It is But Death Who Comes at Last

Keith Haring Untitled (For James Ensor) 1 (1989)

Acrylic on canvas (36 x 72 in)

The Keith Haring Foundation

 

Apparently, having penetrated the object of their desire, the average male lasts between four to eight minutes before ejaculating. Many men may like to believe they last longer - and many female partners may wish that were the case - but, according to those who have studied the matter, it simply isn't so.     

 

Of course, some men climax much more rapidly than four minutes; expelling semen and experiencing orgasm soon after initiating sexual activity and with minimal stimulation [2]. This is often characterised as a form of male sexual dysfunction, although there is no universally agreed definition amongst the experts about what constitutes ejaculatio praecox; some say anything under a minute is premature, whilst others don't think there's any real issue if the man can last over fifteen seconds before jizzing [3].

 

On the other hand, there are men who can last much longer than the average time; although for some delayed ejaculation is problematic rather than pleasurable and can also cause discomfort for their partners [4].     

 

Either way, and whatever the ejaculation latency time one averages out at, it's crucial to remember the following wise words of Sir Walter Scott: 

 

And come he slow, or come he fast, 

It is but Death who comes at last. [5]

 

I don't think even Bataille could have put it better ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Shortly before his death in February 1990, Keith Haring produced a number of works with an erotico-thantological theme, including this work depicting a skeleton ejaculating on a flowerbed. It formed the first panel of a diptych (for James Ensor). In the second panel, thanks to the dead man's sperm, the flowers have grown and are in full bloom, much to the delight of the skeleton.

 

[2] The 1948 Kinsey Report suggests that three-quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters.

 

[3] The belief that premature ejaculation should be considered a medical condition (or an indicator of neurosis) rather than a normal variation, has been disputed by some sex researchers, including Alfred Kinsey, who viewed it as a sign of masculine vigour and pointed to the fact that in the natural world male mammals often ejaculate rapidly during coition in order to increase their chances of passing on their genes. 

      It would seem to me that any coital imperative which posits an optimal-time to ejaculate, merely contributes to the pressure on men to perform like machines and furthers the pathologisation of male sexuality in the modern world.    

 

[4] Delayed ejaculation - which is far less common than premature ejaculation - refers to a man's persistent difficulty in coming, despite his wish to do so and even if he is sexually stimulated. Whilst, as we have discussed, most men reach orgasm within a few short minutes of active thrusting during intercourse, a man with delayed ejaculation either does not have orgasms at all or cannot have an orgasm until after a prolonged period of huffing and puffing.

 

[5] Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808), canto 2, st. 30, lines 567-568.

      This historical romance in verse consists of six cantos, each with an introductory epistle and extensive notes. It concludes with the Battle of Flodden (1513). Those who are interested can find the work on Project Gutenberg: click here.  

[6] Bataille famously explores the relationship between Eros and Thanatos in his work, demonstrating how the idea of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely metaphorical. As Nick Land notes: 

      "Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending-off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality […] The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one […] but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness." 

      In other words, when we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime. It is, as Bataille argues, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

      See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 136. And see also my post of 21 September 2016 on orgasm and the will to merger: click here. 

Sympathetic Reflections on the Case of Sir Clifford Chatterley

Clifford Chatterley

comicvine.gamespot.com

Rather like Jed Mercurio, whose recent adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover for the BBC caused some consternation in Lawrence circles, I'm increasingly sympathetic to the figure of Sir Clifford Chatterley. For whilst, metaphorically speaking, the war had brought the roof down over his wife's head, it was he, poor devil, not she, who had been shipped home from Flanders more or less in bits, paralysed from the waist down, and in need of constant medical care for two full years.

The narrator tells us Clifford had a marvellous hold on life and that, despite the nature of his injuries, he was not really downcast. Indeed, Clifford remained bright and cheerful - "almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes". What's more, Clifford also kept up a certain dandyish display of style: "He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street."

One might very reasonably admire such stoicism, but the narrator seems keen to foreclose this possibility. Clifford, he says, isn't courageously indifferent in the face of pain and misfortune, rather, having been so badly hurt, "the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him ... something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone". All that was left, writes Lawrence, was blank insentience and the "slight vacancy of a cripple". In other words, Clifford is not only physically paralysed, he's numbed in soul.
 
We are also informed that, even before his injury, Clifford wasn't a particularly passionate man. Still virgin at twenty-eight when he married Connie, the sex between them didn't mean much to him; it was just "one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary".

Having said that, he, like her, longed for a son and heir and hoped that he might one day regain some degree of potency, desperately trying to convince himself that he wasn't really mutilated and that the possibility of an erection wasn't entirely out of the question, even if the muscles of the hips and legs were paralysed: "'And then the seed may be transferred.'"*

Even, if need be, Clifford is open to the possibility of raising another man's child born of Connie as his own. Connie sees the logic of his thinking on this question; but she also finds it monstrous and slowly but surely she begins to turn against Clifford. Acknowledging that he wasn't to blame for the situation they found themselves in - and that his was the greater misfortune - she also concludes that he was responsible for the lack of tenderness between them: "He was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bred, cold sort of way!"

