Responding to my friend Danise’s question about what movie I saw on Ecumenical Cinema Day, looking up “ecumenical” to see if it had any churchless meanings, I came across the definition of “ecstasy.”
The etymology offered in this definition of ecstasy — “a being put out of its place, distraction, trance” in relation to its meaning as used, “a state of being overpowered by emotion” strikes me as rather sour. As if a person can’t be joyful and be attentive to where they are. Something wrong with here?
I have the same response to the etymology of “happy.” “Hap” is basically “luck” or “fortune” as in “happenstance.” So if you’re happy, the origins of this word suggest, you’re just lucky. Which may or may not be true, it just strikes me that the origins are a bit grumpy. They make it sound like finding joy in this life is as likely as finding poetry in the dictionary.
Among the synonyms though I find a way to think around this impasse. “Transport,” the dictionary says, “implies being carried away by any powerful emotion.” Again there’s that sense that powerful emotion cannot happen here. But it called to mind a famous account of visionary experience I’d read years and years ago which contains the phrase, “I can be transported… in an anagogical manner.”
“Thus, when –out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God– the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.” from Abbot Suger’s writing On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures (translated by Erwin Panofsky)
The experience recounted in this passage seems to entail a movement of awareness which transforms the place one is dwelling: first an appreciation of the gems calls him away from “external cares” (which I suspect is the “place” where the origins can’t find ecstasy.) From the gems Suger’s meditation shifts from material values to immaterial ones, to “sacred virtues”: in that shift, in the recognition I think, of the equal reality of material and immaterial virtue, he experiences a shift in the whole of the world as he perceived it: “I see myself dwelling … in some strange region which neither exists entirely in … slime … nor… purity…” In that shift in how he sees is a transport between a place he can’t value and a place he can.
O.P.S. Getting to “ecstasy” I also came across “embowel.” I was very happy (lucky) to see that it counted as a word, but surprised to find it listed as a variation on “disembowel.” (And “iterate” must come from “re-iterate”?) Embowel, in my an0nymous dictionary, is defined as “to deeply imbed.” Can I use it in a sentence? Why, yes, I can. “You embowel a knife to disembowel a person.” (I imagine.)
I first learned of “disemboweling” when as a child I was reading about the historical origins of Dracula: Vlad Dracul or Vlad the Impaler had a penchant for pikes as well as disemboweling. To impale, I suppose, means “to imbed so deeply as to pass through to the other side…” Which could, taken another way, be a place-friendly account of ecstatic transport… more like “transfixed” — which the dictionary assures me essentially means being fixed in place by being impaled. Now that’s a powerful image of vision.
