Perhaps the best-known definition of the sublime is from Edmund Burke's 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Here, Burke described the now-familiar dichotomy between the "feminine" beautiful and the "masculine" sublime. Beauty is found in objects or landscapes which are visually 'smooth' (rolling hills, for example); beauty is "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it". The sublime, on the other hand, is accessed through experiences of the 'terrible'; that is, objects, landscapes or experiences which invoke fear or notions of vastness: "it is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous". Felix Baumgartner's recent jump from space may be identified as a sublime experience: his view from the top of the jump incorporated the vastness of the globe, and the jump itself was undeniably sublimely terrifying.
Clearly, not all of us - not even most of us - are able to access sublime experiences in this way. Like the Romantic poets before us, we must find more everyday ways of locating the sublime. Unlike the Romantics, however, we are not looking to the natural world to access it, but to a virtual one. Jane McGonigal, from the Institute for the Future, describes in her 2010 lecture "Gaming can make a better world" how "we" currently spend 3 billion hours per week playing online games like World of Warcraft. She argues that the reason that spending such vast amounts of time in virtual worlds is appealing is because it is in those online landscapes and as part of those gaming communities that we can become "the best version of ourselves". Games like World of Warcraft, so McGonigal suggests, allow gamers to experience deep bonds of trust as part of a collaborative community who work together to achieve world-changing goals, or an "epic win". In light of the 10,000 hours it is estimated many gamers will have already been interacting within such gaming communities by the age of 21, McGonigal asks how the skills learned in these virtual worlds may be applied to solving real-world problems like climate change and global hunger.
Part of the map of Skyrim.
World of Warcraft first came into existence back in 1994. It has since constructed (and continues to expand upon) an "epic story"; players of WoW have accumulated a staggering 5.93 million years of gameplay, and have contributed to the second largest Wiki after Wikipedia. It is this vastness of time and resources that make WoW a sublime experience: as Burke suggested, "when we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth". If the player's individual experience is that "immediately sensible" quality, then the huge virtual world, and its vast number of inhabitants, is something "out of our depth". Gameplay on this scale is in itself a sublime experience.
Game designers now are increasingly exploring the sublime possibilities of gameplay. Bethesda's 2011 game The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is the latest installment of The Elder Scrolls series which, like WoW, also emerged in 1994 (although this is not an online multi-player game). Like WoW, The Elder Scrolls series is formed around a central epic narrative which stretches back thousands of years. Like WoW, too, it has its own impressive Wiki. Skyrim takes advantage of the rapid graphical developments of the last few years; the player may go almost anywhere on the vast map, and the mind of the Skyrim player is, in Burkean terms, "bounded by the bounds of the object" - in this case, the map. Skyrim re-imagines the sublime mountainous landscapes of the northern hemisphere into this virtual world: the natural experiences of the Romantic poets are transfigured into the virtual experiences of the modern gamer.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog. This image became iconic for Romantic explorations of the sublime.
Ikmik the High Elf surveying the Skyrim landscape.
Arguably nothing encapsulated the Romantic sublime experience more than the re-imaginings of the mountain experience. Whether it was Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alpine descriptions, Frankenstein's polar excursion, or Wordsworth's climbing of Snowdon, the Romantics almost universally located the sublime in the ice-tipped peaks of the highest regions of the world. Wordsworth described his ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude (1850):
There I beheld the emblem of a mind That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more than mortal privilege. One function, above all, of such a mind Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth, 'Mid circumstances awful and sublime, That mutual domination which she loves To exert upon the face of outward things, So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed With interchangeable supremacy, That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive, And cannot choose but feel.
The awe-inspiring landscape ignites similarly vast thought's in the poet's mind; his imagination becomes "mighty" through its contemplation of this "awful and sublime" sight. The mountain is sublime because it excites sentiments of eternity: the mind "feeds upon infinity", and the poet can look into "the dark abyss"; that is, his mind can reach inestimable heights and unfathomable depths, and the fear inspired by both is sublimely terrible. The poet's mind is formed through its experiences of the natural world.
More scenes from Skyrim.
