Once, in a particularly flat part of England, I sat in an exam hall in a state of terror and wrote a paper on The Sublime, a concept I remember giving me a fair amount of trouble back then. (I still mentally capitalize the phrase for reasons beyond its formal, philosophical canonization.) Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on aesthetics sought to define and enshrine The Sublime as “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.” For Burke, there was a beauty in this terror-in the mind becoming “so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other”-but “the beautiful” itself (lowercase) was some other, lesser category. Beauty was small, the sublime was vast. Naturally, then, mountains figure prominently in Burke’s asseverations: the bigger and gloomier, the better. Dismissing “soft and cheel’ful colors” as “unfit to produce grand images”, he insists that “an immense mountain covered with a shining green turf, is nothing, in this respect, to one dark and gloomy.”
Nearly 12 years after writing that paper, I found myself living among grand Burkean images, namely the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I was not in Kansas nor, indeed, the equally flat plains of England’s East Anglia, anymore. From bed, I can peer out at Bear Peak, which at an elevation of 8,459 feet, remains snow-capped much of the year and sufficiently immense to qualify as a worthy subject for a Romantic poet, Transcendentalist writer or Hudson River School painter. Contained, however, by my modestly sized window-a rectilinear frame that accentuates the perfect equilateral triangle point of the apex-the mountain suggests itself more as child’s drawing than a grandiose oil painting by Albert Bierstadt.
Bierstadt, who emerged in the 19th century as the foremost artist of the American West, covered huge canvases with rousing scenes of craggy, rugged terrain that was imposing and overpowering-as threatening as it was stirring. Visually speaking, this is where mountains begin in the American imaginary: with landscape configured as something to be conquered. Now, for reasons both ecological and political, we tend to conceive instead of the American West with anxiety-as something to be honored and preserved, bearing scars of sins that must be atoned for. “We are embarrassed by rapture,” writes the Marxist thinker Richard Seymour in an essay published in 2021 in Salvage 11: Already, Not Yet. “We know that there is no ‘pure Nature’, untouched.[ … ] We suspect that the hero’s journey into the wild is saturated with misanthropy and macho individualism, that it reeks of androcentrism and coloniality, that the wilderness aesthetic is loaded with the ideology of the frontier.”
Emily Dickinson, born in 1830, the same year as Bierstadt, appears sympathetic to Seymour’s distaste for “macho individualism,” casting a droll raised eyebrow toward masculinist might with this untitled poem:
The Mountain sat upon the Plain
In his tremendous Chair-
His observation omnifold,
His inquest, everywhere-
You’ll note the mountain is gendered male, rendered paternal and overbearing.
To perceive something as “omnifold” and “everywhere” is very much to meet Burke’s criterion: the mind so filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other. An encounter with the magnificently austere works of photographer Ansel Adams, who made monochrome photographs of alpine scenes in the last century, produces a similar effect. In sensibility, if not of course in medium (silver gelatin print, rather than his predecessors’ oil on canvas), Adams’s work continues a tradition of the western American sublime: his photographs of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Maroon Bells, Mesa Verde and so on, awe, overpower and, to some extent, repel.
In tracing this throughline, two troubling features suggest themselves. First, the conception of nature as something terrifying: a force which dominates or must be dominated. (Even though, it should be noted that Adams was a committed conservationist, whose project was at odds with Bierstadt’s prior one of nationalist, Westward Expansion boosterism.) Second, the intimation that the evocation of terror is the highest ideal to which visual art can aspire.
Geology represents deep time and, on such a scale, the distance between Burke’s England or Bierstadt’s America and our present is less than negligible. In civilizational terms, however, humanity has hurtled with precipitous speed into a largely godless “Anthropocene”: the period in which human activities are the dominant influence on the environment. It would have been fairly prescient, not to say remarkably courageous of Adams, who died in 1984, to perceive that the snowy peaks long-rendered immutable in poetry and painting were, in fact, features of a vulnerable planet dying an accelerating death at human hands. If nature is no longer eternal, what might this mean for the way an artist sees a mountain? Or, indeed, for the way we now see an artist’s mountain?
Last year, approving of my new identity as a hiker, a friend gave me a copy of a short, radiant book called The Living Mountain, an under-sung master-piece of nature writing first published in 1977. Written by Nan Shepherd, who spent much of her life roaming the Cairngorms in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, the book reananged my relationship to the trails and peaks beyond my door in Boulder. “To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain,” Shepherd notes. What a revelation. There are many paths up the mountain, as the prnverb has it, but what if you choose a path that doesn’t go up? What if, instead, there is enlightenment to be found in lateral, destination-less journeying rather than straight ascent to the incontrovertible end point of a summit? Shepherd herself found spiritual deliverance in wanderings, not up and down, but across and around this landscape.
As she wrote: “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular.”
I suspect that Shepherd and the great Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan would have found each other simpatico hiking partners. Adnan’s meditative, book-length essay from 1986, “Journey to Mount Tamalpais,” forms a harmonious companion piece to Shepherd’s book. This Californian mountain was for Adnan-as Mont Sainte-Victoire was for Paul Cezanne, Mount Fuji was for Hokusai and the Cerro Pedernal was for Georgia O’Keeffe-an eternal subject. The many small (incidentally, about the size of a bedroom window pane) and luminous paintings Adnan made of Tamalpais are her greatest achievement. Like O’Keeffe’s mountainscapes, with their yielding, undulating washes of mauves, terracottas and roses, an ecstasy of color sings out from Adnan’s paintings. Also, like O’Keeffe, Adnan tends to render her mountains in strata. They come in heaped, pillowy layers of saturated yellow, pink, orange, green-delicious-looking shades (indeed “cheerful,” to use Burke’s disparaging adjective) that awaken the toddler-like urge to grab the thing, pop it in your mouth and see what it tastes like. Both women’s mountainscapes welcome rather than repel. At one point in her essay, Adnan describes the minds of her and her companions as being, “furry, velvety, soft and curvilinear.” Her renditions of Tamalpais feel equally inviting and benevolent.
In the form of her meandering walks across the Cairngorms, Shepherd implicitly suggests horizontality as a feminized alternative to what we might think of-without straying too perilously into the crudely anatomical-as-masculine verticality: that drive to conquer the summit. “I need to circle the mountain, because I am water,” is one of Adnan’s more gnostic pronouncements. In 2022, however, the lateral properties of O’Keeffe’s and Adnan’s mountain paintings take on a different, urgent significance. As the droughts and fires of global warming continue to blight American mountainsides, it’s now often the case that the only immutable part of a mountain is the bare rock above its tree line. Where I live in Colorado, this line is a striking demarcation-a horizon separating the unchanged part from the changing, vulnerable part below. Adnan writes, in a mood of ecological sorrow: “Often I feel that we are alien creatures bruising Mother Earth, eating her plants, smashing her grass, fighting her clouds with our fists, raising her children for tomorrow’s young wars.” With this, the mountain seems to answer her: “‘Be as peaceful as I am,’ says Tamalpais.” Painting and writing, Adnan notes with gratitude,”give me the implicit certitude [ … ] of what the Mountain is and of what I see: I perceive a nature proper to her while I work.” For Adnan, unlike Dickinson, the mountain is female and benign.
Here is the suggestion of a different sublime, one in which the eye and mind are not filled with terror, but rather flooded with appreciation. Terror incapacitates. Appreciation, however, galvanizes.
1-lermionc l-loby istheauthoro/the110,,elsNeon in Daylight (20/B)aud Virtue (2022). Raised in lo11do11. she lives in Boalder. Colorado.