Car Crash Ecstasy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about ecstasy. Not the drug, and not even the ecstasy in the traditional sense of a really good feeling, but rather a more philosophical interpretation, gleaned from a reading of Kerry Howley’s Thrown, one of the last books I encountered during my MFA studies, a book I'll teach for the second time this spring in a seminar on the liminal space between fact and fiction.

I’m sure that actual philosophers can parse what Howley is getting at much better than I can, but my read on it ecstasy as a moment of pure feeling and separation from oneself. The kind of moment that that pulls you out of a headspace consumed with past and future, and compels you to exist in a moment. To feel, to think only in the now because something has happened that commands your absolute attention. Because your world has changed in a way that resets rules and expectations.

I think of it in the context of dream. I am home, living with my mother and father. Nevermind the fact that I haven’t lived with them for nearly half my life now, and that they haven’t lived with each other for almost as long. In this dream, I am vaguely aware that the situation is unusual, and yet simultaneously unfazed because this is the moment in which I find myself, whether I can rationalize it or not

Perhaps more to the point, I've had more bizarre dreams of interacting seamlessly with someone I only know from television. The time I dreamed myself into an episode of The X-Files, alternately a one-off victim of a paranormal happening, then Mulder himself. Neither role explicable, and yet in the moment, who am I to question the reality I’m ensconced in, any more than to wonder how I ended up living with a wife and child in Nevade, after a graduate program in Oregon after I spent my childhood in Upstate New York, after I spent most of my twenties living in Baltimore.

But this form of ecstasy does not only live in dreams. It’s real enough to talk about. In Thrown, Howley writes a (presumably fictionalized) account of her first encounter with witnessing an MMA fight and the awe and wonder that struck, her culminating in a moment of ecstasy.

And then I think of a car crash.

I’ve been a few accidents, but only one that I think of in terms of a crash. So destructive. So unpredictable. Mercifully, the worst injury to anyone involved was an inch-long laceration on my left leg that didn’t require stitches. But my car was totaled and given that it happened three months before my planned move across the country, into a new life, I didn’t think twice about it, in a time when I was already thinking about selling my car, and thus this accident marked the point when I did become a non-car owner for the first time in a decade.

But that’s all contextualization.

Then there’s the moment.

The moment when I was pulling across an intersection with a big SUV blocking my view, and I didn’t see the car driving straight across and I heard the horn, but heard it too late to react in any meaningful way, and the other car’s front, driver’s side bumper collided with my front passenger side and knocked my car to a ninety degree angle, rolling down the street, and I pumped the brake but it wouldn’t stop and I heard someone yell for me to stop and I yelled back that I couldn’t until I remembered the handbrake and yanked up on it as hard as I could, hopeful it would stop me before my car careened into a parked car or rolled listlessly into the next intersection and another collision.

And the car did stop.

I was close enough to the Hopkins campus that there was security close enough to hear the crash and come to us. To survey the damage. I remember telling the security guard I didn’t know what happened, and she said that she didn’t know either. I remember her asking if I was a Hopkins student and that, processing all of this, the best I could deliver was a convoluted answer that I had been taking classes, but wasn’t in a program anymore. That I was Hopkins employee, but not on that campus.

Police arrived and took pictures, took statements. I remember asking if they had a First-Aid kit so I could bandage my bleeding leg. The officer said he didn’t but he could call an ambulance if I wanted. I didn’t want that.

I was less than a mile from my apartment. I walked home.

It never would have occurred to me to call this a moment of ecstasy.

But in a mind thinking ahead to a life in Oregon, in my carefully laid out day of donating trunkful of books to lighten my moving load, then going to the gym to lift weights, then returning home for dinner—all of this receded in the new now. The moment of calling my insurance company. Of washing my cut leg. Of praying that the woman I’d been in the accident with—who seemed fine at the scene—didn’t come back and report a neck injury.

I don’t like this memory. I still feel a sense of panic when I recall it--a stroke of bad luck, a moment of inattention, whatever it might be. I’m still uncomfortable, though I realize it’s simultaenously true I might be termed lucky for no one getting hurt. For having the proper insurance not to have faced financial peril. For everything working out all right.

That I might be fortunate to have experienced ecstasy then. No pleasure at all, but truly living a moment. Escaping a shell of nostalgia and creating narratives about a life three months away. Called to attention. Called to experience.