Awe Studies: We Look To Be Undone, or At Least Entered
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
Process Note:
My first feeling when asked to write about awe was a thrill and right behind it was fear. Appropriate for the subject matter. Awe contains both. In response to my fear, containment was what I longed for. I wanted to keep awe wrapped up, I realized, protected in a weighted blanket. Maybe even an impermeable shell where my fingers couldn’t go poking at it.
However arrogant an assumption this is, I think I worried that if I saw clearly what awe is, I’d stop feeling it. It would become a known thing, its glimmering coating worried away. Sometimes examination enhances feeling, though. Thought is often feelingful. It’s always feelingful according to neurophysiologists. So, I sat in the tension. Had a drink with a colleague over it.
We agreed protecting awe is impossible because it involves an exchange, an opening. In our limited lists of experience, anyway, awe was always choral. At its sites another human (or whale, or crane, or tree) was always present. I would be teaching a collaboration class soon, so leaning into choruses and inviting others in was of a piece. I reached out to some would-be collaborators.
I didn’t even have an idea yet, but some conversations emerged. One collaborator shared a moment of awe that had come from learning a fact about how young fire is, how it does not exist anywhere else in the universe, “so far as we can surmise,” they said, “it entirely depends on the existence of living things, of organic material.”
I felt awed by that fact too. I wondered if I should abandon the awe choir. I started writing something more like an essay, because is fact collaborative? Then I thought of all the generations of participants that had contributed to the fire fact. Telescope engineers. Lens makers. Archeologists. The earliest flame makers. And I had just shared the awe in the fact’s transmission. I wrote myself back to wanting to collaborate.
With a writing partner, I explained my protective bend, and worried about coming up with the appropriate container for a collaboration. What could contain awe? I said.
And I thought, maybe that’s the ask. And I said out it out loud.
And she said, maybe that’s the ask, at the same time. And I said, jinx, but not out loud. And got a chill.
I’d been imagining field guide entries on awe. But the fact that we’d become literally choral over the container felt meaningful. And that it spoke to my desire to hold awe in, doubly so. So, I sent out an ask. To those who were game, I asked if they could build a textual container for awe.
I was thrilled again as the containers trickled in at the beginning of the new year. Each one made me so happy.
The problem was, many had gone long, like I am now, and I thought I included too many people, even though I loved their contributions. There was way too much material. What might have been a mini booklet inside the larger booklet of this folio would take up too much space. Awe is invitational. We all need room.
So I shattered the containers. There was a sense I always knew I would.
The protective layer within was overjoyed. The vial of air they freed lives in the cracks of this progression.
I tried various shapes, not wanting to overhandle the material of others. Even my shattering had minded writers’ stanza/line/paragraph breaks. At first, I outsourced the handling problem to chance. I tried a plate of awe, for instance.
Created in collaboration with:
Marianne Jay Erhardt
Sunwoo Jeong
Andy Johnson
Dolan Morgan
Dian Parker
Ralitza Ranguelova
Jess Richardson
Angela Woodward
Monoprints by Ralitza Ranguelova.
1.
There once was a sad, dopey prince whose heart became kinder with age. Growing up, he witnessed all manner of spectacle and beauty, filling him with awe. Is that where kindness comes from? Who knows. Either way, the prince’s father died, and he became king. That’s when he got the fear. The fear that, if even kings and dads die, awe might someday fade away and be lost too.
High in the crook of the sugar maple rests the container. It is round, probably has always been round, will forever be round (I should know), and is tucked neatly in, out of drenching rain and our bone white blizzards.
The bowl is lined in mirror. The mirror may be reminiscent of pond scum, ocean whirlpool, or clear glass depending on the holder and the day. The outside doesn’t appear like a bowl, it careens up vase-like into a closed mouth. It’s covered by a top but appears unseamed.
It is in fact a mouth.
A skin, a membrane, but made of something slightly icky? Like nail clippings, woven into a sturdy but porous fabric—like a placemat?—that is, resistant to stains, while also creating a defined space on the tablescape, of one eater’s private domain. Yet open to others. Pass the salt, please. Yes, thank you, I will. Hands flit to either side and across, interrupting these rectangles guarded by knife and fork.
First, I clear the mould. I spray bleach over a large community of grey stars, multiplying. Green leaves set to grow through the armoury. Rain seeps. Plants quietly receive water. Mostly, my body melts. I pull my legs together to keep them. Often, I lose them. I try to place my existence, apart. My eyes search the perimeter of the space I take, in the room I am in.
