{"id":475,"date":"2021-09-28T11:38:33","date_gmt":"2021-09-28T15:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/?p=475"},"modified":"2021-09-28T11:38:33","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T15:38:33","slug":"heaven-is-a-place-in-your-head-covid-19-angels-in-america-and-the-sublime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/issue-2\/heaven-is-a-place-in-your-head-covid-19-angels-in-america-and-the-sublime\/","title":{"rendered":"Heaven Is a Place in Your Head: COVID-19, Angels in America, and the Sublime\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Responding to the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jane Brinkley turns to the sublime: the sense of awe we feel when witnessing a force of incredible magnitude or power. Brinkley uses two narratives from the AIDS epidemic to exemplify the sublime \u2014 David Wojnarowicz\u2019s Close to the Knives and Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America \u2014 and through these narratives offers a powerful commentary on life, death, and the art birthed by enormous tragedies. –Ari Jewell ’22, Editorial Assistant<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

Heaven Is a Place in Your Head: <\/b>COVID-19, <\/b>Angels in America<\/i><\/b>, and the Sublime\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
Jane Brinkley ’24<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I don\u2019t always feel like reading these days, but who does? The pandemic thwarts any attempt to remain steadily focused on a narrative through-line, and besides, my untouched sci-fi novels feel, at first glance, closer to some terrible, days-near present than the usual \u201cwhat if\u201d escapism with which a novel has always whisked me away. Reading <\/span>In the Night Kitchen <\/span><\/i>to my six-year-old cousin is more engaging than the average political think-piece nowadays\u2014I find myself pleasantly submerged in the grandeur of those big, faceless chefs, the tons of dough into which plops the little naked boy plucked from his bed. Beholding comically gigantic bread allows me to consider my own size, my insignificance: maybe in times of terrible illness, there is something comforting about the sublime.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Maurice Sendak. In the Night Kitchen (Cover Image). 1970.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First introduced by John Burke in the 18th century, sublimity refers to the overwhelming feeling of astonishment or rapture that occurs when one beholds something of great magnitude or power from a safe distance\u2014the strongest emotion, he thought, that humans are capable of feeling. The COVID-19 pandemic has provoked a new aesthetic and affective repertoire in many that feels sublime: take, for example, the early fly-by videos of miles and miles of desolate cities, or the ever-mounting online charts meant to represent the shapeless mass of infections and deaths. Scientists and statisticians have tried to render the sheer, overwhelming loss from the illness through comparisons\u2014\u201cimagine that ten concert halls worth of people have died\u201d\u2014but such examples only confuse us; we cannot, after all, literally see the accumulated dead piled up in concert halls, just as we cannot see the virus itself. The sublime thrives on incomprehension, on the invisibility and inscrutability of some massive whole. We stay cooped up in our homes, observing the incomprehensible numbers becoming more incomprehensible, and the little details in life become less important. We stop worrying so much about those things that don\u2019t align with our values; we gain perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was in ruminating upon this that I picked up David Wojnarowicz\u2019s <\/span>Close to the Knives. <\/span><\/i>Wojnarowicz, a gay, unhoused man made famous for his livid, densely symbolic art, wrote the book a year before he would die of AIDS. The memoir is commanding, urgent, and rambling; at times he fills a page or more with the same run-on sentence. Wojnarowicz is profoundly political, but not preachily so\u2014in fact, his words vibrate with a sort of radical honesty that slashes through the vaguely didactic truism I\u2019ve grown used to in much public scholarship about COVID-19. In many ways, he seems to be elegizing something that was not ever granted elegy: the death of a gay man with AIDS, the death of himself, whatever that means. But if, as ACT UP, the activist group to which he belonged, says, SILENCE = DEATH, then <\/span>Knives <\/span><\/i>is very much alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Peter Hujar, “David Wojnarowicz.” 1981.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his first essay, Wojnarowicz, close to death, drives away from a sexual rendezvous with a stranger and squeezes his eyes shut for quarter-mile swaths of highway. He writes, \u201cI feel that I\u2019m caught in the invisible arms of government in a country slowly dying beyond our grasp. There is something singing of this, something in the currents of wind and breeze floating along the black electric cables lining the roads, something I can\u2019t see or touch but moves in the shape of vowels and uttered sounds like spinning soft bodies of birds playing with the sky\u2026. Hell is a place on earth. <\/span>Heaven is a place in your head\u201d <\/span><\/i>(32).<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Angels In America, <\/span><\/i>this not-so-distant pandemic forces ordinary people to reckon with the sublime. Prior, a gay man dying from AIDS, speaks to his partner Louis about a newly-discovered dimension of his ancestry\u2014a ship captain and oil merchant to whom he is related sent seventy women and children off in a lifeboat as his operation sank to the floor of the Nova Scotia coast. As the weather roughened, Prior explains, \u201cthey thought the boat was overcrowded\u2026 the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea\u2026 people in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, smiling men\u2026 seize\u2026 with no warning at all\u201d (47\u201348). Prior\u2019s description hinges on the oblivious violence of nature, and the unjust randomness of death. He is removed from the danger of the unfathomable loss by time, and the object (in this case the mass of dead women and children in his imagination) completely fills his mind. As he goes on, he adds that, \u201cwhen time is running out, I find myself drawn to anything that\u2019s suspended, that lacks an ending\u2026 no judgement, no guilt\u201d (48). He\u2019s rejecting, in essence, the prescriptive approach that organized religion might take in acknowledging the magnitude of loss. Instead of presuming he can comprehend, Prior accepts that he will never do so\u2014and this incomprehension frees him to experience the sublime, to accept a sort of relative smallness that ultimately makes him bigger in more important ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final monologue of <\/span>Angels in America, <\/span><\/i>Harper contemplates such a question as she sits on an airplane bound for San Francisco. As she floats into the upper echelons of the atmosphere, she reflects: \u201cI saw something that only I could see \u2026 Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up\u2026 the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls… the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired\u201d (275). Harper, who sits at a safe distance from her vision, is made small by this magnitude of death. The little trivialities of her life (she is \u201csick of details,\u201d (107)) are thrown into harsh relief, and she feels situated in a greater, more awesome whole, which brings about the sublime. Rather than the souls of the AIDS dead being <\/span>absolved <\/span><\/i>or <\/span>forgiven<\/span><\/i>, they are <\/span>repaired. <\/span><\/i>This is a sort of Judgment Day, but a very Earthly one\u2014a situated observation and acknowledgment of incomprehension, rather than an assignment of guilt, is the defining action that Harper carries out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
David Wojnarowicz. \u201cScience Lesson.\u201d 1982-1983.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2010, 18 years after Wojnarowicz\u2019s death, members of the Catholic League stormed the Smithsonian Museum in D.C. to protest an exhibition of his art. <\/span>Works such as Science Lesson <\/i>(1982\u201383) and The Fire in My Belly <\/i>(1986\u201387) were deemed offensive and anti-religious, and parts of the installation were removed. Some of his pieces are inflammatory\u2014<\/span>The Fire, <\/span><\/i>for example, depicts a cross covered in squirming ants\u2014but others are, to my eye, not. Rather, they are, in many cases, <\/span>sublime<\/span><\/i>, depicting bodies hurled through outer space, sleeping giants, and reddish skeletons propped up against planets. If heaven is, as Wojnarowicz hypothesizes, a place in our head, then maybe the sublime is a threat to absolutist notions of life and death\u2014a threat, in other words, to the forces that sought to discipline and underplay the HIV\/AIDS crisis. Maybe paintings and plays from COVID-19 will look, too, a bit like <\/span>In The Night Kitchen<\/span><\/i>\u2013earth-shattering, incompressible, and utterly beautiful in their own sublime sort of way.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDavid Wojnarowicz.\u201d Artnet. www.artnet.com\/artists\/david-wojnarowicz\/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hujar, Peter.\u00a0David Wojnarowicz.<\/em> 1981 Photograph. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York.<\/p>\n

