Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

––Edmund Burke

This sub talks a big game about transgression, about the ways in which people want to escape the normative handcuffs, how they wish to push into some other régime of experience that rewards the intensity of physical experience with psychological exaltation. And fine; may everyone get what they deserve. But is this really exhausted by stretched holes and yanked leashes? Or is that just the script that gets resorted to when imagine fails?

I've stretched holes and I've yanked leashes; they have their place––when tied into to the greater pursuit of beauty. The beauty of our flesh, in the first instance: yours with the flush of youth and self-discipline; mine in all its battle-scarred tautness. But more essentially the beauty of surrender, when one consciousness yields itself to another. If you are to lie there and feel your intimacy pushed to the limits of what you can viably endure, you must have already yielded utterly to the authority of the person so doing––and done so with no concession to right or to wrong or to any standard at all, except the beauty of the undertaking.

I don't care if you're already taken, I don't care if this world is new to you. I care that you are self-aware enough to know what you want and intelligent enough to see it's possible for you to have it: there is no karma. You will be attractive and young and physically in shape. (I will reciprocate on the last bit.) You will be willing to leap into the chasm of experience, because you know one day there will be no chasm and no experience and that day could be any day––but we can make sure it is not today.

Of feeling little more can be said than that the idea of bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labor, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it.

We have traded pleasure for pain all our lives. It's high time we traded pain for pleasure.