Introduction: Exiled from Oneself– Art and Other Strange Migrations …

Summary

His brain convulsed,

his mind split open.

Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings

and launchings came over him,

he staggered and flapped desperately,

he was revolted by the thought of known places

and dreamed strange migrations.

(Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray)

The sublime is like that, it fucks you up. It exiles you from yourself in an ec-stasis painfully suspended between cosmic awareness and crushing madness. A state that sends Sweeney careering around Ireland and Scotland as a bird fleeing the fateful spear. But while most of the narrative is spent describing his hardships– the physical and psychic torments of this exile from his ‘self’– there are other moments when Sweeney experiences inhuman and incomprehensible joy in the animal rhythms of nature.

I prefer the elusive

rhapsody of blackbirds

to the garrulous blather

of men and women.

I prefer the squeal of badgers

in their sett

to the tally-ho

of the morning hunt.

I prefer the reechoing

belling of a stag

among the peaks

to that arrogant horn.

(Heaney 1983: 43)

Sweeney's life has jumped the boundary dividing men from animals as he joins the hunted, a life dictated by the basic imperative to survive. The pathos of this inversion is expressed in his continuous lament for what he has lost, for his humanity and for the powers of kingship it inferred on him. But through the trials and tribulations of his now nerve-wracked and flighty state shine moments of pleasure, the shivering joy of a life free of the trivialities of being human. Cast out of human form, constantly on the wing, despairing, Sweeney nevertheless sees everything anew, fresh with morning dew glistening at dawn. Living an unmediated life between man and nature, buffeted in turns by hardships and ecstatic visions, continually overwhelmed, Sweeney experiences life's pain and pleasure, and in losing his human part he gains something greater … the sublime.

Immanuel Kant established art's ‘aesthetic’ dimension as that of pleasure and pain, arguing that certain sensations cause us to pass a judgment (‘that is beautiful’, ‘that is sublime’) that is universally true. This is a definition that has remained in place until the relatively recent, and by no means definitive, end of modernism.