Stress and the Sublime

I've been reading John Burroughs's essays in my effort to "learn to see" and though I've established a walking route and rhythm that might constitute a routine, nothing about the attention exercise itself is routine. Burroughs writes, "Neither the seer nor seen is fixed," as in, all is in flux and change. Case in point: this cholla cactus turned purple having been green only the day before. I searched out the other chollas nearby and discovered, in the main, them still green while this one and its nearest neighbor purple. I could not detect any discernible difference in kind that might explain it. Are these two connected underground in some way the others are not? What am I missing? What can't I see? As I continued on, I found other clusters exhibiting this variation, some with more green than purple, others more purple than green. I found some prickly pear with purple paddles as well.

Turns out, this turning of color--and it sure is beautiful--is a stress response. The most common cause tends to be high UV exposure, but other stresses can occasion this as well. The plant is protecting itself and in most cases will return to its normal green self once the stressor has been mitigated.

When I'm stressed, I'm not that beautiful.

Probably ten years ago now I came across a news piece about a Japanese company testing a technology that would register a driver's mood in the vehicle's headlights. I remember very little about it other than the imaginative leaps this provoked: can you imagine such a obvious, uncontrollable tell? Imagine not having to or being able to hide your feelings. No road rage hissy fits in the privacy of my vehicle because my headlights are glowing red and frowning (somehow) for all to see. Potential upside: a couple might park their cars nose to nose and let the headlights report their respective feelings, no longer to suffer nonverbal illiteracy or searching for words that won't offend. Just sit in our cars until the headlights are back to green and smiling.

I'm quite sure it's more nuanced than this and for all I know, this is already an active technology, somewhere, somehow, for some reason. But the purple cholla brought it to mind along with some questions: how do I deal with stress? What are my stressors? Might my own stress responses be more beautiful? Does this seem an ill-chosen word or goal, to respond to stress more beautifully? I think it's right, a reckoning with beauty. In Edmund Burke's classic A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), the beautiful as an aesthetic value and the sublime as an effect produces the strongest emotion the mind can register. Burke wrote, "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." This notion of the sublime ends up at the heart of Romanticism and subsets like the Alpine Sublime or Religious Sublime and further morphs into a more common notion today that links sublime with good or heavenly and underplays this connection to terror.

Of course I'm not speaking of the petty stressors like long lines at the post office or the grumpy bureaucrat inflicting suffering en masse. For such I must rise with Emerson to say that my disturbance by such is my own damn fault: I've given that power to them, and this is work for another day as well. For the moment though, let us speak only of the biggies: like the cholla turning purple in a battle for its continuance, I think when it comes to these more terrible stressors in my own life I might show my own colors more beautifully, and thereby experience the strongest emotions my mind can have, a mind filled in that same moment with a kind of sublime horror, born of vastness, desperation, uncertainty, death, confusion. I need to think about this some more. Thanks to my cholla amigos for getting my attention.