On The Ecstasy

On the ecstasy I’ve been talking about this whole time. On that sore subject. On that preciously sore subject. At the risk of turning into a. Oh. I don’t know. A professional God person myself. Or sounding like one, which is about the same thing. At the risk of turning into Bore Snorington, QED, PDQ, DVD, and XYZ, if I haven’t already. Let me pontificate a bit about ecstasy. Let me expostulate a bit and say this about that. Let me spout some about the mystical shmysical aspect of the whole deal. About where it comes from and where it goes. About how it works. About who gets to have it and who doesn’t. About what this has to do with God. With experiencing God, for Pity’s sake. Which is after all what we’re all about. What Alfie’s all about. Et cetera.

Ecstasy. And I’m not speaking about the powder. The white stuff. I’m talking about the form of all feel good drugs. I’m talking about the heavenly form itself. The experience next to which all these others are mere shadows. Mere ersatz experiences. Mere Disneyfied experiences. Mere Namby Pamby Land type of stuff. Mere Holy Land Amusement Park entertainment type of stuff.

Ecstasy. Bore right straight down into the heart of beauty. The heart of love. And what comes out is a gusher. A heads up straight-shooting gusher. A fountaining artesian streaming on up and rivering down of something that is living water itself. That is the heavenly form of water itself.

What happens I think is that the Honored Guest. Our Honored Guest. Goes out dowsing. Goes out divining. Around the house. Around the property. And he finds his divining rod bending, bending. Until it points well straight on down. And then he strikes the ground of the cosmos with a thunderbolt or some less poetic device such as a celestial well drilling rig that splits the rock and frees the living water to jet upwards, showering everything all around with a rain of living water forced up at great pressure from the living ground of the cosmos.

Or think of it this way. It’s like climbing a mountain. You need to climb one if you haven’t. Really, you should. Like climbing a mountain. Oh. It’s painful. You breathe hard. Your knees are like somebody’s practicing voodoo on them. Full of needles. Weak. Rubbery. Sweat and curse. Perspire and groan, I should say. Feel like. Whew. Will this never end. Perhaps I’ll die. Perhaps long before I get there, I’ll just lie down here in the dirt and on the stones. And breathe my last. And then I’ll shrivel up into a kind of. Oh, I don’t know. A mummified version of myself. Over the days and months and years. A husk. Like those bugs that somehow climb out of their skins and leave their skins behind lying there in the dirt and grass and weeds. Split open skins that are remarkably delicate and translucent to the point of transparency. That are remarkably intact, each detail preserved. More or less. How intricate you think. How complex and fine and almost. Well. Beautiful is God’s creation, even this bug here. This former bug. This former living breathing entity that is now. That is now. A kind of house that has been vacated. A kind of former life that has been abandoned for what comes next. For the next new thing. Whatever that may be.

But even with these thoughts, you keep on climbing. See. You keep on going because. Well. You aren’t there yet are you. So you keep on putting one foot in front of the other in the dust. In the buggy dust over which the trees and the flowers and the ferns lean like doting aunts. Like doting aunts, for Pity’s sake. Like relations who aren’t talking in any sort of intelligible language. Any sort of language that might easily be decoded into the English language, for example. Who are communicating in a kind of green language, if you will. A kind of ferny and treey and flowery language that if translated would have to be translated into poetry. Possibly blank verse that in texture and sensibility and tone and pitch and angle and gesture and drift might be. Who knows. Shakespearean perhaps. Modern but nevertheless Shakespearean as well. That civil and wild and quirky and funny and arcane and private and public and historical and contemporary and trivial and puzzling and serious and clever. That kind of thing. But then as you’re thinking these things and climbing all the while, you’re thinking. Oh my. What in the heck am I thinking, anyways. This is crazy, isn’t it. This is a little loony, isn’t it. I mean. The language of the trees indeed. The language of the ferns and flowers, indeed. What kind of thinking is this anyways. What kind of mind do I have here anyways. And meanwhile the ferns and flowers and trees are speaking their language all the same and you are passing them. Some of them. Inching your way lugubriously up the face of the mountain. Dragging yourself out of the valley of beauty and death. Dragging yourself like some sort of wounded beast out of the valley of the river of clear ideas. Of deceptively clear ideas in which the fish are all apparent and the rocks are there quite clearly on the bottom of the crystalline river. The clear-eyed glassy river that reflects the trees and the ferns and the flowers very prettily there on its surface. Its deceptive and illusory surface.

