Spoiler Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Human Centipede, A Serbian Film, and Hereditary.

Among my favourites in the Carnival Ride canon is the Drop of Doom¹. The creaking ascent, an eternity spent wondering when the ride was last serviced. The constricting chest restraints, designed to prevent you both from falling off and — conspicuously — flying out. Those moments of abated creaking at the top, silent save for the nervous laughs of your ridemates, and the carnival sounds below, coming up to you as from a memory. If you’re lucky, you’re afforded a wide view of the surrounding city. And perhaps you spend a moment pondering —

And you’re off! The wind is knocked out of your lungs, your muscles all contract, and it’s impossible to breathe, let alone think, and for a few moments of freefall it’s utter bliss, total thoughtlessness, a mini ego-death at the fair. It is patently religious. And then you’re back in the carnival itself, which felt so far away moments ago, and your heart threatens to pound a hole in your chest, and suddenly you don’t need another coffee.

Whenever I disembark from a Drop of Doom, I am quickly reminded of the phrase adrenaline junkie. One’s mind is momentarily but undeniably altered. The Drop of Doom brings your body close to the feeling of death for the high of adrenaline that is natural only in the sense that if you really were plummeting off a cliff to your actual doom, your body would react the same way. And in this safe simulation, I (and perhaps we) find great pleasure. Why is this?

My guess is that it has something to do with our bodies’s preternatural ability to enact cognitive and emotional shifts quickly in response to threats. If it truly needs to self-preserve, it’s all systems go, and those systems feel damn good, because by golly do I prefer to outrun that saber-toothed cat. Plus, I assume there are some post facto neuro-trasmitic rewards for actually surviving the ordeal: Keep it up! Live long and prosper!

Chasing this evolved, natural reward system is, I believe, the heart of all extreme recreations. It’s what underlies the reverent tones an adrenaline junkie uses in describing their experience hurtling themselves out of an airplane, slaloming down a mountain bluff, executing a front flip off an airborne motorcycle etc. And while the previous list is representative of the most dyed-in-the-wool thrill seekers, truly risking life and limb for the high, I’m of the belief that many if not all of us have our own idiosyncratic version of this pattern. Face a minideath, and reap the rewards.

Take for instance hot sauce, and the culinary abuse of capsaicin generally. This is a literally painful experience, no? And at least for me the pain itself is part of the draw. It is the actual spiciness that makes hot sauce so exciting, so enticing. But if pain is defined as unpleasant suffering, then how can anyone enjoy hot sauce for the pain? Isn’t enjoying pain a bare-faced contradiction?

Then we jump back to our previous observation about the thrill of surviving. We humans, in our boundless self-awareness, can interpret our bodily reaction to the threat of a ghost pepper as both temporary and survivable, and can thus revel in the fight or flight response our sympathetic nervous system imposes on us — or perhaps, it is we who do the imposing on our system by ordering the Death Sauce, a real sauce I once asked for on a burger, despite warnings from the waiter, thus halting my contributions to conversation in an otherwise pleasant double date.

Consider the most extreme version of this extreme scenario. Would any scoville-enthusiast enjoy the experience of slathering their tongue in lighter fluid and setting their tongue ablaze? Surely this must be the final frontier of the capsaicin game; permanent, unbearable oral heat. Similarly, do sexual masochists have a deep longing to have their minds irreparable harmed by sustained torture?

The answer to both of these thought experiments is a resounding of course not because in the above scenarios the awareness of relative safety is completely removed. And the key word here is ‘relative’, since complete safety also ruins the fun. Eating a bell pepper just doesn’t have the same thrill as a habanero. So the magic is in the boundary, that special place just on the edge of tolerability. It is in pushing this boundary that we cultivate the rush of feeling of having survived another step into the unknown.

While the above description of hot sauce and carnival rides might seem obvious and banal, I believe this sense of pushing boundaries — playing at the extremes — is at the very heart of creation of all types. It is a guiding force behind what is flippantly referred to as ‘inspiration’, as if the insight to create something truly novel comes from thin air, and not from taking one more step along a pre-existing path that so far no one else has dared to proceed along.

