Rules are made to be broken
I'm not talking about the laws of nature. I'm talking about hacks we use to get by.
Rules are hacks. They are designed to help somebody or other. What is puzzling in the idea of a ‘rule’ is whether or not it must be obeyed, and by whom. The word ‘rule’ implies obedience, or at least authority: She was the ruler, she ruled over us. A rule is to a suggestion as a king is to the landed gentry. The big cheese.
If you don’t have to obey it, is it a rule? Who gets to say? What are the consequences of noncompliance? These are the philosophical (or maybe just semantic) questions I’m asking.
I don’t like rules. I don’t care who makes them; I don’t want anyone, including myself, telling me what to do.
I’m in rebellion against the rule I made for myself a couple weeks ago: that I would alternate between posts that are some sort of reaction to the world, and posts that are a report/reflection of my interior world, specifically as it pertains to art-making.
That rule was/is a hack. I made it to give myself permission to pay attention to and write about interior process, without feeling guilty that I’m not responding to the magnitude of idiocy and iniquity in our midst that is causing great harm, and that demands a response.
Do I need the alternating posts rule to give myself permission to write what I want, when I want? Or could I give myself permission without that rule?
Rules are a creative tool. They’re useful as lit-up landing strips in the dark chaos of all possibility. But there has to be an override. There has to be room for responding to present conditions, on the ground or in the air.
When obeying my rule goes against my own inclinations/desires du jour, I want to reject it. I have to have a little conversation with myself about who’s the boss. When I remember that the boss is me I say that she who makes the rule can break the rule.
I’m not saying that I don’t need discipline in order to do the things I want to do, though I might be saying that. This is a question/conversation I have with myself all the time.
To do anything other than zone out requires specificity of purpose, of goal. Some purposes and goals are immediate and straightforward, like taking a drink of water, or scratching an itch. Some purposes and goals, like cooking dinner, or running a business, or a marathon, require planning, design, implementation. And they require sustaining vision and action through the medium of time and space.
Even when the artistic process is fully honored, which means that everything, including long-term plans, are open to change, to evolution, to being moved by the spirit, there has to be a thread of continuity.
Maybe we don’t need rules as much as threads
In The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald, Princess Irene follows a thread that can only be felt, not seen, through scary and dangerous situations, trusting (sometimes with difficulty) that the thread will lead her where she need to go. She trusts it because it was given to her by her beautiful magical trustworthy grandmother who told her to trust it.
That kind of trust, feeling one’s way along a thread in the dark, is not easy without trusting its source, whatever you conceive that to be.
Rules try to predict the future; threads guide us into the future through faith in the present.
Duty calls
From before our first breath we are bound by laws of nature expressed in our temporal being. Every moment we spend in these bodies on this planet we vibrate with the silent challenge of figuring out which boundaries are intrinsic and which are imposed, by ourselves and others. Which rules can we break, and which can we not?
One of my favorite I Ching quotes is from the hexagram #60 Limitation:
Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life
would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man's life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is.The whole hexagram is worth reading. It answers the questions I’m asking about as well as they can be answered, by pointing to the intimate relationship between freedom and duty. It is only in freedom that we are able to determine for ourselves what our duty is. It is only in freedom that we can perceive our ‘duty’ as our calling. A calling is not a rule inflicted from without; it is a love song from within.
Rules are made to be broken
Being an artist/human means that your foremost creative tool is yourself. If rules help you, use them! If they are impediments to seeing new possibilities, give them the finger.
The purpose of my rule was to give myself permission to write whatever I want. I don’t need that rule to give myself permission. The more I follow my interior thread the more I understand that what interests me is the experience of being alive, what that is for me, what that is for us. My art form is to express this interest by embodying and upholding my faith in the thread and seeing where it leads me.