The cover story of a recent issue of Harper’s magazine features the subject “Sobriety and Ecstasy: Searching for the Sublime While Staying Dry.” And just a few pages into that issue, one comes across a photo of a four-and-a-half-pound garden gnome made of one-hundred percent ecstasy (MDMA) owned by a drug dealer.
It took until the 1970s that psychiatrists began prescribing MDMA to patients to induce feelings of openness, decreased inhibition, empathy, and reduced fear. It was used to enable patients to talk about their issues and to successfully treat psychological pain.
Around forty years ago MDMA was outlawed due, according to the US Department of Justice, to its high potential for abuse, and because it served no legitimate medical purpose. But demand for MDMA ecstasy never waned and has only increased with its potential to help heal trauma.
Today, controlled MDMA-induced therapeutic sessions are widely sought after and MDMA retreats take place in several countries around the world. Recreationally in the United States, ecstasy use has been in vogue since the early 1990s when the rave movement began; raves originally launched in the UK in the late 1980s. The name “ecstasy” came out of that rave culture, as the name fit the feelings ravers experienced when high on the drug.
Like the garden gnome, in walks poet Alex Dimitrov and his fifth poetry collection “Ecstasy” (Alfred A. Knopf). He steps onto the stage with a book that is, like the gnome, a work of raw talent. Dimitrov is daring, surrendering this part of his life to barefaced adventure. He proves to be a superb tour guide through all things having to do with sex, drugs, pain, and pleasure. The self-written bio on the inside flap of the cover jacket wrapped around his book:
“Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s in unabashed poems that are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity. He interrogates faith as both an enemy and a valve of catharsis, and as a bedfellow of what this book courts: profound human ecstasy.”
The poetic expressions in “Ecstasy” are like serotonin coursing through your veins leading you in the direction of a chemically induced psychological and somatic peak. What lies beneath the surface of the words is what the reader feels, for the poet is figurative rather than literal. If you’ve taken ecstasy, your experience on the drug, too, is figurative rather than literal. That is, unless you’re having sex on ecstasy; then you have literal ecstasy times two.
From Dimitrov’s poem “Ecstasy”:
“At the end of ecstasy only the memory of ecstasy
Our city of New York.
A pill. A dollar. A hundred. The heart outside the heart
How fast will misery make us its keeper
when the memory of ecstasy wanes?”
Dimitrov writes fearless lines of poetry usually contained in one stanza. This is a style that suits him best. For example, in “The Years”:
“All the parties you spent
watching the room
from a balcony
where someone joined you
to smoke then returned.
And how it turns out no one
had the childhood they wanted,
and how they’d tell you this
a little drunk, a little slant
in less time than it took
to finish a cigarette
because sad things
can’t be explained.
Behind the glass inside,
all your friends buzzed.
You could feel the shape
of their voices. You could
tell in their eyes they were
in some other place. 1999
or 2008 or last June.
Of course, it’s important
to go to parties. To make
life a dress or a drink
or suede shoes someone wears
in the rain. On the way home,
in the back, the night sky
played its old tricks. The stars
arranged themselves quietly.
The person you thought of drove
Under them. Away from the party,
(just like you) into the years.
Dimitrov employs figurative language to provide more precise and vivid descriptions of emotions. Each of us attaches unique meaning to a form, which carries on in memory. Memory itself is a form—a form of neural pattern imprinted on the brain. Sex, or specifically, sexual feelings, are a form and, too, neural patterns imprinted on the brain. So too is poetry; poetry is a form.
When you feel a form, any form, with no physicality like your hand or your foot, but like what you hear on ecstasy, the music, the danceability of the sound, the cerebral connection to another person in which you are within a united experience, within the shape and structure of what you know and understand in your perceptions, then you’ve reached the feeling of ecstasy.
I am impressed by the quality of this book (its cover includes a still from the Andy Warhol film “Blow Job”), in its ostensible aim to bring experienced psychonauts to the edge of bliss; toward the loss of inhibition and to the triumph of euphoria; even those without the experience of an ecstasy high are brought next to a sense of the revelatory value of form and touch.
And though I’ve stressed the book’s figurative language, the figurative feeling brought forth in its reading, tactility is where we’re going; the reader is reading toward a deep embrace, like driving your tongue into somebody’s mouth to know that salvation is possible in this life. Like the garden gnome that first was a form, a thought in someone’s mind, it turned into a solid substance that could have been made of anything. Dimitrov creates a little bit of everything out of personal creativity to a book you hold in your hands and experiment along with him.
Alex Dimitrov’s ‘Ecstasy,’ $29 hardback, Penguin/Random House.
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
www.alexdimitrov.com
Dimitrov will be in conversation with Kai Carlson-Wee to discuss “Ecstasy” Wednesday April 16, 7pm at The Booksmith, 1727 Haight St.
www.booksmith.com
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