Janice E.Patten, writing in regard to Longinus's pivotal work, "On The Sublime," captures a compelling attitude towards both sacredity and respectful religiousity as manifested in human communication: ...Longinus explains that this "beyond" is comprehended in terms of metaphor, or in terms of what is absent from the empirical world. Our sense of the sublime is an illusion, which draws the reader to new heights, to the realization that there is something more to human life than the mundane, the ordinary. In fact, the sublime entails a kind of mystery. The sublime is that which defeats every effort of sense and imagination to picture it. It is that whose presence reduces all else to nothingness. It can be defined and described only in symbolic terms, which ironically defies the pictorial arts to sketch it. It remains only for the art of the metaphorical language of poetry to give the suggestion of the sublime. I find my thinking about sacredity particularly informed by a consideration of subjects which are at least communicatively sublime - things which experientially approach the outer reaches of sensory and expressive limitations. Somewhere between Longinus's suggestion of events, places, experiences, etcetera that confound our ability to reproduce their encounter in linguistic or semiotic forms and the Christo-Judaic notion of things "set apart" for God (an enforced, performative sublimation of a given subject), I feel there lies a poetics of regarding the sacred. When, in word or image, a concerted expressive effort is made to highlight how much a given subject falls outside of our means to own, fully apprehend and, particularly, replicate in entirety that which we are striving to communicate, we walk swiftly into the territory of the sacred and sublime. In this, I agree wholeheartedly with Longinus's supposition that we equally enter a territory of poetics by necessity when we aim to visually or verbally approach any subject we find ourselves incapable of passing on with full fidelity solely via the means provided in our linguistic and semiotic vocabulary. Longinus drives his consideration of encountering the sublime well towards the necessity of metaphor, analogy, and even allegory as substitutive tools for bearing the uncanny and supernormal within our experience forward into dialogue with one another. It is also within this push to utilize visual / verbal vocabulary selectively that I see a performative sacredness placed in practices of communication. In communicating ideas and information associated with encountering the divine, otherworldly and paranormal, we seem to recognize that, at best, we will need to communicate to one another in very connotative ways. Denotative communication alone would highlight only the features most familiar, common and mundane within subjects and experiences that have pushed aside most sense of the commonplace. I'm reminded of two different filmic considerations of an encounter with the sublime, plus what they depict as acceptable responses to these experiences: Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky), and David Lynch's Lost Highway (cowritten by Lynch and Barry Gifford). Within Stalker, two men (Writer and Scientist) are led by a third (Stalker) into a region of Russia that has become paranormally activated by an encounter with extraterrestrial life. This Zone (as the territory is titled in the film) supersedes many of the behavioral and natural tendencies of commonplace spots on Earth and has, as a result, become a place that several people desire to enter in a search for power, revelation, transformation and experience. Within the film's storyline, stalkers are men considered to be an equal mix of guide, detective, hunter, protector and priest for their abilities to enter and exit the Zone successfully. They are sought out by others who want safe passage into and out of the Zone, plus seem to have developed an ever stronger bond with the Zone which draws them continuously back to it. The narrative of the film tracks the journey of one stalker and his two guests as they enter the Zone and make their way to its heart. In addition to all of the suggestions of geographic sublimity within the narrative of Stalker, however, Tarkovsky and the Strugatskies also layer in behavioral responses to this sublimity via the character of Stalker. One of Stalker's principle responses to moving within the Zone is a constancy of both caution and reverent attention to all features of the terrain he is crossing: sound, smell, light, wind, motion, gravity, etc. At several points during the slow and steady progress he, Writer and Scientist make into this uncertain terrain, Stalker pauses to tie metal nuts onto strips of cloth which he then twirls and tosses in various directions. By testing the ground, air and terrain around them, Stalker essentially probes the sublimity of the existence they are encountering and participating in. A similar cautiousness, trepidatiousness and reverence for the Zone exists within Stalker's conversation about it as well. This character often speaks haltingly, tentatively and furtively about features of the Zone, seeming at multiple points to behave as if it is, in fact, listening to every word he uses to describe it and might be shaping its behavior on the basis of what it overhears. For me, Stalker's behavior models key features of one possible communicative reaction to the sublime: approaching it with a sacredity tempered by caution, tentativity and a performative reverence for the potential power (destructive and creative) that a brush with the divine or paranormal could bring with it. Even in conversation, description and other discourse, communication offered with careful strategy, consideration and