on love, strangeness, landscape and the sublime

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:01]We're going to start a little differently today. I'm going to read a piece that I wrote. I've been thinking a lot about love, about the strangeness of love and the experiences that cannot be communicated because as soon as you do, something gets lost. It kind of the experience deforms in some way. And I was trying to make this essay feel more cohesive. And then I thought, "Love isn't cohesive." And that might be the biggest copout. And if so, well, it's too late now. Okay. My first cat taught me respect. And respect feels a lot like love. And so it goes. You dig a hole in the garden of your childhood home. You kneel on the ground with all the care and attention of someone about to pray.

[00:00:49]But instead of bringing your dirty palms together, you reach to your side, and there your cat lays. That morning, you try to explain to your cat what would happen that afternoon. In fact, you've been trying to tell him for days. Only a few words came out at once, very quietly, too. But anyone and anything would be able to know what was being said. What was being said was mysterious and strange. And what's mysterious and strange can be communicated with the least amount of words. This keeps what is sacred intact. But of course, this morning you scare your cat. Of all the mornings you've had, this is the last.

[00:01:23]You're crying. You're wanting to hold your cat, to carry him like a baby close to your heart, but he never really enjoyed being held, so you respect that.

[00:01:32]For 18 years, you kneel down on the floor, and bring your face close to his.

[00:01:36]If love is anything, it is an offering.

[00:01:39]He'll jump on the bed, sleep at your feet, and when it's still dark, he'll wake you up by pressing his head on your cheek so you can let him out. And you do. He sits in the backyard on the dewy grass as the sun rises, and you think this is his favorite part of the day.

[00:01:53]Most certainly it is. In the afternoon, you'll open the front door to let some air in, and he'll sit on the step looking out. You sit next to him. If love is anything, it's respect. Sitting there, you think you finally understand.

[00:02:07]You feel kind and good. You could never hurt anyone. You are kind and good. It is clear. Until, of course, you feel that love is leaving. Then love might become something else. It might turn inside you. And as it turns, you feel it and it no longer fits right. It hurts.

[00:02:23]If pain is anything, it is felt. Of all the mornings you've ever had, this is the first morning your cat hides from you, which is also the last. Everything is now the last. You decide to go back inside, but what is inside? What is inside is now empty. You don't know how to act. After all, it is only a cat. You say this, but you don't believe it at all. Not for a second. And thank goodness for that. Nothing is ever only unless this is the only life there is.

[00:02:50]You go back outside and sit with your back against the window. This is the window you would open for him. When he was ready, he would jump into your room and greet you, rubbing his body against your legs. You would tell him that you loved him, that he was very silly, too.

[00:03:04]He is in the corner now, laying in the dirt, hiding amongst the bushes. You can see him looking at you through the thin branches. You are looking at him, too.

[00:03:12]If love is anything, it is bearing witness. It is seeing what wants to be seen. And for the first time as you hold his gaze, you think that there must be many more lives than this one. There must be many more days outside of these days here. Here is certainly not the only place. Nothing is ever only. He pushes his way out of the bushes. He does this very slowly. When he reaches the middle of the lawn, he stretches his front paws, eyes half closed, and then walks over to you. You're sitting cross-legged. He climbs onto your lap and curls himself there. He has never done this before, so you're scared to move in fear he might jump out and leave you. He doesn't. He will look up and you will scratch his head. You know he knows. If love is anything, it is knowing. If love is anything, it is safe. If love is anything, it is unpredictable. You close your eyes. The words you whispered to him were not for him. Your cheeks are wet, but you breathe slowly. This is a prayer. If love is anything, it is a prayer. for more days outside of these ones. More lives outside of this one. You think one life will suffice you, but one life would never be enough for everything and everyone you've ever loved. You hold his limp body now, strange and mysterious, and bring his face close to your heart.

[00:04:26]You gently lower him down in the little hole in the garden of your childhood home. If love is anything, it is this.

