death · XIII · upright
la petite mort
Written by Victoria
Working for a big corporation can feel like inhibiting your natural sensuality to conform to the tiny pocket someone else designed for you. Whether you fit or not, you’re expected to fold yourself into it.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to eighteenth-century France, to the world of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. The image that keeps returning to me is of a woman hunched over, one hand on her dresser and the other on her stomach. Her corset is being pulled tighter, as though her capacity to breathe is something to be corrected. And why would she need to breathe when all that manufactured, superficial oxygen is right there?
The Death card intimidates. People recoil from it the way they sometimes do when someone says they’re a Scorpio. I like to give it a quiet nod and a knowing smile: I see you.
I think of women carrying a wild, dark rage who spend their teens and twenties conforming to ideas of who they should become: what success should look like, which partner they should choose, what kind of woman they should be. So often, that conformity means suppressing the supernatural thing brewing inside them.
But before that, there was the child catching lizards, the tingle in her fingers. There was singing and dancing to her favorite songs without wondering how she looked. There was curiosity about her own body and the free, wild world around her. Sometimes, I wonder whether that freedom only begins to find its way back to us in our mid-to-late thirties, after years of learning to hold ourselves in.
In his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Thomas Nagel explores the subjective character of experience: what it feels like to be a living creature from within. We can study a bat’s body and behavior, yet that knowledge alone does not tell us what the world feels like to the bat. An account of experience can leave something essential out when it moves away from the perspective of the being experiencing it.
I keep returning to that thought when I picture the woman at her dresser. We can describe her clothing, her posture, her marriage, her place in society. We can say she has become everything expected of her. But what does it feel like to be her? What happens inside her as the laces tighten?
I draw from Nagel to the conformity I’m describing - a woman can become so practiced at seeing herself through other people’s eyes that she begins to lose touch with her own sensations. She knows how she looks when she dances. She has forgotten how dancing feels. Even pleasure becomes something she watches herself perform.
And when she cannot find words for what feels missing, that absence of language can become another reason to dismiss it. Nagel’s discussion reminds me that the limits of what we can describe are not necessarily the limits of what exists. I think of the woman who knows, before she can explain it, that the life she has built leaves her struggling to breathe.
But what happens when approval begins to feel like pleasure? When being chosen, praised, or considered successful becomes so familiar that we mistake it for wanting the life we have?
I wonder how much of what I call desire began as an instruction. Be beautiful. Be agreeable. Be wanted, but never want too much. Even alone, those instructions can linger. The imagined observer follows us into the bedroom, into the mirror, into the moments when we are supposed to belong entirely to ourselves.
The sensuality of the Death card has always resonated with me. I think of the French expression la petite mort: the little death, a name for orgasm. The anticipation, the gathering of sensation, the bliss of release. For a moment, you loosen your grip on yourself. Then you return, and the cycle begins again.
In that moment, perhaps what briefly falls away is the effort of maintaining an acceptable self. The face arranged for someone else. The stomach held in. The constant awareness of how we might appear.
I don’t believe pleasure automatically frees us from everything we have learned. But I am interested in that interruption: a moment when sensation becomes more immediate than judgment, when the body asks for our attention and receives it.
The Death card gives me an image for the longer transformation. What would I have to grieve if I stopped living for approval? A version of success? A relationship? The comfort of being understood as a good woman? There are attachments woven through those laces. Loosening them can bring relief and loss at once.
And surrender means something different when it belongs to you. The woman at the dresser deserves to decide how tightly she is held, whose hands are near her, and when she wants the laces undone.
Perhaps that is why I give Death a quiet nod. I recognize the fear of letting something end, especially when it has given me a place in the world. I also recognize the longing to discover what I might feel when I no longer have to hold myself so tightly.
Being somewhere you’re not supposed to be, somewhere that requires you to keep tightening the corset... is the biggest block to this foreplay of life.