I’ve grown fond lately of learning verse by heart. More often verse of a certain turn: that of the ecstatic. To chew up lines in your head, whisper them to yourself at night with your eyes closed, wildly mishandle their meanings— this is a true pleasure. Any poetic mood can be rewarding. Exacting bitterness, clean Apollonianisms, overblown panegyrics. It’s the ecstatic that expresses me though. For me, the ecstatic is an ultimate.
This is the final endeavor, after all: to maneuver yourself in an ecstatic relationship with all Creation. The ecstastic is not a fulfillment of desire of form of satisfaction. The ecstatic is what lies on the other side of the tragic; on the other side of fundamental problematic of Being. I’ll explain my meaning with a retreat to verse. There is a quatrain in the Rubáiyát of Khayyam which runs something like this:
Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, and many a Knot unravel’d by the Road… But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.
I liked gnawing on this ruba’i, sitting with it and then running off with its concept-images. The Master-Knot. We all know, deep down, what this means. The one that coils around our inability to fit and blend smoothly into the greater world. The essential awkwardness between us and everything else. A gap that Sense and Solution will never bridge or solve. The incongruity expresses itself in a colorful variety of ways: as futile passion, human superfluousness, suffering, unhappy consciousness, absurdity, béance, anxiety— you name it, they all express or qualify that fundamental problematic in some way.
The Pursuit of Happiness often involves us trying to smooth things over— trying to solve the Master-Knot— and failing miserably. The gap just can’t be closed, or filled with anything, or bridged successfully. Once this sinks in, once we come to terms with this, we then find ourselves in the throes of tragic philosophy, or minus the philosophy, in an even shittier state of despair. Laying on the sofa with nothing better to do with ourselves, watching the Home Improvement Channel.
Khayyam, in the Rubaiyat, often sounds preoccupied with death, decay, “mouths stopt with dust,” endings, brevity, and cosmic pointlessness—
“a moment guess’d— then back behind the Fold. Immerst of darkness round the Drama roll’d which, for the Pastime of Eternity, He does Himself contrive, enact, behold.” Khayyam firmly grips the tragic; picks at it like a sore. And yet, the final tone of the rubaiyat will give you hiccups, produce a delirium similar to the minutes right before something wonderful is about begin or end. What’s his secret?
The Grape that can, with Logic Absolute, the two-and-seventy jarring sects confute. This sovereign Alchemist that in a trice, Life’s leaden metal into Gold transmute.
The Grape, yes. The ecstatic. Ecstasis is a way of dissolving rather than solving the Master-Knot. Flipping it inside out. When we can maneuver our perspective in such a way that the fundamental problematic of Being is seen as our reason for Being. When the Problem is embraced in all its jaggedness. When our sense of total superfluousness is rightly welcomed for what it is: grace. Wonderfully gratuitous Being.
If you can hold this in your mind— even for a few seconds— just staring at the wall can fill you to the gills with utter gratitude. You will even love the taste of total misery, out in the snow and rain.
Maybe I’m not really pinning this down with words. What gets me is how the everyday structure of Happiness can fail, and definitely will fail if you start fucking with it. Still, you have to do it. You have to fuck with it until it falls apart in your hand, into pieces. Desire collapses. You lose all terra firma. Malaise and downward, depressive spirals. Happens to me a lot in the morning, or sometimes right before I fall asleep. Feels like heartburn. Nevertheless, we have to know how to put it back together again. The arc of New Meaning. Ecstasis is one of the ways to do this, probably my favorite… but I can think of others.
There is an amazing part of the Pensées, where Pascal paints a relation between Desire, Diversion and Self, which mirrors my own:
“To bid a man live quietly is to bid him live happily. It is to advise him to be in a state perfectly happy, in which he can think at leisure without finding therein a cause of distress. This is to misunderstand nature.
As men who naturally understand their own condition avoid nothing so much as rest, so there is nothing they leave undone in seeking turmoil. Not that they have an instinctive knowledge of true happiness…
So we are wrong in blaming them. Their error does not lie in seeking excitement, if they seek it only as a diversion; the evil is that they seek it as if the possession of the objects of their quest would make them really happy. In this respect it is right to call their quest a vain one. Hence in all this both the censurers and the censured do not understand man’s true nature.
And thus, when we take the exception against them, that what they seek with such fervour cannot satisfy them, if they replied- as they should do if they considered the matter thoroughly- that they sought in it only a violent and impetuous occupation which turned their thoughts from self, and that they therefore chose an attractive object to charm and ardently attract them, they would leave their opponents without a reply. But they do not make this reply, because they do not know themselves. They do not know that it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek.”— Pensées 139.
What Pascal calls “thinking of the Self” inevitably leads to a collapse of Desire. When you keep turning further and further inward to find terra firma or some self-evident desire to start building from, you’re doomed. That’s not how Desire works. There is nothing solid at the center, or taking Pascal kind of loosely: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Man is forced to move outward to sustain his insides.
Outside there is terra firma. Where? Well, for one, in other people. That is, we can doubt own desires— and usually will— but we can’t doubt the desire of others. This is another surefire way to break our fall; to keep us from sliding over the abyss. I mean, people have children on this very principle, the idiots. But it’s a damn-good, Levinasian brand of morale-boosting. Remember that Nizami quotation I love so much? “Un âge où le bonheur consiste à rire et faire rire les autres”— an age where Happiness consists of laughing and bringing others to laughter. Love it. It represents an absolute.
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