notes on the end of summer

Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

i've been watching a lot of the explore.org bear cam at work since an atlantic article linked to it. i googled "environmental writing jobs" the other day, which is probably one of the sadder things i've ever googled.

things will probably pick up. but this work, so far, is dull, and fairly scarce. there's worse fates than spending hours at work learning history from wikipedia. my coworkers are nice, and people seem to like this tweet.

the weather has just turned cold for the first time since the solstice. it'll get warmer again, but you can taste the fall on its way. frank ocean dropped his album at the perfect time - blonde is perfect fall music. it's the end of summer, the end of relationships, the end of youth. it's driving away from it all with infinity opening up ahead of you.

i don't actually drive much, though. i'm riding the same bike i had at carleton, which is not so broken that i can't ride it, but it's broken enough that it's not really worth it to fix any individual defect. the wheels go, the pedals push, the brakes stop - more or less. it takes me where i need to go. sometimes, on the way, i see something that makes me feel a frank ocean kind of way.

the bear on the livestream right now has a hilarious ass. i want to pay more attention to the majesty of nature or something, but i can't stop looking at its ass.

the ACTUAL ufo post

hi okay remember when i didn’t talk about UFOs like, at all last week? sorry about that. this week is officially UFO week. and by “this week” i mean “it’s friday & i gotta write another one of these dang posts because setting arbitrary goals for myself is the only way I can get anything done, so i’m gonna do it about UFOs for real this time.”

I said some weak shit about the vastness of the difference that is possible in an alien encounter. and that definitely is a thing! but that’s more of a thing for “first contact” stories, like the impressive looking The Arrival. while a “first contact” story proposes a particular relationship between the mundane and the sublime,* the “paranormal experience” story proposes a different one.** by examining the “paranormal experience” story we can begin to see the outlines of the relationship between science fiction and scripture.

The earliest text we have that says anything about the Sublime was written by a Roman named Longinus at some point between the first and third century. It’s noteworthy not just for its effect on English literature at the end of the 18th Century, but also because one of Longinus’ examples of sublime writing is the Book of Genesis. He quotes Genesis 1:3, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” and states that the writer “both understood and gave expression to the power of the divinity as it deserved.”

so the sublime is tangled up with religion. everything above and beyond humanity is sublime, and in a Christian context, god is everything above and beyond humanity (and a couple other things ofc). when Longinus’ treatise starts circulating in the renaissance, the first thing to come out of it is Baroque art. you get the gist.

but the enlightenment kills religion. this is hyperbole, but not that far off. beginning in the 17th century religious insitutions are replaced by secular institutions. mass communication through sunday preaching is replaced through the mass communication of the market vis a vis the novel. the sublime is displaced from god into the gothic.

Later, towards the end of the 19th century, as the materialistic positivism of empiricism expands and undermines the immaterial and the religious, an american psychologist makes a rather desperate intellectual move. william james invents mysticism and tells the world it has always existed. a mystical experience is defined by its ineffability, and as such is thoroughly anti-material. but it is also empirically valid as an altered state of consciousness. it’s essentially a logical structure that throws a wrench in the gears of materialism & which you can’t prove exists or not! as a response to modernity it’s pretty chill.

i would also argue that the mystical experience is an experience of the sublime. classically it is overpowering, overwhelming, delightful yet terrifying, self-obliterating and self-affirming. it is beyond everything mundane and it brings a new perspective for the mundane. the mystical is where human meaning breaks down but something is left; what is left is sublime.

while dracula offers a somewhat parallel response to modernity as the mystics, it’s lovecraft’s fiction where something like mystical experience is first rendered science fictional.*** this is the form of the paranormal investigation: much like the mystic, the investigator undertakes a series of mental transformations leading sublime experience of revelation. this is marvellously blended with the form of the police procedural by the x-files.

here is where the UFO becomes sublime: the abduction experience is very much like a mystical or visionary experience. one is passively taken up by a higher power, sometimes seeing a bright light, but unable to adequately describe it. the similarity is so strong that its been noted by religious scholars (don’t ask who i forgot.) it is that part of the sublime which is experience beyond reason or conceptual understanding, incomprehensible but real.

*where the sublime’s translation into the mundane is the source of novelty in the world
**it follows that different modes of science fiction are demarcated by the different relationship between mundane and sublime that they express.
***there’s two dang posts & my whole rotten comps in that sentence tho

lets talk about UFOs

in which i make lots of promises & barely keep them

but first lets talk about the aesthetics of the sublime. if you thought I was going to break my pattern and not sloppily overthink something this week, well, you were wrong. THE SUBLIME (it always takes the definite article so that you don’t confuse it with the 90s ska band, a difficulty that Edmund Burke presciently anticipated when he wrote his definitive treatise on the sublime in 1756) is a feeling that is overpowering, frightening, but also delightful. the sublime is dangerous but appealing, like a dude riding a motorcycle down the freeway with nothing but a t-shirt on. in Joseph Addison’s words, it is “an agreeable kind of horror.”