Kushner, Tony. <\/span>Angels In America<\/span><\/i>: a Gay Fantasia on National Themes<\/em>. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Quinton, Anthony. \u201cBurke on the Sublime and Beautiful.\u201d <\/span>Philosophy<\/span><\/i>, vol. 36, no. 136, 1961,\u00a0<\/span>pp. 71\u201373. <\/span>\u00a0JSTOR<\/i>, www.jstor.org\/stable\/3748935.\u00a0Accessed 6 Dec. 2020.<\/p>\n

Sendak, Maurice. <\/span>In the Night Kitchen<\/span><\/i> (Cover image). <\/span>Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia<\/span><\/i>. https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/In_the_Night_Kitchen#\/media\/File:Sendak-nightkitchen.jpg. <\/span>Accessed 23 Aug. 2021.<\/p>\n

Wojnarowicz, David. <\/span>Close to the Knives: a Memoir of Disintegration<\/span><\/i>. London: Canongate Books, 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wojnarowicz, David.\u00a0Science Lesson.” <\/em>1982-83. Original. Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Responding to the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jane Brinkley turns to the sublime: the sense of awe we feel when witnessing a force of incredible magnitude or power. Brinkley uses two narratives from the AIDS epidemic to exemplify the sublime \u2014 David Wojnarowicz\u2019s Close to the Knives and Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":231,"featured_media":517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[11,24,23,25],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-2","tag-literary-analysis","tag-pandemic","tag-queer-art","tag-sublime"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/368\/2021\/08\/Science-Lessons.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/231"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}