Zakira’s Roses

Sublime Engagement
For: GLS 800
Fall 2007

Human beings are uniquely tragic amongst the animals of earth. Like the other creatures we struggle to survive, persevere against adversity, mate, breed, die, and mourn. But unlike the other animals, we yearn. We are not Nabokov’s butterflies unaware of the pin that spears us. We know we are trapped and we dream a thousand fantasies of freedom.
We ache for something greater than ourselves. We believe it is out there and yet doubt its existence. We sing for souls we cannot be sure even exist, pray to gods we secretly doubt, kill for beliefs that may kill us one day.
There are a few things we can be sure of: the power of nature, the gravitational pull of sex, the heat of rage. Some of us curl up cozy in social mores, getting drunk on holidays and enjoying (but not loving) our spouses, getting our revenge through gossip. Others dance on the fringes, whirling over the edge in an ecstatic frenzy.
Over millennia of written thought we have come no closer to understanding this aspect of ourselves. We seek a sensation that ancient people thought godly, the seventeenth century called the Sublime, the twentieth century called a Transcendental State.  Mary Wollstonecraft called it an Exquisite Pleasure, while Percy Shelley recognized that this kind of pleasure, infinite and complex, is intimately and paradoxically connected with pain (Shelley, 33).  Although we know what we mean when we describe it, somehow its achievement cannot be planned.
Humanity has developed many systems to attempt to control and predict the sublime experience. We have created moral, scientific, or devotional methods of mental self-control and placed the primal ‘something’ in boxes reserved for sins of gluttony and carnality or those reserved for holy wars and transgressions. We have also created infrastructures and activities intended to trigger the experience in a supposedly safe manner. Transcendental meditation, romantic affairs, nature walks, horror movies and extreme sports make shimmering promises.  There are great risks associated with reaching for this goal. This Everest has destroyed lives on both ascent and descent. The one dependable aspect of this force is that it transforms everything it touches.
Julian of Norwich was transformed from nobility to a mystic by this very thing. She longed for an immersive divine transmission, and this longing stayed with her continually (Julian of Norwich, 43). Medieval society contained a strong symbolic and procedural infrastructure to support certain types of religious experience. She engaged in mental preparation, praying and concentrating to define her desire, to realize her yearning into fruition. When this combined with a trigger event, life-threatening illness, her symbol-steeped mind transformed near-death into spiritual insight.
This insight changed the path of Lady Julian’s life. The transformative sublime is no Sunday afternoon dalliance. The achievement of this desire led her to mystical understanding, forcing significant life change. She became an anchorite, lived in poverty and isolation, fed forever by her visions.
The same experience, achieved without the kind of mental preparation Julian engaged in, could have led to madness and self-destruction. Yet Julian maintained her mental stability, cleverly able to avoid the fate of heretics and still publish boundary-crossing Christian insight.
Humbert Humbert, the fictional 20th century pedophile, was also transformed by a taste of the sublime experience. He yearned with his whole being for a kind of love he thought barred to him. Over the years he developed a complex and unique worldview that would prepare him for what he considered to be almost an impossible moment.  He studied children, especially nymphets, as closely as Julian studied her bible. And, in exchange for the Lolita inside Dolores Haze, he gave up every shred of both his and her own dignity. The indescribable moments of his union with and possession by Lolita carry the same power and energy of Shelley’s visions of Mont Blanc, but what destruction they unleash. He transformed from someone who would never hurt a child to someone who would rape one, from someone who was afraid to gently drown his wife to someone who would empty a gun into his competitor.
While Julian went from being a lady to being essentially a hermit, Humbert went from being a teacher to being a murderer. For each extreme, it was the immense and inexplicable experience which overwhelmed the previously limited individual. The new self revealed by the sublime experience has been freed from membership responsibilities in a restrictive and limiting social order. Now on the edges of society, these individuals must choose how to use their new awareness, to develop it or to try to preserve it for themselves.
The reality of the sublime moment was something neither Julian nor Humbert had been able to imagine. For all their fantasies, they had both only known desire for an unattainable. Once obtained, the love object turned out to be much more powerful than dreamed of.
The individuals we have read have placed a great deal of emphasis on the imaginary, the symbolic, and the larger-than-life. These individuals have engaged their symbolic minds to enable access to a level beyond the commonplace.