Similarly, in Skyrim the inhabitants are frequently described as being necessarily hardy: their approach towards romantic love and marriage encapsulates the effects of the inhospitable landscape on their lives. The people of Skyrim, we are told, marry quickly once they have decided on a mate, because lives are precious in a land of extreme weather and unstable politics. The player is, then, submerged into a narrative predicated upon this imagined landscape, but the game goes further than this. The game seeks to enthrall the player through its use of the virtual, visual sublime; the player who remains stationery inside can nevertheless vicariously experience the "awful" natural world. Just as the Romantics seemed to retreat into the natural world, the modern gamer, according to Edward Castronova, is partaking in "a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments". If McGonigal is to be believed, these gamers, like the Romantics, may use their experiences in these imaginative or virtual landscapes to impact upon the real world.
If, as McGonigal suggests, gamers partake in these worlds because there they can become the best they can be, then they can also use these worlds to engage in experiences they will probably never have in their own, real lives. The modern gamer does not need to leave their home in order to experience the "mode of terror" which, Burke argues, "is always the cause of the sublime". Games developers can involve them in a world whereby they can access both the vast landscapes of the natural world, and those of their own "mighty mind[s]".
In her memoir In Pursuit of Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn
remembered her first visit to the then Lord Coleridge in 1930. Lord
Geoffrey Coleridge (a descendant of Samuel Taylor’s elder brother James and
nephew John ‘Justice’ Coleridge) was less than enthusiastic about the memory of
his famous ancestor. Coburn recalled his somewhat intrepid response:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795
Old Sam was only a poet, you know, never did anything
practical that was any good to anybody, actually not thought much of in the
family, a bit of a disgrace in fact, taking drugs and not looking after his
wife and children. Of course STC must have been a wonderful man – in a way – he was somehow clever enough to take in
so many great men – but why a young girl like you should spend your time on the
old reprobate, I can’t think! All those badly-written scribblings – couldn’t
even write a decent hand that ordinary people can read – full of stuff and
nonsense. But all you pedants live on this sort of thing. Useless knowledge,
perfectly useless. Now I at least know something about beef cattle...
Lord Geoffrey unwittingly encapsulated the trouble with his
great-great-uncle: simultaneously ‘a bit of a disgrace’ and a ‘wonderful man’, Samuel Taylor cannot be
an easy ancestor to bear the brand of. His surname could act as a powerful
talisman for the Coleridges who followed him. His daughter Sara suggested that
they would be of interest to posterity only as ‘psychological curiosities’, and
that is, perhaps, still where the interest begins, even if it is not where it
ends up. Literary agent Gill
Coleridge, a descendant of Lord Justice Coleridge, kindly spoke to me about
her experiences of her surname. ‘When she set us poetry to write for homework,
my English teacher used to say to me, ‘I shall expect something extra special
from you,’’ Gill remembered. ‘Of course, she completely put me off.’ Gill’s childhood experiences of the
expectations invoked by her surname recall Sara’s complicated responses to it;
because of her surname, Gill, too, became another Coleridgean ‘psychological
curiosity’, for her English teacher at least. ‘But it was not a curse,’ Gill is
careful to reiterate; for her and other family members it has been far more a
blessing than otherwise.
Lord John 'Justice' Coleridge
Anthony Coleridge,
whose career titles are diverse enough to rival his polymathmatical ancestor’s,
includes in his Twitter description the titillating accolade ‘Poet Relation’,
and has blogged under the title ‘The
Proclamations of A Young Opium Eater’. Here, of course, the drug-taking
Samuel Taylor is invoked as a point of something like pride; Anthony, we can
assume from this title, has inherited the visionary, artistic side-effects
which allegedly resulted in poetic masterpieces like ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The
Pains of Sleep’. In the dual invocation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas
De Quincey, Anthony self-consciously styles himself as a modern Romantic,
moving through an artistic scene just as his ancestor did two-hundred years
ago.
Jacques Derrida suggested that a surname,
risks to bind, to enslave or to engage the other, to link
the called, to call him/her to respond even before any decision or any
deliberation, even before any freedom.
