Abstract
“Ecstasy”: most grown-ups probably understand the concept, whether or not their knowledge comes from direct personal experience. To be precise, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as “an exalted state of feeling which engrosses the mind to the exclusion of thought; rapture, transport. Now chiefly, Intense or rapturous delight.” Additionally, its Greek root ekstasis carries the sense of being beside oneself, and hence it was “used by mystical writers as the technical name for the state of rapture in which the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul was engaged in the con-templation of divine things” (OED). But “Ecstasy” means something else for the majority of young people nowadays: it is the moniker of choice for C11H15NO2, the club drug 3,4-methylenedioxymetham-phetamine or MDMA. In the words of a contributor to urbandictionary.com, the online lexicon of the vernacular: “Ecstasy is a drug whose slang name is perfect for it.” So then, without exactly reinscribing a belief in the essential res-verba relationship between something’s designation and its properties à la Quintilian—nomen est omen—I do wish to suggest that the sobriquet that has evolved for this illicit substance is significant and worth exploring, and will relate directly to Donne.
Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.
—Baudelaire, “Enivrez-Vous”
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Notes
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: HBJ/FSG, 1975), 38.
Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (New York and London: Norton, 1996). Welsh citations will be referenced parenthetically. N.b. Welsh’s work is distinctive enough to be subjected to a spot-on parody by master satirist David Lodge in Thinks… (New York: Penguin, 2001), 91–92.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canturbury Tales, “The Miller’s Prologue” (I.3176–77), in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
See Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), and Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Thoroughness also compels me to cite a recent work that is utterly ludicrous: Richard Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011).
Clausdirk Pollner, “Scots 1: English 0—and Drugs Galore. Varieties and Registers in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting,” in Anglo-American Awareness: Arpeggios in Aesthetics, ed. Gisela Hermann-Brennecke and Wolf Kindermann (Münster, Germany: LIT, 2005), 193–202. For background on rave culture, see Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998). There have been myriad fictional and cinematic depictions; for an introductory analysis, see Stan Beeler, Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film and Television Since the Late 1980s (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2007).
A vast amount of scientific research regarding psychopharmacology, much of it highly specialized and technical, is available. This section relies mainly on Andrew Parrott et al., Understanding Drugs and Behaviour (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), and Daniel Perrinne, The Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Cultural Context (Washington DC: American Chemical Society, 1996).
Parrott, Understanding Drugs and Behaviour, 77; text normalized. An interviewed user counters the claim of determinists: “Ecstasy is not a ‘happy drug.’ It, by itself, does not do anything. It does not contain any warmth, joy, wisdom, or experience. It contains a salt of millions of rather simple organic molecules—all identical. The Ecstasy and joy must come from within YOU. Ecstasy is a glimpse of the true empathy, calm wisdom, and energy you possess when you are living HERE and NOW and not based on the past. MDMA is a chemical key to the paradise within each of us.” Quoted in Richard Cohen, The Love Drug: Marching to the Beat of Ecstasy (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Medical Press, 1998), 83. Her outlook is trippy and possibly simplistic, but her key metaphor is useful for comprehending the pharmacodynamics at play.
See Carlton Erickson, The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York and London: Norton, 2007).
On the ties between hallucinogens (especially nitrous oxide) and religious mysticism, see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin Marty (1902; New York: Penguin, 1982), 386–89. See also Perrinne, The Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs, 255–331 and references therein; and n.b. mention of spiritual/ pharmacological “highness” in Welsh, Ecstasy, 245, 254.
The title of chapter 1 of Fisher’s book, “‘What Wild Ecstasy’: Being in Love,” cites line 10 of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Keats. Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Holt, 2004).
René Graziani, “John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’ and Ecstasy,” RES n.s. 19 (no. 74) (1968): 132.
For representative work on “The Extasie,” see Julia M. Walker, “‘The Extasie’ as an Alchemical Process,” ELN 20 (1982): 1–8; Helen Brooks, “‘Soules Language’: Reading Donne’s ‘The Extasie,’” JDJ 7 (1988): 47–63; and Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Erotology of Donne’s ‘Extasie’ and the Secret History of Voluptuous Rationalism,” SEL 44 (2004): 121–47.
A plausible suggestion has been put forth that an episode in a sequel to the popular Castilian chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula provided a main source for Donne’s presentation of amorous ecstasy; it also influenced Sir Philip Sidney. See John J. O’Connor, Amadis de Gaule and Its Influence on Elizabethan Literature (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 149–53; and Graziani, “John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’ and Ecstasy,” 123–28. Occurring between the characters Arlanges and Queen Cleophile, it is found in the French translation by Jacques Gohorry (1554) of Rogel de Grecia, composed in Spanish by Feliciano de Silva (1535), the third part (in two books) of Don Florisel de Niquea, Book XI of the Amadís series. Neither Graziani nor O’Connor knew of Donne’s 1610 letter to Bridget White, first printed in Letters to severall persons of honour (1651), which he concludes: “For now my letters are grown to that bulk that I may divide them, like Amadis the Gaul’s book, and tell you that this is the first letter of the second part of the first book” (Selected Letters, 50–51); nor his 1614 letter to Sir Robert More regarding the state visit to England of King Christian IV of Denmark: “The rest of hys history, yow may finde, I thinke, in some part of Amadis the Gaule, at your leysure” (Marriage Letters, 56–58). It’s a bit like the multivolume Donne Variorum project. There is a mountain of criticism on the Amadís cycle and its widely read European continuations; for more background, see, inter alia, Pascual de Gayangos, ed., Libros de Caballerías, con un discurso preliminar y un cátalogo razonado, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 40 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1874), esp. i-vi, xxi-xxxviii, lxvi-lxx; José Manuel Lucía Megías and Ma Carmen Marín Pina, eds., with Ana Carmen Bueno, Amadís de Gaula: quinientos años después, Estudios en homenaje a Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2008); and Michael A. Winkelman, “Las Sergas de Esplandián as Praise of Breton Chivalry,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 32 (1998): 557–72.
See Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 195–202.
“An Ode,” 17. The Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). Cf. “The Relique” by Donne, which likewise recounts a soul-ful Neoplatonic love; it is thought by many to be for and about Lady Magdalen Danvers née Herbert, George and Edward’s remarkable mother.
See Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985). Regarding Donne’s platonism, the work known since the 1635 second edition of his Poems as “The Undertaking” was entitled “Platonique Love” in early MSS, while Lord Herbert has lyrics with “platonic love” in their titles too. Debates over platonism were frequent in seventeenth-century English poetry.
Cf. Astrophil and Stella, “Song 8”: “While their eyes, by love directed, / Interchangeably reflected” (15–16). Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Christina Peri Rossi, El Amor es una droga dura (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996).
See, inter alia, Laura Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield, eds., High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002); and Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts, eds., High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; New York: Mentor Books, 1959), 158. For the record, I have never tried Ecstasy; my concern lies in written accounts of ecstatic states, both naturally and artificially induced.
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© 2013 Michael A. Winkelman
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Winkelman, M.A. (2013). “The Very Ecstasy of Love”: Prescriptions for Bliss in Irvine Welsh and John Donne. In: A Cognitive Approach to John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137348746_7
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