IN 3-D
Copyright D. Harlan Wilson
The kiss of death is not only the ribbon dangling over the finish line of life. Death is always kissing us; its lips are always fixed on our lips, taunting us, daring us to kiss it back. Few of us do. As I drive down the freeway I think: No sweat, just jerk the wheel a little and throw yourself into an oncoming car, preferably a large semi that will bowl you over quickly and painlessly, but at this speed even a Volkswagen bug would do the trick . . . Of course, I don't do it. My hands aren't even on the steering wheel; the right is holding a cup of coffee, the left has a Crispy Cream donut in it, and I'm driving, more or less, with my crotch. True, I could stuff the donut in my mouth or place the coffee cup in a coffee holder, take hold of the wheel with the free hand and jerk it. Then again, I don't even need my hands: I'm adept enough with my crotch to take care of business. But I don't do it. But I could do it, the possibility of my body thrusting itself into the face of oncoming traffic and certain dissolution is there, like a scream across a prairie it's there, and most importantly, I realize it. I realize it with such clarity it makes the hairs on my hairless back stand on end.
Kierkegaard calls this feeling anxiety, which stems from the dread invoked by the contingency of human life and the uncertainty and instability of the human condition. When God told Adam that he could not eat from the tree of life and death, He instilled dread in him. Adam's eternity was at this moment placed in jeopardy and this dread, this introduction of the temporal into Adam's life, produced the feeling of anxiety. In other words, dread begets anxiety. What begets dread? Liberty. The freedom I have to put an end to my life at my leisure. The potentiality of this flesh of mine paling, cooling, rotting by means of my will to power. Once Eve connived Adam into eating a piece of fruit from the forbidden tree, he realized he was alive. Then he realized he would, at some unknown point in the future, die. Then, finally, he realized that that unknown point did not necessarily have to be unknown, not if he picked up that rock on the ground there and bashed in his skull with it. In this way, the tree of life and death bestowed Adam with a will to power. He was now free to end his life at his leisure and of his own volition.
Nietzsche claims that a will to power is a will to life, that life itself is a will to power. If this is true, life is in essence a will to death too: whether we defy or ignore or embrace death, we can't escape it, we can't kill it (the punch line of Donne's tenth sonnet [3] is a pretty idea but unfortunately inconceivable), and life always leads us to it.
Love and hate are polarities, opposite extremes of the same emotion. So are life and death. The only difference is that life is always-already infused with death, whereas love and hate can exist separately, in isolation from one another, yet still on the same ontological plane. Love can displace hate and vice versa on a regular basis. Not so with life and death save the one great displacement that death imposes on life, but it is limited to this one, which, incidentally, comes to fruition from the inside out. Death does not merely end life but disorders and decays it from within; its force is indistinguishable from the life force. Death is not merely an ending but an internal undoing" [4].
There is also Freud's notion of the death-drive to take into consideration. Freud's death-drive is that vitality, that lust-for-life feeling inside of me that tries to convince me to ride an elevator up to the third, topmost tier of the Eiffel Tower and throw myself off of it, if only in my imagination. I have acrophobia. Not full-blown, but when I last visited the top of the Eiffel Tower I could do nothing but take baby steps and I had to force myself to get near the railings and look down on Paris, unlike my companion at the time, a staunch anti-acrophobic Frenchman who mockingly goose-stepped around me and on occasion poked me in the ribs. In any case, this moment was the proverbial fear-of-death/full-of-life moment. What if I fall! I will surely die. Or rather: what if I live! I will surely die. Naturally I feel most alive when I feel closest to death, that is, when I am afraid (at the end of the dialectical chain fear amounts to little more than a sudden awareness of the proximity of death). Naturally I want to feel even more alive. I want to jump, to throw my body against the earth, to die. Then Ill really feel good . . .
For Freud, death is the lost womb and the death-drive is the desire to regain that womb. To return there would be to return to the death that preceded one's existence.
The death-drive, the desire to die, as a nostalgic will to power-live . . . This concerns me. I am a zombie, I am walking death, I am a black hole in the fabric of humanity, which is itself a black hole. I can only escape my black holeness if I kill myself. Suicide is the thing, the only real agency for this predicament other than fantasy, but fantasy pales in comparison to death. And yet I can only fantasize about death. I have no idea what actually constitutes death, the first-hand experience of the state of death entirely eludes me, so there's no way to determine if death is fantasy's superior insofar as it has the capacity to free me from the prison of this death-empowered life. Despite this annoyance, suicide is a tangible feat; I could it do at any given moment. But I am not about to do it. I may desire to die. I have no desire, however, to act on that desire to die.
What fills me with dread (and hence anxiety), then, is not only the freedom I have to kill myself at my leisure. It is also the idea that to act upon this freedom would be to actuate my own desires.
I live in 3-D: Desire, Death, Dread. One thing leads to another. I desire death and, in effect, I experience dread. That is the rotten apple core of the apple that is my life. Usually I don't dwell on and rue my pathetic condition. But sometimes those flimsy cardboard glasses with the red and blue lenses spontaneously erupt onto my face and I see everything as clearly and deeply as sanity will allow me to see it.
If the story of Adam and Eve had taken place in something like reality, surely Adam would have done away with himself shortly after he sunk his teeth into the forbidden fruit. For a grown man who has no knowledge of his own finitude, no real idea that he is even alive (insofar as he is entirely unacquainted with the concept of death), to suddenly be presented with this information is a powerful blow. The blow is usually distilled by time in that it takes years for people, in the infantile and early childhood stage of life, to recognize that they are on the stage of life. But Adam caught it smack on the chin. How could he not kill himself? The anxiety invoked in him would seem to me too immense and hideous to bear.
[1] Hubben, William. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952.
[2] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
[3] "And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die."
[4] Dollimore, Jonathan. Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. In this passage, Dollimore is iterating the view of Donne.