Old Creek Rites

Sullivan, James. “Warm-Up.” Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. Da Capo Press: Boston, 2010. (Page 7)

To be sublime, we understand, is an exalted, elevated, or awe-inspiring state. But what about sublimer? Or sublimest? We can also be subliming, have sublimed in the past, or have seen someone or something sublimes. 

As a verb, the transformative potential of the sublime is captured— the miraculous process of changing from one state, such as from a solid to a liquid to a gas, into another. When we say something is sublime, it is not just to describe that it is exalted, it is to express awe in the contrast between the mundane or ordinary and the outstanding. It is not enough to gape at the miraculous; we must also peer at the abyss between and speculate at the whys that went into each degree of separation. 

Traditionally, in philosophy and aesthetics, the sublime is represented by the wide expanse of the night sky, the wildness of an untamable storm, or the depth of the sea. In literature and art, the sublime has been represented frequently by the awe and vastness of nature, as well as by overwhelming emotions and the existential realization of human fragility or smallness. Technology, space exploration, and war brought new shifts to the perception of the sublime in the twentieth century. Rather than nature being the chief source of inspiration, technology, such as machines, rockets, and nuclear power, became active in the cultural imagination. 

Likewise, in this same century, world wars shifted awe of the divine to existential terror. In particular, this has been detailed in art, literature, and cinema movements where silence and fragmentation replaced descriptive narratives. Postmodernism also brought themes of the absurd and the infinite, where before there was sublime meaning, there was now meaninglessness. Leading to the most favorite activities of all 20th-century thinkers—skepticism and irony. Similar to the sublime, irony is a contrast between opposites that reveals a landscape and helps us understand nature better. Skepticism provides the questions, and perhaps between the two, rather than the abyss that previously separated the ordinary from the extraordinary, we have begun to reveal the road between. 

Comedians rely on contrast. While the experience is objectively aimed at entertainment, it also carries a grander thesis. As an antithesis of the sublime, the ridiculous showcases nature, whether it is ours or the universe’s, in the same way that we perceive differences by standing at the base of a mountain or at the top of an abyss. The task of the comedian is navigate the absurd so that we may embrace what is other.

Now, in the 21st century, how we conceptualize, or fail to conceptualize, what is imposing or magnificent in existence has once again shifted. Instead of natural systems like mountains, storms, and oceans, we have failing climate systems, like melting ice caps and dying reef systems. Secondly, the concept of technology has reached levels of awe as AI and algorithms have surpassed comprehension. Additionally, space telescopes are providing images of the universe beyond our Earthly reach, and along with the wonder of these visualizations, we have also discovered new levels of existential dread and dependence. 

With these changes, there are three shifts in how the sublime is perceived.

• 1) Negative Awe: For example, we have come to the realization that climate change is now irreversible, leading to a feeling of being overwhelmed without transcendence. 
• 2) Digital Mediation: the use of screens has looped, curated, and filtered our experience of the world so much that the performance of awe has been flattened and made consumable. A debate about what the authentic experience of the sublime persists and requires further inquiry.
• 3) Previously, when we looked up at the stars to experience the sublime, the encounter was with the infinite (God, nature, the great beyond). Now, when we look at the stars, the sublime we encounter mirrors our own ambitions: the power to destroy, the inability to control that power, and our collective agency and failure. Along with the knowledge that we are all guilty by association as Earthlings, regardless of the extent of our participation, a cosmic reckoning is unavoidable. 

That said, the comedians and artists still persist. The same tools that deconstruct our understanding of the awesome also provide moments of perception through the lenses of satire, the uncanny, and embracing trauma. Pointing out weaknesses to make them strengths is a core trope of comedians who have also made strong cultural shifts to punch up against systems and power, not just individuals, target satire at capitalism and tech, and assume cultural literacy with identity-aware humor rather than ignorance. 

So, in the context of the 21st century, as technology and climate destruction have increased existential dread alongside the mind-deadening awe effects of media, the answer to the question: have you sublimed today? May be accessed by asking: Are you humble? Are you grateful? Do you see yourself in others? Do others see you in them? Have you laughed because you heard the truth in someone’s words? 

ChatGTP:

That line is doing a lot of quiet work. Read it less as a literal claim and more as a diagnosis of modern American sensibility.

In short:
the traditional sublime (awe, terror, transcendence) collapses, in twentieth-century America, into irony, kitsch, and spectacle. And the speaker treats that collapse as almost inevitable—“How could any thinking person see it otherwise?”—which already signals a world where earnest transcendence feels naïve.

Here’s how it breaks down.

1. What “the sublime” used to mean

In the Romantic and early modern sense, the sublime named experiences that overwhelmed the self: vast nature, moral terror, metaphysical scale. Think mountains, oceans, God, infinity—experiences that shattered irony rather than invited it.

But twentieth-century America is no longer organized around scarcity, wilderness, or metaphysical hunger in the same way.

2. Why America finds “the ridiculous” instead

The sentence assumes that mass culture has displaced transcendence. In the U.S., the places where one might once have found awe are now saturated by:

• advertising
• entertainment
• repetition
• commodification
• self-conscious irony

When everything is mediated, branded, televised, and sold, the attempt to reach the sublime risks becoming theatrical or absurd.

This is why American artists and thinkers so often encounter the ridiculous where they were hoping for the numinous.

3. Irony as a defense mechanism

The final question—“How could any thinking person see it otherwise?”—is crucial. It implies:

• sincerity feels intellectually irresponsible
• belief feels embarrassing
• awe feels manipulable

This is the cultural posture later wrestled with by writers like David Foster Wallace, who saw irony as both necessary and spiritually deadening: a shield that protects intelligence at the cost of meaning.

4. The American sublime becomes parody

Instead of terror and transcendence, America produces:

• the oversized (billboards, highways, Las Vegas)
• the excessive (consumer choice, abundance, noise)
• the hyper-visible

Artists like Andy Warhol didn’t reject this—they leaned into it, showing that repetition and emptiness were the new “awe.” But it’s an awe stripped of depth: fascinating, funny, hollow.

5. What the sentence is really saying

Not just “America failed to find the sublime,” but:

A culture organized around spectacle can only experience transcendence as farce.

And worse: once you see that, you can’t unsee it. Hence the rhetorical inevitability—how could any thinking person see it otherwise?