Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston

Fragment 31 is one of the longest extant pieces of Sappho’s work, preserved because it was excerpted in “On the Sublime,” a work of literary criticism from the first century. In the seventeenth century, John Hall translated Fragment 31 for the first time in English; in Hall’s version, the “greener than grass” line is “like a wither’d flower I fade.” The Greek word in question is chloros, the root of the word “chlorophyll”—a pale yellow-green color, like new grass in the spring. As the narrator takes on the quality of that color, a translator could imagine her growing paler, fading—the “pale horse” in Revelation is a chloros horse. Carson reaches for the opposite effect. As the narrator stares at the woman she loves, she becomes greener, and the line becomes an expression of ecstasy in its original sense. Sappho steps outside herself. Love has caused her to abandon her body. The green grows greener. Some essential quality deepens as the self is removed.

The word “decreation” is Weil’s term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I.’ ” She dreams of vanishing, but this fantasy reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of her intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes, describing Weil’s quandary. “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate the desire to vanish is to reiterate the self. Greener, not paler.

Carson’s book includes a three-part libretto in which she imagines Weil in a hospital bed as “the Chorus of the Void tapdance around her.” In a line that makes me shiver, Carson’s Weil says, “I was afraid this might not happen to me.” She expires in the white space that follows the libretto, reaching the logical end point of her philosophy of devotion—an ecstasy that is not so different from death. To grasp at self-erasure is to approach a total annihilation that can be achieved only once. I have wondered if this is part of the reason that many evangelical Christians seem eager for the Rapture, the prophesied event in which they’ll depart the earth and ascend to Heaven. When you love something so much that you dream of emptying yourself out for it, you’d be forgiven for wanting to let your love finish the job.

The last time I participated in anything on my old church campus was high-school graduation. I was wearing a white flowered sundress under a royal-blue robe, and I was onstage at the Worship Center, looking up at the bright lights, toward the empty balconies, giving the salutatorian’s speech. I had turned in a different speech for approval. I barely remember what I ended up saying—I know I made at least one joke about the Repentagon. My classmates whooped, but, as I crossed the stage to accept my diploma, an administrator hissed his disapproval. The distance between the place that formed me and the form I had taken was out in the open, and widening. The next Christmas, when I came home from college, my church held a holiday service at the Toyota Center, the huge downtown arena where the Houston Rockets play. I spent much of the afternoon getting stoned with a friend, and, in the middle of the spectacle, I started to lose it. The country star Clay Walker was singing, his face looming huge on the jumbotron. I left my parents, edging my way out of the stadium seating. Outside, on the perimeter of our church service, venders were selling popcorn and brisket sandwiches and thirty-two-ounce Cokes. I went to the bathroom, overwhelmed, and cried.

I wonder if I would have stayed religious if I had grown up in a place other than Houston and a time other than now. I wonder how different I would be if I had been able to find the feeling of devoted self-destruction only through God. Instead, I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all. The first time I did mushrooms, the summer after my freshman year of college, I felt vulnerable and rescued, as if someone had just told me that I was going to Heaven. I walked down a beach and everything coalesced with the cheesy, psychotic logic of “Footprints in the Sand.” The first time I did acid, I saw God again—the trees and clouds around me blazing with presence, like Moses’ burning bush. Completely out of my mind, I wrote on a napkin, “I can process nothing right now that does not terminate in God’s presence—this revelation I seem ready to have forever in degraded forms.”