even some hesitancy is highly advised. Sacredity, in this expression, is modeled by a sense of conservation, concentration and a fearful constancy of observation prior to action to ensure that the subject held sacred isn't adversely disturbed, awakened or disrupted by either reflection or interaction with its sublime nature. I find this same sense of regard for the sacred embodied in Tarkovsky's directorial approach to the material and to cinematography. At many points in the film, Tarkovsky enlists long-take tracking shots or long pans to enable a viewer to hover over elements of a scene. Tarkovsky wields the camera's eye in a way that reinforces a god-like hovering over the stuff of the Zone and the people within it. When not employing lengthy, cautious and careful extended sequences of the camera in motion, Tarkovsky also employs a number of long-exposure / long run-time static shots that create a sense of visual eternity as well. In each of these approaches, Tarkovsky either utilizes protracted motion as a means to reinforce a need for longer-term consideration of what we view as a subject or static camera position and composition as a means to suggest the same. In both approaches, he rarely chooses to have the camera zoom or pan much closer to what it observes over the course of the time it is observing. The geography of both the camera and its subject generally remain sharply separated - moving neither closer nor farther apart over the course of the protracted gaze enlisted. Here, too, I see the modeling of an approach to the sacred and sublime: to hold it in consideration, awe and constant evaluation, but to do so still at a distance, particularly a distance maintained during the course of analysis and awe. Via his direction within Stalker, Tarkovsky builds a profound suggestion of identity gained via consideration of the sublime (in addition to affinity based in a mixture of fear, awe, appreciation and respect). Stalker demonstrates again and again that caution is highly recommended in relation to encountering the sublime, but that doubt (versus faith in at least the potency of what ability a sublime subject may possess) is an unwelcome and dangerous guest in the space occupied by the paranormal. Awe, constancy and peace exist in this way, at least for those who invest their activity toward the sublime with a firmly held regard for its authenticity, potency and incomprehensibility. In great contrast to the sense of poetic rapture Tarkovsky invests Stalker with, David Lynch and Barry Gifford paint an entirely different reaction to the presence of the sublime within Lost Highway. Although it is a thorny exercise to entirely pin down the fuller narrative which Lost Highway suggests over the course of its running time, it can at least be summarized as a murder mystery that collides with a split-identity case, straddling an asynchronous narrative timeline over the course of both story threads. Particularly within the first half of the film, which focuses on the trials, fears and bizarre surveillance of two characters (Fred Madison and his wife, Renee), Lynch often employs profoundly surrealistic versions of otherwise mundane moments (a walk down a hallway; an encounter with a stranger at a party) and renders them sinisterly sublime rather than comfortingly, awe-inspiringly or humblingly paranormal. I have thought often of a particularly well-constructed scene in the midst of the first half, described rather effectively by this synopsis provided in the Wikipedia article on the film: Shaken, Fred conducts a search of their house when he and Renée return, but he finds no intruder. While Renée is getting ready for bed, Fred walks through the house and finds himself standing in front of a long corridor. Fred walks down the long, dark corridor and disappears. Renée walks out of the bedroom looking for Fred, calling out to him as she stands at the foot of the corridor. A minute later, Fred emerges from the dark corridor. What is left out in this synopsized description is an indication of the way Lynch employs a languid zoom to draw viewers down the same hallway Fred traverses and a particularly industrial hum composed by Angelo Badalamenti as a soundtrack element. At the point when the Fred Madison character walks into the "long, dark corridor" described above, an already subtly brimming, throbbing hum within the audio track bristles into a fuller-force thrum in the ears of the audience. Fred, in many ways, becomes entirely consumed and hidden (auditorily and visually) by his journey into the absence housed within this filmic hallway. In the same way that Fred's image winks out of the persistent vision of its audience, the existence of this character likewise blinks out of presence in this moment, swallowed by the deep blacks, greens and browns of Lynch's visual / locational palette and subsumed by Badalamenti's pulsing auditory fuzz. In the moments before Fred experiences this sublime vacation from the filmic reality, however, we observe his expression clearly, seeing a man exuding repulsion, fear and a sort of hypnotic determination at the same moment. Within this filmic response to the sublime, I find another expression of sacredity: treating that which disturbs as separated and untouchable. Unlike the warmer embrace tempered by caution that Tarkovsky suggests, Lynch turns us instead towards a response based in more animal fear. The sublime poses real, horrifying threat to both Fred Madison and ourselves as voyeuristic participants in Fred's journey. Lynch offers us the sacredity of repulsion, disgust and, somehow within both of those reactions, still the magnetic, gravitational pull of the unknown. This is sacredity rendered as a gut-churning, nerve-raising uncertainty