folks, you can learn all sorts of fancy words from reading wikipedia. i love it! anyways, all that could be made up for all i know, except that i already learned about Burke and the sublime in a ~college class~. later, someone handed me a piece of paper, so i think it must be true.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH UFOs? well i learned about it in a class on gothic novels. ever heard of goths? eye shadow, pentagrams, etc? same idea. gothic novels were spooky books popular at the end of the 18th century. they expressed a lot of the anxieties that a lot of people were feeling after the rapid cultural change of the Enlightenment. they ALSO became the first testing ground for literary expression of the sublime. they’re almost always set in southern europe, especially in the mountains (mountains=easy mode sublime) and around spooky old ruined castles (old things have a kind of temporal sublime (in contrast with the spatially located sublime of a mountain) that is expressed in how far beyond a human lifespan it has and will endure.)

we’re still talking about castles and not aliens. don’t worry, they’re related: after all, the gothic was the first genre of genre fiction, and it contains the seeds of later genres. case in point: before appearing in retrospective to be the first work of science fiction, _Frankenstein_ was originally a terrifically experimental work of gothic fiction. most of what would now be considered science fictional about it can also be approached as a deep, thoughtful exploration of the sublime in relation to humanity’s capacity for creation.

(i would like to take a quick detour into asking that the whole world shut up about frankenstein as a scientist who played god & was destroyed by his own ambition; theres a lot more going on there. leave victor alone!!!!!)

this is what comes to define science fiction in opposition to “literary” fiction. where austen’s novels bring literature firmly into the space of the domestic and mundane, _Frankenstein_ orients itself relentlessly towards the sublime, rejecting the domestic altogether. science fiction is the body of literature that continues this embrace of the sublime possibilities of a universe that we know more and more about. (tho its not necessarily antithetical to the domestic & beautiful.)

WOW was i gonna talk about UFOs??? i sure got off on a tangent. short version: aliens, beings from other worlds, embody the vastness of space and likewise the vastness of possibility in the universe. the gulf is so wide that it is impossible to make any real knowledge of them before contact, so the moment of contact is sublime: anything is possible. they could be dangerous or friendly, ambivalent or just impossible to communicate with. maybe even impossible to recognize. those boys are sublime!

man i wanted to write about ufo mysticism and the x files and stuff but this post got away from me. maybe next time!

miyazaki and western surrealism

The 1970s was a golden age for surreal scifi, a genre which i fuckin love. From Zardoz to La Planète Sauvage, Bakshi to Moebius to Jodorowsky’s doomed dream, a lot of good shit came out of this period. But the capstone of the era was made in the 80s; its a remarkable collage of the ten years or so preceding it in surrealist scifi. This is Hayao Miyazaki’s first movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Nausicaa is an odd movie, and not actually very good in comparison to Miyazaki’s later work. Like most miyazaki films, is at its most powerful on the visual level—but it draws thoroughly from Western surrealists and little resembles his later work. It has more of the surreal medievalism of Moebius’ far futures; faces framed by jewelled hoods, pseudo saxon swords and helmets, Arzach’s steed becoming Nausicaa’s glider and the Valley’s gunship. There is a sprawling, beautiful wilderness—but filled with the bizarre forms of La Planète Sauvage. Nausicaa literally opens with a dude riding the bird-horse from Bakshi’s Wizards.

The opening scene serves as an adequate visual metaphor for how this surrealism functions: an almost familiar landscape is covered in layers of beautifully textured obstruction, rendering its forms abstract and defamiliarized.

This visual boldness, unfortunately, doesn’t make Nausicaa any better as a heroic epic: it lacks the weight that the form needs. (Conjuring this weight, incidentally, is George Lucas’ great gift; but that’s a different post.) But it does contain pieces of his later two epics: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke. Some of the visuals are so similar across the films that you can almost imagine Miyazaki going back and mining Nausicaa for good ideas that were poorly executed—one example would be the world Nausicaa enters beneath the toxic jungle and the swamp where Ashitaka first sees the Forest Spirit:

You can see between those two images how much Miyazaki’s skill as an artist and a storyteller improved between these movies. But later films lack Nausicaa's vision of a sublime world. This it inherits from its surreal predecessors: the world that is not anthrocentric but greater than humanity, overwhelmingly vast in its history, its inhabitants, its possibilities.

In his later work, Miyazaki shifts towards setting his stories in the mundane world. This trend starts with Laputa, which is split between the mundane world on the ground and the sublime world of the flying castle; at the end of the film Laputa sheds its human elements and escapes the earth entirely, leaving our heroes trapped in mundanity. Miyazaki then experiments with domestic stories about magic hidden within the mundane and domestic. Once he finishes with that, he brings what he learned of weight and place and tells his masterful epic Princess Mononoke. The film effectively rewrites Nausicaa but is set in a relative mundane, vaguely historical world, where the sublime only acts through the distant presence of the forest spirit.