Written by Michael Kiser, then illustrated by Kyle Fletcher

The concept of “the sublime” has always been something humans defined, or at least inferred, as a beauty or grandeur beyond a human capacity.

In our brief history, we’ve used the term “sublime” to describe many facets of art-making, such as the symphony, performance art that is particularly transportive, even events on the scale of all-out war. “Awe-inspiring” is at the heart of our relationship to the sublime. It overwhelms us, bowls over our senses, and resonates with some deep, tangible need to be stupefied by our own experiences. 

Most often, we look to nature for this brush with the divine. Places like the Grand Canyon, the perfect mountains of the craggy, Scottish landscape versed in Wordsworth, the frighteningly desolate horizons of Shackelton’s Antarctic — these places, or the idea of these places, leave most of us speechless, and inspire the bravest of us to craft art in the face of that impending silence. 

What then is the sublime landscape of our age? Certainly these same geographies remain as capable of arresting our eyes and minds as they ever have. But their mystery is easily solved for these days. The Antarctic is less the edge of the world as much as it is a political landscape full of evidence to global warming. The endless mountains of the Appalachians, once the source of idyllic visions for a new America are a hot-zone of hydro-fracking debates and land rights.

Certainly outer space holds an unending promise for the sublime, as we seek Mars like a new breed of scientific conquistador. But the mysteries involved in outer space have taken a decidedly detailed turn, as scientists unlock the secrets of a universe at the quantum level, leaving the language of discovery in the hands of so few. The universe, as an ever-expanding lightshow, pulsing with forces beyond our comprehension, and with a history deeper than our greatest religious fantasies, has been abandoned with the last NASA shuttle launch this past month. Outer space is no longer a shared, public edeavor. The things we can learn remotely, and privately, with new technologies is far more than we ever gathered in a handful of dust on the surface of the moon. But in the process, a collective sense of sublimnity is lost. 

Even our science fiction has become a reduction of our former aspirations. No longer an inspired future looking back at us with an alien eye, our science fiction is now instead an alogarithmic extrapolation on the many possibilities of the “now.” Our scientific world changes so utterly fast that the idea of science “ficiton” is itself felt to be a misnomer, as anything that seems impossible is simply roped in by the next discovery and advance in our technical capabilities. We have no choice but to imagine all the things that will be solved, which is to imagine all the things there are. To craft a story away from our ability to solve somethig seems unhuman and a apocalyptic. We are left with abosulte resoltuion either way. And in this bi-polar interpretation of the world, there is no sublimnity except for the end of times.  

Our most promising frontier is perhaps our most abstract. As we stretch our tiny brains, fibrous and electric, across every gulf of land and our atmospheric projections bounce against our own orbit, we find a way to create a modicum of the sublime in our everyday lives. 

Each morning we send our thoughts and feelings into space, and provide terminal to others’ exploding pieces of self in the form of something as simple as an RSS feed, a Tumblr post, an Instagr.am. We create images in a parallel plane that never even existed in our own hands, with Pop Rocket and Early Bird filters, and share them with millions of unknown souls, having never truly possessed them to begin with. And at our own electric endpoint, we ponder these for mere seconds over coffee, multi-tasking alongside Rdio and TeuxDeux, alighting the El for our sunny commute — and in a flash of desire to possess that distant, sublime moment ourselves, we are moved to “like.” This is our truest public endeavour toward the sublime.

Part of what makes a “sublime” experience so compelling is a fear, or ambiguity of experience that borders on the in-authentic. Our brains are built to accept what is knowable, and reject or rationalize what persist beyond our capacity to know. But what we so commonly create with these new tools has a thinning relationship with the world of our physical actuality, and a broadening appeal to the world we feel we have always “seen.” We are creating images, en masse, based on the feeling of a place and leaving behind the cold, scientific accuracy of what we know of that place. For lack of a tangible space to explore with the great mysteries of the universe in tact, we are creating our own on a second plane that exists only in the electronic signals we send to each other, like a telepathic ball of emotional lightening that pulses throughout a system of wires like the synapses of a small, unspeaking child. 

And sometimes, when I find a thread that resonates so deeply with my own experience, or overwhelms my cognitive bearings so absolutely, I’m moved to consider the enormity of our sublime endeavor, not with a sense of reason or analysis, but with great admiration and spiritual excellence. And a tiny pulse of feedback that returns like a carrier pigeon after a long, wavering delivery. 

The imagination of outer space has been left to the specialists to toil with increasingly small, yet cosmic levels of discovery that will likely not be translated back into our everyday lives as they did when man first conducted a “space walk” or took our collective “giant leap.” But it’s the vast expanse of inner space that so many citizens are exploring now, unwittingly, at the edges of the sublime in our collective human experience. And for that, there are only tools, not specialists. Not public or private funds. Not a vicarious admiration of a mysterious journey to the moon. But a personal, collective, emotional beauty constructed from millions of tiny shares, and likes, and RTs. 

RT @kyleluvsew “Seriously. All of these social websites aren’t going to work unless you stop being so fucking stingy with your likes. Express how you feel!”