[00:04:37]If love is anything, it is aliveness. If love is anything, it is strange. If love is anything, it is confusing. If love is anything, it is transformative. I finally read Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, which is a reimagining of the 10th Labor of Hercules in which the Greek demigod slays the monster Gerion.

[00:05:00]And it is based on this story, but more like fragments written by this ancient Greek poet. and Carson, of course, repositions them both in a queer coming of age love story in ambiguous modern times. Carson depicts a relationship of absences. Gerion is this redwinged monster living amongst people. He is an outsider both physically and internally.

[00:05:27]He is growing distant from his mother who he loves so deeply. and he is feeling the emotional wounds of not only a lost love but of the abuse at the hands of his brother. He also just feels deeply misunderstood and he reaches towards Hercules and Hercules does not reach back. So what is love without reciprocity? Love I think can definitely rearrange you in all sorts of way without reciprocity. I mean, I know this. It can make you burn bright with desire. It can transform you, destroy you, confuse you, reawaken you. But it is through these absences. It is through these gaps that the world communicates with Gerion. He does not become disenchanted. He does not close himself off. He remains alive. And it is also through these absences that Carson is able to like fit herself into these gaps and imagine a completely different story. Desire is profound. It is a disruptive force that is both deeply pleasurable but also deeply painful. It is desire that breaks down boundaries and it initiates change. It is desire that influences how we learn, how we understand the world. It is love and desire that reveals an incompleteness about us, a wound. But it is in this chasing, this seeking to become whole, this seeking to become understood, where potential is limitless, where time stops existing and this excitement lies in the anticipation of what might be found rather than in the finding itself. Aeros is this magnetic and deeply imaginative pool that draws us outside of ourselves so that we can converge with the other and the other being that which you know cannot be controlled, possessed, cannot be predicted, appropriated, turned into information. It remains opaque even as we approach it. And the moment that you know it becomes fully knowable, the moment that we are able to grasp it, that's when it seizes to be the other.

[00:07:37]So this wound, this wound lights up the desire to be understood and how we choose to be understood varies from person to person. Of course, Gerion photographs himself throughout the novel. This is his autobiography, an attempt to capture what the self exceeds, to make an image of something that keeps outrunning the frame, to be seen and to be understood. This is a form of self-preservation, one that doesn't require language. Susan Sag called this the cloud of unknowing, the mystic receptivity through which the photographer must pass in order to take the picture at all. And to take the picture is to temporarily dissolve this boundary that keeps the self separate from what it's looking at. It's a way of capturing permanence too when time keeps on moving. And this desire to be loved is a desire to be understood. But in order for desire to remain alive, strangeness and mystery must remain. A paradox. The novel ends at a volcano.

[00:08:47]Gerion, who has carried his wings folded throughout the entire narrative, spreads them finally at the creator's edge. And it feels like this is the only landscape in the novel that is large enough to hold what Garyen's desire has made of him. What love has forced open in him.

[00:09:06]Finally, he finds an equivalent, and it's this erupting volcano. He flies in order to understand the splendor and the anguish that is caused by love. By loving someone that you ultimately don't know, ultimately cannot possess. But the thing is we cannot exist in longing because desire has the power to destroy.

[00:09:30]It has the power to extinguish us. And so we must exist adjacent to it. And Gerion understands this. He concludes we are amazing beings. We are neighbors of fire.

[00:09:43]Sometimes you need to feel things with your heart and let those feelings remain strange and mysterious. And sometimes you need to use your analytical brain.

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[00:11:04]There's things that you don't know that you don't know until you then know them.

[00:11:09]And I'll tell you one of them right now.

[00:11:10]I went to watch Fire of Love, directed by Sarah Dosa, when it first came out, I think back in 2022. I went to the cinema. I didn't really know much about it except for the fact that it was a documentary about volcanoes. Grace, it was about volcanoes, but it was also about love and mostly a love triangle.

[00:11:28]What seems like an expansive and supportive love between two French vulcanologists, Katya and Maurice Craft, and the ever growing obsessive love between Katya, Maurice, and volcanoes.