Perhaps the richest instance of incremental steps up the ladder of extremity, and thus of creative innovations, is in the world of music. Once upon a time — 1968 — The Beatles’s Helter Skelter was called “probably the heaviest rocker on plastic today”². Not long after we get Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Metallica. Metal qua metal, today played on classic rock stations. And we’re still in the ‘70s. If the trend, from Elvis to Paul to Ozzy to Lars is increasing intensity, where do we end up a half-century later?

To answer this, we need to consider what is meant by intensity. The common usage seems to refer to speed, volume, distortion, lyrical aggression, and atonality. Slayer’s Raining Blood is more intense — more extreme — than Helter Skelter for being faster, more distorted, and more disorienting. Sure, Helter Skelter features Paul screaming his head off, but Raining Blood’s screaming is more aggressive, more visceral. We could continue with this trend line, tracing it through industrial, death metal, black metal, grindcore etc, but suffice to say we can jump all the way ahead to Full of Hell’s Burning Myrrh and it makes Raining Blood sound like classic rock all over again.

The obvious conclusion to all this is of course pure noise, and we see this conclusion reached — rather early! — by artists such as Merzbow. Nothing could possibly hope to max out the frequency spectrum more completely, be more atonal, and indeed ‘harsh’ than noise itself. Then is the intensity game done? Do we need to pedal back to acoustic guitars and the satanic-panic-baiting ballads of the halcyon ‘70s?

No! Ye of little faith, doubting the eternal wellspring of creativity that is the human mind. If we can't move forward, we'll need to move left. Here we get our first glimpse of extremity breeding creativity. Recall my previous lingua conflagrata example: for many people, listening to harsh noise is an absurd jump of a similar scale. What I mean is that for your average casual listener, vaguely rhythmic patterns of white-noise isn’t extreme or thrill-seeking so much as it’s ridiculous. And this holds even for avid metalheads — though personally I will defend Pulse Demon with all the social credit I have, the perspective I’ve painted is a reality for, I’m willing to wager, the vast majority of well-adjusted adults. Consider that even metal is a somewhat fringe interest, even today.³

So if the previous non-lyrical⁴ axioms of intensity — speed, volume, distortion, atonality — are exhausted, and you still need to be more kvlt than all our friends, new vectors need to be explored. How can we iteratively evolve the intense? If we can’t find extremity by our old definition, we need a new definition, and it’s both in seeking and fulfilling this definition that the real fruitful creative labor is done.

Bubbling under the surface of our previous axioms is a more abstract vector: discomfort. The reason the previous axioms are perceived as extreme is that they test the limits of what amount of pain we can recreationally accept, just as capsaicin. By cleverly playing with, for instance, sour notes out of scale, it’s possible to bait the human ear into experiencing a deeply — perhaps evolutionarily — unsettling anti-climax or dissonance. And for some of us, call us crazy, this un-harmony actually adds to an aesthetic of aggression, darkness, and violence. It lets us personally feel what is being described or implied.

But this, and our other axioms, are just the most obvious embodiments of discomfort. Many artists have chosen their own vectors of extremity to explore. On one of their opuses, The Seer, Swans punishes the listener with patience testing repetition. The full song comes in at over 30 minutes, and for minutes at a time the song is a single crashing stab of instruments, backdropped only by digital noise and chaotic bells.

In a similar vein is Liturgy’s Generation, a seven minute song with only the slightest rhythmic variations on the same repeated guitar chords. While drums and rhythm shifts throughout, it is a far cry from what one typically thinks of as a ‘song’. Still, the song is among my favourites.

One final example of this flavour of exploration is Boris’s Flood 1. This fourteen minute track is a duo of identical guitar loops falling ever more out of sync with each other. There is the occasional stab of reverb-heavy drums, but the song is an exercise in the listener’s willingness to listen to chaotically rhythm (perhaps intentionally unrhythmic) music. This is compounded by the shortness of the loop that repeats throughout.

