Lemon Cove, 2020
70mm, Kodak Portra 400

1. After the Infinite: Language Beyond its own Limit

A series of essays on the literary sublime:

The first, a consideration of the sublime in Henry James’s The Ambassadors in which the limits of the novel as a form are considered against James’s unconventional uses of the langauge of obscurity and nonidentity.

The second zeroes in on King Lear and the problem of “nature,” perhaps Shakespeare’s favorite word in the play. Its meaning is rendered complex against the themes of natural processes, court conventions and filial piety. Lear’s encounter on the heath precipitates two possible readings of the play’s tragic ending: either Lear’s sublime encounter renders him humbled and ready for love, or it is yet another reminder of his complete lack of control, the kind of executive authority on display at the play’s opening.

The third installment approached Moby-Dick with an understanding of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, considering the symbolic doubleness of the spermaceti and the Melvillian metaphor for the enlightenment, the food of light. From there, I argue that Melville urges the reader to consider the possibility that this pursuit of industry and this domination of the world has forgone enlightenment and become myth. Our urge to illuminate the earth has become the very thing that we sought to eliminate.

The fourth and final essay functions as a conclusive exploration of a central theme in the three preceeding it: the social sublime. Through Beckett’s Molloy I explore the implications of language as a social instrument and try to draw a link between this use of language (as a way to dissolve the difference between self and other) and the social sublime, as a loss of identity in some soical organ or collective.

2. B&W

wedge-shaped core of darkness, 2022
35mm, Illford 100

3. Color

foilble , 2020
70mm Portra 400
Appears in a small book I made, That Which Has Landed, as a response to Frank Lloyd Wright’s dour contempt for Los Angeles, famously musing, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”

4. Design

WCFM 91.9, 2024

WCFM oval logo design based on archival station identity from the early 90s.

5. Thoughts

© CHARLIE NICHOLAS 2025