The Apocrypha of the Wild

Exploring the Sublime in Lake Clark National Park

Part One: The Traverse of the Sublime

I am resting at the crossroads of the sublime, reclined on a lichen-covered rock amid Lake Clark National Park's Telaquana trail. The word trail is a misnomer. There is no trail; there are no signs, no campsites, nothing as far as the eye can see to suggest that humans ever put down their stone tools to take up life in the modern age. To the East, Telaquana Mountain with its blue, hanging glaciers and neighboring unnamed peaks dominates the view, rising from the tundra vertically several thousand feet above me. To the West the landscape maintains a gentle aspect, punctuated with small lakes and low ridges, as far as I can see. I am at the intersection of what Immanuel Kant would recognize as his two versions of the sublime.

In his third critique Kant split the sublime into two variations: the dynamic sublime in which the imagination is overwhelmed by an enormous power or magnitude and the mathematical sublime in which we are mentally unable to cope with a huge quantity or space. Gazing over the landscape to the east I imagine that with supplies, strength, and impossible luck I could rise and walk until I arrived at the Bering Sea without encountering any sign of the modern life that dominates our day-to-day existence. For somebody who lives in the lower forty-eight, the vastness of this terrain inspires awe and I can't really imagine just how much wilderness is over the horizon. On this rock amid this expanse I can feel the sensations Kant describes, but I doubt I share his intensity. I have, after all, seen satellite imagery and flown over this area in a plane. My imagination doesn't strain to contain the entire area in a single concept—one of Kant's definitions of the sublime—but it does strain to imagine it in terms of my own size. As I think about this space, allowing my mind to switch back and forth between the various scales, imagining first the walk across the landscape, and then the little dot I would represent on a satellite image, I cannot form an accord between the systems of reference. My smallness and vulnerability in this environment is emphasized to a level of apprehension. This must be what Kant means when he says,

The feeling of the Sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the Imagination and the estimation of the same formed by Reason.

To the West, rising to 8,000 feet, Telaquana Mountain is awe-inspiring as it dwarfs any structure made by man, but gazing over its jagged edges offers no feeling I would associate with the sublime. Perhaps climbing up and staring into the blue crevasses of its glaciers would shake me up a bit but that would be more akin to fear—a distinct feeling Kant separates from the sublime. In Kant's day a trip through the Alps was uncommon. It left eighteenth-century travelers raised in cities and farms breathless. Nothing in their everyday life could prepare them for the power of the high Alps and their own insignificance by comparison. Insignificance, however, is a feeling anyone living in a modern city with a population in the millions has learned to cope with, or in many cases embrace. The enormous bureaucracy of modern governments, metropolitan populations, and the power of a global economy are things that prepare us to observe our smallness in comparison to a mountain like Telaquana, even while standing directly under it without feeling the emotional vertigo described by the explorers of the sublime such as Kant and Edmund Burke. But this mountain and surrounding landscape have a quality that dwarfs not only us, but also our entire civilization, economy, and history. The time scales represented in this landscape humble our assessment of history the same way the mountain and receding tundra challenge our estimation of physical scale. This landscape places human history in a larger perspective, so large in fact it creates its own feeling of the sublime, a temporal sublime.