All three of the above songs are sanity testing, not because they paint pictures of satanic rituals, war, and murder, but because they challenge our preconceived notions of acceptable songwriting. And here lies their achievement: where previous extreme music takes for granted that cochlear assault is the be all and end all, the above artists recognize that even the ear is an approximation for the mind. The real endpoint they should be playing with is the mental experience in the listener.

And in all of these cases — but especially the last — sacrifices have been made in order to innovate extremity. At least in the case of The Seer and The Flood, the songs are slower than most metal today. At points, The Seer drops into raw ambience, and Flood 1 never even includes distortion. By peddling back on the assumed axioms, these artists have made space to define extremity anew. And while Generation is certainly loud and fast, it is looped and repetitive to the point of sounding vaguely mathematical, rather than strictly aggressive. And this is no accident: the band themselves refer to their music as “transcendental”.

Occasionally the pursuit of certain vectors will lead to a dead end, and rather than beat our heads against the final frontier of say, death metal or noise music, we might actually find ourselves making more progress if we are willing to take two steps back.

Let's apply this reasoning to my previously ignored vector, extremity in lyrics. Superficially, it would seem that my above arguments don’t apply, as the search space for lyrics is infinite. While there is a maximum tempo achievable on a drum kit — even with digital altering — before the sounds become a static signal, there is no upper bound on the level of aggression in lyrics, right? Unfortunately, even lyrics seem to follow pre-carved trendlines that, for me, eventually become cliche before becoming boring. Metal is especially guilty of this. In the pursuit of out-extreming one’s contemporaries, the ante is ever upped. Since lyrics only risk being a magnet-rod for controversy — revelled in by many artists — it’s easy to leap straight into flaming-tongue territory.

Here is a sampling of what I’m referring to. Here’s an excerpt from Cannibal Corpse’s elegantly titled I Cum Blood:

Charming. Here’s another, from Carcass’s Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment:

While undoubtedly these lyrics are extreme, they don’t instill anything like actual horror in me. They’re shocking sure, but to me, they scan as childish playground gross-out contests. All across metal you can find this pattern: just search for ‘most extreme metal lyrics’ and examples abound. People are upping the ante, from mere mention of abortion to eating the aborted foetus and beyond, but the impact doesn’t seem greater.

Here’s the flaming tongue effect in action. Beyond a certain point, we are out of reach of what the average person can actually imagine and contend with. Any attempts at ‘innovation’ once we hit this point are only innovative in the sense that adding one to the biggest number is innovative. Our ‘this is an actual threat’ radar doesn’t fire up, so we don’t get the thrill. Maybe you feel a little nauseous, but it strikes me as juvenile. Never in a million years am I going to be digging up a grave to copulate with the corpse. So truly, this song threatens me exactly nil. A ghost pepper has the allure of something I may actually someday try. Burn yourself alive is obviously off the table, and so it’s less lurid despite being more intense.

Now let’s take a look at a song that achieves extremity in a different way. This is Xiu Xiu’s Support Our Troops, Oh (Black Angels, Oh):

What Xiu Xiu achieves that Cannibal Corpse and Carcass do not is emotional engagement. The detail about the car seat, for being so close to home for so many of us, is way more intense than any amount of blood and viscera Carcass is willing to play with. The above story, as implied by the title, is an honest to god possibility for millions of soldiers. And this is enough to make your skin-crawl. Heap on top of this the single-entendre, ostensibly anti-American message of not supporting the troops and you get something legitimately transgressive: can Carcass say the same? Should we lock them up for the threat they pose to pregnant women? Of course not. What they are talking about is all way beyond the pale. But Xiu Xiu’s derision at the sort of people who sign up to kill people is real, and those people really do shoot and kill people, day in and day out.

Again, we are talking about the fringes of acceptability. Where necrophilic lyrics are so far beyond acceptability as to be rendered meaningless, Xiu Xiu’s anti-war messaging has real political import while shocking us into investment through pointed and plausible violent imagery. This is the heart. This is the boundary that artists aiming at the extreme should straddle.

