) appears to be a man from the city who has reached a place where he can go no further. He stands on a precipice. There appears to be a sense of culture (i.e.the man) and nature embodied by rigidity. The man looks into a mad landscape.
There is an arrogance attached to man that he believes he can colonise the world. But nature cares nothing about man's control, and cares nothing for us. We care about nature but this is not reciprocated. Nature continues to behave in any way it deems... natural phenomenon occur all the time and there is nothing that man can do about it. (Examples avalanche, tsunami, lightning strikes, tornadoes, floods etc etc)
We were shown a photograph of Joseph Kissinger jumping from space and then a video of a man who did this again only last year in 2012.
Other Reading Suggestions
Simon Norfolk "For most of it I have no words" (1998)
Emmet Gowin "Changing the Earth" (2003)
With Thanks to
http://www.openeye.org.uk/archive-exhibition/simon-norfolk-for-most-of-it-i-have-no-words/
for this image
To end returning to Apocalypse Now... The Sublime .... looks alien to us, the landscaped changed, bombed, becomes harder for us to recognise.
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