"Heightened sexual situations provide catharsis . . . letting us say the things we might feel deeply but are anxious to discuss, a smashing together of Eros and Thanatos."
– Cody Delistraty
I.
Co-incidences abound.
I say this because Cody Delistraty's essay, "Sex and Death,” was published a few days before my review of Alison Strayer's translation of The Uses of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie appeared in LARB—- and maybe the poetics of coincidence has been on my mind lately.
Leaving my mind to the side for a moment, Delistraty begins by meditating on the abjected subjects that populate Egon Schiele's art, and then moves into the subtext of perversion and perversity. The moral hygiene surrounding sex and death creates a generalized discursive prudery (one could say it emerges from 'prudence') that stymies discussion of what makes us human. We are the animals who know we will die. If grief is characterized by "catastrophizing," as Delistrary notes, then sex is the catastrophic writ large. The dissolution of the boundary between self and other, or life and death, complicates the expectations of presence – of 'being there for,' so to speak. In Delistraty's description of grief-related sex, one secures release rather than closure. Closure is bad infinity. Conceptually, closure serves various nameless others by making loss invisible, rendering its expression dirty. Dignity is what is at stake in Schiele's art as well as the way we respond to death.
II.
Another co-inciding (or perhaps co-inciting) thing is Delistray’s reference to J. G. Ballard's novel, Crash, which many humans have seen in its movie form, as a 1996 film directed by David Cronenberg.
Speaking to Tom Vanderbilt about the relationship between the novel and the movie, Cronenberg said:
“Flaubert once said that the more bourgeois you can be in your life, the more radical you can be in your art—something along those lines—and certainly that was Ballard,” said Cronenberg. Of Crash, Delistraty ties the crash’s confrontation of death to a sort of “transcendence by way of fetishisation”.
“He never wavered,” Cronenberg said.
III.
And there is a different coincidence at play here—-one that won’t be recognizable to most people. The context for U2’s “Stay (Faraway, So Close)” is a different film, namely, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. But that is the objective context; subjective contexts differ.
There is a relationship between what the girl in this song wants and what the players of the Crash game want . . .
Dressed up like a car crash
Your wheels are turning but you're upside down
You say when he hits you, you don't mind
Because when he hurts you, you feel alive
Is that what it is
To quote Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Inga Junghanns (dated January 5, 1921): “because the whole is too infinite, and we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the wrong, makes us guilty, kills us …”
What it is cannot be severed from what it was.