John Fenlon Hogan
Positive Incapability
In order to achieve the sublime, one must approach it
from The Non-Threatening Angle as one would a horse.
One must assign it a silly name and fill its ears with idle
chatter overheard in the men’s locker room. To identify
The Non-Threatening Angle, take the Tangent of loneliness,
which is to say the sublime is not a group activity.
Somewhere someone will say the sublime is a jelly donut
but this is not the case. A jelly donut is an ersatz golden
calf nuzzling the grass, masquerading in the abstract
particulars that America has come to appreciate like
the unreality of Reality TV.
A cheap and dirty way to achieve
the sublime is to imagine the different possibilities of
what Christ scrawled in the sand. A few more rules
and regulations--don’t drink the baton’s glittery liquid.
Don’t chew gum before sleep. Don’t say you didn’t ask for this.
Or something Ashberyian before it was Ashberyian:
Living is a meatloaf sandwich. A cheap and dirty way
to undermine all of that is to imagine the world’s first
game of Tic-Tac-Toe played to stalemate.
One may
confuse the sublime for drunkenness, but there is nothing
more anti-sublimatic than a sublimous hangover.
In fact, one hangover says to a future hangover:
Is the universe expanding or are we just shrinking?
Only a God as magnanimous as ours would allow
its creation to doubt its existence.
