Goines On: La petite mort

Image from
Les Ballets de Monte Carlo,
Jean-Christophe Maillot
[Click image for more vignettes]

Often, when Goines felt death near, he thought of the French phrase “la petite mort” – literally the little death – closely associated with the ecstatic few moments of sexual orgasm. But those moments preceded the death referred to – the brief lapse into unconsciousness that can follow orgasm. Those moments felt nothing like the...nothingness that Goines expected of death. Those moments were the opposite of death – they were longings to live, to thrust forward, to go on and on and on.
    But wasn’t that why Mother Nature endowed orgasm with such an exaltation of feeling, precisely to urge her creatures to keep on mating, procreating, and going on? Goines’ death would be little compared to potential generations to come....