theGesturalist

The Fading Sublime

A lightning strike, specifically that lightning which travels from an electrically charged ‘thunder’ cloud to the earth’s surface (as opposed to intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud lightning), offers one of nature’s most charismatic displays of the sublime as it stretches miles from the belly of a dark and swollen cloud to the earth’s surface at near instantaneous speeds (~ 240,000 mph—which is to say much faster than sound, but still much slower than light itself). 

Lightning is not light, not in the technical sense. It is (to the best of our knowledge) a channel of plasma: that rarely mentioned form that is neither liquid, gas nor solid; the fourth, and most mysterious of the forms.

A lightning strike is one of the many, many things we see so frequently [→and so much more frequently now that TV and the internet has enabled us to capture and distribute images across the world in a matter of seconds, thereby realizing the fears purported to have been held by a variety of indigenous cultures across the globe, who seem to have developed the same belief independently in response to the advent of photography: that to be photographed is to have some portion of one’s essential nature robbed, stolen, divided; a spiritual violation of the highest order] that we lose something of an intrinsic sense of awe that lightning strikes, and their slower, louder sibling, thunder have inspired (both as symbols and meteorological phenomenon) in myths and legends of mankind since myths and legends have existed to be decoded.  

Imagine the young child who first sees a lightning strike on a television screen or magazine cover–or worse, captured (as if it were a subject we could tame) in those thin glass orbs, sold at Spencer’s alongside black lights, that send blue electromagnetic tendrils to your fingertips without any of the actual intensity of electricity–before she ever looked up at a massive turreted black cloud and saw the Genesis-like appearance of light out of nothingness, an eruption shooting down faster than an eye can capture, but moving, certainly moving, branching, splitting, always searching for the closest possible route to something, anything, longing for touch in what seems like a realization of our most prescient human desire: connection (or might it be destruction?).  This is the modern state of being. Our first glimpses of truly inspiring creativity of our universe so often now delivered in commoditized packages, one step closer to learning to live in a manufactured digital reality. 

The race is getting out of hand, fans are leaving the stadium. We need our sense of magic back. Everything has become a spoiler–no alert needed.  It is part of our cultural DNA (at least here in the US). We are losing our curiosity, if it has not already been lost. Perhaps this isn’t even news anymore.

What does it mean when we are losing our ability to identify the Sublime? And where do we go from here?