...and above all, is the sublime.
Happy Thanksgiving Richard. Thank you again for hosting me last weekend in your city. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to share my ideas and passion for a better kind of urbanism with so many powerful people there. I know we will have a positive and meaningful impact should we persist with this project, regardless of those compromises to the purity of the ideals the various processes and pathways to achieving built results may inevitably demand. We will make a difference, and transform your city.
Yesterday, I was blessed to be able to celebrate Thanksgiving with all of my closest family members and friends, gathered around a table that my wife and I created in a house of our own, for the first time in my life. We only became homeowners in August, after nearly 15 years of marriage, during which world travels, studies, work and experimentation forestalled our planting more permanent roots. My child and two god-daughters feasted happily behind me at the kid's table, the people with whom I have built my life and identity and to whom I most owe the creation and nurturing of my character, arrayed to either side in front of me. I sat at the head of a table. Proudly, my father watched me deliver the prayers and start the toasts; sentimentally, my mother watched me delight the children during the meal to keep them entertained despite their accelerated schedules. I want to believe that the grandparents I buried last year, only a few months separating their departures, were serenely watching the sentiments in my soul, fulfilled in their turn that I have finally aspired to the mantle they lived and revealed for me while it was my turn to be among the delighted. After the meal, I took my son and godchildren to the family room in the basement of my house and watched with them for the first time, Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, the animated classic first released in the year I was born, four years after the book by the same name was first published. As the sublime narrative unfolded, they asked me simple, innocent questions--what's under the blanket?, is that a whale?, where are they flying?, is that the north pole?--at first nearly breaking the spell, but then as the totality of the moment and their relative place in it slowly hit me, rendering it even deeper than I had previously known. My own father, who did the same ritual with me as a young boy and nearly every year thereafter, had quietly slipped in to join us. He no longer needed to watch the story. I could see him in the corner of my eye, watching me and my children. And as the climax of the narrative began, with it's hauntingly beautiful score and poetry by Howard Blake--the great, transcendental flight across a world devoid of time and boundaries, to the place where the spirit of Christmas lives, our analogue for the positive, creative force of love and resulting atmosphere of generosity and community--I began to silently cry. This was a sublime moment.
And so, this morning as I now celebrate and enjoy that the memory of that evening will remain with me for as long as I shall live, and contemplating out latest discussion, and the three qualities of "art" that I laid upon you, the following crystallization occurred to me:
Heaven is when and where my soul would contentedly reside forever, were it not for the march of time. This is what I mean when I declare the sublime.
If I reach similarly apt descriptions which for me capture the "aesthetic" and the "didactic", I will share them with you as well.
I believe it is unfair to expect that a mere artist or architect can fully represent the sublime in his or her work. It is the most potent and fleeting of the artistic qualities. All of the context I provided above is necessary for it. And as a relatively young man, I have so much farther to travel into its depths. It depends on the one experiencing the world to be ready for and capable of it. For those blessed or cursed with apprehending it regularly--the poets--we discover that in fact, it is possible anywhere and everywhere given the right events. Thus, we can only memorialize our experiences and set out contexts conscious of what and where gave rise to it for us, hopeful and trusting that others will be inspired as we were, or will remember experiences similar to ours, that may have taken place in similar environments to those we experienced.
If you'd like to see The Snowman, it is available at no charge here:
And if you're interested in the poem that accompanies the climactic scene of the boy and his Snowman's flight, I have transcribed it below:
We’re Walking in the Air
by Howard Blake (1982)
We’re walking in the air
We’re floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below are sleeping as we fly.
I’m holding very tight
I’m riding in the midnight blue
I’m finding I can fly so high above with you.
All across the world
The villages go by like dreams
The rivers and the hills, the forests and the streams.
Children gaze open mouthed
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below believes their eyes.
We’re surfing in the air
We’re swimming in the frozen sky
We’re drifting over ice, see mountains floating by.
Suddenly swooping low
On an ocean deep
Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep.
We’re walking in the air
We’re dancing in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly.
When I speak about the "cultural memory" that events and places like the farmer's market, the pumpkin patch and the Christmas tree fair manifest, it is my own experience and deep, fond and now sublime memory of growing up and passing through this life that most deeply moves and convinces me that these places are the most worthwhile focuses of the urban spaces we will create together. The sublime is the most valuable quality I have experienced. It is the place my soul could reside forever. There is no worldly value that could describe it or for which I might trade it. It transcends the mere markets and consumption, work and play. And it is where people come together to form deep bonds of community and hold the events they will remember and cherish forever, that the sublime most reliably will take shape. Without such public spaces and opportunities and the will of the operators to create and support such events, life is diminished.
Best,
[Galxzdfndr]
