Rapturous

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”- Joseph Campbell


“Assuming that rapture is nature’s play with man, the Dionysian artist’s creative activity is the play with rapture.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche


According to Wikipedia ‘rapture’ is from the Latin verb rapere which means "to carry off, abduct, seize or take forcefully" (compare rape) and, following a vulgate Latin Biblical translation incident, circa 405C.E, it has come to (mis)inform the niche evangelical Christian eschatological belief around the ‘tribulation’ or ‘wrath’ preceding Christ’s (imminent) Second Coming.

According to the Cambridge English dictionary, its meaning resides in the idea of extreme pleasure and happiness or excitement. I’d like to think that Christ would approve of ‘extreme pleasure’, although I’m not convinced that is the way some of his professed contemporary believers see things. In fact, this brief piece is a journey into its own rapture, in the name of that hijacked verb; an abduction of a stolen meaning then forcefully pleasured back to the side of life. It boils down to Nietzsche and Campbell, the Christ and You.

So long as we locate ‘extreme pleasure, happiness or excitement’ outside ourselves, we participate in our own rape, and we simultaneously slake our rapacious lust upon the externalised love object (the body of Christ-as-sacrificial-victim). However, it gets worse, because in doing these things we buy into the most toxic form of dualism, where consciousness is crucified and fed to the carrion crows of consumerist-materialism. We become worshippers of death in a cracked crucible of charred bigotries, and we live in the perpetual shadows of our un-enacted middle. That is to say, we risk our lives breath by breath, terrified of the darkness we must locate outside (usually, in these wildly Patriarchal times, in one or other forms of the despised feminine) and yet secretly married to the notion that it is our very own darkness that rules, the ‘secret rapture’ that takes no-one to heaven, but manifests a great line in portable hi-tech (and old school) Hell.

We crave ‘the rapture of being alive’ as Campbell says, yet we fear the ‘play with rapture’ that Nietzsche demands of us. We are too much the sons of Pheobus Apollo to go lightly with that pyrotechnic wizard of chaos, Dionysos. And Dionysos himself, Christlike in some ways, is a product of godhead ‘self-born’, the patriarchal fantasy of the male-mother, the death sentence of the actual woman-as-mother, as Semele is fried by Zeus and, from her womb the foetal proto-Dionysos is sewn into the father’s thigh to complete his gestation. And all this after Zeus had promised to fulfil Semele’s every wish! And so we have Dionysos, always keyed into the moment of creation, ‘born from the thigh of Jupiter’, coming (officially) motherless into the world.

So what of these pointers, this rape-rapture, brutal-sentimental, light-dark, reasonable-mad game? Are we not here upon the edge of madness, just as Dionysos’s childhood is cursed with the child-killing mania (induced by the ever-jealous Hera) of his guardians, are we not also at risk of killing our own children, literally (nuff said), metaphorically and creatively? And, at least insofar as we are all co-morbid partners in the inexpressible crime of Gaia-cide, is there not something of the rage of mothers in all this?

Consciousness and its structure, it would appear, are far more dynamic, complex and damned well chaotic to be contained in the ultimate Apollonian fixations of Reason and Harmony. The unconscious, rather like hell, is not a place but a process, a flux, and chaos is its preferred energetic structure. As Dionysos was torn asunder, so are we, in every moment of every day. This is our rape and our rapture, our ascension and our damnation, our immanence and our crisis of action. Will our hearts survive (to be weighed…)? Will we be reborn, remade? In the star-fires of the green lion, where the Rebus-headed bar-maid-man serves perfect pints of a black and pensive brew, the threshold throbs with space and time, the thrilling, blissful eccentricities of our orbits become finally still, the poise of the rapturous birth-death circle is blazing in the medulla of god-within, of the nervous system that has the nerve.

Brothers and Sisters, Mothers and Fathers, The Red One is calling. As Longfellow said:

The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.



KH 15th June 06


IMAGE: Bacchanal before a Herm by Nicolas Poussin (c. 1634).