#sublime #CasparDavidFriedrich #romanticera #art #music #GeorgesBataille #aesthetic #theology #religiousexperience

Yesterday, I listened to Laufey’s brilliant new jazz album “Bewitched.” It simultaneously captures the power of Ella Fitzgerald’s love ballads, Nat “King” Cole’s heartfelt spirit, and the reflective sadness of Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of Morning.” I was brought to tears. Laufey has managed to penetrate into the depths of human emotion, showcasing the sublime beauty and heartache of falling in love. The album is astonishingly passionate, and it refuses to compromise or tame itself, reaching into the extremes of sadness (”California and Me”) and love (”While You Were Sleeping”). Like a breath of clean air after years of a polluted environment, Laufey’s words, instrumentation, and vocal cadence are an unapologetic, full-throttle sincerity. Her music — simultaneously angelic and concrete—puts to shame the trollish and ironic dispositions of our current milieu, where authentic human emotions are obscured for non-committal niceties. In short, the album is a testimony to the depths of the human spirit for an age in which it feels like our souls have been ripped from our bodies. “Bewitched” is not merely a once-in-a-lifetime artistic achievement, it is a spiritual masterpiece.

To expand upon the spiritual reality Laufey was able to capture, I will turn to an explanation of the Romantic era, the sublime, and the link between romance and religious experience.

Romanticism and the Sublime

The Romantic era of art, which spanned from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, was a period characterized by a profound shift in artistic expression. It emerged as a reaction against the rationalism and restraint of the Enlightenment — instead embracing emotions, nature, and mystery. At the heart of this movement lay the concept of the sublime, a powerful and often overwhelming aesthetic experience that evoked both terror and awe. As I've said before, it's like looking over the edge of the Grand Canyon. The sight is overwhelmingly beautiful, but it is simultaneously terrifying because the canyon is so deep that one could fall to one's death if not careful.

Caspar David Friedrich, a prominent figure in Romantic art, expertly exemplifies this connection between the Romantic era and the sublime. Friedrich's works, such as “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” and “The Monk by the Sea,” are quintessential examples of the sublime in art. His landscapes are vast and majestic, depicting untamed nature in all its glory, but saturated with deeply spiritual themes and undertones. In these paintings, human figures are often minuscule compared to the grandeur of the natural world, emphasizing the finitude of humankind in the face of nature's (and, for Friedrich, God’s) sublime majesty.

The Romantic artists sought to capture the sublime not only in nature but also in the human spirit. Emotions, often intense and tumultuous, were celebrated in their works. Friedrich's use of symbolism, such as the solitary figure gazing into the abyss or standing on a precipice, conveyed the individual's quest for self-discovery and spiritual connection with the sublime. Furthermore, Friedrich's manipulation of light and shadow created an atmosphere of mystery and transcendence. This technique intensified the emotional impact of his paintings, inviting viewers to contemplate the vastness of the universe and their place within it.

The term “romance” in the Romantic era originally referred to medieval tales of chivalry and adventure, often involving heroic knights and heroic deeds. These stories were marked by a sense of wonder, idealism, and a focus on individual passions and quests. The Romantic era drew inspiration from this idea of individualism and the pursuit of intense, personal experiences, which is why it came to be associated with the term “romance.” However, I believe that this artistic movement also sheds light on the romance of falling in love, and the qualities of sublime love are captured quite powerfully in Laufey's album. During its prime, the Romantic era often linked sublime beauty with masculinity and grandeur. But in our contemporary age, Laufey brings a much-needed feminine perspective. And although the album has moments of grandeur in which the music builds and the symphony swells, her music is also able to capture the spiritual and sublime moments found in the calm and quiet. Laufey does this by focusing on falling in love.

The Spiritual Dynamics of Falling in Love

Falling in love is both the greatest catastrophe and purest ecstasy. Hence, someone overcome with romantic emotions is said to suffer from lovesickness. One wants to cry bitter tears when on the mountaintop of joy and sing joyous melodies when in the valley of sadness. A romance into which one fully surrenders oneself is vulnerable, raw, and terrifying — but it is the sacrifice necessary to most intimately glimpse the divine light in the Other. It is, in short, sublime.

