It's a sing-song children's joke: What's sublimer than sublime? The man at the corner asking for change. What's ridiculouser? He's asking for a fiver. What's sublimer? He may not know it, but he's not talking about money.
Fair enough -- if all culture is a product of sublimation, as Freud insisted, then it is the very nature of its subliminal ridiculosity that alternately chills and thrills me to the marrow. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, is the triumphance of the mass event. These are spectacles made not to assist vision but to replace it -- carnivals, in their Latin roots, of a Shakespearean pound of flesh.
But the sublime is by nature subliminal, below the conscious threshold of everyday perception. Wonder is not measured on the applause meter of societal amusement (literally "to stare fixedly at"); the masses are given weight only by the gravity of a particular situation, which in turn is determined by their relations to opposing masses. This isn't merely the effect of pulling out all the stops for the vox populi; it's the nature of the laws of physics.
At 10 o'clock this morning, I'm an abstract mind in a concrete jungle, an obtuse fool acutely aloof. You misunderstand me. I'm not getting even, I'm getting odd. Today's pound of flesh is no different from any other; the carnal is merely the context for the sublime, the subliminal subtext of situational effervescence.
Sorry, I can't spare any change. I'm looking for change myself, and when I come up with five years of it, I'm going to spend it all in one place. I'm going to Lake Havasu. I'm going to jump off the London Bridge. I'm going to strangle Jack the Ripper today, because I want out of the 20th century -- I want out of this millennium. It would take the truly sublime to give me a sense of direction today. I feel stupid and contagious.
Contagion? Confusion? Delugion? Delusion!
We're waiting for nirvana, or at least apocalypse, and the closer we get to either the more similar the two begin to look. More and more in my subliminal daydreams I'm falling down, falling down into a spectacular black hole where it all gets swallowed up like the proverbial snake eating its own tail. It's an endless carnival, my fair lady.
"The really valuable thing in ... life (is) the creative, sentient, individual, the personality," Albert Einstein said half a century ago. "It alone creates the noble and sublime, while the herd remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."
Have you herd the verdict?