Impossibility
Title: Impossibility
Genre: romance/philosophy
Characters: Thomas Bernhard, Anton Chekhov, T.E. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Table: 2
Prompt: #6: Sunset
Word Count: 917
Rating: G
Summary: Why you never can’t describe a single sunset.
Impossibility
Anton Chekhov once insisted that the best way to describe a sunset was to say that the sun set. Maybe Ludwig Wittgenstein would tell you the same because of what about you can’t talk you should be silent. Or take the attempt by T.E. Lawrence to describe Petra, the colourful sand-stone town of the ancient Nabataeans:
“Petra - the most powerful place in the world, not for the sake of it’s ruins, which are quite a secondary affair, but for the colour of it’s rocks, all red and black and grey with streaks of green and blue, in little wriggly lines … and for the shape of its cliffs and crags and pinnacles, and for the wonderful gorge it has, always running deep in springwater, full of oleanders, and ivy and ferns, and only just wide enough for a camel at a time, and a couple of miles long. But I have read hosts of most beautifully written accounts of it, and they give one no idea of it at all … and I am sure I cannot write nearly as nicely as they have … so you will never know what Petra is like, unless you come out here … Only be assured that till you have seen it you have not had the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.”[1]
You very know such beauty won’t neither be described by words nor photographs or movies. Logically it always has to be a failure, because you always see it through someone other’s eyes not the one’s of yourself. And it’s the same the other way round: You describe the beauty of a moment, you try to pick out the right words but couldn’t find them because they don’t exist in spoken languages, just in your mind. That’s Wittgenstein and he is so desperately right. But what Chekhov said isn’t enough, I think, because you always have to be prepared on moments of pure beauty in life, otherwise it may happen to you like this:
“Out of the most concerts I get one or two or three exquisite moments when myself goes suddenly empty, the entire consciousness taking flight into space upon these vibrations of perfect sound. Each time lasts an instant only: more, and I should die, for it holds still my breath and blood and vital fluid. Just to the ecstasy of a poem lies in the few words here and there - an affair of seconds.”[2]
Out of this case I want to describe a sunset anyway, although I haven’t got the words for all the beauty itself. Though I’m just able to describe the process. In fact I don’t want knowing you standing there one day in Wadi Rumm not knowing the stunning beauty of a sunset there. With the following advices - and there will be just amateurish advices - I want to prepare you for the sunset in Wadi Rumm. It will be no painting, just a rough drawing.
At first you have to walk for yourself, totally alone into the deserted countryside of red sand, red-black mountain formation down in Jordan. If you go by car with a group of screaming tourists, all the magic and beauty will be far from you and you’ll never feel what you should. But if you are a deep thinking and feeling person, not able to stand more than seconds of real splendour you maybe have to take one person with you for leading you back healthy into civilization right after this enigma that takes place there every day.
Now you walk into the desert, straight between the high mountains, some darker, some fairer, some brighter, some duller. Then you choose one hill, not as high as the others around for climbing above. So, that will be a healing process - climbing a hill in a desert. There is so much in it: mystic, religion, spirituality … and around you: silence, silence, silence and much more of it. Once you stand upon the hill you may turn to the big sun nearly fading away. Maybe it seems to you that it’s bigger than your’s at home and brighter and more red and that the sunset itself takes much lesser time than usually. That’s not an accident at all. That’s because you are totally focused on what’s going on in front of you. You also shall not talk the whole time the sunset takes, to talk just diverts. Just be focused on the sunset and breath every second there on the hill, so you can be sure that you get the entire event, that you after it, when the sun is gone and suddenly a cold breeze blows strongly into your face, maybe with some particles of hot sand, biting into your skin, then there in this very second you are in a similar mood I was on that hill in Wadi Rumm. I was nearly to die with some tears into my eyes, that were blown away by the sand. My heart hurt, was nearly to break, my head full of thoughts about everything and my whole mood totally overwhelming that there was just a second more of this missing to left me there forever in the highest disposition I had in my life.
You see, you can’t describe a moment of beauty or magic, you just can make it kitschy, as Thomas Bernhard would say. And that’s why I finish here just now, hoping that you will also enjoy that moment one day.
Finis.
[1] T.E. Lawrence to E.T. Leeds, 28 Feb 1914. IN: Malcolm Brown (ed.), T.E. Lawrence. The Selected Letters, New York 1992, 59.
[2] 352087 A/c Ross (i.e. T.E. Lawrence), The Mint, London 1955, 105.
100 situations table