Let's Talk About Death, Baby
and also about bodies and being alive
Any understanding I’ve gathered of arguably-primal roots of abelism I can first credit to a crazy experimental film I happened to see in college called Decasia. It’s a visual anti-feast entirely composed of a black-and-white collage of things decaying, and I remember a faintly hallucinagenic-feeling experience where, momentarily, I was floating out of my body and observing it in the context of this film. They think that’s me, I realized. I mean when they see me they think of that. They think of their body breaking down on them, or the mortality they’re trying to escape.
One time in Austin, a stranger on the street greeted me (as strangers often do) with, “What happened?” and I said, “What do you mean?” He got furious and incoherent and stomped off. I’m supposed to understand that my body looks like the product of what you wouldn’t want to happen to you, and it’s taken me a long, long time to fight against this “understanding,” which is built into most conclusions that people take for granted.
But there was one period of my life where the fight was mine, and my spirit was so ruthlessly alive that nothing anyone said or did could embarrass me, could make me “understand” that their ways were normal and therefore right and mine were “weird” and therefore wrong. (My ways were, as it happens, New Orleanian, deemed weird because I was in college in the Midwest, but we’ll get to the part of the story where I suddenly saw where I come from, this city of life and death and disasters and rebirth and jazz funerals and above-ground cementaries etc.)
I was twenty-two. I had spent six months in a dark, hopeless place, feeling like I had already died. I started treating my loved ones horribly so they would walk away and let me die in peace, but this, they refused to do. I realized, then, something about the nature of love, which I would forget and have to remember again in intervening decades but: if it’s real, it doesn’t go away, no matter what. (This does not mean that we occassionally have to walk away from loved ones for our own well-being, but the force is still there). One late-night early-morning in March, I thought, “If I’m going to get love from some of these people no matter if I’m a person I like or a person I despise, than I may as well live as someone I like.”
I set out to do that, and it scared the hell out of everyone, except the people who liked it. Most of the people who liked it were in New Orleans, where I hadn’t been back to for a year, because Katrina had just destroyed the city and I couldn’t travel. I know without a doubt that watching the news from afar, hearing my dad’s voice from afar, getting my friends’ “I’m okay” mass emails from afar, contributed to that depression, because even though I was indescribably relieved that they were all all right, watching everything flood and crumble in the middle of parochial cornfields basically killed me. “Is everything pretty much back to normal down there?” one cheery Iowan asked when I got back from my trip. Who are who are who are these people. The day I stopped caring, I started loving people, suddenly, even if I walked around in rage at people’s self-imposed limits. I didn’t see, then, that a lot of my rage stemmed from the fact that their bodies are potentially limitless and they didn’t see it. I didn’t want to think about “limitless bodies” because that’s what my first (hyperabelist) boyfriend said when he fell in love with another girl. He’d met her in dance class, and he said he wanted to be with someone whose body didn’t have any limits. I’d have been well over that by now if not for all the years of agreeing with him that I’d have been a lot hotter if I hadn’t been born decayed.
It’s a shame that the first thing I did when I understood I was back to myself was actually call that guy at 3 in the morning, but we hadn’t talked in years (because, I’d said, I’d need time to get over him) and the act of calling him at 4 in the morning had been so familiar, even if from another life, that it felt indisputably correct. I woke him up, but he didn’t mind. When you’re 22 you can do things like that: call someone up at 3 in the morning not because you’re in the midst of an emotional emergency (for the first time in 6 months, I wasn’t) but just because it’s been a while, was just thinking about you, and yes, perhaps the sudden flush of sexual confidence combined with the madness of what our intense teenage romance had been played a role. To come back to life, I thought, I’d had to slay that self who had essentially spent 3 years in blurry self-immolating worship. Resurrection is a complicated business.
