Red Cedar

Sublimity and mountaintops.

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Megan

(Sadly, you can’t experience the sublime through a photograph.)

I’ve spent a fair bit of time hiking in and around mountains over the last several years – not as much as I would like, but enough to recognize that there is a distinction between nature’s “beauty” – as in “that is a beautiful flower/bush/etc” – and an entirely different feeling one gets when encountering the immensity of a mountain range, the heart-rumbling rush of water through a valley channel, or the fearful ridge precipice from which one can see a hundred kilometres in every direction. This second feeling – I used to describe as “being broken open” as in – “when I stood on top of that ridge between two mountain ranges I felt as if my heart was broken open”. An entirely different response than “isn’t that beautiful,” and one that implies a physical pain which I very much feel in those moments, as if I am being spread apart by something so awe-inspiring that I can not contain its existence within me. It is a pleasureable pain – one that allows for rhapsodic tears, and grand plans for rearranging life to spend more time in the presence of such grand landscapes (not to mention inspiring a resistance to all that would destroy the wild and untamed in us and in our environment).

“Whatever is fittied in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” — Edmund Burke

But until reading Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea that this feeling was a) to some degree universal and b) a philosophical concept developed in the 18th century. That is the mutually exclusive distinction between the beautiful and the sublime – sublime being the experience I have described above.

To quote wikipedia, sublimity refers to “the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.” According to Burke, the sublime experience is a kind of “negative pain” which is distinct from positive pleasure but still brings on a kind of “delight” – and this sweep of emotion is the strongest feeling one can experience – far surpassing reverence, admiration and respect.

Why is it that the experience of the sublime – particularly in nature (sublime experiences also being possible in religion and art) – excites the human core in such a particular way? According to Burke:

The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such sircumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions.

And having experienced some degree of sublime experience I read this as true – because so often I have felt that I could be swallowed up by such great mountains and rivers, that I am powerless if a wind were to come and push me into the precipice, and that timelessness of those natural artifacts is overwhelming to my individual ego. This is *not* the same as actually being in danger, which does not inspire sublimity but some much baser instinct to save oneself. Sublimity relies on the reflection of the possibility of danger, of the awareness of mortality as being close at hand without actually being present. As Burke notes, it is is the affecting idea of death which moves us.

But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death; nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is, that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors.

Thus, a kind of delicious horror is produced in a sublime experience. This is nothing like beauty, Burke is right in drawing out their mutual exclusivity. This is nothing short of the experience that reminds us most of our human frailty and mortality – face to face with a mountain range that pre and post-dates our own existence by hundreds of thousands of years.

This is not the only exploration in A Philosophical Enquiry which seeks to describe, though Burke clearly gives a preference to the emotions produced by sublime experience over beautiful experiences. This shift in cultural thinking (which appears in many other writings starting in the late 18th century) is one of the entry points to the Romanticism which dominated 19th century philosophic and artistic thought. I’ve noticed that a number of the readings for this semester draw from this tradition – one in which the emotions are validated as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. This being a kindof counter-Enlightenment and to some degree a response to the Industrial Revolution.

Given that Burke describes a feeling many of us have had (particularly those naturey types I know – many of whom are motivated by just such emotional responses) – it strikes me that this writing marks a return to a particular kind of emotional honesty which was downplayed by the highly-rationalist Enlightenment. While Burke was horrified by the French Revolution, and is noted as a grandfather of modern conservatism, he is also one of the first to give voice the impassioned motivations in human nature. For sublimity is not only found in nature, and may serve as the foundation for the making of meaning – ie revolution – in ones own lifetime.

East Van’s secret hospital

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Megan

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This is where I was yesterday. Minor medical test only, really nothing to worry about…. But I’m flagging it with this photo as an excuse to let you East Vansters know about Mount St. Joseph Hospital which is probably Vancouver’s best kept secret.

At Kingsway and Prince Ed (two blocks off Main at 14th), this is East Van’s only hospital and if you have to go somewhere for testing, day surgery or an emergency room, I would highly recommend this over VGH or St Paul’s both of which are frenetic day and night. I first became acquainted with St. Joseph’s when I took Brian in for cataract surgery last year – and so requested that my test be scheduled here when it came up with my Doctor. So much more relaxed than having to work one’s way through the maze of a giant hospital! Plus the staff here seem less stressed, and I have only had professional and courteous experiences the three times I have been (twice for B., once for me).

Super easy to get to, any bus up Kingsway or Main will drop you right there. And best of all? It’s in the hood which means closer than anywhere else for urgent medical care. I’ve noticed that most people have never heard of this hospital – as I hadn’t before B. had his surgeries scheduled there which is why I’m passing this on as good-to-know-info.

It *is* a Catholic hospital, which I recognize some people don’t use as a matter of principle on the whole question of abortion access (but so is St. Paul’s and they do some of the most progressive HIV research in North America) – but Vancouver has a clinic system for abortion and contraception so it would be rare to go to a hospital for these things anyway.

