Elevation

Elevations are funny. We always associate them with things that are noble and good, even though there is nothing that can demonstrate that empirically. Elevation, in and of itself, is just a height above a given level. The level could be anything: the sea, my chair, the floor. However, as soon as one refers to an elevation, images of the sublime appear: clouds at the top of a mountain, a rocket leaving Earth's atmosphere. The gods on Mount Olympus. The view of Paris at the top of the Eiffel Tower. These are all things evocative of exhilaration, exaltation, magnificence.

Take Baudelaire. His poem “Elevation.”

Above the ponds, above the valleys,

Mountains, woods, clouds, seas,

Beyond the sun, beyond the ethers,

Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,

My spirit, you move with agility,

And, like a good swimmer enraptured in the waves,

You gleefully furrow the profound immensity

With an indescribable and male determination.

Fly far away from these morbid miasmas;

Go, purify yourself in the rarefied air

And drink, like a pure and divine liquor,

The clear fire that fills the crystalline spaces.

Leave behind the troubles and vast chagrins

That bear down on the murkiness of existence,

Happy is the one who can hurl themselves

Into the serene and luminous zones with a single vigorous wing!

The one whose thoughts, like swallows,

Swoop to the skies in sheer freedom,

-       Who hover over life, and effortlessly understand

The language of flowers and other mute things!

Baudelaire’s elevation has little to do with altitude. It’s all attitude. The euphoria is palpable. This is a clear mental state. There’s an exhilarating sense of power enhanced by an exquisite sense of being, giddily and freshly unshackled from the burdens and murk of everyday existence. The experience he’s presenting is elemental, waves, wings, the language of mute things, things with a language all their own, the language of space, the language of air, the language of zones outside the tiny parameters of our miasmic subjectivity. Enveloped in this rapture, the sky becomes a “divine liquor.” You can feel the poem’s energy trying to break free of itself and become a thing as elemental and primary as the experiences it describes.

I was eighteen when I first encountered this poem. It blew my mind. I hadn’t connected with anything that deeply before. Bob Dylan’s music and lyrics had had a profound effect on my direction, but this poem spoke to me at a very deep level. I wasn’t a happy adolescent. Few are. In U.S. culture, once you graduate from high school, you’re either off to college or the start of a soul-killing, brain-deadening job. I also had the specter of the draft and the Vietnam war casting a menacing shadow over me.

I later discovered in Baudelaire a hatred for the mediocrities and stupidities of the western culture bourgeoisie. I had a taste for the exotic, a powerful appetite for spiritual and metaphysical adventures, ambrosial, rarefied indulgences that ran counter to the withering literalness and pragmatic obsessions of what the German sociologist Max Weber described in the title of a singularly insightful book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Nietzsche, too, enjoyed a singular obsession with elevation. Unlike Baudelaire, who sought elevation in wine and hashish, in sexual freedom, in sublime, otherworldly pleasures and a contrarian aesthetic, Nietzsche looks for elevation in suffering, in great suffering. There’s a bit of that in Baudelaire as well, an acute fascination with the exquisite tortures of maladjustment and chronic dissatisfaction, but in Nietzsche the suffering is Olympian:

The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul--has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

In chemistry, it’s called sublimation: it occurs when a substance goes directly from a solid to a gaseous state without passing through an intermediate liquid state. One minute you’re a brick, the next you’re an angel. It’s an endothermic change in that the substance absorbs sufficient heat from its surroundings to volatilize. Chemists use sublimation to purify a substance from its compounds. Poets use it to volatilize into poetry and its cheerful luxury of detaching from the impurities of a world obsessed with money.

I prefer the idea of sublimation to elevation. I’m afraid of heights. I don’t see any mountain climbing in my future. I will not be leaping off of a cliff in one of the fjord of Norway in a webbed suit with a parachute to be opened at the last possible minute. I believe this is called BASE jumping, and while it’s looks like a total adrenalin rush, it also looks totally insane. I will be staying at home in my chair, attaining elevations by way of metaphor, which is a form of sublimation requiring words, a brilliant capacity for play, and the craftiness of a Houdini to unshackle the chains keeping me here.