Looking around I see nature operating on a variety of time frames. A few fit into a human scale like the yearly migration of the arctic terns or the cycle of freeze and thaw on the lakes. Others are longer, like the travels of the caribou who leave deep ruts the width of roads in the tundra when they pass through in herds several thousand strong. I am sharing this rock with a large rhizocarpon, a type of map lichen. Unless you are a caribou who likes to dine on lichen you probably don't spend too much time thinking about them, but they do have an interesting property which is useful when talking about time: they tend to grow at a uniform rate. This has spawned the science lichenometry, a method of dating exposed rock surfaces by calibrating the growth rate of the lichen living on them. Lichenometry can be accurate but because lichen grow at vastly different rates in different environments, taking a growth rate curve from one area and applying it to another will not produce accurate data. This minor setback, however, doesn't stop me from wondering about its age and playing the game of armchair lichenometrist. Rhizocarpon has a growth rate between a couple hundredths and one millimeter per year making it quite possible that this large colony has been working on this rock since Kant's time. It was likely here when Europeans first came to the Lake Clark region, and while the human world was experiencing the violent upheavals and struggles of the last one hundred years this little yellow and black colony was quietly digging into this rock. It probably looks about the same today as the day I was born. From the point of view of the lichen human history is like the history of mayflies. Our insistence on writing history solely in human terms the way Paul Shepard observed, "conceives the past mainly in terms of biography and nations," begins to look shortsighted when you begin to see how long the processes of nature are compared to our own. The way this challenges our inherited values by showing how easily and completely they can be contained in a larger framework is sympathetic to Kant's definition, "the sublime is that in which comparison with which everything else is small," and further, "we willing call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature."

A few inches of lichen on a rock is probably not what Kant had in mind when he developed his ideas of the sublime; the lichen doesn't inspire fear, but it does plant the seeds for doubt about the assumptions which allow us to go about our daily lives. I have a natural inclination to defend myself against this doubt with a sort of teleological argument which takes refuge in the accomplishments of modern humanity. I console myself with the idea that our ends and purposes are greater than the lichen's, that we as individuals contribute to a meaningful history and that if our lives are short at least our history and accomplishment are lasting. We have gone to the moon, cured polio, and produced lasting works of art, all greater and more permanent things than what is happening on this unswept stone. Endowing ourselves with a role in a great human history with a Hegelian purpose may overcome this mild temporal sublime but when I look to the west across the tundra to the terminus of the piedmont glacier flowing down Telaquana Mountain I am back where I started. The ebb and flow of this glacier which once covered the area I am standing, and is responsible for the placement of my lichen-covered rock, has been shaping this area for all of recorded human history. While imagining the glacier as a slow river with eddies, tides and rapids, my mind is forced to a temporal scale which makes it difficult to judge our historical tradition and the purposiveness of our striving as anything other than an illusion. Paul Valéry in The Crisis of the Mind beautifully captured this overwhelming temporal sublime:

We modern civilisations have learned to recognise that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered with all their men and all their engines, sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics, romantics, symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics.

We like to hold our young civilization exempt from the effects of time but proof of Valéry's foundered empires is scattered across this landscape. Artifacts from a people who lived here eight to ten thousand years ago can be found throughout this area mingled with more recent artifacts of an entirely different people who moved into the region only a couple thousand years ago. Entire religions, languages, and cultures have been absorbed into this tundra. In our culture we place a special significance on the individual and create a history from the biographies of people whose ideas and acts we think of as extraordinary. When I consider that the people who occupied this land did so not for hundreds, but for thousands of years, I think of Claude Levi-Strauss who challenged our exceptionalism when he wrote, "I see no reason why mankind should have waited until recent times to produce minds of the caliber of a Plato or an Einstein." The land before me likely holds the dust of the bones of such people. Stepping back and viewing history in this framework is similar to imagining myself in the satellite photo. Our entire recorded history becomes so miniscule as to be invisible and ephemeral. Wilderness is an exercise in humility. We often argue the need to establish and preserve wildness in pragmatic terms—how it can be a tool in our economic goals or how it effects our health—but there are other equally persuasive reasons to keep large areas untrammeled by development. The sublime humbles our ambitions, our economy, and our history but also adds dimension and a wisdom lacking in our workaday life. That these areas exist even while I sit in an office at a computer, or stuck in traffic—that the glacier continues to shape the land, the caribou continue to migrate across the tundra, and the lichen slowly adds a millimeter to its circumference—offers perspective and presents a wider framework in which to judge the madness and folly that surrounds our daily lives.

Next: The Ecumenism of the Bear

Š2005 Mark Meyer