Inside, Paper
Weights of the World made our children
weary. Ancient goblets were only ancient
and empty. Even when different panes shattered
into different patterns, I saw their faces
stretch into yawns behind clean masks.
•
In March of 2023, I was diagnosed with non-ischemic cardiomyopathy, commonly known as heart failure. It’s a fairly common diagnosis among men of my demographic (African American, 50’s) and it’s controllable with medication and/or lifestyle changes. In my case, we couldn’t find a cause: no history of smoking, heavy drinking, or illicit drug use, no blockages in my arteries, no genetic factors, and the wrong sort of cardiac damage to be caused by a virus or vaccine. We tried multiple medications and lifestyle changes, including cardiac rehab and a heart-healthy diet. Nothing worked. We adjusted medications, doubled down on the lifestyle changes, installed a pacemaker/defibrillator device in my chest. Nothing. And finally my doctors just laid it out straight: I wasn’t responding to treatment. I had five years to live, maybe more, maybe less. I was certain to have a large heart attack. How large was anyone’s guess. Large enough to require a heart transplant? Maybe. Large enough to cause a stroke or a coma? Maybe. Large enough to kill me outright? Maybe.
•
The ancient art of gunpowdery teaches us how to go out with a bang.
These are the steps.
First, locate your tail. Everyone has one, though patience is required to coax it out of millennia of evolutionary somnolence. Try looking into crevices. Dimples. Butt cracks. The backs of your knee. It will look like a negligible string, embedded in folds of lipid like a forgotten vein.
2.
The king called for the realm’s three greatest inventors. “Make for me a container for awe, so I might keep it,” he told them. The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.
On the seventh morning, the engineer dragged into the royal hall an iron box covered in gears, mechanisms, and locks. “It’s an impossible safe, unlike any other,” he said. “Nothing gets out, not even awe.” The king smiled. But awe? Far too big for this vessel. He sent the engineer away, and the guards hanged him within the hour.
I went through some of the stages of grief, mostly anger and depression. I was not the most pleasant patient I think.
Typically, a relationship comprises three things. At first, one thing rises in front of you, a volcano, an ox, it fills your eyes, overwhelms you, cancer, your mother, your lost job, Isabel—it bursts in the door, bellows in the hall, announcing, “I’m here, the one thing.”
Though it only speaks sparsely, and only in response to questions it deems valuable by way of being unanswerable. It collects them, deposits in its clay lining, wrapped in a hardened amber that catches no prisms and that no one ever finds.
There is no one here, a voice reassures. Everyone can leave you. All can stay outdoors, beyond the water, the mountain, the paved streets. You can contain nothing but a private thought. You can watch from inside the hollow of a surface that crampons cannot attach to. You will not be a suitable place for an anchor to drop.
Gently pry it out with a matriarch’s tweezer (most often your grandmother’s, but an eccentric aunt’s will do in a pinch).
When the moment is right (e.g., the Fourth of July, le Quatorze Juillet, Solstice, Chuseok, when everyone remembers you, when no one remembers you), pull it. Don’t be hesitant or squeamish. Otherwise, the pressure that’s been building—through grief, toil, and routine injustices—will fizz out. A single, firm tug is essential.
Over its shoulder is frequently the second thing. A swallow, a collar, maybe something as small as a hyphen. But in any case, the opposite, the other hand, the alternative. With these two things you can walk, like on stilts, left, right, left, right. You move forward smoothly, with balance. How capable you are. Now with these two things, the world seems at last complete. The male, the female. The dark, the light. The eyelid, the blazing orb.
The opening is a tiny pinhole but I can see that inside is burnished gold, as if lit from within. But it is the emanating smell, pulling me deeper and deeper, a mixture of sweat and orange blossoms, or tuberose, maybe a Queen of the Night blossom.
The paper peels like birch, the curls inscribed with words that shift their meaning when reversed. If the lid on the mouth is lifted on an unspecified day in spring, a substance may appear to fill the bowl. Do not assume it’s soup, or that it’s for you. But you may sip. Sipping will not deplete anything. I once convinced myself otherwise and starved for years.
•
For a few days, I was at peace. Then I woke just like I used to, only hours after falling asleep, and pulled the curtain aside. Clouds whited out half the sky, and in the other portion, the stars seemed about to retract into their lairs. I was sick, I remembered. I was still sick, and even after the operation, I would be sick some more.
