The Sex Appeal of Death

from an essay by Tibor Hajas

Contemporary Europe, or rather Western civilization in general has been boycotting the death experience - excluding it from the voluntary ghetto of life.

This civilization is life-centered, and tolerates nothing which it considers to be irrational or unacceptable. The afterlife, which did not prove to be rationally acceptable, was done away with. Thus rationalized, death became irrational, and therefore unacceptable.

From the point of view of the Self, death is the ultimate irrational state. But the Self must nevertheless experience dying, and since it has dissociated itself from the sphere of irrationality, it has no way of getting in touch with death, or of establishing control over it. Death is the ultimate. Death is, for the mind which conceived of the concept of Totality, the real and frightening manifestation of that concept.

Europe has been striving for the expunging of death from the start. Death itself became the enemy, a spectre in opposition to the real nature of civilization. From time to time, and for brief periods, this spectre has been a reflection of this civilization's damaged nervous-system. But the systematic sublimation of death did not serve to integrate it into general experience – it distanced it, covered it up.

The most recent European mass death experience, World War II, provided such an unimaginably intense vision of death, that since then death has really become a taboo subject – one open to neither understanding, nor analysis. Death, since then, has turned into an inconceivable abstraction, and the individual death experience has become incommunicable, because Europe no longer has any way to describe it.

Death is, however, one of the fundamental physical, aesthetic and religious experiences; man cannot ignore it. If physical necessity does not, then the imagination finds ways to acommodate human vision to a death which people are unable to accept psychologically. Indeed this vision keeps people in training, so to speak, in order that they not forget during their wait. As an accomplice of horror, it offers basic training.

Since conceptions of death are by their very nature rooted in our experience, the audience should live through their own death, fear of death, and its various related types (or those of others) so intensely, so directly, that they purge themselves of their intellectual and moral analysis of it. It then becomes a message speaking for itself and in itself – a message which the audience accepts and consumes as a passion play – its own passion, as a substitute for an experience lacking in our civilization. With its intensity and its unfamiliar familiarity, it both attracts and repels. It is on too great a scale for anyone to dare experience it or, by the same token, to forget it.

The death experience, as communicated through the media, reminds one of the real thing - it constitutes a model of death. Death ends up in the secondary sphere of reality, it becomes inalienable, and if death is inalienable, then life is also inalienable.

English translation: Oliver Botar