Writing About the Sublime

Does Writing About the Sublime Produce Sublime Writing?

Does Writing About the Sublime Produce Sublime Writing?

Robert Greene is interesting because human behavior is interesting.

At least to me.

My friend, Alex, a cool, just left of center (but too center for his leftist friends) worked at a cool book shop in St. Louis.

We became friends in the shop by talking about books. The best kind of friend.

He told me the only people he ever saw buying Robert Greene’s book, The 48 Laws of Power were young, white, frat-guy-looking dudes. He said it with a look on his face and a tone that showed what he thought about it.

That’s fair. Robert Greene is a modern day Machiavelli who claims he is trying to help the rest of us understand what the very powerful who are oppressing us understand.

How power works.

I’m telling you, it’s interesting. But I’m sure some read his books in order to learn how to control people. Try not to do that.

He also wrote The Art of Seduction. Again, who is buying this book?

(Okay, I did, because I thought it would be fun for my wife if I seduced her. [I did, and it was.] Actually, to be perfectly accurate I checked it out from the library. We can talk about this topic [seduction, not libraries] some other time.)

But Greene has a great book on Mastery, called Mastery. It’s about getting good at things.

And another one called The Laws of Human Nature, which you should read if you write fiction. It’ll give you ideas for days.

And now…

I see that he’s trying to write a book on the sublime.

And what is interesting to me is that he’s been writing it forever.

I don’t know why it’s taking him so long (except maybe that he had a stroke just as he was beginning to write it. That might have something to do with it).

But I think a major reason is—-how do you write about the sublime? The very act of reducing it to words takes you out of the sublime.

Usually.

Unless you are a brilliant poet.

Ah…that was an introduction. Was it sublime? I don’t think it was, but, you are still here and reading, so I’ll keep it.

Now to the point. I’ve been binge watching interviews with Iain McGilchrist, who studies the brain, particularly the relationship between the left and right hemispheres.

McGilchrist says that what we’ve always been taught about the two sides is wrong. If you’re like me, you grew up thinking the left side was for logic, and the right side was for art.

As an individual, you were either a left brain person, that is, good at math, or you were a right brain person, that is, good at drawing or playing the guitar.

But McGilchrist points out the debunkery that has occurred and explains that it’s really about conscious and unconscious thinking.

Right here I’m too lazy to go and look up some quotes and get more clarity, so I’ll just tell you what I remember. He used an analogy:

Killing, cooking, and eating your food is left brain.

Scanning the environment for predators while you do all that is right brain.

Also, language is mostly left brain.

So if the sublime happens in the right brain (did I mention the sublime happens in the right brain?), trying to describe it takes you into left brain modes. So, experiencing it is much easier than describing the experience.

This also makes me think of the Bible.

Experiencing God is the most sublime thing you can do. Some of the prophets, like Isaiah, write about this eloquently, but I bet even Isaiah despaired of truly describing the throne room of God when he was commissioned (Isaiah 6:1-8).

Or consider John, who saw thousands upon thousands of angels worshiping around the throne (Revelation 5). This is powerfully written about, but how could the writing possibly compare with the actual experience?

That said, if you’re a Christian, you likely know the experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit in a manifest way as you read the Bible. I wish it happened to me more often, but I’m glad it’s happened some.

But we aren’t writing Scripture as scribes of the Holy Spirit. I mean, hopefully, we are writing under His influence, but we aren’t writing the authoritative Word of God.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the sublime, and how we write sublime things.

A better question might be: How do some writers manage to write sublimely?

Or, let me put it this way…

How can we write in a way that allows the reader to experience awe?

That’s the question I’m trying to get to. I should go back and delete everything to this point and start over with that question, but…I won’t, because I wrote it and I like it.

Writing that Produces Awe

Instead of breaking it down with my left brain, let me end all this by showing you an example. John Piper first pointed out this passage to us somewhere (a talk? Tell me if you know), and then I went and read the book he was reading from, Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.

Check it out. I’ll leave it here for you. Like Piper, I was in awe.

From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with-given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century. Think about your own first gasp: a shocking wind roweling so easily down your throat, and you still slipping around in the doctor’s hands. How you yowled! Not a thing on your mind but breakfast, and that was on the way.

When I was born to Helen and Jeremiah Land, in 1951, my lungs refused to kick in.

My father wasn’t in the delivery room or even in the building; the halls of Wilson Hospital were close and short, and Dad had gone out to pace in the damp September wind. He was praying, rounding the block for the fifth time, when the air quickened. He opened his eyes and discovered he was running -- sprinting across the grass toward the door.

“How’d you know?” I adored this story, made him tell it all the time.

“God told me you were in trouble.”

“Out loud? Did you hear Him?”

“Nope, not out loud. But He made me run, Reuben. I guess I figured it out on the way.”

I had, in fact, been delivered some minutes before. My mother was dazed, propped against soggy pillows, unable to comprehend what Dr. Animas Nokes was telling her.

“He still isn’t breathing, Mrs. Land.”

“Give him to me!”

To this day I’m glad Dr. Nokes did not hand me over on demand. Tired as my mother was, who knows when she would’ve noticed? Instead he laid me down and rubbed me hard with a towel. He pounded my back; he rolled me over and massaged my chest. He breathed air into my mouth and nose -- my chest rose, fell with a raspy whine, stayed fallen. Years later Dr. Nokes would tell my brother Davy that my delivery still disturbed his sleep. He’d never seen a child with such swampy lungs.

When Dad skidded into the room, Dr. Nokes was sitting on the side of the bed holding my mother’s hand. She was wailing -- I picture her as an old woman here, which is funny, since I was never to see her as one -- and old Nokes was attempting to ease her grief. It was unavoidable, he was saying; nothing could be done; perhaps it was for the best.

I was lying uncovered on a metal table across the room.

Dad lifted me gently. I was very clean from all that rubbing, and I was gray and beginning to cool. A little clay boy is what I was.

“Breathe,” Dad said.

I lay in his arms.>

Dr. Nokes said, “Jeremiah, it has been twelve minutes.”

“Breathe!” The picture I see is of Dad, brown hair short and wild, giving this order as if he expected nothing but obedience.

Dr. Nokes approached him. “Jeremiah. There would be brain damage now. His lungs can’t fill.”

Dad leaned down, laid me back on the table, took off his jacket and wrapped me in it -- a black canvas jacket with a quilted lining, I have it still. He left my face uncovered.

“Sometimes,” said Dr. Nokes, “there is something unworkable in one of the organs. A ventricle that won’t pump correctly. A liver that poisons the blood.” Dr. Nokes was a kindly and reasonable man. “Lungs that can’t expand to take in air. In these cases,” said Dr. Nokes, “we must trust in the Almighty to do what is best.” At which Dad stepped across and smote Dr. Nokes with a right hand, so that the doctor went down and lay on his side with his pupils unfocused. As Mother cried out, Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, “Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.”

The truth is, I didn’t think much on this until a dozen years later -- beyond, of course, savoring the fact that I’d begun life in a dangerous and thus romantic manner. When you are seven years old there’s nothing as lovely and tragic as telling your friends you were just about dead once. It made Dad my hero, as you might expect, won him my forgiveness for anything that he might do forever; but until later events it didn’t occur to me to wonder just why I was allowed, after all, to breathe and keep breathing.

The answer, it seems to me now, lies in the miracles.

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