Moreover, similar to the spiritual themes saturating Caspar Friedrich’s paintings, the feeling of falling in love is akin to a religious experience. It is rapturous and overtakes us without us necessarily preparing for it, such as looking over a mountainside and suddenly recognizing our own finitude and contemplating the Infinitude of the Divine. Or, in Laufey’s case, her album begins with a song (”Dreamer”) in which she promises to not open her heart again— “And no boy's gonna be so smart as to / Try and pierce my porcelain heart.” But the album ends with her experiencing a rapturous pull into the beauty of love once again:

I try to think straight but I'm falling so badly

I’m coming apart

You wrote me a note, cast a spell on my heart

And bewitched me

The rapturous power of falling in love is perhaps why many religious persons wish to shun the passion of romance, fearing that the ebb and flow of infatuation will replace God in one’s life. However, if we look to the artists of the romantic era and the philosophy of Georges Bataille, we can see why romance is religious without needing to bring charges of idolatry.

The romantic artists understood that instances of the sublime brought about a keen awareness of one’s own finitude. The overwhelming beauty cascading over oneself — as beautiful as it is terrifying — has a way of breaking one’s consciousness. However, this breaking is by no means traumatic. Instead, it is the necessary expansion of one’s awareness to perceive new depths of truth. A whole new reality is opened to oneself in such moments.

Georges Bataille recognized the link between beauty, terror, and the loss of self in his work “Erotism: Death and Sensuality.” Within this book, he develops a theory of limit experiences. To quote what I have written in my previous post, a limit experience can be created through an experience of the intense combination of the erotic (not necessarily just sexual) and that which is terrifying. This is because limit experiences entail a loss of self and a dissolution of individual boundaries. In these moments, individuals transcend their individuality and merge with a larger whole, experiencing a sense of continuity and connection with the universe. Bataille associated limit experiences with a kind of sacred or mystical state that disrupts the everyday order and opens up possibilities for profound transformation. He notes that both erotic encounters and moments of terror (especially witnessing death) bring about this loss of self into the broader world, like pouring water into the ocean. For Bataille, such limit experiences provide a means for understanding religious experiences as well — especially the mystical and rapturous experiences reported by many saints. Such moments are the loss of self into the divine.

Thus, we can see that true romance — the catastrophic joy of falling in love — bears structural resemblance to the sublime and to limit experiences, and hence, to religious experience. Romantic love involves the boundary-breaking, vulnerable expansion of self into the realm of the Other. And we find examples of this moving beyond oneself both in the love songs of the great poets and in the deepest ecstasy of the mystics, for even a casual reading of the mystics will thrust oneself into a romantic spirituality full of passion, rapture, and the sublime.

Of course, things depend to some extent on context and the individual, but I disagree with the de facto charge that one falls into a passionate romantic love merely because one is too immature to keep his or her emotions in check. The truncated immanence and secular materialism of our culture often discourage higher forms of spiritual rapture. But the vulnerable strength it takes to risk pain for the sake of love reveals something deeply true about reality that one cannot learn in the abstract. Falling in love might instead be a sign that one’s soul is alive. Moreover, from my own Christian perspective, enduring vulnerability and even pain for the sake of love is at the heart of Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—which is the ultimate statement about the character of Being Itself (God).

Conclusion

Through her music, Laufey was able to allow us to experience a real human soul once again. “Bewitched” is powerful because it is so vulnerable. It is coherent because it is emotionally contradictory. Laufey has pulled back the curtain and shown us once again what it means to be a spiritually alive human— to fear, to hurt, and to love simultaneously beyond the boundaries of self.

#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #sublime

In one of my earliest posts, I analyzed the weirdcore aesthetic and claimed that it represents a type of immanentized sublime produced by capitalism. More fully, I said:

“In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened 'outsideness.'(...) The outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.”

I encourage you to read the full article if none of this is making sense to you. https://nathaniel-metz.writeas.com/weirdcore-and-the-eerie-atmospheres-of-postmodernity

Recently, I was listening to a weirdcore music playlist on YouTube. However, the playlist was not simply weirdcore but incorporated other related aesthetics, such as kidcore and traumacore. The connection between traumacore and weirdcore struck me as interesting, and I realized that my previous theory about weirdcore as an immanentized outsideness of a postmodern sublime might explain the relationship.

On Aesthetics Wiki, traumacore is defined as follows: “Traumacore is a type of aesthetic imagery that delves into the themes of abuse and trauma (particularly sexual trauma or CSA) along with cute visuals to give the whole aesthetic a 'bittersweet tragedy' feel. Mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse are also common themes in traumacore. Traumacore in general tends to be more focused on trauma experienced in childhood, explaining the cute visuals, although adult trauma can also be covered. Many people turn to these images to help them cope with the pain they suffered in the past.”

