creative transgressions

photo by steph

Taboos, they say, make transgressions so pleasurable. There is an intense pleasure in doing something you don’t really expect to get away with, but no pleasure at all in getting caught. It’s a mysterious and self-contradictory thing.

In my childhood home, the walls of my parents’ bedroom were covered in pale green wallpaper, which, upon closer inspection, wasn’t green at all. It was actually white, or off-white, with a complex but faint floral pattern. Those appearing and disappearing flowers intrigued me because even at close range, there weren’t any real flowers there at all, just thin outlines of flowers, carefully, minutely, methodically drawn, it seemed to me, with a pale green pen.

I remember standing close to the wall one afternoon. I wasn’t supposed to be alone in my parents’ bedroom. It was off-limits; there were other places to play. I was about seven, just about eyelevel to the top of my father’s dresser, where he emptied his pockets every day after work at the college. My eyes swooped over his keys, his watch, the ubiquitous roll of peppermint Life Savers, a Chap Stick in its classic black plastic tube… and finally landed on his felt-tip pens, one of which was red. I found myself surrounded by all those empty faint flowers, just waiting to be colored in, set free from their bland anonymity on the wall, and I had just the means to do it.

Meticulously, proudly, and minding the lines, I filled the first tiny petals with bright blood-red ink. I admired my work, so pleased with my idea and sure my parents would be impressed and approve. The blood rushed next to my face, as I stepped back and realized what I’d started, for unless I filled in all the flowers with my felt-tip pen, and turned the whole wall red, the red mark, however neat, would not be the art I had intended. I colored in two or three more flowers, hoping to hide the first in a field of red. Predictably, the blood only spread; my transgression was impossible to hide or deny. I was punished promptly.

The bloody spots remained on the wall, and every time I saw them for years after that, until the house was sold and all its flawed walls became some other family’s problem, I blushed equally red – not with the penitence and shame my family still insists that I should feel, but with pleasure: with the complex satisfaction of a secret transgression, and the simple pride I took in my work.