Review

Awe and wonder

Culture

29 June 2023

6 min read

A Sky Full of Stars: lessons on awe from Coldplay's concert

Unexpectedly finding herself among a sea of 90,000 people at a recent Coldplay concert, Belle Tindall reflects on what the experience taught her about the nature of awe and wonder.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A singer struts a stage pointing to the spotlight as coloured orbs float down.

Coldplay's Music of the Spheres tour.

Stevie Rae Gibbs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Coldplay are about to wrap up the European leg of their Music of the Spheres tour; their multi year-long and (literally) world-wide spectacle. When I say spectacle, I really mean it. The three-hour long show is nothing short of an audio-visual marvel, one that they’ve played to millions of people over the past year or so, and a couple of weeks ago, I was (rather unexpectedly) one of them.

Hold your personal tastes for a while, leave your ‘Coldplay make me cringe’ critiques at the door (you can pick them back up at the end), and allow me a moment to paint the picture for you.

The band adorn alien masks, they duet with a puppet, they dance upon a stage that changes colour beneath their feet, they release a tidal wave of giant beach balls, they dance through a downpour of confetti, and they bring it to an end under a canopy of fireworks. That’s not to mention their most infamous party-trick, the wristbands that turn the audience themselves into the lightshow. The result is, as you can imagine, utterly breath-taking. The crowd become a panoramic murmuration of colour that dances around the stadium.

Aside from the long queues for the bathroom and the sticky folding seats, the escapism is all-encompassing, it doesn’t falter for a moment. All of it made all the more wholesome for knowing that its being powered (at least in part) by the kinetic dancefloor and the spin bikes towards the back of the stadium.

And I know what you’re thinking, I haven’t even mentioned the music yet.

There is something innate within us that is awoken when we are faced with something great, something that transcends us as an individual, that resides outside of ourselves.

What is there to say? Hearing 90,000 people belt out words as heart-wrenchingly vulnerable and honest as ‘nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard’ on a cloudy Wednesday evening was as powerful as you would expect. Strikingly countercultural too, where does all that emotional honesty hide when it is not coaxed out by nights like these? But that’s a question for another article. Watching those same 90,000 people put their arms around the ones they love as they sing the words of the cosmically-minded love song Yellow, and then in the next moment dance with abandon to Adventure of a Lifetime was a joy to behold, a people-watcher’s paradise, a true case study in human nature and emotion.

And that leads me to the premise of this piece, which is not wholly to gush over Coldplay.

As I observed these 90,000 strangers, many of whom had travelled a considerable distance to commune together in this place at this time, I was reminded that humans are made with an inherent need for awe and wonder. There is something innate within us that is awoken when we are faced with something great, something that transcends us as an individual, that resides outside of ourselves – and that is exactly what I witnessed. More interesting than any firework display was the sight of 90,000 people who had pressed pause on the daily rhythms of their lives and gone on a pilgrimage in search of awe and wonder.

Awe and wonder are admittedly elusive emotions, notoriously hard to define and harder still to analyse. As a result, they have been largely understudied and overlooked. However, the one thing we do know about awe and wonder is that they are among the most precious and powerful emotions a person will experience. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the forefront of a surge of research into the complexities of awe, proposes that awe is distinct; it is not interchangeable with joy or fear, ecstasy, or horror. Rather, raw awe is a particular state that comes as a result of experiencing vastness. As Keltner writes,

‘Awe arises in encounters with stimuli that are vast, or beyond one’s current perceptual frame of reference. Vastness can be physical, perceptual, or semantic and requires that extant knowledge structures be accommodated to make sense of what is being perceived.’

In short, awe is an emotional reminder that we are small.

It is perhaps surprising that coming face-to-face with our minute nature equates to mental and spiritual wellbeing. Our individualistic society would have us believe that such a reality should bring forth feelings of desolation or a fear of oblivion, that awe must therefore be a gateway to some kind of existential crisis. But not so. Numerous studies tell us that is simply not the case.

Believe it or not, we humans benefit from coming face-to-face with our smallness. It has recently been suggested that cultivating awe on a regular basis can ease stress, depression, and anxiety. It can improve our sleep, increase our creative capabilities, and even reduce inflammation. It is a core premise that underlies the Twelve Step programme, an acknowledgment that there is something bigger than oneself, and therefore stronger than one’s addiction, continues to aid countless people in their recovery. Referring once again to Keltner, he proposes that when awe is notably absent from a person’s routine, narcissism, materialism, and a deep sense of disconnection from anything that resides outside of themselves become its inevitable substitutes.

And what’s more, we actually enjoy awe. We crave it. We go out of our way to seek it out.

We build telescopes and gaze into space, we flock to areas of outstanding beauty, we take pictures of sunsets, we visit ancient ruins, we study pieces of art, we sing our hearts out in stadiums brimming with complete strangers.

It’s fascinating. The more you allow yourself to dwell on the nature of awe, the more interesting it becomes. How remarkable that even in a society which is largely built upon premises such as Albert Einstein’s - ‘everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual’ - we seem to have a biological afront to this, something ingrained that tells us that this is not true.

Of course, I imagine you have been waiting for me to bring God into all of this? To say that any awe the world can offer is but a mere glimpse, to allude to something similar to what C.S Lewis said, that

‘if you find yourself with a desire that no experience in this world can satisfy, then the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world’

and subsequently suggest that the seen cannot compare with the unseen.

I suppose it could absolutely be argued that our craving for bigger things is a symptom of our craving for the bigger thing. That our wonder at all things transcendent is a taste of the wonder on offer from the transcendent. And that is certainly an intriguing thought. That’s the kind of thought that has led the likes of Paul Kingsnorth into Christianity, and David Baddiel to oppose it. Do we crave vastness and need awe because we crave and need God? Or do we crave (or as Baddiel would argue, create) God because we crave vastness and need awe? Such a thought could be pondered for a lifetime, and I suppose now would be as good a time as any to start.

But for now, I shall return to where I started, sitting on seat M22 at a Coldplay concert, just one of a sea of 90,000 people, all listening to a set list of songs that have become cultural artefacts. Each tune that bellowed from Cardiff’s Principality Stadium during Coldplay’s residency there gathered countless individual stories and bound them together into a wonderous collective sound. It both belonged to every person there and transcended them.

If you ever found yourself in need of a lesson in awe, I would heartily recommend.

Explainer

Books

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.