death-porn-video-phone-loneliness-sex

Clifford Ray Jones died the way he drove – with one hand on the wheel and his trousers on the floor. At around 3.30am, he was hurtling down Interstate 75 in Detroit when his Toyota Supra crashed and rolled, throwing him out of the sunroof and killing him. Police recovered his mobile phone, which had been showing a porn video when he died. But the most interesting thing about the story is that it isn’t about sex.

Whatever impelled him to his squalid and ludicrous death, it can’t have been lust, as this is normally understood. One detail makes this look like a suicide: the fact that he had his seatbelt off and the sunroof open. I can imagine why he might have found a seatbelt inhibiting, but who the hell drives through Detroit with the sunroof open on a freezing January night? There may be men who get a kick out of masturbating while shivering uncontrollably (I’m not going to Google this because I don’t want to be proved right), and others who like to do it in a moving car – but there is probably no one who belongs to both fetish groups.

To suppose that he went out into the night to look for a sexual thrill seems to me to make a mistake that permeates the whole of our culture: to use sex as a symbol or metaphor for all sorts of things that it really isn’t.

In particular, we talk about sex as if it were about sensation, when actually what moves us is not sensations but emotions. Sexual sensations are part of all sorts of emotional experiences. Sex builds love, companionship and reassurance; and sometimes it builds all their opposites too: hatred, self-disgust and insecurity. But in all those cases, it’s the result that matters – the meaning, not the actions with which it’s expressed.

Sex is never memorable in itself. I mean that quite literally: we can no more remember how pleasure feels than we can remember real pain. The quality of the most wonderful orgasm, and of the pains of childbirth, are both impossible to recall. What persists is the emotions they arouse, and the networks of association that these form.

You may say that some people are thrill-seekers. “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man,” as Hunter S Thompson liked to quote. But even here, the point is not the sensation in itself, for any sensation will do so long as it is strong enough to annihilate all feeling. The purpose of such behaviour is to feel nothing: the emotion that drives it is a longing to feel no emotion – to get away from all memory and feeling.

In the end, sensation is self-annihilation. The last ride of Clifford Ray Jones really had nothing to do with sexual pleasure. He just wanted to get away from his emotions. And, possibly, he succeeded; possibly, of course, the last thing he felt was regret. So when I think of the last ride of this man, it really doesn’t appear to be a story about sexual thrills. It’s a glimpse of horrible loneliness, of despair.

thanks np