Full article. Warning: topics of abuse, PTSD, and other trauma-related topics: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Traumacore

In many spaces throughout the Internet, traumacore and weirdcore often bleed together, so much so that different weirdcore forums now have strict policies against posting anything traumacore related. The relationship is born, on the one hand, from their similarity in form. Both utilize a type of haunted, surrealist, dreamy nostalgia permeated by an early-2000s cyber-surrealism. In the case of traumacore, the content within the form, such as the text or images, takes on themes of traumatic experiences. Imagine a glitched-out gif of a CRT television displaying Halo 1 footage with text that reads “Mom isn't coming back.”

In addition to the similarities in formal quality between weirdcore and traumacore, I think there is also a connection via the haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime. An experience of the sublime is an experience of something that combines beauty and terror in such a magnitude that the excess of experience has difficulty being fully registered within one's consciousness. The example I always turn to is that the sublime is like standing on a cliff looking down at the Grand Canyon. It's overwhelmingly beautiful, but there is also a fear that if you fell, the canyon would kill you — not to mention the feeling of finitude compared to the massive size of the Canyon. Weirdcore separates the sublime from its often theological or natural components and instead places the sublime within postmodern capitalist landscapes, such as a McDonald's play place.

Similarly, traumatic experiences bring when them an “excess” that the brain has difficulty integrating. In many ways, trauma can 'break apart' the brain. Or, put another way, the brain breaks apart the registration of the experience into smaller chunks and then 'tucks them throughout one's unconscious and body so as to avoid experiencing the excess of horror all at once, which would be too overwhelming. This is why many individuals struggle to fully remember all the details of their trauma encounters and why many go into the freeze response during a traumatic event. Likewise, this gives trauma a feeling of both outsideness (via the external event of trauma) and insideness (the trauma lingers within oneself). In a way, it's a haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime, albeit a dark and horrific one.

The way in which weirdcore is a surrealist non-sequitur art form, or 'breaking apart' of narrative and coherent meaning, coalesces with the feeling of 'breaking apart' experienced in trauma. This is not to say that people with PTSD or who undergo traumatic experiences are intrinsically broken people or damaged goods. Rather, trauma has a way of disrupting our cognitive faculties and resisting integration into the psyche, which is captured surprisingly well by traumacore's utilization and appropriation of the weirdcore aesthetic. Traumacore shows how these weirdcore spaces are not only found within dead shopping malls and abandoned indoor parks, but also haunt our own psyches as well.

Finally, I will end on a positive note. I want to reemphasize that trauma does not make one intrinsically broken or damaged goods, despite how one might feel. Given my theological background, I will end with a quote from chapter 3 of Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconophilia and Iconoclasm by one of my favorite theologians, Natalie Carnes:

“The cross breaks brokenness by showing that brokenness—sin, violence, torture, death—cannot exclude God’s presence. At one level, the cross announces an absence. It sounds an absence of health, vitality, power, and, in the case of Christ’s wounds, an absence of flesh. Crucifixes, having a dead corpus, even declare an absence of life. Yet by these publications of absence, the cross makes, at another level, a powerful proclamation of presence. Churches, homes, and individuals fill their lives with crosses to mark the ubiquity of divine presence in the world. To put a cross on an altar, whether by painting one on it, like Grünewald’s Christ, or setting one nearby, as Catholic canon law requires, identifies the cross with the proclamation of Christ’s presence in the liturgy of the mass. The cross’s status in the Eucharistic liturgy underscores the way divine absence is bound to divine presence. On the cross, where the negation of the Image would seem to go too far—to overtake and vitiate, rather than unlock, presence—that negation is itself negated. The negation of negation celebrates a new presence, whereby God is present even in death.” (Carnes, page 88)

#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #liminal #sublime #artandtheology

As someone who is interested in contemporary art, I often explore the aesthetic wiki website in order to learn about new art movements. While on one of my adventures, I came across weirdcore. Weirdcore is defined as follows:

“Weirdcore is a surrealist aesthetic centered around amateur or low-quality photography and/or visual images that have been constructed or edited to convey feelings of confusion, disorientation, dread, alienation, and nostalgia.” [link] (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore)

Usually, the images convey a sense of vague, quasi-nostalgia—lost memories from childhood and dreams you can only half-remember. Or even better, a half-remembered dream about your childhood. But in contrast to pure nostalgia, the images often lack any recognizable “brand” iconography (there's no Surge soda or Lunchables), and the images contain an eeriness that many find unsettling—and yet slightly comforting as well.