If we use a light metaphor to describe human experience, it can be seen as a spectrum comprising conscious and unconscious thought, dream, movement and action, and passive or active visualization. Within this spectrum, elements of thought, activity, philosophy and society blend in complex layers, but instinct and imagination overlay every aspect of our lives. Lived experience is spent in the management of symbolic expectations and physical needs. We layer religion, philosophic worldviews, personal fantasy and ambition in delicate balance with the social, moral, and physical limitations that control us.
Mary Wollstonecraft recognizes that without the cultivation of the imagination, emotional or physical pleasure is still possible.  The sublime experience with its immeasurable variations and intensities, with its possibilities and its unpredictability, is more likely to be enjoyed if the mind and the imagination have been prepared in advance. The development of the imagination is, for Wollstonecraft, key to the sublime.
The cultivated imagination as demonstrated in these readings is volatile. Without the capacity to real-ize the imaginary, individuals can easily self-destruct. Emma Bovary, unable to reconcile the real and the imaginary, lived in a state of perpetual disappointment.  She became desperate to actualize the sublime experience and through increasingly frantic and senseless behaviours spun herself out of control towards her inevitable suicide.
Perhaps Emma Bovary’s error is that instead of cultivating her imagination as a tool for understanding and preparing for sublime or transcendental experiences, she develops it as a standard against which to judge the world. Against the “splendour of the skies of poesy” (Flaubert, 29), her experienced life seems unidimensional.  Instead of seeing the mentally created world as a doorway to potential, she sees it as the perpetual proof of the failure of those around her. Ultimately the discontinuity between the imagined and the real drives her to madness.
In contrast, Humbert lives in a world overlaid by imaginary constructs to such an extent that we barely know what is real and what is not.  He loves the mythic sexual pubescent sprite that he imagines lurks behind Dolores’ sullen eyes. Once deep in its thrall he admits the “fanciful Lolita” overlaps and encases the real girl (Nabokov, 62).  He can visualize her with “hallucinational lucidity” (107). He describes her using words that emphasize her un-reality, such as “enchanted prey” (131) and “immortal daemon” (139).  Humbert experiences a symbolic, detailed world where his love object is described as a fantastic whole made up of realistic parts (socked feet, tear-stained cheeks, pouting mouth).  This parsing of his victim enables him to continue his molestation. Only when he no longer has access to her does he admit that he broke her life (279).
The quality of Humbert and Emma’s lives is in many ways determined by their ability to navigate the layers of imagination and reality. As long as there are sufficient layers between the passive, banal, small-town provincial backdrop and the heightened, active, epic internal storylines, the characters are able avoid significant transformation. Despite their immense concentration, visualization and study of the sublime freedom they crave, they did not work to develop their emotional ability to manage the sublime once achieved. Emma and Humbert both drifted out of control the closer they came to realizing their dreams.
What is the purpose of having these experiences, of being swept off your feet in love or dumbfounded by rolling mists? The sublime experience renders us insignificant in its face, aware of our tiny humanity.  It unites us with nature, with our species, and with the stars.  It may render us half-mad poets or reclusive mystics, but those who live to share the awareness help to fulfill the universal yearning for the sublime. Not everyone can survive the transformation, and not everyone should try. Some of us may be like Charles Bovary or Charlotte Haze, content to dream. Others may be more like Emma, incinerated in our own desire.
Those who have sought and survived the transformation induced by sublime experience have often been mystics, poets, and artists.  Survival is the best quality of life they could hope for. Percy Shelley was a melodramatic hypochondriac, Mary Wollstonecraft intermittently suicidal, Julian of Norwich a recluse walking the line between heresy and insight. Looking at the personal history of art many who have touched the sublime have had tragic lives and early deaths.  The primary difference between them and the fictional individuals in Lolita and Madame Bovary is that the characters did not have any productive outlet for their passion. Without the ability to create, these characters destroy.
The sublime is the transformative power which Romantics respirate and without which passionate individuals suffocate. The consummation of spirit with eternal sublimity has been the inspiration and the risk of the ages.  From both real and fictional stories, we see clearly that those who yearn for more than everyday ideas in everyday clothing (Flaubert, 30) must not be passive consumers, they must be ready to be consumed.

Works Cited
Flaubert, G. Madame Bovary. E. Avelin, Translator. Project Gutenberg Etext (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2413), 2006. Page references from Plain Text download.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love. E. Spearing, Translator. Penguin, Toronto: 1998.
Nabokov, V., Lolita. Vintage Books, New York: 1997.
Shelley, P. A Defence of Poetry. EasyRead Edition, ReadHowYouWant.com: 2006.
Wollstonecraft, M. Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.G. Imlay, Translator. Project Gutenberg Etext (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3529), 2002.