I saw red as the color of life, then, and so I wore red fishnets on my legs and my hands and deliberately smoked rolled up tobacco in part because, I was convinced, red + fire equalled life. So did tequila. I went on pretentious passionate rants to anyone who would listen about how the force of the sun was actually distilled in these shots and that’s why they had the immediate life-giving impact that they did. I went on pretentious passionate rants about a lot of things because I truly believed I had been to Hell and discovered the secret of existence and now I understood life as in life force in a way that the Midwest refused to. There’s no other way to say it, I preached. I studied all the Biblical women that had been deemed whoreish from the Bible and I preached in their names: Mary Magdelene and Lillith and Jezebel and Salome. They got me, I decided, and if you believed in living a life not half-killed by societal pressures you had no say in, then they get you too. At an antique shop, I found a necklace composed of rows and rows of deep red beads and I wore them over a transparent white dress and described it as a symbol of my heart-blood, on the outside, not hidden like they wanted it to be.
The most disconcerting thing I learned from this period of my life was that the majority of people who made rules for the University liked me a lot better when I was morose, silent, quietly dejected, and slow to speak. Depression made me servile: I didn’t have the brainpower to question anything. Back to myself, I questioned everything, and even outright laughed at the assumptions I was supposed to take for granted. That was when I started doing spontaneous spoken-word pieces wherever I felt like it: I did one performance at a Greyhound station in Madison, Wisconsin, one at a cemetary at sunrise in Chicago, one on a stage at a folk venue accompanied by my own struming of an oud I could not play (but whose sounding-board provided the design that became my first tattoo, so the purchase was ultimately purposeful.)
I became obsessed with Romeo and Juliet that summer, enduringly: the ultimate tale of two people who were so alive in their youth and lust and promise and depth of connection that they first destroyed their families and then healed, at last, in death, the blood fued that had always existed between the Montagues and the Capulets. That ending, their truce, gets me every time, and I always think, “They didn’t have to die for you to make peace,” but did they? Do they? Is life a battle, does peace come only in death? If you’d asked me when I was 22 I’m sure I’d have had an answer, but I can’t began to say, anymore.
Finally getting to New Orleans that May of 2006 turned out to be the last time I would spend with my father before he died suddenly that July. My dad, who sometimes laughed so hard he literally couldn’t drive and had to pull over, is undoubtedly one of the most intensely alive people the world has ever seen. That he could die at 50 seemed impossible. That he could die at all had been unimaginable. But there was an undeniable sense of “all bets are off” liberation stemming from our grief, as though his life force had seeped into every one of us and shot some kind of spiritual tequila into our dialogue. There was no juicy story that was off limits, no embrace that was unwelcome, no laughter or tears that could possibly go judged: life, reality itself, was suspended. It was death and life all at once.
I’d go back down to those depths a few times before I could start to understand the truly incompable differences between my father’s body — massive, and, I have to imagine, even in bones is as powerful as ever — commemorated in unquestionably majestic marble, side-by-side with the radio that a dear eccentric friend had placed in his grave with him so that he could hear his beloved talk shows in the afterlife — and mine, which, for all its scars and their stubborn tissues, for all its forced submission to the professional hands that stretched my hamstrings while I was asleep, that reshaped my muscles and bones so that I wouldn’t be strained “when I got taller,” but I never got taller, for those pinched nerves in my right foot from the inevitable slip of the medical-tool that’s bound to happen, and wasn’t harmful, but will keep that foot numb and needle-y for the rest of my life, for all that —
is unquestionably alive. And has no reason to be percieved otherwise.
Here’s a secret: When I first got serious about working out walk out of the elevator of my gym’s 3rd floor where all the machines are and spent about a minute placing my crutches safely against the wall before walking the short distance to the ab machine. One I got kind-of-addicted to that machine, though, I stopped doing that: I’d lay the crutches unabtrusively down to work out. This is not a time-saving measure. I do this deliberately so that anyone who happens to spend a deliberate second watching me on that machine will see that this is who they’re watching, that the body that can do this is also the body that needs these.