This pattern crosses media. Consider film, and specifically horror movies, a close genre-analogue to metal. We have come a long way since Psycho, and the musical pattern of ever-heightening intensity has been followed in film. Slasher’s are a sub-genre unto themself, and they have been for decades. We have seen the film world indulge in the same sort of gross-out contests as metal.

The Human Centipede is a film in which three victims are surgically attached, mouth to anus, in a gastrointestinal chain as a form of experimental torture. Another notorious film in the genre is A Serbian Film. The movie simulates on film exactly the sort of stuff Cannibal Corpse seems so hung up on (necrophilia, murder, all manner of assault, often mixed together in a near arbitrary grab-bag).

I have seen both these films, and while they are certainly uncomfortable to watch, and unsettling, their plots, beats, tension etc. are completely forgettable. I can remember the films only as ‘the most over-the-top movies I’ve ever seen’. And this isn’t meant as a compliment. The emotional impact these movies had on me is totally absent, the cinematic equivalent of stubbing one’s toe: sudden, acutely painful and expletive-eliciting, but meaningless in comparison to the gradual, cataclysmic groundswell of breaking one’s heart.

So these films are disgusting, provocative, and gut-wrenching, but they are not affecting in the way other, less extreme, and thus more impactful movies are. In my view, The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film both aim low — if you’ll allow me to abuse a concept — on Maslow’s Pyramid of human discomfort. This is the sort of stuff that one hardly needs to be human to be disgusted by.

Like Cannibal Corpse and Carcass, The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film jump straight into the stratosphere, and sacrifice all emotionality (except perhaps revulsion) in the process. It’s virtually impossible to take them seriously. To get a feel for what I mean, the sequels to The Human Centipede are an almost direct embodiment of the ‘add one to the biggest number’ paradigm of innovation. The second film in the trilogy features a chain of 10 people, and the third a chain of around 500 people. But this is completely missing the point. Once you’ve cashed in on way-over-the-top shock, you’ve backed yourself into a corner. The gulf between the average person’s life and a 3 person human centipede is unimaginably larger than between a 3 person chain and a 500 person chain. The punchline has already been said, and telling the joke 500 more times doesn’t make it 500 times funnier (on the contrary, it actually makes the joke tiresome and repellent).

These movies, and movies like them, don’t leverage our humanity in making something intense. Instead, these movies are a bare-faced rejection of our desire for sincerity and depth of meaning. Which is to say that perhaps, the ‘less-extreme’ movies that manage to get us emotionally invested in them are actually more extreme by dint of staying with us longer, scarring our psyche more thoroughly. Extremity might not be a simple maximization function, but instead a precise tightrope walk along the outer fringe that takes subtle creative talent.

A recent success in tightrope walking is Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Like Xiu Xiu, Aster aims straight for the heart, rather than the stomach, and in doing so cuts us much deeper. Hereditary is a virtuosic blend of a family drama and supernatural horror, but the most disturbing elements of the film are in fact the plausible, real-world domestic problems (extreme, to be sure, but plausible nonetheless).

The most affecting scene involves an outing with a teenaged boy and his pre-teen sister. The boy is convinced into bringing the sister to a party, where she is quickly left to her own devices so the brother can chat up some girl he has eyes for. The sister, trying to make herself busy, happens upon a cake some of the party-goers made in the kitchen, and finds herself a private corner in which to eat it. Unbeknownst to her, the cake was made with nuts to which she has a critical allergy. When she realizes her throat is closing, she alerts her brother, who in a panic brings her out to the car, and attempts to drive her (from out in the middle of rural Utah) to safety.

During this manic drive, the sister, still struggling to breathe past her closing throat, leans out the window to let the rush of air enter her lungs, and at the same time the brother is forced to swerve around an obstruction in the road, slightly too close to a telephone pole, beheading his little sister.

The moments of quiet immediately after the sister’s death are some of the tensest, most heart-pounding moments of cinema silence I have ever encountered. This scene alone justifies the movie as easily among the most deeply impactful, disturbing, and hard-to-shake horrors out there. And beyond that, the scene is just fantastically written. The undercurrents of frustrating sibling dynamics, social impotence and irresponsibility at the party, the complete reversal of priorities when an emergency strikes, and the overwhelming guilt that immediately descends on the scene are all tightly woven into something way more horrifying than any amount of blood and guts could achieve. I have seen plenty of scenes of corporeal gore and death that are more explicit than Hereditary, but don’t come anywhere close to this level of horrific majesty.

