Blog 2

Trees

Days. Or had it been months now? He couldn't be sure. Things were... different here. The flow of time didn't feel like the concept he held in memory. Fah! Memory. He cursed that as much as everything else fickle in this place. But he had gotten used to it, or as much as one could here. Senses adjusted to a degree to change, adapting to things that would normally have his brain screaming that they shouldn't exist in such a fashion. Yet his eyes never managed to block the wrongness. The color seemed to have drained out of reality. There were still traces of it here and there but for the most part it seemed that luster and hues were muted to a bare glimmer. All that survived were murky grays and dusty browns. Even white seemed faded, if that color could be said to. The only untouched of the spectrum was black, which actually seemed to thrive as if all that was drained only served to channel directly into energizing it further. He had thought it wise to give wide berth to spots where shadows seemed more then they should be. Now, however, he clung close to the ancient trees that lined the path he took. The corporeal whispers deep in the surrounding mist made discretion a well suited choice. He sighed. He reminded himself that there were most likely things worse then this place, where ever here was. A tickle of memory made him think that following that instinct, as he always had, was better then flinging himself head long into the long spaces in between the paths despite his belief that continuing on was futile. He couldn't remember what had come before this but he would continue on for as long as he was able to. Survival seemed all he been reduced to. And that's all it took for him to continue on through wisps of fog. Allowing himself to be swallowed whole. Allowing himself to be endlessly spit out somewhere else. Never into what came before. Never into clarity. Never into an end.


Some early theorists argue that sublime is, if not a thing of beauty then, a thing of awe, greatness or a thing that is elevated above all else. So in the case of the above narrative, would it be considered something of the sublime? To some it may not be, yet to Edmund Burke description it would undoubtedly meet the requirement. 'Trees' establishes a mood that "excite[s] the ideas of pain, and danger" and since it "is in any sort terrible...in a manner analogous to terror [it] is a source of the sublime" (Burke 459). And that is where 'Tree's' exists, in the idea and threat of these ideas. It stands on the precipice, the possibility of terror. Hidden with in the ambiguity is a foreshadow of 'things worse then this place'. Burke sees these principles as "the most powerful of all the passions" (Burke 458) more so then those that are pleasurable yet since this in a form that a reader may take a step back and experience it safely for themselves, that buffer between the reader and the possibility of pain or terror can be a source of pleasure in itself. It is this aesthetic distance that allows the reader to enjoy the sublime aspect that are "dark and gloomy, rugged and negligent" (Burke 460).


Burke, Edmund. "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.