I have no idea if this silent activism succeeds in sending the message I want to send or telling the story I want to tell, but I feel good about it, because I spent too many years believing that, whatever might be admirable about me, none of it was physical, couldn’t be physical, because I had internalized many times over the conclusions clarified by Decasia. (I also spent too many years unaware of adaptive sports/athletics.)
No one I know is more unapologetically alive in his body than my personal trainer, so I’ve spent a lot of time since the following exchange contemplating his relationship to what can only be described, physically if not spiritually, as food that courts death. I mentioned to him that I had been attacked by a fully uncharacteristic craving for a McDonald’s fish sandwhich, and he said, helpfully (because I do always take his advice):
“Don’t. Don’t eat it, because that shit is trash. And that’s coming from someone who, I mean I love McDonald’s. I would get a tattoo of McDonald’s. I want McDonald’s served at my funeral.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are you serious? You’re putting this in your will?”
“Hell yeah,” he said. “The whole menu. Apple pies, McFlurrys, all of it. And a spicy chicken sandwhich and a regular chicken sandwhich for everyone, and no fighting about which one is better because everyone will have to try both. If I die, you’re all dying with me, just slower.”
He doesn’t usually get this goth. When he told me about yet another pair of aesthetically staggering sneakers he wanted to add to his undeniably hot and epic collection but they’re too expensive and he has too many shoes etc. I said, “Oh get the shoes, we’re all gonna die someday,” and he started and said “Jesus!” like he never thinks about death. Maybe we all do and we all don’t. Maybe the people who make a big show of doing so are warding off something. I found out from one of my father’s many brother-close friends that they would comfort each other through sucidal ideation in their 30’s by reminding the other one of curiosity. My dad truly believed curiosity was our life force: he wrote a (beautiful) song about it. Even knowing that song by heart, though, I had never known about his dark thoughts. I can’t help but wonder if being born and raised in New Orleans helped him connect death and life force in such a way that influenced his art forever, and might have saved him. As a limo driver, he once stopped a young goth couple (“because I knew you’d have liked them,” he told me later) and asked if they wanted a ride anywhere. (This is a generosity he revelled in being able to indulge during his off-hours as a chauffeur.) Delighted, they accepted the ride in the black limousine and asked to be taken to one of New Orleans’ famous cemetaries. He related to me that the girl had remarked, “I love the cemetary, it’s so peaceful.” Death as comfort. Death as pleasure.
The French expression petit mort has lodged itself in the back of my mind the moment I heard it — no doubt as a teenager in New Orleans, probably in a vampire novel — and the more I’ve had reason to think about orgasm as experience rather than something that my childhood heroes obliquely sang about, the more I understand that that’s the ideal. I don’t think petit mort — those deaths created purely from the ultra-aliveness of human bodies — can happen via an orgasm conjured purely by oneself, and, while I’m certainly no abstainer I believe it’s flattened and nullified by on-screen porn. Only someone else that you give yourself up to can bring about that blissful death of the body that hadn’t done this to become the heightened one that has, that does, that is. Maybe every lover is a murderer, if they’re doing it right.
I think I knew this and feared this as a teenager, and that’s why I loved Anne Rice. I understood, before I had ever experienced le petit mort, that that’s exactly what it would be: I was brought so close to the edge by songs and stories and Hollywood actors and suggestive words that I could only conclude that that loss of control would be death. Not death to fear, necessarily, but the death that preceeds every vampiric transformation and usurps the need for orgasm, because it’s all in the blood. “Snuggling with dead things” is an unappealing phrase I remember from, if memory serves, The Vampire Armand, to describe a human character enamored with a vampire. I remember being startled, even a little hurt, every time she took pains to remind us that vampires are dead. “But they’re alive,” I’d wanted to argue. “They’re more alive than any of us.” But the cold skin. The agelessness. I have to concur that she was right.