Formally, weirdcore borrows many elements from liminal aesthetics. Liminal is a term that refers to an “in-betweenness.” Liminal spaces are often “non-spaces,” which forego a unique identity of their own, such as the interior of a public bus, hotel rooms, office spaces, hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, and abandoned malls. The liminality can also be found in spaces where normal activities are absent, such as shopping centers or worship spaces during after-hours.

Liminality likewise holds a vague quasi-nostalgia. When you look at a picture of a hotel pool, it feels like you've been there before, but the memory lies just outside of your grasp. There's a combination of pain and sorrow: You remember the fun adventures you had on that playground and realize that you perhaps made a friend for that brief hour, and you will never see them again.

Weirdcore picks up on some of that formal liminality but then saturates it with the weird and eerie qualities of postmodern capitalism. Weirdcore conveys the strange sensation of stepping into the Twilight Zone of capitalist hyperreality.

Within our culture, we are increasingly disconnected from the sorts of material environments in which humans evolved, and we have replaced those material environments with increasingly “plastic” surroundings. Natural materials have a way of generating their own sorts of energetic atmospheres. As an extreme example, imagine sitting in a cabin made of wood compared to that same cabin made of artificially colored plastic. Increasingly, our material environments mimic the plastic cabin more than the wooden cabin, which is why office spaces and Walmart shopping centers are so displeasure to inhabit. Likewise, the intentions of design behind the material environment are to create an atmosphere that pushes people toward consumerism above other forms of relation. Lost in a slurry of blinding florescent lights, randomly organized plastic plants, dazzling commodities, and faintly echoed music, the shopper can experience a sense of de-subjectivization or, in extreme cases, a quasi-disassociative state perfect for consuming.

With these interior design strategies built around unnatural “plastic” materials, postmodern atmospheres become eerie, weird, and strange — but also somewhat enjoyable. I think the perfect illustration of this eerie enjoyment is the McDonald's play place. It is a labyrinth of plastic tubes and shifting color blocks that cannot be easily navigated. And perhaps if you can remember as a kid, there could even be times in which you got lost within those spaces for a brief moment, or you were met with a sudden extreme darkness full of uncomfortable bumps as you went down a slide. The 'McAmbiance' is both eerie and enjoyable, and I think weirdcore captures that feeling within much of its imagery. The images creep me out, but I also find myself wanting to get lost inside them.

In this sense, I think weirdcore represents a new postmodern shift within the sublime. It's not the first instantiation of this shift, but I think it's a good example. In its simplest sense, the sublime is that strange combination of something that is both overwhelmingly beautiful but also terrifying. It is like standing on the edge of a cliff at the Grand Canyon: one is overwhelmed by the world's splendor, and yet one is also aware that one misstep could end one’s life. In the midst of such a vast beauty, we recognize our own finitude in comparison.

The sublime is not only a property of natural environments like mountains, oceans, or forests, but it can also inhabit architecture. Standing inside a large cathedral can be a sublime experience. However, in the case of the cathedral and natural environments, there can be a deeper spiritual and theological meaning attached to the sublime. For example, when standing inside of a beautiful cathedral, one can feel overwhelmed by its magnitude and outstanding beauty. But there is another step in which one is then awestruck by thinking about how God is even grander and more beautiful than the cathedral. It is likewise with nature: creation is vastly large and immensely beautiful, but God is even more so. One's sense of finitude turns into a religious experience of recognizing one's dependence upon the Infinite, generating gratitude toward God.

In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened “outsideness.”

The notion of a truncated outsideness is inspired by how the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri truncated the concept of time. To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

I'll be upfront: I don't understand Deleuze and Guatarri, so I hope what I said makes the slightest bit of sense. Anyways...

What Aeonic time is to Eternal time, weirdcore sublimity is to transcendent sublimity. Though in this case, the outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.

As a concluding thought, I think we can see from these instances that the hyperreality of postmodern capitalism generates its own, rival forms of religious experience, space, and time. I think weirdcore has managed to do a great job of capturing the feeling. By engaging with that art and musing upon its meanings, I think we can learn a lot about our current (hyper)reality. And maybe it will also inspire us to spend some time out in God's beautiful creation.