Makin’ music.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Megan

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I started learning how to play the violin when I was just two and a half years old, my mother being a music teacher and all, not a minute of potential was going to pass me by. Consequently, the feel of a fiddle under my chin is second nature – even when I don’t pick it up for years – and reading music is a little bit like looking at another language which I know almost as well as my first.

But despite that (or perhaps because of it), I have had a push-pull relationship with playing music for most of my life. I quit lessons when I was fifteen, started busking at 20 (and paid my way through my first year of college), put my instrument away until I was 24 when I pulled it out again for a university breadth requirement. That course lead me to the Flying Folk Army, a band I established with six other people in 1998 and played with until about 2005. And now? Other than a few forays, I haven’t played at all in the past five years. Five years! That’s after a playing schedule that involved at least one practice and one gig per week for a long time – not to mention the 3 and 4 gig weeks during out busiest periods….. The music, it just slipped out of my life once the band eroded into other lives (we never did break up, we just stopped having time for one another as other things took over).

For the first couple of years I didn’t miss it, a band is a lot of work after all – and after awhile it had begun to feel more like work than I wanted it to. I had taken over gig scheduling and promotion and organizing rehearsals early on, and so I felt a bit burdened by the responsibility of making sure everything ran right in addition to just busting it out on stage. I needed a break from playing and at the time I hoped that the break would morph into some other musical project after I had recouped myself a little. But instead of seeking out other projects, I found myself loathe to look at my violin – preferring instead to sing along to my badly-played guitar which at least I had the excuse to suck at.

And that’s how it’s been, with the exception of some weddings and half-hearted jams. I haven’t wanted to play at all.

Sort of. I mean, I thought I didn’t want to play at all, but then it started that I would hear music recordings that sounded like they were made in a kitchen and I found myself turning them off because it hurt me to hear. Like I’m locked out of that kitchen music and I want back in so bad I could cry from it, and so instead I’ve found myself tuning it out. I stopped going to the gigs of friends for similar reasons, which I thought was a jealousy about being on stage, but recently have discovered that it’s something quite different I miss.

That realization came from a conversation among my old bandmates on Facebook, when afterwards I could hear a particular song echoing in my head all the way home on the bus. Titled “The Ukranian Song” on an old piece of sheet music (that can *not* be its actual name), it is comprised of a slow part and then a fast part (a really fast part) which I used to play in harmony with our accordionist to a backdrop of guitar shots and encouraging shouts by the rest of the band. I wish I had a recording of it handy – but for now you’ll have to put up with this description and believe me when I say it was the kind of song that drove crowds into wild dancing and hollering. Amazing. Anyhow, as I was thinking about all of this I realized that what I missed most of all – more than the creative connection, more than the stage, more than the crazy dancing fools – was the feeling of pure empowered joy that ran through me when I played those insanely speedy numbers. The strength of my fingers, the courage of my physical being to stand up there in front of others and challenge the strings and my fingers to keep up without breaking. That! That is an incredible feeling and I don’t know anything else like it.

It’s what I miss. The melodic to the frenetic, the angst driven into the strings, the blocking out of everything except getting the notes down in the right order, the muscle memory the retains the melody long after the mind has forgotten it. I can’t sing the damn song to this day, but I can still play it (albeit slowly at the moment) if I let my mind go and my body take over.

Remembering that, I feel a pain well up inside me, a trapped impulse to get back to that place of ability and joy, but I don’t want to dial it down anymore. I want to let it out! and as a result I have recently picked up my fiddle. In the living room, sheet music stacked on top of the piano, I hammer my fingers down in exercises designed to bring strength and dexterity back, regain the fine muscle control needed for such daring feats of sound. I swoop my bow out in stretches that reach all the way around my shoulderblades, into my lower back – and I pace with them, improvising on chords and scales, filling the wood up with vibrations in order to restore the sound to my underplayed instrument.

It’s painful at the moment, my mind moves faster than my fingers (it should be the other way round), I trip on the fast runs and my waltzes aren’t light enough. And it hurts! A half hour of playing and my arms are sore from the effort, my lower back doesn’t like the fact I’m sitting at the piano instead of standing and moving my body with the bow. But at the same time I’m reminded how second-nature my instrument is to me – I can pick it up and still play the ten songs embedded in my body, I can improvise on a theme without giving it too much thought. This makes it believable that I might make myself good enough to play with others again, sometime in the not too far future. Perhaps the Flying Folk Army reunion hang-out, perhaps a random jam, perhaps a solo or two at the labour cabaret next month?

I’m not sure if I’ll even keep it up, but answering this call right now seems essential as I seek more ways to incorporate creativity into my life. If ever I could refashion myself, it would be to work less and create more. More of what’s real. More meaning. More joy and beauty. More excitement and freedom of spirit!

My fiddle is just one way to do that. And I am finding my way back stroke, by stroke.