On Writing Awe

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Part one of a two (or even three parter) on awe. Apologies in advance, it’s all going to be a bit philosophical. But also - hopefully - interesting! And fun! And readable! With anecdotes and EVEN a few paragraphs about butterflies at the end for anyone who wants to skip all of this pseudo-academicry.

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I keep an inventory
Of wonders and of uncommercial goods.

Wendell Berry, Sabbath IV

Awe - proper awe - is not an easy thing to write about. Some manage it, just. Think Mary Oliver (Invitation, Wild Geese); Emerson (On Nature); Rousseau. But writing about awe can quickly and easily fall into the toe-curlingly naff, words written in cursive over sunset Facebook cover photos.

I don’t think this is accidental. It’s not because of a lack of good writers, or from a lack of effort to try and capture that feeling that we can recognise and yet still struggle to describe. Instead, I think there are ways in which awe and writing are fundamentally opposed.

Premise 1: Language is linear and removes the freedom to direct our attention

In James Lovelock’s ‘Novacene’, he points out how writing is unavoidably linear*. You read words one after another on a page. Ideas are presented sequentially, in time. The world of language is one of ‘stepwise logic’, where B is caused by A and in turn causes C - a way of thinking that is ‘one dimensional and linear whereas reality is multidimensional and non-linear’.

To make this a little more concrete, take this passage from The Lord of the Rings

Upon its outward marges under the westward mountains Mordor was a dying land, but it was not yet dead. And here things still grew, harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life. In the glens of the Morgai on the other side of the valley low scrubby trees lurked and clung, coarse grey grass-tussocks fought with the stones, and withered mosses crawled on them; and everywhere great writhing, tangled brambles spawned.

You can see that there are the marges and the mountains, then the low scrubby trees, then the tussocks, stones and mosses, and only after the brambles. The ideas appear in your head sequentially, in the order that Tolkien intended. Thus, the track that your attention takes is predetermined, governed by how different aspects of the scene are presented. There is nothing arbitrary about what you might think, about where your attention might fall. It runs along the tramlines set out for it in language.

Premise 2: Awe is non-linear and dynamic, and relies on the ability to direct our attention

There isn’t a neat and tidy definition of awe. However, there is a common core of vastness, of an idea of complexity, of almost comprehending something, but also seeing it fall just out of reach at the same time. Koetner’s ‘Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder’ settles on a definition of awe as the ‘feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world’.

*** Heavy philosophy warning ***

For Kant, what is awe-inspiring is a source of both a pleasure and pain. Pain from fear, the idea of something that is so much larger than us, how we are dwarfed as mortal beings by the expansiveness of the infinite, the sublime. Pleasure at our capacity as rational beings to be able to see this vast entity in front of us, to be able to hold in our head a gesture at the vastness, to pull towards the infinite.

As he puts it: “The feeling of the sublime… is at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation of reason, and a simultaneous awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of sense of being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.”

*** Heavy philosophy over ***

I think this sense of clutching at the infinite - at something at once vast and complex, but also harmonious and balanced derives from the freedom that we have to direct our attention. No matter where we look, things appear to fall together and make sense. There is also the feeling that - if we were to direct our attention at another part of the scene - things would again balance, reveal a different part of a complex puzzle that improbably fits together. It is that sense, that there are nearby possible worlds where we look elsewhere and see a different aspect of the whole that gives us the feeling of a comprehension that is just out of reach and also close by.

This also explains why we can feel awe from sounds and from sight, but not smells or touch, and only those with educated palates can be awed by taste. We need the feeling that we are focusing our attention arbitrarily on different parts of a complex whole, that close by another part would be revealed and still slot into a larger picture.

Conclusion:

This is the trickiness of writing about awe. When we write about something awe-inspiring, things are carved out and brought to the forefront and slowly fade away - brushstrokes on water, each part dissolving downwards as whatever is written a few lines above recedes from view. We no longer have the choice of being able to focus our attention on whatever may be there.

