Necrophilia

The disturbing images in my psyche

Dying is like living, like making life, like breaking up, but different. It's like loving, like laughing, like falling and never hitting the bottom. It's a religion of sheltered cedar boughs and small horizons. An embarrassed silence. Dying is our deepest interpretation of life.

Dying, that deep interpenetration of life and death, has been bubbling up in my psyche of late. As it does on occasion, synchronicity and conversation collude to make me meet this simplest of all human problems.

Dying.

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It began with a facebook post I stumbled on, and fell. A disturbing thought I couldn't get out of my head. A revulsion that crawled across my skin.

It was a story about a woman who had a one night stand with a man and let him cum on her face and breasts. Days later she found a rash in just that pattern. A doctor looked and said that the parasites that made the rash could only have been in his cum if he was having sex with dead people - and on closer investigation it turned out he worked in a morgue.

I'm comfortable with most strange expressions of sexuality. I get turned on by trees, warm shuddering copy machines, cats, cakes, hats, bees. I get turned on by pain, both giving and receiving. I get turned on by mud, grass, red, the smell of gas, babies, brides, rabies, wives. I get turned on by snow, storms, rain, doors, deer, wolves - and so much more.

So even if you're outside my range, I can extend and attempt to understand you. I don't get swearing during sex, but I can understand exclaiming. I don't get hanging her from the roof, but I do get handcuffs. Fisting is weird but birth is hot.

But not death.

I want to get this stupid story, that comes up at the most inconvenient times, out of my head. I start doublethinking, cutting it out before the story even begins to unfold, but even that is uncomfortable. Its touch is cold and clammy, like skeletal fingers creeping along my c**k. All my sexuality pertains to life.

“Love is death!” Eithne exclaims as I come in. Is it? Is it really? Must it be?

A week or so later I'm listening to This American Life with Papa, when a story comes on about a man who exhumed the woman he loved, turned her corpse into a doll, and brought her back to live with him for seven years.

I'm eating breakfast and I want to run, but there's really nowhere to go. It's raining outside, the kitchen is still within listening range.

Stomach churning, I stay and I listen. Yes he had sex with her. No she was never in love with him. I imagine living in a house with a corpse doll sitting beside me. Sleeping with a skeleton in my bed. Caressing something cold and inanimate. At least a copy machine moves.

“Love is death!” the poet writes and all it brings me is grief.

A week later papa reads me this story

“There once was a fisherman, who was fishing in a cove far from home, that he didn't realize was haunted. Looking around and seeing no other kayaks out in the water, he thought, 'I have this bay all to myself.' He dropped his bone hook over the side of his kayak and waited. And he was so hungry. And he was so lonely. And he had been hunting and fishing for days on end without finding anything to eat. And so his bone hook went down, down, down, into the deep waters.

“Beneath the waters was a skeleton woman, and she lay there on the ocean floor, rolling back and forth with the tide. The bone hook, as it drifted down into the deep waters, caught in her ribcage. Although she tried to move with the currents to disengage herself, the bone hook caught all the more tightly. The fisherman above, felt a tug, and pulled a little more, and saw his fishing stick beginning to bend. 'Oh' he thought, 'I've got something really big on the end of this line that's going to keep me fed for a very long time to come.' As he pulled harder, Skeleton Woman began to drift to the surface of the water. And as he turned back around with his net to catch his 'prize', there she was - hanging off the bow of his kayak, with her long yellow front teeth, and her bald head filled with crustaceans, and sea worms dangling from the nose holes and ear holes of her skull. The fisherman was absolutely terrified! So much so that his ears turned a bright red and met each other at the back of his head. He screamed and paddled fast as he could towards shore. But she was still hooked in her ribcage and so when he paddled and looked back over his shoulder, he saw her standing on tippy-toes racing after him, over the tops of the waters. 'Oh no!' he screamed, 'She is chasing me! She is after me!' And he arrived at the shore, not a moment too soon and scrambled out of his kayak, grabbed his fishing stick and ran for his life. He looked over his shoulder every few moments and sure enough, she was still keeping up with him. The poor fisherman was running in terror as fast as he could and finally he came to his little skin house and dove inside, into the darkness.

“And he thought, 'At last I am safe.' He became very still and listened . . . and the only sound he could hear was his own heart pounding. 'I must have out run her', he thought and after a little while just to be certain, he began to make a little fire, because he was so cold. And then, right across from him, flickering in the light there she was! She was still hooked and all in a tangled mess. Her ankles were over her shoulders and one arm was caught in her ribcage and her pelvis was tilted backwards, and her skull was hanging down below her shoulders. He looked at her and something came over him. He looked a little longer, and tried to still his fear. The more he studied her the more he felt sorry for her. She was in such a predicament. Somehow in this tangled mess she didn't look so frightful as she had before. And he contemplated her . . . and she did not move. The more he thought about it, she had an almost pitiful, pleading expression.

“Like a father would to a child, he reached out and took her ankles down from her shoulders cooing, 'There, there, that's better isn't it? Not so uncomfortable.' He straightened and untangled her, as he sang a little song, as a father would. And soon she was all straightened out. And she had an odd little tilt to her skull that almost made her look grateful. And he mused, 'Well, she's just a skeleton hooked by accident. I'll leave her be this night and then give her a proper burial in the morning. I'll try to sleep now, because I'm so very hungry and sleep is my only escape from this hunger. And he fell fast asleep, exhausted by all the excitement and lack of food.

“As often happens when we sleep, a little tear escaped from the corner of his eye and began to trickle down his face. Skeleton woman saw this tear glistening there and became very thirsty. And so very quietly, with the slightest of tinkling and rattling of bones, she got on her hands and knees and placed her mouth there and drank deeply. When she saw that he did not awaken, she slid her hand inside his chest and took out his heart. And she raised it like a great drum and began pounding on it. Boom....boom...boom...and she began to sing flesh onto her bones. She sang with the drum of his heart and long, glossy, black hair grew out of her skull and a full, elegant face and fine hips and all the things that a woman needs began to take shape. And when she was done, she slipped the fisherman's heart back inside his chest and looked at him ever so tenderly. She lifted the sleeping skins of his bedding and climbed in underneath and pressed her warm body against his. And they tangled all night long. They wound up more tangled then she had been to begin with. With her legs over his shoulders and all those things that happen when people make love.

“And when morning broke, they left together hand in hand. Because she was from the water, they never again went hungry for she had a way of calling the creatures of the sea to her. And people say that if you are ever out when the whole land is white with snow and the sky is also stark white and nothing seems to move; if you look out into the horizon, and can see two tiny black dots bobbing gently, that is skeleton woman and her man."

(As told by Arnell Ando, with slight editing)

It all comes together then, as I react as the man reacts, to the terror of bones. I who have never seen an offscreen corpse. I who have never had a loved one die. Viscerally I feel only fear, and run.

But deep inside I know that life, love, and death are all part of the same coin. I have to look at necrophilia without revulsion. I have to accept the death in the making of life. The parallels between the screams of the dying and the pain of birth. The peace of the grave and the peace of the womb.

I cannot shrink back from the bones of things. I cannot make love anywhere but in the abyss.

I'll stand before my departed lover and say,

Love is death

Reviews

[Scerina Elizabeth]

WOW...

As disturbing that was that was deep I mean I love how you write and it is beautifully written...

But the idea of sex with a dead person...

Eww but I do get what you mean when you say Love is Death - I just wouldn't go as far as to making love to a dead lover but maybe that is me...