The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives (Edited by Anastasios Gaitanidis and Polona Curk - Routledge, 2021)
This book is a work of love as a sublime event in its different forms and emanations. It begun with the love of wisdom (philosophy) and the love of truth and then moved to the truth of love, the love as it is expressed in poetry, literature, film, theatre, play and, most importantly, as it is experienced in our interactions with friends, comrades, and companions. It is because of these sublime interactions with friends and companions both past and present that this book has come into existence. First, my dear friend Tessa who started this project with me almost 12 years ago and then my good friend Polona who stepped in as a co-editor and saviour when Tessa was no longer alive. All of the contributors are also friends or they have become so through the process of working together over the last two years. Of course, this book would not have been possible without the love and friendship of my wife, Sasha, whose sublime presence is a constant source of inspiration for me. For the sublime as it is conceived in our book is not simply an individualistic event that introduces greatness into the ordinary and the mundane. It is based on experiences that are shared and have the power to elevate us together. As I will shortly demonstrate with some examples, the everyday sublime is not only a singular feat we strive for as individuals, but it is also an uncommon value that could be held jointly and lead to change.
I remember as a young man in my early 20s, after having had my first serious break-up, sitting on a bench, looking melancholic while waiting for the bus to arrive. An old lady who was also waiting for her bus, sat next to me, touch my hand softly and said: Please don’t worry my son. In life, you will experience sorrow and joy in equal measure. She then stood up, got into the bus, and disappeared, never to be seen again. It took this moment of sublime grace and connection to make me realise that nothing in life is permanent, not even my worries.
To live with this transience is to love what is mortal. But how could one love what is mortal in a time when the crematoria are running out of wood to burn the corpses? How can one love what is mortal in the midst of so much destruction and violent death? This seems to be a nightmare from which we will not awake if we do not deal with the haunting memories of those who died in vain. This is not only an issue of ‘sublimation’, i.e., of how to transform the nightmare into a dream – the primary objective of psychoanalytic therapy; this is also a matter of truth and social justice. “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth”, said Voltaire.
So, at times, it feels as if writing about love during or after the pandemic could be seen as barbaric, an act of cruel indifference to suffering. Yet, not to write at all would mean to deny that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream” (to paraphrase Adorno). At least, this act of sublimation gives some form to suffering in contrast to the repressive de-sublimation which maintains our careless apathy by thoughtlessly evacuating our pain onto others.
But what is the relation of the sublime in writing and art to the other’s suffering? Is it similar to the one described by Auden’s poem Museé des Beaux Arts? In the poem, Auden describes Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and people’s indifference towards the falling boy in the following way:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…
In order to overcome indifference, the sublime disposition that Auden reflects (and prescribes) here is one that attempts to acquire some distance, to be at one remove (like the Old Masters) or, perhaps, two steps removed (as Auden was) from suffering so as to be able to witness it. It is like looking at the sun through a glass darkly. Otherwise, we will be blinded or worse, taking Icarus fall as a warning, we will fly too close to the sun, the wax will melt, lose our wings, fall into the sea, and drown.
However, although we cannot observe suffering for a long time without blinking an eye, we do not also have to turn a blind eye to it by turning it into our contemporary primal scene. Perhaps with differing levels of awareness, it is likely that people still experience physical reactions to direct or indirect trauma and violence to and from the other within their environments: a knot in the pit of their stomach when they hear that refugees are treated as illegal aliens, a pain in their lower back when they experience someone complaining that s/he is a ‘costumer’ and needs to receive a particular service, acid reflux when they see people flaunting their privilege without any consideration for its effects on their fellow human beings, and losing breath when they can only find scraps of time to spend with their friends and families as they are overwhelmed with useless, mind-numbing administrative tasks. Perhaps, we have all become veritable hysterics! However, unlike the hysterics of Freud’s era, we do not have the time to reflect on and process this physicality which, as a consequence, becomes fleeting and transitory. Through certain works of art that manage to arrest this transitoriness and express suffering in ways that we cannot escape from or ignore anymore, we can re-gain the opportunity to encounter it in a different form and process it more effectively. Apart from works of art, psychoanalysis also serves the same aesthetic function – it cultivates a science (and an art of) of sensibility that attends to the suffering mind-body and the current shocks inflicted on it by the world.
We also need to be very aware of the dangers of concealment in the adoption of a life informed by the aesthetic dimension without an awareness of social and structural inequalities. I remember driving on the motorway with Tessa… There were road works everywhere. We were unnecessarily delayed. I was irritated. She said: “Look, Anastasios! Just look! Aren't they beautiful?” “What is beautiful Tessa? I don’t understand.” “The roadworks, you silly. What else?” And she went on to describe the exceptional symmetrical arrangement of the pylons and traffic cones that made the whole artificial landscape so aesthetically pleasing. I was struck by her ability to not simply observe, but to look - really look - and find what is beautiful and sublime even in the most mundane (and, frankly, deeply frustrating) aspects of everyday reality. I thought she was blessed with a vision that could make the world sacred again. But I was also aware of the real suffering that this gesture could potentially conceal, i.e., of its ideological nature, if it is not followed by an awareness of the toil and pain of the workers involved in the road repairs.
When I began writing my chapter on love as a sublime event, I had a sense that I was lost for words. These were words that were lost but were never there, words that were yet-to-come, words that, if I allowed myself enough time, they would have appeared again to leaven truth with love. I suppose this is what makes loss so difficult to bear: you do not lose only what you had, but also what you would have become if you hadn’t lost it. But, of course, this is also a fantasy, as if these words could ever be completely found. Yet, I feel it is important to allow one’s words to be lost for a while and not try to tie them to a mast. It is important not to pin one’s words down. You see, “words are like angels, if you pin them down too quickly, they lose their wings and die” – to paraphrase Virginia Wolf.
“Stop! Enough! Stop!” I can hear Tessa saying to me: “When it comes to love, you need to do what will cost you the most…” I remember feeling puzzled by this answer she gave when I asked her whether I should stay in a relationship that would potentially cause me a lot of pain. It is only years later that I came to realise that if I had succumbed to the calculus of neo-liberal dating, I would have missed on years of precious connection and mutual generosity. As Mary Oliver says in in her short poem The Uses of Sorrow:
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Here is a link to the YouTube video of the book launch: