Exploring Taboo, While Remaining Sane

Let’s start with “imagination,” broadly.

How elastic is it? Let me speak on behalf of people like me here, when I say that I (we) tend to think of it as boundless.

Is that normal? How would I know.

I know what I’m told. I’m told some people lack imagination. Maybe it’s a calibration thing — the same as how some people think something is too sweet, while others would say the same thing isn’t sweet enough.

Maybe the people who think they’ve got weak imaginations actually have the strongest imaginations, but people like me are just hypersensitive to disturbances in the field.

What are we talking about?
Right. Imagination. It’s hard to define and impossible to compare.

A Thought Experiment

Imagine that you’re a dog. Can you truly picture it?

By picture it, I mean can you experience it?

How deep does your empathy extend when you try to imagine that you’re something other than exactly what you are?

And when you’re imagining yourself as that other thing, does it give you any appreciation for the struggles or hardship you encounter as that other?

Try a cat now.
Now try a person of a different race.
Try someone of a different gender.

If you felt as though you were successful in your spiritual alchemy, I’d like to now ask why? What did you feel distinctly?

I can tell you what I feel when I do it — it’s something I often feel, but cannot place.
It’s the part of my being that pulls me towards experiments like this to begin with — it’s a dislocation.

The Feeling of Otherness

Sometimes we feel alien, or foreign — without group or place or home. Maybe we walk into a church, or pool hall, or a local diner, and we’re on the outside until we learn the rules and sense the boundaries.

Other times, we know the rules and we hate them, and we choose to “other” ourselves.

It can be a source of pride.

I’ll use politics for example, to say:

“I’ve got no position on this issue, because I think the entire argument is stupid.”

See there — in this instance you’ve successfully othered yourself.

In a more extreme case, at the grocery store say, you might walk out without paying — bypassing the rules and social agreements. You’ve othered yourself here.

Then, instead of eating the food you’ve stolen, you might throw it on the pavement and stomp on it. Now you’re really othered.

Alienating yourself is a luxury, to be clear. In a less civilized society, alienating yourself would logically be the least advisable thing to do.

In polite culture, we get away with it — and not only that, but we get a thrill from it too.

Some people build their entire lives upon doing it — and boy, do they pat themselves on the back for their troubles. Sneaky little devils, doing the work that the 9–5 employee isn’t brave enough to do.

“Staring into the void.”

The Arrogance of Freedom

I used to be so proud to tell everyone I was an atheist.

Hell, I didn’t even need to tell anyone to get a thrill from saying it.

I could tell myself:

“I ain’t doing what the rest of them are. I don’t need what they need.”

Their rules, and little shelters they build to insulate themselves from the chaos of reality — pathetic.

Maybe most transgressive people aren’t as hostile about it as I was, but I’ll bet there’s a kernel of that thinking in them.

A little arrogance to the perspective.
A feeling of being unbound and free to explore and do whatever you want.

We need it. We crave it. Solitude actually makes us feel connected.

And to an extent, that individuality is fantastic — it’s how we arrive at new ideas.

Zardoz, and the Virus of the Outsider

There’s a great film — well, not actually great.

No, you know what, fuck that, it is great.

It’s called Zardoz, and it’s got Sean Connery in a little thong toting a gun around. It’s a post-apocalyptic thing, and he’s a real rebel — a primitive, uncivilized thing who finds himself in a world that could only be described as a homogenized hellscape.

Everyone shares the same thoughts, and if you get off the shared wavelength, you’re cast out of the society and forced to age out alone.

Sean Connery busts into their safe little world like a virus, and starts a war, bringing back along all of the outcasts that were exiled.

He, the virus, then rebuilds the group, finding a way to unify the outcasts and the homogenized group.

The virus is then neutralized as a threat, and the ecosystem expands to accommodate the new information.

The Mainstreaming of Transgression

This happened with rap music.

Remember how taboo it used to be? Maybe you don’t. It was.

Now it’s funny. You hear music about men having sex with women and selling drugs and you think nothing of it. The big scary other is no longer other.

Look at a rapper like Eminem, who really defined himself as being frightening and forever a rebel. He’s a household name now. He’s also depressed, and his output has been awful.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself when he can’t be transgressive.

Solitude gives us a place, but it also lets us think we identify better with other outsiders.

We speak the language of solitude with each other and mistake it for a common tongue.

See, because my plight is actually a core part of my identity.