A surname – any surname – can trap the individual, can ‘bind’ them to a specific idea that is
constructed even before they are born; it is this nominal slavery that Sara and
Hartley Coleridge’s critics responded to; that, in the 1890s, responses to Mary
Elizabeth Coleridge continued; and that, well into the twentieth century, Gill Coleridge’s English teacher persisted in
maintaining. It is, then, other people who use the name as an
enslavement; for the bearers, it is a site of engagement, a place of recalling
and reinterpreting past associations of the name, and challenging them until
they become, once again, individual.
"I am brief myself," Hartley Coleridge declared, "brief in stature..." It is enough to make the short researcher rejoice - "Hurrah!" I cried (or should have), "I have something in common with my researchee!" - until we read on: "...brief in discourse, short of memory and money, and far short of my wishes." "Li'l Hartley", as he was called by his Grasmere neighbours throughout his adult life, was a part of that select group of nineteenth-century writers: those who, in John Keats's words, were "five feet hight." Derwent Coleridge recalled in his "Memoir" of his brother that
The singularity of his appearance, by which he was distinguished through life, and which, together with the shortness of his stature, (possibly attributable in some measure to his premature birth,) had a marked influence on the formation of his character, was apparent from the first...
Hartley Coleridge - possessed of a "singularity of appearance"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted this "singularity" of appearance, writing to a friend after his wife had told him of the similarities between his own looks and the baby's that "in truth, I have received finer compliments in my time." Hartley was not destined to be the looker of his family (that accolade was left for his younger sister Sara, a renowned beauty in her youth). That his looks affected his life Hartley was in no doubt; he was painfully aware of the affect of his appearance on women. But Derwent's suggestion that they affected his character from a young age is telling; it is an early indication of the self-conscious connections between his body and his mind that Hartley was to acknowledge increasingly as he got older, and which others were to notice more and more as his alcohol consumption increased. For Hartley, as for his relatives, his short stature was taken as a metaphor for his disappointing creative output. Echoing his brother's essay, Derwent Coleridge suggested that "all who knew my brother with any degree of intimacy, are agreed that his written productions fall far, very far short of what he might, under happier circumstances, have achieved."
For John Keats, too, this sensitivity about his short stature was self-consciously bound up with his anxieties regarding women. As he wrote in July 1818,
I am certain I have not a right feeling towards Women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them but I cannot--Is it because they fall so far beneath my Boyish imagination? When I was a Schoolboy I thought a fair Woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept though she knew it not--I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them etherial above Men--I find them perhaps equal.... I do not like to think insults in a Lady's Company--I commit a Crime with her which absence would have not known--Is it not extraordinary? When among Men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen--I feel free to speak or to be silent--I can listen and from every one I can learn--my hands are in my pockets I am free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice spleen--I cannot speak or be silent--I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing--I am in a hurry to be gone--You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since Boyhood–. . . I could say a good deal about this but I will leave it in hopes of better and more worthy dispositions--and also content that I am wronging no one, for after all I do think better of Womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet hight likes them or not.
John Keats: just "five feet hight"
However, Keats's concerns about women seem to be a cipher for his height-related anxieties about his creative abilities. When he was young, before his shortness upset him, women could sleep in the "soft nest" of his mind; that young mind was then a willing receptacle, open to divine inspiration. This older, self-consciously small poet is affected to his creative detriment: the "Goddess" of his youth resided in his imagination, producing "fair", fruitful thoughts; the real women he meets as an adult inhibit this creative process. It is not a process which men can help him with: although men enable him to "speak" or to "listen," they do not engage his mind in an active process of poetic creation. Keats's poetic power is, it seems, androgynous; a feminine aspect is necessary. His identity as a man, too, is bound up with his awareness of his perceived unmanly height: "five feet hight" seems almost an addition to his name, as if it is both of these attributes which defines the poet to both himself and to "Womankind."
Fortunately, perhaps, for those short people who long for an extra few inches, neither of these men are remembered predominantly for being short, just as Byron is not remembered for his height. It is those other connotations of brevity which are far more damaging. Hartley's complaints of his shortness are from a rather long essay entitled "On Brevity", which Hartley cuts short from an awareness that he has already exceeded his point. It is a playful essay, and indicates the extent to which this creative or professional "brevity" lies entirely in the writer's hands to solve.