[00:11:42]Volcanoes. Volcanoes. Volcanoes. In the first few minutes of the film, you learn that Katy and Maurice will die following an eruption in Mount Unen in Nagasaki, Japan in 1991. And what they leave behind is hundreds of hours of footage and thousands upon thousands of photographs. And it's all so alive. It's all so electric. There's lava flows, close-up eruptions, red volcanoes, gray volcanoes, creation through destruction, devastation through destruction. Two people always at the edge of immense danger, inching closer and closer to the thing they love, the thing they desire until it consumes them. What I didn't know until a few weeks ago is that Verer Herzog found that very difficult to say.

[00:12:33]Verer Herszog Herszog had also made a documentary about the crafts from the same archival footage uh released the very same year.

[00:12:45]And when I finished watching that film a few weeks ago, I felt in many ways so much further from the love triangle Dosa's film depicted, further away from that specific love between Katya and Maurice and more mystified by the enormity of the landscape presented, the power of the erupting volcano, the beauty that intertwines in a more kind of unsettling feeling. the feeling of terror. Herszog does not make a documentary about love. Not specifically, that is not the story line. I now have a cat with me. Herszog, I don't think is interested in creating a documentary about love. Um, that is not the story line for him. And I don't think that he has much interest in appeasing the audience, which I think tends to make for very interesting and sometimes very uncomfortable documentaries that really make you think. So I found myself asking not why, you know, would anyone ever do this, but instead what does it really truly feel like to stand there? What relationship to fear to time to mortality allows two people to return so fiercely? and yet so calmly to the thing that has the power to end them. What does it feel like to stay in that strangeness to stay to stay with the thing that you can't quite grasp? One of the things that I found really interesting was that through doing research for this essay, I started listening to a lot of the interviews with Sarah Dosa, and one thing that she repeats very consistently is the challenges of creating an archival film. Yes, she had hours upon hours of footage, but it was still full of gaps. And Katy Maurice had been dead for like over 30 years. So, she definitely needed an interpretive prism, a framework that could give shape to all this footage that she had access to. And she mentions that after reading one of Maurice's books, there was this one line that really kind of brought it all to life. and it said for me Katya and volcanoes it is a love story. So that made it very clear the direction that Dosa would take. She would aim to kind of understand these two people through through love. And funnily enough, Dosa describes the sort of like unrequited love that she felt as she was creating this film because first of all, it was during the pandemic and she was feeling a lot of loss and a lot of grief and a lot of uncertainty and sifting through this archive. She was just constantly reaching towards people that, you know, are no longer alive. She felt a longing.

[00:15:37]And so she herself was now caught in a love triangle. One which kind of fueled her desire to yes understand them but to ultimately make this film. She aimed to bring these two people closer. And so I think in many ways through fire of love the crafts do become knowable because their choices are explained through narration. Their relationship makes a lot of sense. It is coherent and their deaths are given kind of this weight of inevitability that a love story requires. It is definitely a moving film. It's very tender. It is well constructed too. I think Dosa really understands what the audience wants. And I think what the audience wants and what most people want most of the time is to understand, seek comprehension. It can be like taken with certainty. But then when that happens, it feels like there's nothing else to reach for. And so this is what I didn't know that I didn't know until now, which is for many years, Fire of Love was one of my most favorite documentaries until I watched The Fire Within. Understanding or comprehensibility is not necessarily the most valuable offering that there is.

[00:16:56]Underlying his work is this concept of ecstatic truth. According to Herszog, there are two kinds of truth available.

[00:17:04]The first is factual. It is accurate. It is verifiable, possessing what he calls normative power. The second kind of truth is ecstatic or poetic truth. It is mysterious and not reducible to fact. It is a different category of knowledge altogether. It's what pierces the heart.

