that makes ecstasy risky—for a while, there was a supply of molly floating around New York so soul-crushingly poisonous that I couldn’t even look at the substance for a year—along with the general danger in doing imprecise amounts of any drug in a setting where no one’s taking precautions. It’s also been documented that ecstasy’s magic is strongest at the beginning and worn down through repetition. In my own life I’ve become careful about using it: I’m afraid that the high will blunt my tilt toward unprovoked happiness, which might already be disappearing. I’m afraid that the low that sometimes comes after will leave a permanent trace.
But still, each time, it can feel like divinity. It can make you feel healed and religious; it can make you feel dangerously wild. What’s the difference? Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer. You feel that your soul is dazzling, delicate, unlimited; you understand that you can give the best of yourself away to everyone you love without ever feeling depleted. This is what it feels like to be a child of Jesus, in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here. You are depraved, insignificant; you are measureless, and you will never not be redeemed. When I took ecstasy for the first time in my friend’s bedroom when I was seventeen and slipped into a sweaty black box of a venue down the street, I felt weightless, like I’d come back around to a truth I had first been taught in church: that anything could happen, and no matter what, a sort of grace that was both within you and outside you would pull you through. The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it; you don’t even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed.
They don’t say this about religion, but they should.
* * *
—
“What if I were to begin an essay on spiritual matters by citing a poem that will not at first seem to you spiritual at all,” writes Anne Carson, in the title essay of her 2005 book Decreation. The poem she refers to is by Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who is said to have thrown herself over a cliff in 580 B.C. from an excess of love for Phaon, the ferryman—though this is, for Sapphic reasons, unlikely. In “Decreation,” Carson connects Sappho to Marguerite Porete, the French Christian mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310, and then to Simone Weil, the French public intellectual who, during World War II, assumed solidarity with the residents of the German occupation and died from self-starvation in 1943. The spiritual matter in question is mysticism, a strain of thought found in nearly all religious traditions: mystics believe that, through attaining states of ecstatic consciousness, a person can achieve union with the divine.
Carson turns our attention to Sappho’s Fragment 31, in which the poet looks at a woman who is sitting next to a man, laughing with him. Sappho describes her feelings as she watches this woman, how the sight makes her speechless—“thin / fire is racing under skin,” reads Carson’s translation, “and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills ears”:
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
Fragment 31 is one of the longest extant pieces of Sappho’s work, preserved because it was excerpted in Longinus’s first-century work of literary criticism On the Sublime. In the seventeenth century, John Hall translated Fragment 31 for the first time in English: the “greener than grass” line, in Hall’s version, is “like a wither’d flower I fade.” In 1925, Edwin Cox translated the line as “paler than grass in autumn.” William Carlos Williams’s 1958 translation gives it as “paler than grass,” too.
The Greek word in question is chloros, which is the root of the word “chlorophyll”—a pale yellow-green color, like new grass in spring. As the