In the isosceles that is Messrs Treadwell, Irwin and Macauley, (TIM) we find a common theme in the facing of fears. But unlike their fears, the majority fear, isn't a matter of certain death, at worse it is mostly a case of chagrin.
Their exploration was antiquated, hero-like, to a point of them becoming ennobled, when juxtaposed to mere man, whether they sort it or not, when you take on beasts and the earth itself, the feeling of transcendence must be there.
In other examples, as we have seen, are the pseudo western guru's that get their money off of acid tourists who are looking for psycho-jungle therapy, deep in the Amazon. They offer a holiday of the mind by imbibing you with a shamanic brew, where after 24hrs you wake up jubilantly sobbing out a healthy dose of existential angst, post-analysis -and this is their exploration of the mind. But it's not hard to realise how disingenuous this concept is when imagining the Happy Mondays, post acid comedown, organising a workshop to discuss the experience.
Then we have the hippy humus girl beholding her multiple ingredients whilst staring ravenously, but also in visceral fear, at other non multi layered bio-dynamic tales of uncertainty.
In each case they are trying to reach the sublime. The "sublime" is a term in aesthetics, which refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that we experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision.
This metaphor can be applied to Messrs TIM in equal measures. But when have you ever eaten a sandwich and on the first bite declared it was sublime? When have you ever been in actual danger when eating a sandwich? If we are ever in danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime, being an aesthetic experience, is not a practical feeling of personal danger and this explains its combined feeling of anxiety.
Two concepts of the sublime:
The mathematically sublime: Our mental faculties are inadequate at matching the magnitude of what we see to what we know is there. We see a mountain or ocean but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert that it must have limits.
The dynamically sublime: Our sense of physical danger tells us that we are not just physical material beings, but moral beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by such magnitudes but our reason need not be.
This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.
Thus we realise the inadequacy of the imagination is not commensurable to reason and what we are seeing is the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and the edges of its conceptuality.
This straining is evident in the realisation that in every case, fear took hold of these seekers of the sublime and reduced them to scared boys who knew this time they had gone too far.
Now faced with the inevitable end, naively and prematurely brought on by their own hand, this left only themselves in their last moments of fearful existence to reflect on the futile nature of these noble activities when taken to extremes, which they first adopted as mere pastimes to fill the existential void of modern life.
These activities they then foolishly tried to make a way of life, contra to everyday mundanity.
To do this they had to validate it as full-time employment, job-title: Action man. Unfortunately when action men enter into competition it no longer becomes a sport, but a war and freak show taken to needless extremes in an attempt to make it all believable but also entertaining to the masses.
Now, unless you're some kind of part-time sky-diving part-time actor using as many mediated forms as a way of communication with your fellow man, then you don't need to validate such activities as insanely as the pseudo explorer monomaniac, with a need to be first in something, whether it is in pressure to paymasters or proof to themselves for their place in the universe. Thus, this constant straining had impaired reason, which in all the cases further caused ill preparation in their attitudes towards it and so did attribute eventually to their downfall.
If only they could have found or sought a centering or completion of the self by more everyday means, a face, a loved one, a local shop or even, in our case; a sandwich. Exchanging one isosceles triangular structure of thrill-seeking Victorian madness for one triangular structure of analyse, synthesise and evaluation of the everyday.
After the harrowing stories of Messrs TIM, it is now even more important to get other people to explore something more typical of our everyday, something we can all relate to. For us we have proposed a new-lens in which to see the world, in the many faceted concepts of the sandwich and in its triangular structure of the BFB, where the paradox's of safe-danger and/or sublime-anxiety, will not get you killed and where the only flash-backs you find coming from deep into the filling's objective interior are those guru's and hippies with their multiple ingredients, coming to terms in the trans-utopian truth of the sandwich.
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