Where The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film present us with situations we are totally insulated from, Hereditary makes us contend with something that is a daily threat: In virtue of our fallibility, no matter how careful we are, any one of us might directly cause the death of someone we love.

I hope the above examples help identify what I mean by the fringe of acceptability. But what’s the point of all this? What I hope to discuss here goes beyond how to write a good horror movie, how to pen soundly hardcore lyrics. Again, this is about innovative creation generally.

Imagine an abstract space of the things you comfortably enjoy. To make this concrete, let’s stick to the domain of film. Imagine a large sphere that encompasses all of the movies that you like. Those close to the center of the sphere might be those from childhood, immediately accessible, with stakes fit for a child: The Lion King, Toy Story, Space Jam. Moving out from the center we get those films that, along some axis, challenged us in some way, but were eventually incorporated into beloved classics. Alien or The Exorcist might have been too frightening for you at 5, but likely not at 20. These expand on the ‘fear’ vector in our abstract space, and when we’re ready, we incorporate the new films into the sphere by watching them, enjoying them with new maturity, and thus pushing the boundaries of what we can enjoy. Scarface. Pulp Fiction. Violent films, but probably open for discussion at family dinner. They are challenging, but not beyond the pale.

Once we do this expansion, whole genres of films are now on the table. We don’t need to think twice about seeing Predator after seeing Alien. We can be reasonably confident from the synopsis that this is within our comfort zone. The value we get out of pushing the boundary is what I believe people refer to when they refer to having ‘good taste’. It is, at least as far as I can tell, the ability to enjoy a very wide range of content in virtue of having explored widely away from our comfort zones.

Let’s suppose we then encounter a film that is explicitly outside our comfort zone. In virtue of continually working at expanding our boundaries, that new piece of media is more likely to be ‘reachable’ by the outer fringe. It is more likely to be incorporated into the space of things we actually enjoy, rather than being rejected outright as being too alien or confusing. It’s perhaps a little more frightening than the most frightening film we’ve seen, or only a little more violent. We might then be more willing to appreciate the film, and critically engage with it. This isn’t to say the newcomer is going to be a high quality work of art by default, just that we will be more likely to give it a fighting chance.

I have so far been using ‘extremity’ in the sense that it’s used colloquially: things like violence, horror, gore, playing with taboos etc. I’ll call these traits the ‘intensity’ vectors. Many people won’t get any pleasure out of expanding the intensity vectors, but expanding the space of enjoyability along intensity vectors isn’t the only way to do so. People who refuse to watch scary movies outright are a dime a dozen. Ditto with hot sauce. Plenty of people find the burning sensation (or deep fear in the theatre) so deeply unpleasant that the joy of the adrenaline rush is outweighed by the negative. This doesn’t mean that the foregoing is useless to them.

The value and joy of expanding the fringes, I believe, can apply to anyone who finds joy in experiencing something new. Consider another vector: age. Many young people will refuse to watch films that are too far removed from the current day, because of an understandable inability to relate to the content of say, the 1950’s. But if that same person slowly worked back, they may find that they can use their accrued cultural landmarks as launching off points for earlier eras. If you’ve watched a dozen films made in the ‘70s, a film made in the ‘60s won’t be as alienating. Once the ‘60s are open for business, a whole decade of art is added to consideration.

As I’ve alluded to a few times now, though I’ve blended the concepts throughout, I’d like to explicitly define extremity as the fringe of any domain of enjoyment. This is to say that we can apply the concepts listed above to any axis we can identify, and need not expand the vectors of violence and intensity specifically. My argument stands: those newly encountered items⁵ will be of highest impact if they engage our sense of novelty by being outside our comfort zone, but engage our hearts as well by being sufficiently close to our comfort zone that we can take them seriously. One of the greatest joys in life, at least for me, is seeking out those things that fulfill these requirements.

