Whence the subtle? The world of bigger, brighter, and faster assaults and overwhelms our senses leaving them coarsened. Our senses defeated, they recede from the liminal, fleeting and tenuous. Slowly, we have become insensate to the subtle. Yet the world enveloping us moment to moment is a myriad of subtleties, a sliding kaleidoscope of sensual effervescence. Profundity and joy live in a conjuries of sublimities existent at the very edge of our perceptive faculties. When our capacity is diminished we lose not only fugitive moments of refined grace but also the sudden conjunctions of ethereal elements that move us to ecstatic feelings, visions, and transformations.
Flooded by the immediate and super-tangible, we have become perceptually flabby; incapable of apprehending anything less bright than a noon-day sun. Unpracticed, we are left adrift in a sea of inarticulateness when, through some sacred felicity, a sunset, a peony, or an evocative face resonates within us. Sensually mute, we have only a fleeting moment of dim reflection upon an experience that fades before us even as we reach out for it. The sublime is, alas, irretrievable. Much, however, that is currently lost in the external-maelstrom and the internal vagueness can be sensed, reflected upon, held keenly in memory to be pulled fourth at some remote day and savored. Robbed thus of both a vibrant present and a resplendent past we throw ourselves moth-like at the brightest flame we can find – and burn.
Consider a collection of everyday objects: paper, pen, coffee cup, and spoon. Functionally, there is little matter to dispute with amongst a set of likely candidates. Hence, we are overwhelmed with extra-white paper, fluorescent pens, garish coffee cups and spoons of solid indifference. Indeed, one need but note the truly absurd size of many of the coffee-cups seen in shop windows to pause and reflect that perhaps the only discernment left to the general population is between small and large objects. So much as we are subject to these brute elements, as much does the richness of sensual experience fly from us. Conversely, fine linen paper, a quality pen suited to one’s hand and eye, a pleasing cup of lipid form, and a tactily engaging spoon in sum transform a commonplace event – writing – into a feast of evocation; not from any large transformation, but through the accretion of subtleties.
Many of our iconic pleasures are encounters with the subtle. Candlelight is functionally less good than the electric light but the candle’s distinctive liquid glow is infinitely more pleasing. Yet, the nominal convenience of the bulb has displaced the candle even in those areas where searing brightness is not to be greatly preferred to a swaying glow of embracing luminance. Similarly, wine is a pleasure that is definitively subtle – color, bouquet, viscosity, infinity of tastes – displaced by the single quality of price. All sensual qualities become referred to the great arbiter of sensation – the insensibility of cost. In the case of wine and other pursuits of a largely subtle cast, connoisseurship – the appreciation and reflection upon small variations – has acquired a pejorative connotation. Our society not only has become coarsened, it treats those of refined sensitivities as if they were prophets of dead gods, occasionally suitable for derision but generally ignored as harmlessly delusional.
Yet it need not be so. Subtlety is, above all else, a matter of attentiveness. At virtually any moment when one pauses and pays close attention to an object near to hand one can encounter the subtle. Close your eyes and pay close attention to your next sip of coffee. Note the colour; consider the aroma; hold the flavour in your mouth; absorb as fully as possible all the qualities. Before you now opens the manifold world of sensual pleasure that surround us veiled ever so slightly by diaphanous Subtlety.