A few summers ago, the plants on my rooftop patio wilted after a long heat-spell. I was busy preparing my dissertation defence and neglected to water them consistently. Baking in the sun, the plants struggled in the swelter – Delphinium, Hosta, Nepeta, and Euphorbia all. However, I noticed that instead of shrivelling into crisp, they shed their flowers and poured what remained of their vitality into their seeds. Distress from heat had hastened their demise and the seed pods emerged early. It was as if the plants said to themselves: I am not long for this world, therefore I must spread my genetic information.
Humans diverged from the kingdom plantae many eons ago. However, evolution’s strategy for the continuation of life remains constant among many species. Most insect species live only brief span of time, during which their primary objective lies in reproduction. Many dragonfly species, for example, live only 5 weeks at their adult stage. Some live only a few days. During that slim crack of light, the dragonflies frantically eat and mate. Once a male attracts a female, they copulate in a wheel-like formation. The pair flies in tandem, and the female deposits her eggs in water. Mating complete, the pair reaches the end of their lifecycle and fade into eternal darkness. The brevity of their lives intensifies the urgency of their reproductive act.
The evolutionary imperative to procreate in the face of death animates primal instincts within the psyche, such that mortality often casts its shadow on sex. Within subjective experience, a sex drive has little to do with the conscious fear and denial of death, yet its intrusive and reckless influence indicates an unconscious force that is much older than the rational, directive mind. Attraction can catch us in ways that leave us perplexed. The lure of sex foists upon us emotions and urges that we hardly know how to handle. While our culture requires that we fashion within ourselves a functioning agency apt to handle career and family with equal competence, sex and attraction can upend our neatly constructed personas. However polished our public image, however well-managed our personal lives, we are mortal creatures of blood and bone, and our animal bodies march to the silent call of mortality. Evolutionary impulses pulsate within us. The thrill of procreation lurk beneath our cultured sense of self.
The temptation of sex is especially pronounced in the middle passage, when people reach a pivotal moment in their life journey. Sexual attraction hearkens to the excitement of youth, when hot passion eclipsed cold reason. There is a vitality in the intensity of attraction, something that rises from the unbridled energy of life. For people with steady careers and stable families, the cocoon of comfortable monotony finds release in the thrill of infatuation or illicit sex. Having achieved relative success in life, the psyche slides into a kind of stasis: it is confined to routine and no longer faces the invigorating challenge of uncertainty. The prospect of a fling stirs the impulse and quickens the blood, bringing back the warmth and colour of youth. In this way, the lure of sex is a way to cleave to life, a device for denying the inevitability of death. On the one hand, this urge for sex stems from an inner desperation that can prove destructive to one’s relationships. On the other, sex can indicate the unity between death and life, the former prompting urges that give rise to the latter. Like the mating dragonflies, our desire to party before we die is an evolutionary device that ensures the continuation of the species. However, evolution is a biological process that is indifferent to psychological pain, broken relationships, career setback and financial ruin.
For others, fear of death manifests in ways more oblique. In “The Gift of Therapy,” Irvin Yalom shares a case of a young mother who had a hysterectomy, and who, despite having three kids of her own, suffers from intense jealousy of her pregnant friends. To understand the cause of her distress, Yalom asked the client what she would be thinking about if she were not thinking about having kids. “Vitamin C. . . I eat four tangerines a day,” the client answered. It turned out that the client constantly thought about dying and her obsession with vitamins was her way of staving off death. Her preoccupation with health, a subterfuge for avoiding death, found a parallel project in wanting more kids. In this case, the inability to conceive became a proxy for the inability to defeat death. Having lost her mother to cancer at a young age, carrying guilt for abandoning her mother in the hospital, she developed a compensatory devotion to her children, a devotion she believed would atone for her failure to care for her mother. The preoccupation with having children was entangled with her previous experience with death.
The compulsion toward life is bound together with the inevitability of death. This being so, the life impulse which parades as sexual desire is neither deviant nor reprobate; it is a force of the unconscious that needs to be brought into the light of conscious reflection. Without conscious intervention, the unconscious drives can thwart vital boundaries and destroy valuable relationships. Affairs and flings often cause irreparable damage to partners and families. Others fall victim to financial fraud due to the promise of intimacy. The need for excitement and novelty calls for our acknowledgement and direction. We can give voice to them while considering safe, healthy ways of channelling their expression. For those in secure relationships, there are ways to explore sexual narratives and practices that expand our horizons with a safe container of consensual sex. Some people explore polyamory and open relationships as they seek to introduce more variety into their sex lives. They do so with full awareness of the emotional complexity and labour that such arrangements introduce into their lives. This is an arduous process, one that requires great emotional courage and maturity. Working with a therapist can be helpful as people attempt to open their relationships.
Beyond the renewal of sex drive, I believe there is important inner work in exploring the fear and denial of death. We need to turn towards, not away from, what threatens us with annihilation. There are stores of energy and vitality which are time-bound; they don’t make themselves known until we come to a certain moment in our lives. Conversely, we do not release their creative energy unless we traverse their dark passage and submit to their instruction. To ponder pending death is to let go of the self that we’ve outgrown; to let go is to enter into the movement of the cosmos. There is something deeply unsettling about this dark passage, for it counters our conditioned defences and challenges our ingrained aversion to death. Despite the anguish, this dark passage remains the most truest manifestation of our plight, and presents a necessary task if we strive toward maturity. The work lies in softening into mortality. We experiment with a friendlier, more curious attitude toward death, finding in it a shelter under which we rest. Practically, we might attend death cafes where people speak honestly and openly about death. We might try sharing our bucket lists with our friends and family, with a curiosity of how each item expresses our deepest desires. We can recite a few simple lines of reassurance whenever time steals away our years. For myself, I use this line from William Earnest Henley’s “Invictus”: And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. This line reminds me that while mortality evokes fear, I do not have to live in fear. By processing unconscious material in the light of conscious examination, we free ourselves from primal drives that dictate our actions, and avail ourselves to more creative and healthier possibilities.
This is beautiful. Thank-you for sharing your deep thoughts.