The sublime
So I was listening to Medulla by Bjork on the exercise bike. It's kind of delightfully weird - different from all her other stuff and pretty much all other music. So, in one of those strange cross-connections the mind sometimes makes, I remembered a class I took in 1996 or so, about the sublime in British poetry. The classic example was Keats and his ode to the Grecian urn - an urn depicting a runner who can never quite catch what he's chasing. The sublime is indescribable and hard to capture. So this made me wonder if Medulla is sublime in that sense - because it's less accessible, more challenging, but at the same time more enjoyable than other music. Maybe things are more enjoyable when we can't fully capture them.
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