TRANSGRESSION, MORALITY AND AESTHETICS

'Confessional', the true story I wrote to illustrate the idiosyncratic meanings around sex, also illustrates the power of transgression. For this man, the power of what he was doing came from the certainty that it was wrong. Transgression is bigger than that, though. If transgression was merely about wrongdoing, many of our daily weaknesses and not a few of our major sins and crimes would be transformative for us. In fact, most of the things we think of as wrong just keep us stuck in low places. We learn nothing except rinse and repeat. Transgression means to carry across. It is crossing boundaries, finding edges, jumping off, taking what we know into the unknown, from light to dark, from dark to light.

TRANSGRESSION HIGH AND LOW

A woman I knew was experimenting with Left Hand Path magic and wanted to explore transgression. She worked in a supermarket where there was a door only customers were allowed through. All the other staff routinely broke the rule and went through this door, but she had always been painfully law abiding and never went through it. For her, going through this door was an act of High Transgression. She thought about it for some time, made a kind of pact with herself to do it, and after she had done it she was a braver person who had been through not just a door in a supermarket but a minor rite of passage.

When it comes to sex, low transgression is fun and frequent. It is the frisson of the forbidden liaison, or the thrill of doing something new. Sexual acts such as dogging (sex in public) are always transgressive simply because they go against social norms. High sexual transgression may or may not look similar. Perhaps simply allowing yourself an orgasm is transgressive for you. Perhaps genuine Self love is transgressive for you. Perhaps it is doing That Thing. I’m sure you know the one I mean.

The stupidest thing I have ever done was break beer bottles on a picnic bench in a park. I mean I have done lots of stupid things, but this was a conscious attempt at low transgression, in that it was a study in meaningless damage. Come on, said my friend, in his best Homer Simpson fashion. It’s fun to smash things. So I did, to please him and it wasn’t fun at all. I did not come out of it with any useful learning and I mention it here as a tasteless example of naughtiness without any potential for growth or beauty. It was not High Transgression.

 

 FEATURES OF HIGH TRANSGRESSION

High Transgression is Aestheticized: It is consciously beautiful or consciously challenging. It knows how it appears. Some modern art experiments with forms of ugliness, deformity or decay located in the body in attempts to confront and challenge. I refer you to the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, and the paintings in blood of Vincent Castiglia. It’s become a trope of sorts, within the art world. Just add corpses! And yet, compare this with common or garden Low Transgression porn, which is also self conscious but is usually designed to reaffirm the tastes you already have, so that you want more and more of it.

High Transgression is Difficult: It has to stretch you mentally and/or physically. It has to take time and effort. It tests endurance, patience, strength and courage.

High Transgression is Deliberate: You can’t do it accidentally or retrospectively, although you can reflect on something transgressive you have done and then do it again as an act of High Transgression. You can say, wow that was weird and gross and I liked it, but that just makes it low transgression. High Transgression is always intentional, and therein lies a good part of the magic.

High Transgression is Mature: It is made by healthy adults, and it is never trauma-based or regressive. There is much that is therapeutically useful in sexual transgression, and I have given examples of men using painful sexual submission to play our early trauma in a safe manner. This is not necessarily High Transgression, if it is serves to comfort, reaffirm and calm the psyche, rather than to challenge it. But it may be High if it results in an intentional remaking of the self or genuinely seeks to cross boundaries.

High Transgression is Spiritually Risky: If you get it wrong, you form more of the unhealthy attachments from which you are trying to free yourself. Hindu sadhus or holy people called the Aghori, in India,  use transgression in a very deliberate manner. They eat rotting human corpses from the sacred Ganges river, meditate sitting on corpses, and in a final initiation ingest semen, meat, forbidden grains, urine and faeces. They are frequently antisocial, assaulting those who approach them. All of this is about detachment from material things and the ego. They give up all social attachments as well as all sense of the normative, in order to propel themselves into the void. This is Left Hand path practice in its most rigorous form.

 High Transgression is best done sparingly. Plan it, reflect on it, design it with care, use it for self reflection and spiritual development. Does all this planning and thinking and consciousness bullshit take the fun out of it? I think not. I think it enhances the experience and deepens it. Low transgression is morally arid, dull and stereotyped in comparison. Porn can often be low transgression. I am not at all against porn, but at its worst it has that stereotyped, repetitive, arid quality that means watching it is unlikely to gain the viewer transcendence.