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Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:
A scattering of caves towards the top of a mountain
Ecstasy is not something that can be accessed on demand
I get so excited sometimes
I purr with pleasure
I saw the ecstatic smile on the face of a Chola idol
People argue even today about Teresa of Avila
A scattering of caves towards the top of a mountain, the grottoes look out over the precipice, the sides of the mountain dropping sharply away beneath them; far below forests of holmoak descend right to the bottom of the valley in an impenetrable mass of leaf and shadow; concealing birds, rabbits, deer, and boar; up near the top the caves nestle between great wedges of grey rock stacked up steeply straining for the summit; silence at the mountaintop; and tangles of nettle, thickets of bush and bramble among the slanting rocks.
Here once the hermit saints would have mortified themselves, throwing their naked bodies down and rolling in the thorns. Splendid men, whatever you think of their spiritual views. It is ultimately a human gesture, rolling around like that, their blood leaking into the dirt. There was a nice thrashing of human limbs there, whatever it did or didn’t do for the soul.
Nowadays, that sort of thing is left to the video artists. They do it in a different spirit perhaps, but it is good that someone is continuing the work.
Those are the fun parts of Christianity, the crazy bits where it was interesting.
It would have been painful but it must have been fun: rolling around like that, like maniacs, in the thornbushes, under golden skies. No matter what your opinions about religion, faith cannot be all bad if it gives you courage to do things like that.
Those prickly bushes must have died back and regrown through a lot of generations since they last snagged human flesh on their thorns. They aren’t trampled down so much now.
Once upon a time they were beaten this way and that by the writhings of holy men. Their branches were twisted under arms and legs and they bit back with their prickles, carving up flesh, mopping up blood on their leaves until they were stained quite red. They were carnivorous plants back then; they had blood on their lips, they gorged themselves on meat.
Nobody rolls in the thornbushes these days. The bushes sit tight in their soil, their spikes are sharp as ever but no-one wants to utilise them in that way. They hold still, undisturbed, the same as any other bushes. The blood they once drew has long since seeped away.
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Ecstasy is not something that can be accessed on demand, but there may be little tricks and methods we can use in order to make ourselves more amenable to ecstasy when it does come. One useful technique is the spontaneous performance of abnormal acts. The most notorious incident in the life of the thirteenth century mystic Angela of Foligno occurred one Maundy Thursday when she and her companion were bathing the sores of some lepers. Angela had the idea of drinking the water she had used to bathe the sores, and when a scab that had been floating in the water became stuck in her throat she declared that it tasted like the Eucharist. Remarkable though the story is in terms of sheer disgust, what I find most impressive about it is the impulsive character of Angela’s action: the way she made the decision, seemingly from out of nowhere, to drink the scabby water. Benedict did something comparable in his decision to jump into the thornbushes. Normally, when one is confronted with a glass of water that has been used to bathe a leper’s sores, one does not then ask oneself whether to drink it or leave it alone; and normally, when confronted with a group of bushes with sharp thorns, one does not pose the question as to whether one should leap into them or pass on by. These questions, under normal circumstances, simply do not arise; and the water is left undrunk and the bushes are walked away from. But both Benedict and Angela did something extraordinary in these two stories, they created a choice where there had not seemed to be one. To do so opens up a kind of vacuum, because all of a sudden one’s actions are not being informed by the trends of thousands of years of human culture. Within this vacuum may arise the possibility of achieving ecstasy (quite possibly Benedict felt it in the bushes; certainly Angela felt it drinking the water as she tells us of the resulting “intense sweetness” that “lasted all the way home […] just as if I had received Holy Communion”).
Although I have done nothing on the level of Benedict or Angela, I have made some modest attempts at putting the principle into practice. It feels good to try taking steps outside of normal procedure, to forget momentarily the standard approaches and treat situations as if they were being faced for the very first time in the world, without the benefits or impediments of established knowledge. One example took place on the evening of 28/08/06, significant because that dates it to the day immediately prior to my great ecstasy noted a few pages back. I was attempting to cross Park Lane and took the subway that runs under that road; and coming towards the middle point where the tunnel dips down to its lowest level I found that a section of about ten metres in length had become flooded and was under several inches of water. Rather than turn back I suddenly decided to carry on walking and did not take my shoes and socks off or roll up my trousers but continued straight ahead and let the water flow in. This action, as it happened, did not constitute an ecstatic experience – I was laughing as I walked through the water but nothing more – but I believe that it did in some way help to prepare me for the ecstasy I would receive on the following day. The incident in the tunnel was one of a number of similar actions I made in the days leading up to the 29th (the first of my attempts to shower in the rain on my terrace also dates to this time), and together they helped to get me into the habit of casting aside normal patterns of behaviour that is perhaps a prerequisite for the subsequent receipt of ecstatic experience.
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I get so excited sometimes, seemingly out of all proportion to whatever might appear to be the immediate cause. It is evident that I am tapping into something larger, something that the saints and mystics have also partaken of. I’ve had less of it than them but I make no bones about it, I call it ecstasy and ask for more and more.
Ecstasy didn’t vanish from the world with the delirious saints of the middle ages. It is not something to be restricted to a single time, place, or creed. If it ever was here then it will be here now, and if it is here now then I want some for myself. I’ve had a taste of it – now again, here and there – I’ve tasted enough to know that, elusive though it is, it exists for real, in this world right here, and even in my godless world.
