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!