Werewolves, by contrast, are alive, ruthlessly so, to the point that we fear them ultimately because they don’t adhere to comandments or rules or morals, and that’s the thing, vampires do, vampires have all sorts of codes and rules and ways they bend over backwards to ultimately live as human, they care who they are in the eyes of the world. Werewolves do not. One could argue that civilization’s mission is to kill us all at least a little, shaving off the parts of the spirit that will either shout, “Fuck you, no,” or exclaim, “Fuck it, yes.”
Since moving to California in 2017, I’ve thought about apocalyptic death more often than I ever have. Initially, this is because we happened to be in Mendocino County the year that much of it was irreprably engulfed by one of the biggest wildfires the region had ever seen (which is saying something) and it was a while before I could smell ash on air without freaking out. Where I come from, I kept thinking, the end of the world is wet. I had also never experienced an earthquake and now, inevitably, I’ve seen the couch and the walls shake suddenly several times. (I naively thought earthquakes belonged to SoCal, where I’ve never lived, but of course this gigantic two-states-in-one is all susceptible to all of it).
I can’t shake an erotic association with the question everyone asks after an earthquake (unless there’s no question): “Did you feel it?” Perhaps only an outsider could even entertain such a connection: I come from a place that had been warned of The Big One, and it’s debatable that my hometown survived. Historically, it’s been a given that every hurricane instigates a Hurricane Party, where you gather at the most luxurious house in your social circle engaging in the most joyously hedonistic behavior you can. You can’t really have an Earthquake Party, can you? Just like you wouldn’t ask, after a hurricane, “Did you feel it?”
The biggest earthquake my dad ever experienced was in Las Vegas in the middle of the night. The evacuation happened so fast that he fled his hotel room without his glasses, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. (at 6’5, broad-bodied and 200-something pounds, this must have cut quite the figure.) My aunt recently told me what he had left out when he’d related this story in my childhood: initially, when he woke up, he thought the bed had been shaking because of reverberting sexual impact from the couple in the next room. Sex and death again, linked by instinct, without even trying.
Over the course of the pandemic we all thought about death so much that a destructive Protostant anti-pleasure force kicked in and compelled the American middle classes to double-down on making sure that “back to normal” usuped any prior impulse to actually live life like we’re all going to die someday. Had New Orleans not been taken over post-Katrina by all the people who compose this particular problem, the city might have had a place in the national conversation we need to have around work and sexuality and human connection and inhibition and fear-of-pleasure and fear generally, rather than the conversation we aggressively avoided by taking “life” online and encouraging one another to work until we couldn’t think anymore and obliterate our senses via legal weed if we started to.
Now I think about death all the time because I live in San Francisco where the above lifestyle is considered the only truly respectable one and when I hear the horror-without-the-fun-of-horror stories of any one Musk-aping individual who lives like this I say, “They do know they’re gonna die someday, right?” I don’t think they do, though. I think they believe they’re immortal and that they’re using immortality all wrong.
I’m not saying I’d know what to do if I was told I would live forever. The prospect sounds overwhelming, like too much pressure, exhausting. I don’t feel like I ultimately know a whole lot about sex or death anymore, the way I was convinced I did when I was 22. Both sex and grief can rip you open or close you off. Both can do one and then the other. There’s no real conclusion or end.
Before Romeo died, he was banished to Mantua, a fate he declared in no uncertain terms to be worse than death. Both Romeo and Juliet were fake-dead before they actually died, but what if they didn’t die? What if the lovers they had been, their burning, heart-driven selves as defined by each other, had died by necessecity, and now, liberated from their families and their shared obsession, they just went about living seperate lives in…
Apologies, this is a tangent. I’ve kept you on this Substack far too long. We’re all gonna die someday, go live your life, and if you feel yourself slipping away from the moment, not fully in the one body you’ve got ask yourself: “Did you feel it? Did you feel it? Did you feel it?”