So I don’t think you can capture experiences of awe successfully in words. In the time it takes me to give you the four stripes of pink in the sky, the purple clouds, the elephant walking slowly, smell of smoke, the wind on my back – by the time I said all that you would be bored and you cannot be bored by awe.*

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Some recommendations:

1. For poetry about awe – please read Mary Oliver. She’s the master of the gentle reminder to pay attention. Her poems let you step into the head of someone who finds so much wonder in the everyday. Starter-for-10 here.

2. The Penguin pop-science book on Awe is by Koetner. The research is interesting, the anecdote is annoying, and I’m slightly sceptical about how good the science can be. Can you really test for awe with a GIF? Nonetheless, it’s still worth reading if you’re interested in the physiology and the research/ data on awe.

3. If you want to try some philosophy, I’d kick off with Burke’s ‘On the Sublime and the Beautiful’. Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgement is (classic) beautiful awe-inspiring ideas wrapped in fourteen-hundred layers of very unnecessary technical jargon.

4. Other clever philosophers from the very nice professor I got chatting to in Blackwell’s - Dougherty; William James and a modern book called ‘On Beauty and Being’. I have read none of them so far, so if you do find them please let me know what you think.

*Caveat 1: Auto-fiction - the kind of pick your own novels where you choose which page to turn to - is the exception to this rule. And even then, the autonomy there pales to what we have when we experience moments of awe.

**Caveat 2: I think you can be awed in writing to the extent writing can convey a complex idea. I remember an Oxford tutorial on Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ where a seeming contradiction is resolved by pulling fragments from all over this impossibly dense book, how the ideas seemed to hang together, improbably. But then I don’t think it is from the writing so much as the idea below that the writing is gesturing at.

On Butterflies

The air was still and hot, and the sky hung close, the coloured lead, as it is during the season of the rains, when the Highland winds stop blowing for a time, and the only movements are the tremulous flights of white butterflies, migrating westward in endless clouds of palpitating wings. They go, like waves, incessantly in the same direction, as to a rendezvous they cannot miss at the far end of the horizon. The golden air seems full of the snowflakes of an improbable summer storm, or of petals from a creamy bougainvillaea scattered in gusts by an invisible breeze.

Kuki Gallman - African Nights

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A weft of butterflies is running through the conservancy, starting at Lake Baringa, spooling out through the Rift, casting its way upwards over Kuki’s Gorge. The Brown Lace Wing is migrating from the North East, and there are now hundreds of thousands of white flickers scattered across the landscape. In a couple of weeks, this mass movement will make it to Mugi, an adjacent conservancy, though none of the butterflies I see will make it there. They will all be dead by then, their three-day life span playing a part in a multi-generational odyssey. Instead, they will leave eggs a few miles away, taking the family that bit closer to wherever they hope to end up.  Like light from distant stars, they gesture at a home in another time.

They are everywhere. Moving slowly, the numbers pick up in the afternoon, forming light flakes through the classroom window, the very best kind of tumble weed. Walking to the Mess, and there they are again, closer now, flicking in and out of existence, like they’re under strobe light – and it’s only when they fly right into your eyeline that you can make out the dark filigree on the edge of their wings. I can see them working through the thistle and the scrub, out on the wide savannah plains, feel them brushing up against an arm, a shoulder, a leg. The Swahili for butterfly is kipepeo, pronounced ’Ki-pa-pay-o’, each syllable another soft brush of a wing.

There’s more, hidden, nesting or resting or simply flying low. One of the conservancy dogs, Topé, alerted us to this by hurtling through a patch, scattering them upwards, the subsequent tumult revealing just how many more lie beneath the surface. Their stark whiteness is there again against the crisp brown of trees uprooted by the last storm, against the persimmon-red leaves of a Gliricidia, or flailing in the dark muddy hollow left by the foot of an elephant or a buffalo.

They make strange things happen with the wind. Most travel straight, doggedly northwards, but every so often one will be caught in a dust devil, some eddy, some torrent – something in the air that I can’t see and I can’t touch but that is evidenced in the small metre spirals off course, in the deviation. Every so often I get a strange sense of relative motion, like sitting in a plane as it comes to a stop as the butterflies keep moving onwards across the savannah even as I feel the wind pushing against me in the opposite direction.

It is a recipe for soft fascination, for a near-total engagement without the work of attention.

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