Kissing cousins (1)

and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.  Revelation 21:4  NASB

Eros and Thanatos

What do you see in this sculpture?  What pulls you in?

Does the sexuality of this angel assault you?  She exudes femininity.  You can’t help but look at the shape under her cloth.  But as soon as you do, you notice the agony in those covered eyes.  Something terrible has happened, something that overpowers her desirability.  Her wings; distorted, broken.  She can’t fly away.  She’s a captive of the coffin, stretched over it like a sacrificial offering.  What is this agony that impales her?  Below her, almost hidden but not quite, is the tomb, the final box containing what was once alive.  Her broken wings hide death.  She can’t escape because what she once loved, protected, cherished is now beneath her as an empty husk, a hopeless reminder of vibrance, passion, desire—gone.

And we are caught; trapped just like her.  We want to look away.  Our desire to see her, to behold what the fabric conceals, what the wings suggest, is tortured by what is under her.  The grave.  The end.  Not being.  We want to look away from that too.  We don’t want eros to bring us close to thanatos, but here—here in this stone (is it really stone?), sex, life, flight, forces us to witness death, despair, emptiness.  We want to hide the embarrassment of our sexuality but we can’t turn away because our own sexuality is also laced with death.  The intimacy, the union, the creative explosion has turned inward, rotting, decayed, immobile.  Every effort to reach for heaven is denied by those broken wings.  We die as she dies, alone, abandoned.  The power of sex, the animal instinct to survive, isn’t enough.  In the end, death breaks us all. Beautifully.

“Anxiety . . . is the price we pay for self-awareness.”[1]  Now we see that eros and thanatos are more than kissing cousins.  They’re incestuous.  Maybe Paglia is right, “Emotion without eroticism is impossible.”[2]

More tomorrow.

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Topical Index: death, beauty, eros, thanatos, Revelation 21:4

[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Being at peace with your own mortality, p. 276.

[2] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 302.