Diane Ackerman Quote

The ancients wrote about and celebrated key elements of deep play, coining names for some of its moods. Because of them, for example, we know its rapture or its ecstasy, and those words I too have used on the many occasions when I’ve felt deep play. Rapture and ecstasy are not themselves deep play, but they’re central components of it. Rapture means, literally, being seized by force, as if one were a prey animal who is carried away. Caught in the talons of a transcendent rapture, one is gripped, elevated, and trapped at a fearsome height. To the ancient Greeks, this feeling often foretold malevolence and danger—other words that drink from the same rapturous source are rapacious, rabid, ravenous, ravage, rape, usurp, surreptitious. Birds of prey that plunge from the skies to gore their victims are known as raptors. Seized by a jagged and violent force, the enraptured are carried aloft to their ultimate doom. Ecstasy also means to be gripped by passion, but from a slightly different perspective: rapture is vertical, ecstasy horizontal. Rapture is high-flying, ecstasy occurs on the ground. For some reason, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the symbol of standing, and relied on that one image for countless ideas, feelings, and objects. As a result, a great many of our words today simply reflect where or how things stand: stanchion, status, stare, staunch, steadfast, statute, and constant. But there are also hundreds of unexpected ones, such as stank (standing water), stallion (standing in a stall), star (standing in the sky), restaurant (standing place for the wanderer), prostate (standing in front of the bladder), and so on. To the Greeks, ecstasy meant to stand outside onself. How is that possible? Through existential engineering. Give me a place to stand, Archimedes proclaimed in the third century B.C., and I will move the earth. Levered by ecstasy, one springs out of one’s mind. Thrown free of one’s normal self, a person stands in another place, on the limits of body, society, and reason, watching the known world dwindle in the distance (a spot standing far away). The euphoria of flying in dreams, or the longing to fly through the ocean with dolphins, fills us with rapture. Can one feel ecstasy and rapture at the same time? The heart of standing is you cannot fly, William Empson muses in a poem about the simultaneous limits and grandeur of a love affair. These are two escape routes from the mundane, two paths to deep play, equally quenching, equally mystical, and subtly different. All roads may indeed lead to Rome, but one might be hilly, the other marshy.