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