Awe Studies: An Introduction
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet. It was taco Tuesday. We looked up and—frighteningly sober—saw the sky unfix. The stars swam. We all saw it. Aliens? Apocalypse? After a long breath, the heavens settled. And three lights separated, moving on reasonable routes. The best we could figure, three planes or satellites or who-knows-what had been traveling at the exact distances and speeds to swirl the firmament. A trick of geometry, of optics.
Beautiful? Wondrous? Maybe in the Rilkean sense (“Beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,” in Stephen Mitchell’s translation). I felt sick.
Reflecting later, my friend mentioned Elaine Scarry’s description, in On Beauty and Being Just, of two “genres of mistake,” in aesthetics. The first involves “the recognition that something formerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded,” while the second “is the sudden recognition that something from which the attribution of beauty has been withheld deserved all along to be so denominated.” Our perception of the unfixed stars could recall either kind of mistake—that is, depending on whether you prefer to see a kaleidoscopic vision or to think about optics—but it’s more than that. Its primary aesthetic experience, I think, was the shift in perception itself, not the terms that shifted. I think of another walk, another error. I saw these peacocks. Let’s say egrets, too. Swans. In cages, on a sudden sidestreet. I felt a fairy tale tinge: are these charmed creatures, of golden eggs, wishes? Then I saw the store’s sign. They were for eating. The fairy tale, in truth, probably starts in a hungry year, with slaughter. After dinner, the child learns she was served her favorite pet. She wanders outside, distraught, and sees the blood in the dirt. The blood in the dirt forms a mouth and begins to wail. It’s awful.
That, to me, is the distance from wonder to awe. You think you’re on a whimsical walk. But you might be taken for a peacock eater. You might become one. You think you’re regarding the stars. Then everything spins. The classic distances of the sublime, which put things into perspective (“You there—me here,” as Mary Ruefle puts it, in her lecture “Poetry and the Moon”), become undone. Scale gets screwy. What are we even seeing? What is seeing? “Speaking of sunsets, / last night’s was shocking,” begins James Tate’s poem “Never Again the Same.” He goes on: “I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they?” Awe, to me, isn’t the vision of a sunset, however pretty or aghast; it’s that unsettled question (“are they?”). And who’s he asking? Who could reply?
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The first sentence of the section above isn’t me. It’s Freud, the start of his short essay “On Transience” (1915). In reality, I saw those stars in Kansas City, not the countryside, and my friends were neither taciturn nor, exactly, young. I got Freud’s essay the other week from Patrick Blanchfield. Blanchfield is the co-host, with Abby Kluchin, of Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast about “psychoanalysis, pop culture, politics, and the ways we suffer now.” I contacted them to talk about awe, the theme of this spring’s Cleveland Humanities Festival. For the third year, the Cleveland Review of Books will host an affiliated series of pieces, and I was feeling stumped. The theme two years ago (“Discourse”) had been easier (what isn’t discourse, we might say), and last year’s (“Wellness”) let us feature pieces such as Rachel Conrad Bracken’s “Healing Stories: Wellness and Narrative Medicine” and Valentino L. Zullo’s “Health is Other People: On Wellness and Book Clubs”. That is, it lent itself to topics that we might readily associate with the public humanities. I can picture a session about book clubs or narrative medicine in any community setting. It’s harder to imagine hosting a chat about the de-stabilizing confluence of fear, trembling, wonder, terror, reverence, and marvelous dread. What kinds of snacks do you serve? Is it safe to drive after? Respect to the Festival for this complex theme.
I hoped that Blanchfield and Kluchin might help me think about my ambivalence about awe—especially about perspectives that see it as salutary, serene, triumphal. How might all of that connect to Freud? “You could cast Freud as somebody who has a profound suspicion toward awe,” Kluchin said. “Awe involves the dissolution of the self, and that can be antithetical to Freud.”
Blanchfield added: “There are points at which he registers wonder at psychic processes. He’s basically saying, ‘It’s amazing that the mind does all these things.’ The creativity of the human produces institutions, or sublimation products, as durable and cruel as the medieval church but also as beautiful and sublime as its art.” But often, they noted, Freud considers awe, or the desire for oceanic dissolution, to be infantile.
Kluchin said, “Freud is like, ‘You feel the oceanic feeling? Grow the fuck up.’” For Freud, she said, “The only time you feel this in a normal, healthy, adult way is in interpersonal love.”
And yet, Kluchin said, in philosophical traditions, wonder can be seen as “the condition of the possibility of all other feeling.” It’s “what actually motivates us to learn about ourselves and the world.” The potential endlessness is very much of Freud (“Freud is nothing if not a theorist of interminability,” Kluchin noted), and it can help us.
“Figuring wonder as the inexhaustibility of meaning is an inoculation against despair,” Kluchin said. “It’s the opposite of intransigence or stuckness.”
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The pieces in this year’s series—which will appear weekly—grapple with these and other dimensions of awe. They find ways into the inexhaustibility, ways to move from stuckness to muchness. They include contributions from critics, creative writers, visual artists, and more. Benjamin Rhodes follows awe’s phonemes—its mixture, in the mouth, of “uh” and “ah”—through grief and its visions, and Agnes Borinsky explores a form of “weak language” that can offer “other better ways of saying things,” in the midst of vivid moments and the mundane. Sony Ton-Aime considers the paradoxes of awe and pity, and Brian Blanchfield offers a new poem, with reflections on the “portals made by repetitions” that can be instructive during distress. Rachel Ferber charts the lightness and gravity of the “floating fragments of visual information”—like giant potato chips against a blue sky on the side of a Frito-Lay truck—that surround us, and Jess Richardson offers a polyvocal story, made of the shards of “containers” for awe that she generated in collaboration with a number of writers and artists: Marianne Jay Erhardt, Sunwoo Jeong, Andy Johnson, Dolan Morgan, Dian Parker, Ralitza Ranguelova, and Angela Woodward.
In “On Transience,” Freud considers the mourning that can accompany a feeling of “the proneness to decay of all that is beautiful.” Transience, he suggests, shouldn’t be seen as a loss but as a value: “Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.” Evanescence, fleetingness, scarcity in time: these can raise a thing’s worth. Perhaps. But it’s important that he also considers other limitations on beauty. “My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war,” he writes. “A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization.”
It’s easy to hear that passage in our time, among the current wars (“‘Everything Is Difficult’: The Struggle for Life’s Basics in Rafah,” reads a headline in the New York Times this morning), and to feel the horrific sides of awe, the stars spinning, or devastated. It’s far from aesthetic. The mouth might hang open in reply, particularly for those of us who will always hear “awe” in the shadow of “shock and awe,” that phrase that helped sell the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The shocks have continued.
The pieces in this series find ways to speak into and around awe—often figured as speechlessness, to be dumbfounded—and how its overwhelming facts can run through our lives. We’re grateful for the chance to share their insights and models in the weeks ahead.