In this way, Connie justifies her rejection and sexual betrayal of her husband: "Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him off. ... Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him." Before long, this dislike has become pure hate:

"For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself."

Charming! No wonder then that he eventually turns to his nurse and housekeeper, Mrs Bolton, for comfort and affection: "At first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers ... But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness." After his breakdown, following Connie's decision to abandon him, Clifford and Mrs Bolton draw into a closer physical relationship:

"He would hold her hand, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly kissed him, he said! 'Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!' And when she sponged his great blond body, he would say the same! 'Do kiss me!' and she would lightly kiss his body ... And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation ... Mrs Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him."

Lawrence describes this as an intimacy of perversity, but his characterization of the relationship as such betrays something both limited and limiting - and at times deeply unpleasant - in his own thinking on sex and disability. The fact is, whilst Lawrence posits genital intercourse as the only truly legitimate and authentic sex act, others of us are happy to experience and experiment with a far wider range of pleasures and not worry whether these be counterfeit, unnatural, decadent or perverse in character. We're happy also to accept that people with disabilities may - through choice or necessity - differ in the manner they express their sexuality. 

One way or another, it's Mrs Bolton who makes a man of Clifford and rouses him to action in the world:

"And in this Mrs Bolton triumphed. 'How he's getting on!' she would say to herself in pride. 'And that's my doing! My word, he'd never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.'"

This, I think, is true: acutely aware of her own feelings and desires throughout the novel, Connie never seems to consider that Clifford had also been gradually dying within the marriage and that she had neglected him and his needs. By the time she's fucking Mellors, she doesn't touch her husband any longer; not even hold his hand. Yet she blames their lack of physical intimacy entirely on Clifford and his impotent cruelty. 
    
I don't, like Clifford, believe that Connie's actions indicate she's abnormal or insane, or one of those perverted women who must run after depravity. But I do think her selfish and somewhat fickle. And I do rather sympathise with Clifford, in a way that I didn't twenty years ago when I thought of her as an embodiment of the New Eve and of him only in the wholly negative - often ablelist - terms suggested by the author-narrator.  


*Note: The exact nature and extent of Clifford's spinal cord injury isn't made clear in the novel and so there is no reason for us as readers to pour scorn on his hopes. Nor should we subscribe to the mistaken idea, prevalent amongst the non-disabled, that disabled persons are incapable of enjoying an active and fulfilling sex life, replete with orgasms. For decades, the medical community assumed - logically, but incorrectly - that paraplegics such as Clifford couldn't experience the latter. But now, thanks to recent research in this area, we know differently. There is only one thing that definitively precludes such and that is massive damage to the sacral nerve roots at the base of the spine which interferes with the automatic nervous system. For orgasm is an internal (automatic) reflex, not a somatic sensation transmitted from skin and muscle movement and it needn't be exclusively genital in character; some people with spinal cord injuries develop compensatory erogenous zones allowing them to experience orgasms triggered by stimulation applied, for example, to their necks, knees, or nipples. You're triggering the same sacral reflex, just doing so via different routes. Mary Roach describes these non-genital orgasms rather nicely as immaculate; see chapter eleven of her work on the scientific study of sex, Bonk, (Canongate, 2008). 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

On Orgasm and the Will to Merger (Another Thanatological Fragment)

Man can find his individual isolation or discontinuity hard to bear. Thus he often seeks primal unity, or a return to universal oneness. But this will to merger is, of course, a sign of fatigue and decadence; a thinly disguised longing for oblivion.

Lawrence is clear: "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself". When this is no longer the case - when individual singularity breaks down - death results.

And yet love, of course, is a vital attraction that brings things together into touch ...

This obliges us, therefore, to admit the relationship between Eros and Thanatos and acknowledge that the French description of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely a metaphor.

As Nick Land writes:

"Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality … The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one … but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness."

When we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime.

Despite the primary law that dictates singularity, the greater truth is that we need one another and we need love. Thus the secondary law of all organic life - according to Lawrence - is that "each organism only lives through … contact with other life". 

Of course, if we go too far in this direction, then love is no longer vivifying, but destructive and deadly. Men might live by love, but so too do they die, or cause death, if they love too much or allow their love to become infected with idealism.

Lawrence values coition precisely because it is a coming-close-to-death, but not a form of merger; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the discontinuity of each party remains intact.

But such intimacy brings us to the very point of fusion and leaves us changed, or wounded by the experience (which is why love is often poignant, painful, and transformative all at the same time).

Orgasm gives us a clue regarding the return to the actual and the deep communion that awaits us. It is, as Bataille says, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

Thus, ultimately, the truth of eroticism is ... treason.

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed.  Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading related thanatological fragments can click here and here.