what are we reaching for? what are we hoping for? what are we living for? / is it the sublime, is it ourselves, is it each other?
octavia butler builds a world in “the evening and the morning and the night” which is so similar to what we know, that the uncanniness of the shared specifics feel two steps from being our own reality. they feel too-real, which in itself, then feels scary, horror-real, like the kind of on the edge of your seat fright you get from the horror genre of mediums. something all too like the rules within dreams, where you don’t question anything, because somehow, it just makes sense. it makes everything real, in a way you can’t differentiate until you wake up. until you become – different. until you become a different version of you.
interestingly, this is also one of the points that morley brings up in “the contemporary sublime”, that one of the viewpoints of the concept of the sublime is that it can be defined as something that transforms the self. that we become aware of this lack of awareness as it finally clicks into place. until we just – know, due to this experience. because then, we are finally able to define it. we are finally able to take something undefinable, something personal and old and new and different and have words for it. because of course, we want to have words for it. then we want to share it, we want to know it, try it on and on again like an old favourite jacket. like something to hold us, as we walk into the dark.
like this, we want something bigger than us, something to hold everything we are not able to. to know everything we want to know, but don’t know where to begin. to have all the answers because every question needs one, doesn't it? because if we don’t know – it’s just another thing we can’t hold in our hands and know every inch. it’s another thing we cannot know, another on the list that only seems to just grow and grow and grow.
the future is a puzzle we cannot ever finish. not due to lack of trying, no – it's more like we don’t have all of the pieces, and the board keeps changing. the game keeps changing. how we want to play keeps changing. this is the core idea that both works touch on – butler’s characters always looking to the future that they know is coming, as something already set in place, and all that's left is planning for it, day in and day out looking for a way to either stop it, or just live towards it, preparing. in morley's work, the sublime is something that has always been unreachable and changing – we aren't able to see it coming. we can only look towards it, we can only imagine it. the future, this idea of something untouchable but there, but existing, but unknowable, distant as the horizon, but just as close.
it's a casual outlook to say that we see the future usually as something far away. we plan for it, set out our schedules for days, months, years from right now. we put physicality to all that space between us. this makes the present a kind of preparement period, where things going on right now, but in a way is put on a delay, or pause, until something comes to fruition, something to make all the work worth it. we chase the sublime because it’s a goal: self-betterment, or maybe even just something as simple as – self-knowledge.
within identity, we work on defining ourselves into something that makes sense. into something we feel we have a kind of control over. the sublime is treated and talked about as this destruction of an unseen boundary – are we looking for something other, or something more permanent? or is it something in the middle, a mutual recognition, between who we believe we are, and who we want to become? is there a difference, really?
it's like this: we want the light to last a little longer. we know it will come again tomorrow, but then there is something then about unpredictability, about cloud cover and things we cannot hold forever in our hands. we balance expectations with dreams, an asymmetry of something sublime but not quite. of something real / but not real enough. how it is just the edges, something too hollow when you knock, like one of those color-by-number puzzles, but not quite, but how here there are no numbers and the spaces are influenced by not just you, but by your entire world – no pressure, right?
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