•
But we made it to the molten glass
demo, claimed the first row, a move
out of character. Before us, some miracle.
a lit torch that could become
a vessel. We all felt it,
wonder,
as the gaffer caught the wet start
3.
On the seventh afternoon, the architect told the king to look out the window, pointing to a gigantic box across the valley. The box towered over the kingdom, enormous. “There’s nothing that won’t fit inside,” the architect said. “Even awe.” Everyone could tell he didn’t believe it. It was uncomfortable and embarrassing. The king hummed a song his father used to sing and the guards drowned the architect in the ocean.
It is 1235 A.D. and I am astride my dromedary on the Algerian sands. It has been a long trek from China. My camel, laden with sacks of saffron, lopes over the dunes and we are both in a trance, stricken by the constant mirage of water. As the smell intensifies, wrapping my trance ever tighter, I hear the ancient Ney flute and at once I am with Rumi again and we are spinning, spinning, spinning and I am inside. Inside the container. With no escape, I knew, ever.
Embrace the explosion. The bursting out of infinite expanse from something as finite as yourself. Do not worry about the sound. Your ears will be the first to be blasted.
If you can, observe yourself. You’ll never know until you pull what inner patterns of light you’ve been guarding. Reflected in the lapping water, on rusty mirrors of Volkswagen campers, in irises of migratory birds, deep sea creatures, people whose names you’re beginning to forget.
Somewhere between moments, I accepted my fate. I was going to die, and that was okay. Everyone dies. This wasn’t the timing I planned on, but death would come whether I fought it or did nothing.
No hooks, I say.
•
That night, we studied the flat lake as it grew
dark. We listened to the steady breath
of the sleeping children we made
with our bodies. We found ourselves
Hydras of luminescence. Cascading halos. Confettis of neon rose. Icicle blue. Oracular purple. All following an inner directive.
The third thing, which I had hoped would be the spiritual one, crawled out of the blankets. A mist, a gas, the ineffable, it coiled around me, whispering something incomprehensible into my hair.
4.
On the seventh evening, the artisan arrived with no box or safe, nor even any vessel, only a small slip of paper, which he handed to the king and said, “It’s a schedule. A set of daily tasks. Routine.” The giant trap door was right there underneath the artisan—it would’ve been as easy as flipping a switch—so nobody really knows why the king instead gave this paper routine a shot. But the king did just that.
Look at it from the side and soften your gaze and you will see other layers as thin and curious as your own, as easily interrupted. The paper might sink forever, a living hole. It doesn’t. It’s suspended as we are in lunar darkness, our orbital aplomb netted by wind. Some mark it with ash from cleansing fires, some lick the fibers to watch them break.
Ink was a silken way to say paper was bark unheld. A small hand hugging your finger. Asking.
I climb the tree late one August moonlit night, the sky a deep Prussian blue. I’d never climbed this giant before even though the tree lives on my land. Intimidating. There’s just too much of it.
We look to be undone, or at least entered
using our mouths and using
our mouths and using
our mouths and
what took shape might hold nothing
more than a couple of hard candies
in cellophane, but even so it was
so hot that it made its own
light, our glow, enough to see.
Enough to relish and endure
For at least a year, you will embroider green veins on greyed leaves. Someone showed you how to do it: little green stitches marking the frame of each leaf. You practiced. Scatterings of green appeared because of you. You have the green thread. You need to feed it through the needle’s eye again and keep the work until the hollow fills with spring, until green corners emerge on the outside, unseen.
And then came some unexpected news: my heart began repairing itself. We don’t know why I’m getting better any more than we know what caused my illness in the first place.
5.
After a week of the schedule—which was boring, mundane, and small—the king called the artisan to him and said, “I didn’t feel any awe at all. Less than I’ve ever felt before.”
The artisan replied, “Yes, because it was contained. Nothing contains awe quite like monotony and repetition.”
To form what? What do you see? How do they all connect, in the end?
What comes afterwards, you may ask?
If you’ve reached this point, you won’t care.
6.
It’s only after the artisan was beaten and thrown from the highest rampart in the castle that the king thought back on all the tedious periods of his life, all the stretches of mundanity both behind and ahead of him, then smiled his sad, dopey smile at the terror and wonder, the beauty hidden in each quiet moment. Even here. Even here. Even here.