READING EKSTASIS
When I say ex-stasis, ekstasis, exstasy, ekstasy, ecstasy:
I don’t mean pleasure, bliss, passion, a blind union with an otherworldly entity wherein I learn some Truth. I don’t mean a total engrossment with an object, or that I am beside myself: enraptured, mesmerized until I can’t speak. I don’t mean Saint Teresa; I don’t want her deep, white folds. But I am reckoning and re-reckoning with what I don’t know, with what I can’t know. I am attempting alchemy, transference, to sublimate beyond a border of self—to be here and there at the same time. In a sense, that is otherworldly.
Ecstasy comes from the Greek word ἔκστασις—eksta sis—formed of the prefix ek (outside or beyond) and stasis (“standing,” “position,” sometimes “static”). “static”). ἐκστα (eksta-) is the stem of the word ἐξιστάναι, which means “to put out of place.” Classical concepts of ekstasis were along the lines of “madness” or “bewilderment,” and in late Greek the definition of “withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance” was added on.
The original lyric poems of Ancient Greece historically involved ecstasy; the poems were accompanied by music, and performed by a poet whose voice comes partly from himself, partly from a muse outside of himself. Even further, we have the ancient ecstatic rituals from the mystical cult of Dionysus—a cult of female power, of wine, and of liberation. At the heart of this ritual is the trance—an encounter with otherness. In this encounter, the self is displaced so that it occupies two spaces, simultaneously. As Anne Carson explains in an interview,
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another [emphasis mine]. It’s what they call ecstasy.
Ekstasis is not antistasis, the opposite position. Ekstasis is not even on the spectrum of position. It is outside position. It is the process of being abstracted, channeled out. A stand-off. A radical discontinuity. Standing outside of the body, looking back from a vantage point exterior to it. Folk tales tell of bodies staying put while the rest go on a journey of ekstasis, giving us a sense of something akin to: Astral Projection? Bilocation? Autoscopic hallucination?
One foot in the door, one foot out.
I want for distraction, always. I cannot sit still. I do countless things in order to not find myself sitting still: working innumerable, often mindless, paid and unpaid jobs; I “stick things out” far past when I should, use the doggedness, the difficulty, to make up for failures—to avoid risk, liability, accountability. When traveling with friends, I have to be reminded to do things like drink water, go to the bathroom, sit down to rest, eat lunch. I often have to ask those close to me what my preferences are. Knowing what I want is impossible.
I am a thinker in dialogue; I still find it hard to write to a paper that can’t answer back, ask me questions, make myself think harder, push farther, . If I am alone, it in our poems, thought it excessive, something to grow out of. I understood it as a direct assessment of how self-involved, how self-interested I was. The last thing I wanted was for my poems to be a litany of whines.