To concretely argue that there are myriad other vectors — probably infinitely many — that we can follow to expand our space of tastes, I will use an obscure culinary example. I was once out for dinner with my partner and her family at a swanky restaurant where the idea was that parties ordered a large number of small plates, thus getting to explore a variety of palatal joys. Ripe territory for fringe expansion (and I’d wager the restaurateurs are aware of this).

One item in particular caught our eye: it was a simple salad whose sole vegetative component was kale. In the midst of other complicated cuisinal constructions, such a basic, uncomplicated dish felt almost paradoxical. And indeed, it’s $16 price tag tested the bounds of acceptability for a single-vegetable salad. Of course, we had to order it.

And it was remarkable! We enjoyed it completely, largely in virtue of the subtle and masterfully crafted dressing. Of all the items we ordered, it was this that we recall, and that we told friends about after the fact. It was bold, challenging, and it was a salad. Would you believe such words could be used to describe a bowl of kale?

Another example seemingly at odds with preconceived notions of extremity is the recent rise of hyperpop. Hyperpop takes the mainstays of the radio pop genre — mass consumption, vanity, polished production, vapid lyrics, unabashed sincerity — and pushes them to their absolute limit. Pioneered largely by A.G. Cook and Sophie, hyperpop is the glossiest music imaginable. The sugary sweet female vocals of say, an Ariana Grande-type are chipmunked into pitches far beyond biological possibility. The bleached-clean production is so manipulated it verges on machine manufactured. The sounds are siliconic when they aren’t rubbery and bubbly. Any ironic pretense is dropped utterly, opting instead for 21st-century romanticism embodied best by someone like Hannah Diamond, who sings shamelessly about hoping to chat with — in fact, merely to say Hi to — a love interest online, backed by an instrumental that sounds like it was played on toy-instruments.

While hyperpop is on the complete opposite end of the genre spectrum from the most brutal metal, it employs precisely the same methodology: restrict the domain (in this case pop music), identify the fundamental vectors that can be played with (cleanliness, vanity, sweetness, digitization), and push them to the absolute limit of acceptability while still staying in-domain. The same method is used for the salad: Restrict to the domain of vegetable salads, identify the ‘number of vegetables’ vector, and extremify the vector by pushing it to a boundary, in this case down to one⁶. My point is that through extreme-ification, a domain commonly derided as being by-committee and cookie-cutter can be converted into something fresh and exciting.

There are certain things I enjoy in life, and when I realize I am enjoying them, I receive great fulfillment.⁷ Of course, I would like the set of things I enjoy to be as large as possible to maximize my chances of encountering such pleasure, day to day. When something that I identify as not being enjoyable turns out in actual fact to be enjoyable, I receive the pleasure twice over. When I am surprised this way, the world proves to me that it is literally more enjoyable than I expected.

Perhaps this is why the intensity vectors are worthy of exploration to some people, me included: being able to derive pleasure from pain must be one of the most graceful tricks of the human mind. We can, through creation as artists and critical analysis as consumers, effectively become machines that convert fear, pain, repulsion, and elitist sneering into joy, excitement, vitality, and empathy. Stare long enough into the abyss and it might blink.

A special version of this pleasure is also had when one encounters something that is initially too far outside the comfort zone to be engaged with, but that falls into reach after sufficient expansion of the fringe. This is, for me, a sure sign of the growth of my tastes, and from it I derive the profound fulfillment of having progressed, and having achieved an expanded sense of identity. This abject pleasure requires nothing more than an open-mindedness to trying new things and a willingness to find them.