And it feels. Oh, I don’t know. It feels like you really will any moment drop over. Just flop over in the dust. But you don’t because you’re still not there yet. Occasionally you turn around and look down into the slowly descending valley with its windy river there. Its cursive and recursive river there making its inexorable but tentative and curling way down the steady slope of the valley. The dialectical river there making its glassy way down through the fern and tree and flower strewn valley to who knows where below. But you don’t stand and rest and look too long because you feel it pulling you, don’t you. You feel the river pulling you down toward it. And it feels like if you stand here for very long looking, you’ll fall headfirst off the side of the mountain. Or worse yet dive. And so you turn and resume the climbing. The beetling small-limbed small-minded activity you are engaged in. It’s just the climbing now. It’s pure climbing now. Pure difficulty and sweat. No cussing now because. Well. It takes too much breath to cuss. It takes too much out of you to cuss. And you need to save as much as you can for what you are doing. For this silly climb you are engaged in.

Oh this monumentally silly climb, you’re thinking. Where did I get the idea that this would be fun in any way. Oh. This is. This is a lot like work, isn’t it. Is what you’re thinking. As you huff and puff. This is a lot like dying, really. A lot like The Death of Ivan Illych, for example. You feel like screaming and howling like he did as he died, but. As I say. That would take too much energy. Energy you don’t have. Energy you’ll need to complete this climb. And so you do not scream like a banshee. You do not howl like a monkey. You do not groan like the Jews in the Holocaust or the Christians under Nero or the Muslims under the Crusaders’ swords, because. Because everything is going into putting one foot in front of the other in the dust here on the face of the mountain. Every bit of your strength is going into this climb now. The trees and the ferns and the flowers are a kind of far off blur. The trail itself is way down there, mingling with your shoes. Way down there beneath you. And your legs are long. Too long really. And so heavy. So absurdly heavy and long and awkward and difficult to make do what they’re designed to do. Stupid, these legs. Gross and ungainly and fat and heavy. Why do people even have legs, you’re wondering. What good are they, when all is said and done. They just carry you back and forth and up and down. But where does one actually get to. What actually gets accomplished by all this traveling. By all this gadding about.

Isn’t everything the same, really. Isn’t the world all one. Aren’t all humans. Well. Just humans. Oh there are differences. Slight perturbations to a basic design. Slight variations. Matter shaped a bit differently here and there. But it’s all just dust, isn’t it. All just cosmic dust. Formed. Dispersed. Reformed. Dispersed. Fluxion. Flexion. Plate techtonics. Volcanism. Quantum mechanics. The carbon cycle. Electrons and holes. Clocks and watches. Trains and light. Particles and waves. The butterfly’s wings. Mechanical properties. Physical properties. Gravity, for example. Stuff moving and forming and falling apart and reforming again. And moving and moving and moving. Circling and sphering. Elipsoiding and spiraling. And what’s the point. I mean what’s all this movement for, anyways. What am I climbing this mountain for, anyways. Just for the halibut, I’m wondering. I mean. I mean, you’re wondering. I should have said you’re wondering. Just for the halibut. Just because. And then you look down at the trail, and you look back down the trail. And it’s all snaky and rivery all down the face of the mountain, disappearing into the trees. All wormy and snaky and rivery curves and recurves this way and that.

And then you turn around. And you keep on slogging up the river of dust and rock and stone. And then. Quite abruptly. You’re here. A few steps more, and you obtain the crest. You are on the crest. Or a crest. Because on most mountains, there are several crests. And you look out. You take on the long prospect. The great long volume of sky and earth that is sensible from here. And it seems. Well, you’re not sure. Somewhat insensible as well. Paradoxical, one might say. Far and near. Small and large. And its. It comes at you like a freight train. Like a rocket-driven dream freight train in the night. Suddenly you are annihilated. Suddenly you don’t exist. Suddenly this. Out in front of you and all around you. This is all that exists. You have suddenly disappeared in this. This. This that is not you. This that includes you but is also not you. And suddenly you become this.

You have stepped deftly out of your delicate skin and into this. Whatever this is. And you do not know what this is. Oh. It is sky and earth and trees and ferns and flowers and a river of water and a river of dust and rock and stone and birds of various kinds soaring and the sun and other people gathered up here to take this in. But it’s not these things as well. Together these things from this perspective are not these things. They have become this. And you have become this. And you have no idea what this is, except that it is exhilarating and frightening and it gives you goose bumps. Except that it is beautiful and terrifying and humbling and exalting. And gratifying and worthy and admirable and full of grace. And your responses. Your complex and incomprehensible responses are infused, everywhere, with this odd feeling also. This feeling that you have had in other very different contexts. And this is the feeling that you are in love. That you are loved and that you are in love and that everything has changed and will never be the same. And that this is it. This is where you will live somehow. If not in a physical home of lumber and sheetrock and glass. Then in memory. In your being. From now on. Every day of your life. And you will be in this, and this will be in you. And this is all you know now. About anything. Ever. Really. This and only this. Whatever this is.