Aesthetic Ecstasy

Ellen D spends an entire 10 pages talking about the importance of ecstasy in terms of aesthetic experiences.  She defines this term as "a range of experience characterized by being joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source" (157). I think to really understand the aesthetic experience in all its intensity, ecstatic experience is essential, but I don't think I really grasped this idea until recently.

I live in Maui and there's a lot of hippies who hang out there so naturally there's a lot of "hippie festivals," if you will. I just mean festivals with vegan food, a lot of yoga, crystal alchemy, sound healing...and in particular ecstatic dance. This seems to be a really common thing in certain circles these days: ecstatic dance. What the heck does this mean?

I didn't understand ecstatic dance (and thus I couldn't fully comprehend the depth of aesthetic experience) until I attended the Mystic Island Festival in January. Ellen D says that "music was the most frequently named art ecstasy trigger" (158) and these festivals are all about the celebration of music! I remember one night sitting around this huge fire someone had built. There was a man playing his hand drum and chanting songs that he learned from his village in Africa; another man was playing a didgeridoo. Unlike many of the people there, I was not on any substances. Nevertheless, I found the whole thing so entrancing. Even intoxicating. It was like your whole body would just vibrate with the didg and your heart was beating along with the drum. My body was in tune with the music. What's more, so was everyone else's. Ellen D talks about a kind of ecstasy where "there is a sense of union, a complete or almost complete loss of sensibility coupled with a feeling afterward that any contact that was made was complete" (158). This was exactly what I was feeling and my feelings manifested themselves in the form of dance: it was literally impossible not to move my limbs. Hence my first experience with ecstatic dance and the community therein.

I always smile to myself when I go to concerts now and I see people our own age bobbing their heads but otherwise unmoving.  I think this generation is afraid of dancing. They're afraid of connecting with others around them in any kind of union because they're afraid of being judged to the point that they become immobilized. They cannot know ecstasy or aesthetic experience. In fact, without an kind of "intense emotions [that] make us feel we are living" (134), they are more like zombies than anything else. They cannot really grasp what art--maybe even the human condition itself-- is all about without this integral piece.

But there's always one or two people at the edge of the crowd who are spinning and waving their arms. You might think they're crazy because they're so into the music! But I know those are the people who understand, or at least have the capability to understand, ecstatic experience; they appreciate, as Ellen D says, the "importance of feeling" in aesthetic experience. These are the true artists and this is what art is for.

I don't have any sound bites of the drumming and didgeridoo because no one was video taping or on their phones (obviously)...but here is a clip from another incredible artist, Freedom, who played that night. His voice hauntingly touches your soul.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wNr7pSLFNA