Great joys and excitements lifting me up out of myself, overturning my surroundings, leaving everything transformed and glittering. My body seems to swell up inside itself, I feel my heart expanding and my eyes opening wider, my nostrils inhale lavishly, all the air about me seems suddenly fresher, purer, and the simple act of breathing becomes a pleasure to be lingered over, deeply.
My body feels no tension but is keen and alert, my mind races and rolls about inside my head. The world no longer offers me any resistance, I move about in it as in my own home, but my own home encountered for the first time, all new.
If I believed in any god it would clearly be enveloping me right about now; as is, I am just adrift, in ecstasy, in the space god left behind. The mystics themselves, the religious mystics, were taken in their ecstasies beyond the gods they thought they had known; they submitted to stranger embraces, declared all that they had professed to know about their gods beforehand to be inadequate, outmoded, null and void. It’s no different…
Believers and non-believers alike, we are all carried off, into the ecstatic unknown. We shed our old notions, smile over the precipice, give ourselves up to something neither lot of us can properly understand…
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I purr with pleasure, I try not to cover it up; one of the secrets is not to get ashamed. Ecstasy seems to snowball when encouraged – it needs to be milked for all it is worth.
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I saw the ecstatic smile on the face of a Chola idol whom centuries of anointing under honey, milk, water, ashes, and sand had worn down the metal of, making the features soft. The priests’ hands had rubbed these substances down over so many times that the eyes of the statue, open at the start, had closed; and when the artisan had come to re-carve the faded features he had kept them in their closed position, chiselling along the single line at the bottom of the eyelid – only on the left eye did the pupil very faintly peep through to show that the eye had once been open. The smile in those eyes was something remarkable, unmistakably the smile that is smiled when the face is anointed in milk, sand, water, ashes, and honey. It can only have been achieved by slow increments, too delicate for any craftsman to carve first time, the smile emerged from a long process of submergence, gradually sweetening, rising up more radiantly every time from under each shower of liquids.
It struck me as being a fine way to treat a statue, to treat it to baths such as this (I understand that the idols are often bedecked in flowers too). I want to be bathed like this – we don’t anoint enough in this culture. My parents are not religious, but they took me to the church to have me baptized when I was born: merely out of formality, or a sense of tradition. The ceremony was not spectacular. A culture shows a deplorable restraint when it thinks it can baptize its citizens with an eggcupful of water over the forehead – a tepid gesture.
I saw another smile, on the Apollo di Veio, at the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Borghese, Rome. Nando Espositi sent me to see it, my friend’s father and a more committed atheist than me. He told me that if he had to believe in a god it would be this one, this god that does not sit in the clouds looking down upon men but who looks you in the face instead, and smiles. And he was right to send me to look at this god because here again was another remarkable smile, magical in its aliveness, beaming benevolently out of a quizzically cocked head. I could see why Nando, worldlier than me, found special appeal in that communicative smile – more gregarious than the enraptured expression on the Chola idol. But both of these smiles were clearly touched with ecstasy: the one gave itself over to ecstasy unsparingly, while the other bore the ecstasy inside it in a more modest manner and kept up a simultaneous dialogue with the world of earthly men even as it glowed with unearthly fire.
People harp on about the Mona Lisa’s smile but why bother with such an anaemic enigma when mystery comes also in expressions of such elevated joy?
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People argue even today about Teresa of Avila and whether her ecstasies, which she enjoyed five centuries ago, were of a truly divine nature or if they were simply the mistaken result of transposed sexuality. But must it necessarily be so clear cut? Couldn’t her ecstasies have involved something of both spheres?
There is no reason to my mind why a spiritual transport should not be venereal too, and vice versa. If that were allowed then perhaps these high ecstasies, which are so troublesome to fit within the categories we have devised, might be rendered a little more understandable. Rather than polarize the religious impulse and the erotic urge, surely we should be allowed to have both, and at the same time.
Many have been quick to dismiss Teresa’s ecstasies as being “merely” misunderstood sexual orgasms; but even assuming that they were orgasms, they were plainly not just any old orgasms. When Teresa says that “a great force, for which I can find no comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet”, or that “the soul is utterly blinded, absorbed, amazed, and dazzled by the wonders that it sees”, then those are momentous things to report, regardless of what really brought them on. Until Teresa’s detractors have themselves achieved orgasms of comparable magnitude they are really in no position to say anything. Teresa has the high ground with her superior experiences and may feel entitled to call them whatever she wants.
But in actual fact, Teresa, in her own writings, placed increasingly little value on the raptures and ecstatic transports she received. Like her friend St. John of the Cross, she repeatedly stressed that the “spiritual consolations” were really only peripheral to the central business of obedience to god, that the receipt of such favours was not to be taken as any sort of index of holiness, and that they could even be spiritually harmful if handled wrongly.
This, though, is where I part company with Teresa. Reading her ‘Life’ was, for me, unashamedly a case of wading through the good Christian teachings to get to the exciting rapturous bits. I regard those as being her most valuable pages, pertinent for believers and non-believers alike (believers in god, in obedience, in ecstasy, in excess…) Teresa does say some very interesting things in playing down the importance of her ecstasies; but there seems little doubt to me as to what her greatest achievements were, and Bernini did not misrepresent her when he sculpted that notoriously sensualized statue in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
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