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As I mentioned on a post written three days ago, I finished watched the “new” Battlestar Galactica on Sunday.    I’ve been thinking about the series this week, and I’ve found some food for thought in the lectures Joseph Campbell did on James Joyce’s literary works called The Wings of Art.   In the first part of this six-part lecture series, Campbell describes James Joyce’s thoughts on art and aesthetics that he gleaned from three sources:  Aristotle, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas.

In this post, I wanted to describe the aesthetic concepts of beauty and the sublime to illustrate how Battlestar Galactica is effective as a work of art.   These are discussed in James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.   Thomas Aquinas said that universal beauty has three hallmarks, integritas or wholeness, consonantia or harmony, and claritas or radiance.   When you have an art work such a painting, you have a frame, and it is this frame which makes the art work a whole.   In the case of a television series, you have the framework of the “previous episode recap”, the opening credits and the “teaser” for the following episode, the episode itself, and the closing credits.   Harmony is the rhythm of the elements in the artwork.   When I think of the themes that are represented in the BSG series, I think of a symphony where you have the opening statement of a theme, and repetitions of that theme with variations throughout.   Even the Cylon characters which have multiple versions of themselves carry this meme of “variations on a theme”.

If an artwork is fortunately composed, then the magic comes through in the last hallmark of claritas.   This is where the rhythm achieved within the framework creates a sort of corresponding echo within the mind of the audience.   A musical analogy would be that of the sitar.   The sitar consists of a series of main strings which are played, and then a series of strings which are never played called sympathetic strings, which run parallel to and below the main strings.   They vibrate in sympathy with the main strings, giving the sitar its shimmering, echo-like quality.

BSG was so well crafted that many watchers, like myself, found themselves stirred in sympathy either emotionally by the characters or intellectually by some of the themes involved.    That is why I would call it “beautiful” from an aesthetic viewpoint, because it moves me–sometimes to laughter, and sometimes to tears.    There were characters that I liked, or wished I could be more like, and there were other characters I despised, sometimes because on reflection I was more like them than I would have liked.

Another aesthetic experience is that of “wonder” or “awe”, and this is called the sublime.   This is when what is experienced is not something to which you can easily relate to, such as in the case of beauty, but rather something elemental or powerful which “blows you away”.    The experience of the sublime can come from sudden expansion of one’s perspective with regards to space or time (such as looking up at the night-time sky), or from natural or elemental forces with tremendous power (such as a tsunami or an atomic explosion).   Most Western art covers the aesthetic experience of beauty, but does not deal with the sublime, with one notable exception:   science-fiction.

BSG has moments of the sublime, such as the episode where the Cylons destroy the 12 colonies of the Colonials with nuclear explosions in the opening episode of the series.   The magnitude of the destruction is impossible for the brain to fathom, and you are left with the mind trying to shrink from the implications of what it has just seen.  However, for me the combination of the beautiful and the sublime was what made BSG a truly memorable experience.     The experience of beauty, of art to which my mind and emotions could relate to, was certainly there in the growing relationship I had with the various characters and their stories.   But these moments of intimacy were punctuated by moments of the sublime where I would just stare at the screen in wonder, locked into aesthetic arrest.

Those sublime moments sometimes came in the form of the sheer scale of the plot in terms of both time and space.   Other times it came because of prodigious violence, like in a battle scene between groups of ships.   However, some of the most surprising moments of the sublime came not in violence, but in silence.    Some of the prototypical moments of the sublime from the Old Testament come from these two extremes:   you have Job 38:1 where “”the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” and then in explicit contrast, the “still, small voice” that spoke to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:12.

An example of these extremes in BSG was a chilling scene where a breach in the hull developed.   This caused pandemonium in a causeway of the ship, and the camera tracked a hapless crew member as she was sucked out into the vacuum of space.   The cacophony of the out-rushing air and her screams faded into the deadly silence that ensued, given the absence of any air to carry the sound.

But spellbinding moments of the sublime like these were always leavened by the beauty I felt in the unfolding of the characters’ stories, at times delicate and other times brutal, and it was this particular combination for me which made it a science-fiction experience unlike any other I’ve had before.   So say we all.

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