Gazing out the window of a speeding car, on your way to somewhere else, you see it on the side of the road: a small white cross. Sometimes it’s festooned with garlands of colorful flowers. Sometimes it’s made of PBC piping. Sometimes there is nothing but two white brush strokes painted on the rock face blasted years ago to build the highway you are driving on. You see this small, crude thing and it steals your breath. Whatever is going on inside your car, whatever song you are listening to or fight you are having or dream you are dreaming is suddenly interrupted: you are in the presence of the dead. They are unknown to you, but for one moment, they are in your life. They are yours. You drive and they fall away behind you, eventually disappear. You continue to go where you are going.

 

As a child I was fascinated by them. I was trapped in my own life and in a flash these roadside memorials cracked open someone else’s, a mysterious life already completed, a story with a beginning, middle and end, full of violence and tragedy. I felt a kinship with these unknown dead. I was a child and I already knew too much.

 

 

I thought about my own life and the losses in it. There were many. For the purposes of this project, I decided to stick to moments of physical violence acted up my body, by someone else or by myself. Transgressions against the body are transgressions against the soul. A kind of death occurs each time someone is assaulted, violated, raped, abused, cut up, or mortified. But as Georges Bataille has written, from transgression comes transcendence. If each act of transgression resulted in a death, then each death gave birth to a new life, one transformed by the experience, for better or worse. The body withstands a battery, the soul is immolated, but both continue to walk and want, both continue. This is my experience of transgression, at least. I choose to see it as a transformation.