The midwestern sublime

I’m not thinking of beauty. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

The sublime is an important concept in 18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics, closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is often (following Burke’s theory of aesthetic categories) contrasted with the beautiful and the picturesque, in the fact that the emotion it evokes in the beholder encompasses an element of terror.

I first thought of the midwestern sublime when driving in the late afternoon, in late fall or early winter. It must have been more thirty years ago. We were driving home on a rural route after a day of shopping in a nearby city. Elaine was reading the liner notes of Yazoo Records’ Skip James LP (a purchase of the day) to entertain me as we drove. And it occurred to me that the sound of James’s voice matched the landscape around us, even if we were in Illinois and not Mississippi.

The midwestern sublime is composed of equal parts vast muddy fields and vast grey skies, as seen from a car on a two-lane rural route. There are telephone poles along one side of the road and houses on the other. The houses are infrequent and unlit, their mailboxes and newspaper boxes waiting — for what? There are no other vehicles on the road. The sky is beginning to darken.

Have I made myself bleak?

[Skip James sang about our state in “Illinois Blues”: “If you go to Banglin’, tell my boys / What a time I‘m having, up in Illinois.” A good time, he says. Banglin’: a Mississippi lumber camp.]