[00:17:23]He says we must ask of reality how important is it really? Of course we can't disregard the factual. It has normative power but it can never give us the kind of illumination the ecstatic flash from which truth emerges. It's reminiscent of the punctum that Roland Bars write about in a collection of essays on photography mostly through the lens of grief and the loss of B's mother. He's a philosopher. He's not a photographer. So he's kind of just talking about his experience of photography, what awakens something in him and what doesn't. And although they differ in origin, this ecstatic truth and the punctum, the punctum usually being an detail that is discovered by the viewer and ecstatic truth being a deliberate manufactured effect created by the filmmaker. They both arrive somewhere similar. It is a deeper subjective reality beyond surface level facts or purely intellectual analysis of images. It pierces it pierces the heart.

[00:18:34]I think it's also interesting to note that Herszog's kind of relationship to the crafts is shaped by personal kinship. He has spoken about this closeness that he feels towards them because they share the same orientation towards mortality and towards time. His own account of his early life includes a conviction that he would not live long.

[00:18:58]He said, "I knew I had to be careful about how I use my time, that I couldn't waste a single second or allow myself to be afraid of anything or anyone." which is a sentiment that Maurice Craft also accepts within himself. It will kill me one day, but that doesn't bother me at all. The relationship to death seems neither like morbid nor defiant. To me, it's just very practical. Time is finite. Fear is a waste of it. And the thing worth pursuing is worth pursuing regardless of the cost. And this is how Herszog has pursued art and it's how the crafts pursued volcanoes. It was just all full force. But Herzog, I think, would also say, and in fact, he does say that the crafts were also pursuing art.

[00:19:48]There is a visible shift in the crafts footage. Their shots at first are more like home videos, photos, and videos you would take on a holiday, kind of like as a tourist. But it then completely evolves. It evolves into incredible cinema. For Herszog, the craft's primary legacy was not scientific data. It was the mythic imagery. The way that they were able to carry us in the realm of strange beauty. The craft's images become grandiose. Maurice captures an apocalypse that we have never seen before on film. And it is through this apocalyptic landscapes that the blend of terror and beauty and the very notion of the sublime is born. It is through this state of sublimity that something deeper becomes possible. We arrive at ecstatic truth. Maurice and Katya would reenact events for the camera and sometimes they would exaggerate different emotions and seeing these takes. I think especially after watching Fire of Love might, you know, it might deflate something in the viewer. But I think it can also reveal their capacity for imagination, for world building, for fantasy, for wanting to fill in these gaps. the the desire to want to understand and in a way to be able to preserve this strangeness which is the same thing that Gerion was doing in autobiography of red. How can we dissolve the boundaries between the self and everything else? And it is through these cinematic shots suggests that such truth then coaleses out of moments so saturated with reality that they become surreal. In his speech on the absolute, the sublime and ecstatic truth, which I highly recommend, he says, "Our entire sense of reality has been called into question. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations have such an unusual bizarre power that they seem unbelievable. But in the fine arts, in music, literature and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth, a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort. One attains it through vision, style, and craft. However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. For many years, I thought Fire of Love was one of my most favorite documentaries. That was only until I watched these long scenes of what a volcano could create, but also what a volcano could destroy, or more so what a volcano could destroy and what could be created out of that. In 1757, Edmund Burke published a short book with a very long title called A Philosophical Inquiry into the origin of our ideas Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

[00:22:50]Burke was interested in our response to things like a cliff face or a Russian cataract, massive mountains that seized and terrified, but somehow also pleased the mind by just being too big and too powerful and too high. A blend of pleasure and terror. In Burke's terms, beauty had a relaxing effect in what he calls the fibers of the body, whereas sublimity tightened these fibers. Beauty is passive, whereas the sublime, it stimulates. For Burke, the sublime was a much more real, much more important type of aesthetic judgment than beauty. And this concept, this concept really changed the way people started seeing the world and the way that people started seeing nature. I recently read Mountains of the Mind by Robert McFarland. If you're a big hiker, I recommend in which he examines how the western perception of fearing mountains and seeing them almost as like obstructions and even grotesque goes through this big shift. philosophers in the 1700s really started romanticizing mountains and being outdoors and suddenly hiking the Alps was like the prudent thing to do, the right thing to do. And it seemed like now everyone was putting their lives at risk in order to be in close contact with the sublime and they truly were. There's a lot of people were dying because people were not prepared for uh the difficulty of climbing mountains. This was a natural push to the enlightenment period where philosophers were using reason as the guide for human progress and were arriving at truth through fact. So there was romanticism and romanticism loved loved loved the sublime. Kant then refined and complicated Burke's account in the critique of judgment. He distinguished between two forms of the sublime. the mathematical which is produced by confrontation with immeasurable vastness. For example, when you go out camping and you see the sky and it's full of stars hiking and you climb a mountain, you're at the mountain top and everything just looks so vast.