that may better be left alone, yet holds such terrible attraction to our baser curiosity that we, like Fred Madison, cannot prevent ourselves from treading straight on into the void of the sublime. Although Lynch also offers a quick return from this void, he suggests through the later narrative of Lost Highway that Fred is quite far from the existence he was prior to entering this sublime void, left forever changed and turned by the encounter. This, too, speaks to Lynch's cautionary approach to the sacred: perhaps better to leave the sublime fully apart from the stuff of our experience and encounter, knowing that any approach to it is tantamount to playing with an incomprehensible fire which could only leave us, at best, burned and, at worst, consumed and eliminated. So I find these two artifacts speaking of potential polarities in responding via sacredity to sublimity where we find it: + A response couched in at least cautionary reverence coupled with a performative religiosity (consider Stalker's ritualistic consistency in tying metal nuts to fabric and tossing them ahead of him, almost like an incense censer swung in a cathedral) + A response routed in horror regarding the uncanniness of what we may encounter if we allow the sublime to approach at too close a distance (consider the white-faced man Fred meets at the party within Lost Highway and the clear suggestion that both time and space seem to have only a tentative hold on such a man) I find a third response to the sublime within the substance of Brian Friel's play Faith Healer, and particularly within the character of Frank Hardy, the purported faith healer of the play's title. Constructed as a series of interlinking monologues delivered by three characters (Frank, his wife and their longstanding tour manager), Friel provides both supportive and contradictory accounts of Hardy's life, work and, eventually, death. Particularly within the contradictory elements of the differing monologues, Hardy is presented as a man possessed with (or possessed by, depending on the monologist's reaction to Hardy's gifts) an intermittent ability to perform miracles. These eruptions of the sublime are viewed as disruptions of the natural order of things even by Hardy himself who, although recognizing himself as the instrument for occasional healing, seems only to clearly recognize in advance the times when sublime and miraculous happenings will NOT occur rather than being accurate in predicting when they will. In an excellent (and thorough) consideration of Friel's work within Faith Healer, Margaret Strain offers this remark about the aim of the play: It is at once a commentary about the artist and process of artistic creation - a production whose reliance on monologic structure and the shifting memories of its characters evokes Kurosawa's Rashomon and Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - and a drama that poignantly enacts the possibility for transcendence which lies at the heart of aesthetic and religious experience. The character of Frank Hardy in Faith Healer greatly invokes a third possible response to sublimity: + Actively working to encounter and share an experience of the sublime through any means available, recognizing that the task of accurately sharing such an encounter may often come up short or, likely, not prove possible at all. Secondarily, an insistence that art and aesthetics may be absolutely necessary means for coming to any terms with the sublime before, during and after an encounter with it. Here inlies my sense of a third discursive understanding of sacredity - a sidelong ability to recognize its presence moreso by a firm recognition of its absence at points. Just like Frank finds himself acutely able to know in an instant that he'll have no means to heal a person, experiencing and expressing sacredity may entail being able to more clearly articulate and identify where there is no presence of sacredity to be found. We would do best to follow both the suggestions of Longinus and Friel (by nature of suggesting a Frank Hardy possessing of any capability to participate in the sublime would exist in the first place) in seeking out those who have an adeptness in encountering the paranormal. Again, from Patten's reflections on Longinus: Longinus centers also on figurative language, discussing the great writers of the past and their importance, our "possession 'by a spirit not one's own. . . . The genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators." He holds Plato up as a model and an ideal of great literature, thereby answering and defending Plato's style against his critics. The decline of letters in his day is due not to despotism, but slavery to pleasure and greed. He shows us that great thoughts have been uttered by men of the past and can be uttered again. Sublimity becomes, for him, the source of the distinction of the greatest poets and prose writers, something like a thunderbolt that could strike anywhere. Because of his belief in sublimity, he also believes in the privileging of mental processes. He holds in an almost mystical way that the composer is identified with what he describes; and because of the excitement of the moment of inspiration, the hearer or reader is also a participant in the feeling of sublimity. And so it was that Longinus first brought passion and the concept of readerly complementation to the study of literature. So, too, we may be brought back to the power of art and communication (visual and verbal) to render in poetic approach a better, larger encounter with the sublime that could, in turn, generate the sort of religious (which is to say ritualized performative approach) advance towards sacredity our time together in workshop discussion may serve to examine.