F3: ‘Sublime’
They said it couldn’t be done.
Well, I sure showed them … Fools!
*cackles menacingly*
SUBLIME
Finishing the last of her soup, Theresa turns to me and smiles. Her eyes are unnervingly reptilian. I don’t know, perhaps her great-grandfather was a monitor lizard or something. My boyfriend, my former boyfriend, kept a monitor lizard. He was called Coleridge, after the poet. The lizard, that is. Not my boyf-
Not my ex-boyfriend.
Anyway, she’s sitting there; cold eyes, fixed smile.
“Becky” she says, hints of a smirk playing on her lips, “Really dear, that soup was sublime.”
Her voice goes up on the last word. I clench, well, pretty much everything. This is it – showtime.
“Sublime?” I ask, raising both voice and eyebrows; “Really?”
As I continue, her smirk hardens.
“So,” – (I lean in, eyes pitched skyward) – “Would that be the Burkean or Kantian conception of the sublime?”
She turns to Ivan; her man from Minsk. He shrugs, inadvertently concealing what little there is of his neck.
I wait. I’m good at waiting.
“Kantian?” she hazards eventually, staring intently at the table.
“Ah!” I say, getting to my feet, “So the soup shattered your ‘misplaced belief in authentic representation [1]?” I advance on her, menacingly. She shrinks back into her seat.
“Was it” – (anticipating victory, I pause to wet my lips) – “a phenomenon so fundamentally overpowering that it was, to quote Bleiker and Leet, ‘not just awe-invoking, but simply too vast to be comprehended in [its] totality [2]?”
“Did you just manage to incorporate footnotes into your … uh …?”
Ivan trails off as I fix him with one of my stares. Snatching the empty soup bowl from under Theresa’s chin, I’m pretty sure I see her wince. For the rest of the evening, she says nothing, and I later return from a toilet break to find both her and Ivan gone – having slipped, unnoticed, into the neon gloom of the concrete jungle.
- – - – -
[1] Bleiker, R. and M. Leet. 2006. ‘From the Sublime to the Subliminal’, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34 (3), p. 723.
[2] Ibid. p. 717.
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