Consider another domain where people’s reactions of revulsion prevent them from extracting enjoyment from the world: that of modern art. For many, the works of abstract expressionists (most famously Jackson Pollock, but also Gerhardt Richter, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, and many others) are so impossible to engage with that they verge on ‘non-art’. They are an ‘extreme’ version of visual art in that they maximize the ‘abstractness’ vector, and also commonly minimize the ‘order’ vector, not unlike Merzbow and other noise artists in the music world. And people explicitly express revulsion not at a particular piece, but at the entire genre. A whole space of art is way outside their comfort zone, so far away as to be impossible to engage with. And the descriptions people tend to use in defining why they are so repelled indicate that they believe the only pieces worthy of being designated as "art" at all are those pieces that are sufficiently close — and ideally inside — the sphere of art that they find comfortably enjoyable. They will set up boundaries about skill or composition, medium of instantiation and so on. They claim not only that they don’t get it, but that nobody could or should.

The same holds for what people colloquially refer to as ‘screamo’, a catch-all term invariably used by people who don’t listen to any kind of metal. The argument isn’t that screamed lyrics don’t appeal to their (current) tastes, but that they are inherently ‘unmusical’, as if the people who do listen to and enjoy the music (or e.g. abstract expressionism) are pretending.

What is and is not art is beyond the scope of what I’m trying to say here. Instead, my point is that it would be a strictly good thing to be able to engage with a wide variety of creative works that might be superficially, or only for the time being, repellent or alien. If one had worked up the ladder from the painters of antiquity to traditional landscape painters, up through cubism, dadaism and beyond, they would likely be in a place to at least grapple with the art they are standing in front of, rather than simply ‘not getting it’. My point is not that people should enjoy all works of challenging modern art, but that the possibility of enjoyment (or critical non-enjoyment) hinges on the closeness of a piece to one’s sphere of acceptability. And while some pieces will probably forever be unenjoyable, to preclude entire subspace as unreachably alien is, I believe, at best a failure of imagination and at worst a failure of empathy.

Of course, mortals as we are, we can’t all be massively informed about all possible domains. I know virtually nothing about sculpture, for instance, or of theatrical set design, or figure skating, or computer generated graphics, or the subtle differences in cuts of kobe beef, or sake, or soju, or fine wine, or opera singing, or costume design for opera, or Chicago footwork, or Chicago deep dish, or improv, or improvisation jazz, and obviously this list, exhaustively, is far longer than what my single lifetime can support gaining expertise in. But my hope is that you will be pushing at the boundaries of whatever domains appeal to you, trying to expand the sphere of what you can comfortably and critically consume. And to apply this in the meta sense, that you are willing to consider a wider set of domains themselves as worthy of exploration. Maybe you love music, but why not runway fashion too? What I am encouraging is the deliberate growth of one’s tastes, and one’s possible tastes. We are not set in stone.

It is tempting to return to the items that are reliably enjoyable, deep in the sphere of acceptability. After all, what if a new fringe item, once engaged with, is consciously unenjoyable? But ultimately, this mindset results in a small sphere of enjoyability where most things will fall way outside the sphere and be alienating and confusing. While this might lead to a riskless, safe existence, I think it ultimately degrades the rich fulfillment one is able to extract from the world.

Choose a domain of exploration at whatever level of abstraction you want, identify a vector along which to explore, identify an item along that vector that is just barely outside your domain, and go engage that item. You will find your tastes growing and diverging in all sorts of unexpected directions. And while I’ve used the image of a sphere for convenience, the reality is that each of our spaces of acceptability will be irregular and unique to us. “Well, I like spicy cocktails, but it’s still got to be sweet, and my absolute favourite drinks are frozen”. While sounding trivial, there is fascinating insight to be extracted from these sorts of sentences, and they allow the opportunity for the utterer of that sentence to sit down at a restaurant, see something called a Jalapeno-Watermelon Bellini, and fall immediately in love. The more we explore, the more you push your zone of acceptability into unpredictable subspaces of enjoyment, the more opportunities you have at these lovely moments that feel crafted specifically for you.