[00:25:08]It's this infinite distance that makes you feel so incredibly small in like the best way possible. Then there's the dynamic sublime which is produced by confrontation with extraordinary power and force. K's own example of the dynamic sublime is of course an erupting volcano. The sublime involves coming up against some obstinate limit of our understanding because it's the ultimate other. You cannot impose order on it.

[00:25:41]You cannot control it. It remains unpredictable and it's just too immense and too powerful and very often too strange.

[00:25:50]It's what exceeds understanding. It's what sometimes cannot be explained through language. Aris Murdoch extending on K describes the experience very clearly. She says confronted with some vast prospect the starry sky or the Alps the imagination and the senses cannot properly take in what lies before them.

[00:26:09]Yet in being so defeated, the reason gains a fresh sense of its own independence and dignity. The encounter with something that exceeds us clarifies something within us. Through the sublime experience, we can gain an awareness of our freedom and our capacity for reason.

[00:26:28]Both of these being foundational to moral action. But this clarification comes at a cost. The sublime is not necessarily a comfortable experience.

[00:26:39]Very often it requires effort. It requires risk. It requires making something within you feel quite uncomfortable. But it is through this discomfort that there is an invitation to humility, an invitation for self-reflection.

[00:26:55]It's looking outward. And it's a desire to understand and respect the natural environment. And in doing so, becoming so sensitively linked to it, it stretches our empathy and our care to include others. Iris Murdoch termed this unselfing. You forget about the self.

[00:27:14]You move away from the relentless ego and you finally you finally see clearly.

[00:27:22]The sublime ultimately exceeds language.

[00:27:24]It is deeply subjective and deeply experiential. The experience overflows what any kind of words can contain. And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Katya and Maurice were in close contact with the sublime. I think it's with this awe and this transcendence that is found in nature found in volcanoes. It just kept pulling them in.

[00:27:50]And yes, they were volcanologists, but as Herzog stated, the crafts in a way they probably knew the borderline. They probably knew that most of the time they were just too close. And for doing real science, you don't need to be 10 feet from a crater eruption. Everything that I read points towards strangeness and mystery. The reason I found out many years later that Herszog had also made a film about the crafts was because I was reminded of him whilst I was reading the right to oblivion where Presley argues for protecting these dark illegible places within us in order to make our lives feel not only habitable but meaningful. And he quotes Herzog in his book and it says we have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever. You cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore. Let's say in a marriage or a deep friendship if everything is illuminated, explained, and put on the table. And so I keep on thinking about Dillard's essay, Total Eclipse. She makes her way to Washington. and she is very prepared and eager to witness this eclipse. There are all these things that she knows and then there are all these things that she thinks she knows and then the eclipse tips everything on its head. She understands none of it.

[00:29:20]Everything she sees in that moment seems wrong because what was happening was so entirely different to what she knew the world to be. Everything was strange. So I keep on thinking about the difference between knowing and encountering. And I think love can be an encounter. You bring this person closer and rather quickly you understand that closeness is not possession. That even if you are there right in the middle of it all, you have your little glasses on. You're prepared. You find the unexpected. You reach out, but they might turn away from you. You love and love and love and still what you might love might leave.

[00:30:03]Still what you love will die. But oh my goodness, to love it all is to live right. And to be prepared is to be sensible. But at some point you just have to stand at the creator's edge or climb to the top of the mountain with no language with you, just feeling. And maybe finally understand that a punctured heart is adequate communication. A punctured heart is a form of knowing and it is truth. And it's actually more than just knowing. It is being