(Brevity of money, on the other hand, he provides no answers for. Sorry.)
This week finds me in the Lake District; specifically, I'll be spending my days in the Jerwood Centre at Dove Cottage. Blogging this week will temporarily offer different fare, then: my week among the 65,000 manuscripts and rare books on offer in this idyllic part of England. (A shorter way of saying this would be "Romantic researcher heaven".) I will try and refrain from harping on about the amazing breakfasts, courtesy of my base for the week at the rather lovely Forest Side Hotel (but they deserve several posts on their own).
Photo: Jo Taylor. Young enters North Staffs, leaving Cheshire
with a dig about their rubbish horses.
Aside from attempting (badly) to decipher the letters of Coleridges writing in various degrees of sobriety, I'm doing a few tasks for the Jerwood Centre team. My first task this morning involved delving in to Arthur Young's four-volume account, A Six Months Tour Through the North of England (1771). The account begins near Hull, and follows Young on his journey south, along the way taking in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Yorkshire, the Lake District, Liverpool, Lancashire and Cheshire, among other places. Young toured the country, visiting local landmarks and, essentially, comparing the different methods of cabbage-growing. Young discusses the soil quality of the areas he visits, examines the local industry (including the wages of the workforce), and includes diagrams of the farm machinery in use.
Fascinating though I undoubtedly find the growing habits of different varieties of 'ternips', it wasn't the agricultural information that caught my eye. No, what really got my attention was scan-reading a page, only to see the phrase "I had the pleasure of viewing... Burslem". Naturally, I had then to read on.
Top photo: High Street, Newcastle, 1895. http://www.thepotteries.org/tour/023.htm
Bottom Photo: Jo Taylor. All praise Wedgwood (and, specifically, his
canny business partner)
Young enters into a detailed description of the various manufactories around "Newcastle-under-line". He credits the famous Mr. Wedgwood with establishing a thriving local economy; all other potters, he says, are "little better than mere imitators". Mr. Wedgwood has, it seems,
lately entered into partnership with a man of sense and spirit, who will have taste enough to continue in the investing plan, and not suffer, in case of accidents, the manufactories to decline.
How this relates to the Potteries now, I will leave for others to discuss; needless to say, perhaps, that a similar man "of sense and spirit" would find plenty to do nearly two and a half centuries later! Regardless, Young's congratulation of North Staffordshire generally, and the Wedgwood potteries particularly, serve as a quaint reminder of the hope invested in the Stoke-on-Trent area at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the Burslem potteries were on the cutting edge of industrialisation and the technology that went with it.
Photo: Jo Taylor. Newcastle: home of hats.
Newcastle and the land south of it towards Stone, on the other hand, is praised for its "beauty" - but it's not the picturesque description Young indulges in when discussing the Yorkshire fells or the "cataracts" of the Lakes (invocations of the sublime and beautiful that would make Coleridge and Wordsworth take to their notebooks). No, Newcastle and the surrounding land is praised for a different kind of beauty; a more specialized version, if you will: "From Newcastle southwards the country improves greatly in beauty: The soil towards Stone is generally a sandy loam." Young, to give him due credit, has the mind of the truly optimistic pragmatist: Burslem is fortunate to lie in the midst of such an apparently unending profusion of coal, and Newcastle's ability to grow a wide variety of crops (although sadly some farmers adopt 'a vile as well as strange' course in the rotation of these). Newcastle did not only rely on agriculture, however: it also possessed "a considerable manufactory of shoes and hats". The shoe workers earned significantly less than those in the hat business: a worker in a shoe factory earned between 10d and 2s a day, whilst those in the hat line earned 7-10s a week. (Young seems to engage in some subtle social criticism when discussing wages; his alternations between daily and weekly calculations often seems designed to shock the reader.)
Photo: Jo Taylor. Young considers local agricultural practices.
Cows & potatoes good.
Beans bad.