My struggle that is uniquely mine allows me to imagine your struggle that is uniquely yours.

The pain, I think, if we reduce it to its simplest form: My pain is your pain.

I enjoy hearing about your pain, because it reminds me that I’m an individual.

Todd Solondz and the Power of Taboo

Let’s talk about a filmmaker named Todd Solondz — he made a film called Happiness.

He intentionally made it offensive. One of the main characters is a pedophile, who was also a good father — what a lot of us might think of as a contradiction.

He made a great film, but was also seemingly intent on alienating people. I mean, why else would you do this?

If you looked at a photo of Todd Solondz, you might get a little bit of a better perspective. He is clearly an outsider.

Physically, he could best be described as an unfortunate nerd, and though I’m sure he cultivated a personality where he amused himself by pissing off the normies, in the beginning, it probably wasn’t his first choice.

My guess is that if he could’ve, he would’ve fit in. Life had other plans.

Todd was an outcast through no fault of his own, I’m sure, and eventually he just embraced it and found empowerment in amusing himself by disturbing the people who never accepted him anyways.

All this to say — taboo became his identity and helped him reframe his story. From victim of bullying, he turned it around and became the intellectual bully of the suburbs.

The Modern Explorer’s Dilemma

Alright, this is all getting a little long in the tooth. I’ll wrap it up soon, I promise.

We all feel this otherness, some to greater degrees than others. Some of us by choice, and others less so — though even they make a conscious decision to embrace it.

I’m not Todd Solondz, but why do I root for him when he antagonizes people who see things in black and white?

Because, I think, life exists in the space between our similarities.

There’s a friction happening between agreement and disagreement, and that’s a palpable energy.

There’s an energy in harmony too, but that’s akin to being a cell in a larger functional organism. That’s a truth that exists beyond us.

The friction is very… earthly. It’s fleshy. It’s something tangible.

It’s stuff we drag back from the other side like some disturbing specimen to analyze because it looks crazy and like nothing we’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s evil, maybe it’s not.

We like to be the ones to find it, though.

Returning to the Surface

But now, being an explorer of the dark isn’t what it was.

Thirty years ago a man like Todd Solondz would strap on his harness while we watched, and careen down into the cave, and re-emerge with his treasures.

But then the next guy did it, and came back with the same shit. Then the next, then the next.

Eventually, even the cowards got in on the action.

Finally, we decided to move the whole camp a little further down so we could plumb deeper.

Then we hit the bottom, and realized that the camp we left behind at the top was actually pretty cool — at least, what we could remember of it.

If Todd Solondz was active today, maybe he’d be one of the guys going back up and bringing back down relics from the surface to impress the people who grew up in the cave.

I don’t know. Something tells me he never actually untethered from the top to begin with.

The Moral Tether

So here’s how I’ll end this — where I was going to begin with:

Intelligent transgressive people understand that to go exploring, you must respect the surface.

You must remain connected to it; Solondz achieved this through his hardcore religious upbringing, having originally planned on becoming a Rabbi.

Without these firm moral understandings, you will fall indefinitely.

You can’t even begin to frame the argument on behalf of the pedophile father, if you don’t appreciate with conviction the evil of the father.

That’s why the question rattles decent people — because they don’t believe in their convictions strongly enough to step away from them and ask the question.

Often when I have these debates with people they become hung up on trying to reassure me that X is evil.

“Yes, I know that’s evil, that’s a given,” I’ll say.
“But what about this part… isn’t this interesting?”

No. In most cases they’re not interested.

I know what I believe, but I’m always interested in understanding something in a more sophisticated way.

To use the morals I know to be true, to arrive at a conclusion that someone else might not like.

Maybe to arrive at no conclusion at all — but to marvel at the complexity.

The Final Note

Alienation, or otherness, at its worst is reduced to empathy — or an attempt to place ourselves in someone else’s trauma.

It’s an attempt to solve an equation that you don’t understand because it looks similar to your own.

To cry for someone, because you want to cry for yourself. You want to give ultimate power to the friction of the flesh.

Instead, we must acknowledge the singing — the victory of truth.

The truth that enables us to move in harmony, and build on one another like cells in an organism.

When we point to the friction, the taboo, the transgressive, we can marvel at the complexity of the universe we inhabit — the other truth that we are alone.

But we are also one, and those two things need to be appreciated in equal measure for flowering to occur.

— Good Evening