Imagine that I’m early-twenty-something, a wee naif who’s seen like three butts, if that. I’m in an art gallery in an earnest, cunty little vest, striving for journalistic greatness in my dutiful reporter drag. I’m holding a tape recorder up to an artist.
She said something and my brow knitted itself into a subway map.
In her mother’s attic, the artist Jeannie Simms found expired gelatin photograms — an analog photography material where an image is transmitted onto the sheet upon light exposure. This was a defunct material from a bygone age, since replaced by modern technology.
Inspiring her art with it was writer Georges Bataille. From the exhibition notes: “Bataille saw photography as a space of the uncanny…. He likened this space of the uncanny to an orgasm—“la petite mort” that produces a momentary suspension of the consciousness.”
She stated into my recorder: “I made love to them.”
Ah, of course, I thought. An artist nurtures their art. They birth their art. They make love to their art. I said something to telegraph that I was on the same page, wink wink, with her metaphor. I get it. Symbolism!
I, too, know art.
She looked at me like I slurped milk from a sippy cup. She clarified.
No no, no. She fucked them. A lot!
To my nonplussed sippy-cup face, she explained. She took these sheets and in the pitch darkness found various ways to pleasure herself, as you do, rolling or crumpling them up, etc. Orgasm origami, if you will (my words, not hers). I suddenly imagined all of this with an acuteness that did not befit my quaint little vest, which suddenly felt a lot less cunty.
When the moment came, she turned on the light, exposing the sheets. At the moment all consciousness suspended, as Bataille said, so did the nature of the sheet itself. The material forever changed, transformed. So was my innocence, forever changed as well.
Most of the resulting artworks didn’t look suggestive or even directly conveying she masturbated with them at all — they swam as a school of pellucid abstract shapes and crinkles across pale paper. It was a beguiling array of forms, save for the occasional streak of a stray pubic hair.
Cristina of the past fretted about having to type this up in InDesign. She, of the dutifully vested, dreaded looking my editor in the eye as he, too, realized what was happening and feared how the little old ladies who read our paper would absorb this over their morning kouign amann.
Cristina of 2026 thinks this is a brilliant idea, and we should all do something like it.
Haha, what?
Whenever I pull cards for clients new to tarot, I utter via dulcet tones a brief disclaimer: There are no bad cards. Don’t be afraid.
And then, right on cue, I pull Death.
My client, every single time.
Don’t be scared!!! Death in tarot rarely means actual death. It just means change. More of an ego death, and the kind of change that you can’t ⌘+Z, akin to a rebirth or transformation. Just as you can’t make a butterfly revert into a caterpillar, you can’t retrogress into who you were in 2004.
I chose “Transformation” as the name for Table 13 at my wedding, partly because “Death” at a party is never that great, and partly because I love this as the true heart of this tarot card’s meaning.
As I do with most philosophical quandaries, I turn to Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. In it, she writes of the Death card. See how it reminds you of Bataille’s perspective on photography and Simms’ work:
“The ego never wants to release energy; it wants to hoard it against the fear of death. … in sex too the ego hoards energy. It fights climax and surrender because at that moment the ego partly dissolves. Because the ego resists the very idea of death and therefore keeps us from enjoying life we must sometimes take extreme steps to get past it.”
I haven’t, despite my endorsement, found antique gelatin photography materials in an attic and become biblically acquainted with them. But I understand what Simms was exploring, which is also what Pollack hints at: our ego’s resistance to letting go. Surrendering is terrifying. What if we find a new way to lean in?
Death asks us in part to examine how our resistance to our own transformation is born from our fear of change. And then, from the darkness of that fear, how we can bite into the unknown and co-create a new era together that honors what’s gone and ushers forth what emerges in its disintegrated wake — orgasm origami optional.
How does your concept of ego death change when you think of it as transformation?
Thanks for reading,
Cristina
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