Nevertheless, Young presents an image of North Staffordshire that fits in well with his idyllicised descriptions of the more northerly parts of England. Certainly, it is an optimistic representation to the point of outright falsehood; although we may find traces of social criticism, Young deliberately overlooks the poor working and living conditions of the "Poor man". Regardless, it's a good reminder of the things Stoke still does have to offer. We're told that Hollywood directors are being invited to Stoke; maybe they should follow Young's footsteps.
So, it's all over, and we must now come back down from the highs of London 2012 and recommence our usual griping about what David Cameron isn't doing, Ed Miliband says he would never have done, and Nick Clegg says he would have done if only the circumstances had been right and he got what he wanted in return anyway.
I will, genuinely, quite miss the Olympics. I was fully prepared to spend the fortnight indulging in various 'look how we've messed it up today' conversations, and in the event had none. Further than that, I actually spent a large proportion of the Olympics praising the organisers, the volunteers, and the athletes. I must even confess a newly-discovered soft spot for Lord Coe. But I also must confess that I was drawn to the Olympics by an ulterior motive: a quest to see how many Coleridge references made it into the Games.
Probably not what Coleridge had in mind.
Now, of course, literature was set up as a reference point from the earliest moments of the games; the opening ceremony was themed for Blake's 'Jerusalem' and the 'satanic mills' became the Miltonic 'Pandemonium' on Danny Boyle's gloriously frenetic stage. I was already hooked, and engaged on my new Olympic mission, by the time the cameras swept down into the pastoral stadium, though. My post-Coleridge conference euphoria was maintained by the introductory sequence of the opening ceremony, the 'Isles of Wonder'. Starting at the source of the Thames, we follow the river from its source, through the countryside of pre-Industrial England, passing poppy fields, cricket matches and Wind in the Willows characters, into the heart of the City. Coleridge would have, perhaps, been proud to see one his several unfulfilled poetic ideas come to fruition on such an epic stage - and only 178 years and 2 days after his death (I can't imagine why this momentous anniversary wasn't highlighted). In his 1817 sort-of-autobiography, sort-of-social-commentary, sort-of-just-a-general-whine-about-critics-and-other-writers-who-were-more-successful-than-him Biographia Literaria, Coleridge outlined his grand idea for a long poem:
I sought for a subject that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident and impassioned reflections on men, nature and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops became audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheep-fold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories and the sea-port. My walks, therefore, were almost daily on the top of Quantock and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and memorandum book in hand I was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery before my senses.
Clearly Boyle sympathises with Coleridge's theory; his opening ceremony brought the 'objects and imagery' from a conglomeration of the real (/ideal) and imaginary Thames. It's as apt a metaphor for the vision of London 2012 as it was for Coleridge's subject: the 'parts' - the multitude of sports and nationalities - are brought together and 'unity [given] to the whole' under the flag of the Olympics. So, at least, we're meant to believe, and so it seemed to be throughout the fortnight of the games.
Although my favourite, and perhaps the most poignant, Coleridge Olympics moment, it wasn't the only one. One British cyclist (in the excitement of the pun I forget which) was congratulated on their win in the velodrome under the tagline 'Pleasure Dome' - my sincerest congratulations to whichever BBC tagline writer came up with that one. Kubla Khan's 'stately pleasure-dome' beside the 'sacred river', Alph, becomes Lord Coe's sporting velodrome beside the Thames.
The last I noticed is maybe somewhat tenuous, and we get to Coleridge via Pink Floyd. During Ed Sheeran, Nick Mason, Mike Rutherford and Richard Jones's performance of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here', an LED albatross could be seen soaring above the sea around the stadium seating. It's a dual reference: the albatross recalls that in Pink Floyd's 'Echoes':
Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand.
This static albatross is an ancestor of Coleridge's. London 2012 may have been the albatross around the organisers' necks these last few years, but they can breathe a sigh of relief now that it has passed. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, they had to work with a ghostly presence - the largely unseen, but much applauded, volunteers - to get their Olympic ship home safely. Now it passes over the 'wide wide sea' to Rio - but not before the tale is told to unwitting guests around the world. Repeatedly. We've all got our different Olympic stories after all. No Brits will be invited to another wedding for years... just in case.
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