““We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has a normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges.””
I used to have a blog. Remember those? My blog was called The Ecstatic Flash. I named it after I read the turn of phrase in an essay by Werner Herzog entitled “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth”. The exact quote that arrested my attention reads thus:
“...we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges.”
So what then is an Ecstatic Flash? Why, it is the exact feeling the evocative string of words —The Ecstatic Flash—itself aroused in me: a coup de foudre, a sense of wonder, the recognition of beauty, in the words of novelist and philosopher Muriel Barbery, “an always within never.”
To my mind, an Ecstatic Flash is that moment in which an external stimulus (be it the entrance of the oboe in the adagio of Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 For Winds or the rapturous overture of a conversation with a kindred spirit that seizes the spirit) takes us on an internal trip to another dimension. In short, The Ecstatic Flash happens when a moment of beauty elicits this ineffable spark in us; a spark that illuminates the channel we all bear to The Divine within.
Through my Substack, I share such scintillations of ecstasy as pertains, most often, to the poetics of my travels— for “journeys are the midwives of thought” wrote Alain de Botton— but also to the arts in their numerous incarnations, to philosophy, poetry and the literary, sometimes to science, and always towards the exploration of inner self. I believe we can find the essential truth of existence in small ecstasies; that we can taste “infinity in a single moment” if only we are present; present and curious.
I’ve been variously called a “poet of voyages”, “the philosopher in the ad agency”, a “bridger of worlds.” Through my dispatches, I hope to capture unexpected synapses between the disparate but coherent worlds that animate me, and and in so doing, to bridge the delights of the outer world with the shapes and colours of the inner landscape.
It is my hope that my flash of ecstasy may be your twinkle, if even only but a brief candela of light.
““...we are ourselves are the infinitely small and the infinitely great; we are the path between the two.” ”
The Ecstatic Flash is the path illuminated.
Illustration by Nelly Aba