Awe

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air —

When it comes, the Landscape listens —

Shadows — hold their breath —

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death —

In hearing “certain slant of light” and “the Landscape listens” and “look of Death,” my heart paused and my eyes teared up slightly, accompanied by a faint rush of chills up my spine. I understood in my body the vastness of loss, leaning in with other audience members in a shared awareness of this fundamental truth. And then heard Hass again:

WHOA.

And then to finish, a poem by Gary Snyder. Sitting near a small fire in the Sierras, Snyder draws connections between the fire warming his body, the volcanic fires that created the mountain he was near, and Buddhist fire rituals that purify the soul. Hass ends with a saying of the Buddha:

We are all burning.

WHOA.

Hass’s whoas and the poetic words he read stirred audience members to open their minds, to wonder about our moral failings, death, our connections to neighbors and the mysterious operations of their minds, the meanings of light and cathedral tunes, and how fire creates mountains and granite and, metaphorically, our souls. Literature, drama, essay, and poetry join us in the experience of awe and allow us to benefit from its transformations. In one test of this idea, students were first presented with this question: “Why are we alive?” They then wrote a poem to capture their thinking and reported upon the awe they felt while writing. The poems were then rated by PhD students of literature for how sublime they were according to these criteria that date back to ancient Greece:

Did the poem have boldness and grandeur of thoughts?

Did it raise passions to a violent or enthusiastic degree?

Did it show skillful use of language? Graceful expression?

Did it reveal elegant structure and composition?

Another group of participants then read the poems and reported on how much they were inspired by their words. The critical finding: the more student poets felt awe in writing their poems, the more those poems were judged as sublime by the PhD students; and the more sublime the poem, the more inspiration student readers felt. We can transform experiences of awe into shared aesthetic experiences that unite us into something larger than the self.

This archiving of awe, of translating the body of awe into a cultural form, was part of how Claire Tolan would make her way in Berlin. She transformed her sensations of ASMR into creative acts of twenty-first-century culture. She hosted a show on Berlin community radio featuring live ASMR collages. With a fellow artist, she hosted social events in Berlin nightclubs that involved ASMR karaoke, where participants whispered songs and audience members whispered for encores.

WHOA.

Awe and culture are always evolving. Several thousand years ago, it was a time of everyday awe. Indigenous peoples found awe in relation to nature, stories, ceremony, dance, chanting, song, visual design, and in states of consciousness beyond our ordinary ideas about space, time, and causality. Lao Tzu would orient a continent to the mysteries of a life force, Tao, in nature. Plato would declare that wonder is the source of philosophy, and the means by which we answer life’s great questions, including those that have concerned us here: What is our soul? How do we find what is sacred to us?

Twenty-five hundred years ago, accounts of mystical experiences, like those of Julian of Norwich, begin to dominate the written history of awe, from the Buddha and Christ until the Age of Enlightenment. This archiving of mystical awe in legends, myths, teachings, ceremonies, iconography, and temples would become a fabric of religions. Awe was transforming, at least in the historical record, into a largely religious emotion, reflecting our efforts to make sense of the Divine and to build community in the face of violence, expanding trade, the breakdown of the family, and the privileging of self-interest over communal sharing.