On the far end of this exploration, it becomes possible to enjoy virtually anything. In fact, despite my tarring and feathering of Carcass and Cannibal Corpse, it isn’t hard to imagine someone’s sphere of acceptability expanding until these artists are within a person’s sphere of acceptability. It’s possible that through repeated listening and deep engagement all the way up the ladder of disgusting gross-out songwriting, one can gain a deep appreciation for the art of crafting these lyrics. After all, not every band can simply throw down the same set of necrophilic references and call it a day. Maybe the emotional relatability that is important for so many ceases to be important if one iteratively expands along the disgust vector sufficiently. Who knows? There are as many ways to enjoy the world as there are people, and while my previous arguments are directed at what I firmly believe are the average person’s interests, we are now deep in idiosyncratic individual preference territory. And for each of us as richly private individuals, that's what counts. So regardless of how they got there, let’s suppose someone’s zone of comfort has expanded sufficiently far that songs about eating aborted foetuses are on the table (as it were).

One can begin to ask which of Cannibal Corpse’s songs are their favourite, which, between the two band’s lyrics I have quoted above are more pleasing within the domain of gross-out lyrics. If I force myself to take these lyrics seriously, I can begin to comment in the way I imagine. For instance, for me the phrase “Pasteurised foetus goulash” verges on the humorous, partly because of the sound symbolic funniness I perceive in the word ‘goulash’, and partly because of the absurdity of treating a foetus deliberately to the pasteurization process, normally reserved for such mundane foods as milk and cheese. I can imagine myself in deep debate with Carcass fans over if this line helps or harms the overall gross-out factor of the song, which we are taking for granted is the vector we care about. I can imagine them shooting back that Carcass's flair for playfulness, something usually ignored by goregrind artists, is what gives the band their special lustre. I haven't listened to enough Carcass to know if these arguments are coherent in the context of their discography, but the point is that being radically open-minded about what I can engage with is important enough to me that I'm willing to argue for the legitimacy of these debates. And I hazard to say that everyone should have this perspective, as it leads both to great conversation, and a more empathetic view of people's sometimes baffling preferences.

The same goes for The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film. These films were deliberately crafted to be way out of reach for most people, but this is a contingent fact of the society, not inherent to the films. A film like Mean Girls would be completely unacceptable in Victorian England, but is a beloved family classic today. Our spheres of acceptability have expanded and shifted, and that's okay.

The artistic game is in the analysis of the content, not the content itself, and the more art that we can analyze the better. Barring dogmatic traditionalist elitism, the sort of hypothetical — and I’d be willing to bet very real and common — debates I have described above are no less critically serious nor artistically charged than debates in a domain closer to what most of us would find acceptable. And anyways, eternal debate at these more comfortable levels tends to become worn out and exhausted quickly, for which a decent cure is to move to a new level. One just has to be willing to climb the ladder. And if you aren’t willing to climb this particular ladder, towards violent intensity in music, that’s okay, but choose a different ladder. Why not the use of primary colours in interior design? Why not the layering of woody scents with citrus in cologne? Why not sitcoms with increasingly female-dominated casts? Find yourself a place to practice the critical analysis dance. Anywhere will do.

And if you are the type of person who likes to create, and better yet, to create things that are innovative, the discussion above is worth taking very seriously. While it’s completely valid to create in a domain that’s already firmly established, if you hope to push a domain forward, you need to be working at the fringes of your audience, challenging them while convincing them to take a few steps out of their comfort zone. Actually identifying this boundary is itself an artform worth exploring. But once the fringe is identified, a recursive process takes over that allows creators and consumers to grow quickly and simultaneously. By being willing to consume out of our comfort zones we push our fringes outward, and create a new fringe where creators can create new challenging works that we are then, in virtue of our newfound exploratory nature, once again willing to consume, and the process recurses, pushing the fringe upwards and outwards. What I have just described is to my mind one of the purest forms of magic we have. A society, filled with strangers, can flourish together, through the vagaries and flux of shared preference, and scintillating art is born from the dance.

What a shame it would be if the rich overgrowth of shifting passions in our childhoods stopped there. Especially in the age of on-demand media, virtual galleries, online recipe books and guides of all colours, access to the art of the world has never been faster, nor more universal. Our power to develop our preferences — and perforce our identities — has never been greater, and we should wield this power while we can. Not everyone will fall in love with Liturgy the way I have, but I encourage one and all to find a Liturgy for themselves. And from there, to ever be willing to step into the dark. The stuff of life is out there.

Notes