Sublime

From whiskey river (last two stanzas):

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens)

Not from whiskey river, a reading of the above poem by Ken Worsley of Trans-Pacific Radio (over Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes, as a background track):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is about 1 minute long.]

(You might also be interested in reading Worsley’s account of how he came to read the poem this way, over this background music. That page is where I found the above podcast.)

Note: Audio player not working for you? See this little tidbit for an alternative.

Over the past week, whiskey river also cited a poem called, there, “Changing Places.” But, well, there isn’t any such poem in Rilke’s work*; it’s actually an excerpt from the start of his Ninth Elegy. In one translator’s version, from 1977 (and regardless of the title or the translation, yes, sublime):

Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind’s smile) — why,
then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?

Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
– that could be in the laurel, too…

But because being here means so much, and because all
that’s here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, to the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once — that’s irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin [source])

Now, something not from whiskey river…

The word “sublime” is one of those words, perfectly wonderful in their own regard, which nevertheless seem anymore to be used almost exclusively in the context of an overused phrase or dead metaphor. In this case, we have the phrase from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s commonly used to express the speaker’s view of two extreme, almost diametrically opposite experiences. “The hero’s adventures ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.” “The excuses used by defendants in court range from the sublime to the ridiculous.” And so on. (Yeah: there’s almost always some form of “range,” too.)

But in its earliest appearance, the juxtaposition of things sublime with things ridiculous focused not on how far away those extremes were from each other, but how closely they lie together. Here’s Thomas Paine (in The Age of Reason, Part II [source]) talking about a Biblical story. His intention is to puncture the literal-minded belief in old stories (particularly Biblical ones), by pointing out the obvious: the world simply does not work as described.

This tale of the sun standing still upon Mount Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition of it would be universal; whereas there is not a nation in the world that knows any thing about it. But why must the moon stand still? What occasion could there be for moonlight in the daytime, and that too whilst the sun shined?… The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again…

Finally, another audio clip.

The ska-punk/dub-reggae band Sublime pretty much went out of business in 1996, after the death (from a heroin overdose) of their lead singer and guitarist Bradley Nowell. But in the seven or eight years they were active, they cut a pretty broad swath** through alternative music, especially in southern California. (Wikipedia reports, “The renowned Los Angeles alternative rock radio station KROQ has listed Sublime at #3 in its ‘Top 106.7 biggest KROQ bands of all time’ memorial for the past six years in a row, behind Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana.” That’s pretty heady company to be grouped with.)

The first time I heard their music I was hooked; what an infectious sound, y’know? But then a little later I actually read some of their lyrics (which, of course, I’d never have made out on my own) and, I gotta say, frankly — forget ridiculous, this is a range from the sublime to the repellent.

So, alas, I’m not going to be incorporating any Sublime videos or lyrics into this post. (There are plenty of them on YouTube, including the non-embeddable video for “What I Got” and the comedic “Santeria” (released after Nowell’s death; he makes ghostly “appearances” spliced into the video).

But what I can do with a clear conscience, though, is share a track from Sublime Acoustic: Bradley Nowell & Friends (released a couple of years after Nowell’s death). This is the band’s take on “Rivers of Babylon” — and I like how the band’s cutting up before and after the song is itself a sort of ridiculous counterpart to the sublime music (lyrics below):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:38 long.]

Lyrics:

Rivers of Babylon
(music and lyrics by Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton;
performance by Sublime)

By the rivers of Babylon
where he sat down
and there he wept
when he remembered Zion
Alpha the wicked carried us away
captivity required from us a song
how can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land

so let the words of our mouths
and the meditation of our hearts
be acceptable in thy sight
over I

By the rivers of Babylon
where he sat down
and there he wept
when he remembered Zion

Alpha the wicked carried us away
captivity required from us a song
how can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land
how can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land

“Rivers of Babylon” is itself an interesting song. The first time I heard it was on a 1976 Linda Ronstadt album. She sang it a capella; from the simplicity of the tune and the theme, I assumed it was probably an old spiritual hymn. Not so: it was written (and first recorded) by members of the Jamaican band The Melodians — in 1972 — and has since been covered by many other artists.

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* whiskey river seems to have gotten its version from an entry at a blog called Changing Places.

** Yeah: “swath” is another one of those only-in-one-phrase words. About the only thing you can do with a swath is cut it, and you’ve got to do so more or less broadly or widely.