Higher Laws Part 2

I would define Higher Laws as something that can never be written down, reread by others in authority or teachers. Higher Laws cannot be spread over the whole populace as an unifying theory. Your Higher Laws and mine can never be the same. Like me, you must obey the laws that govern you.

In this modern world of legal ordinances and societal regulations, we all know that the laws of men do protect us as a whole. We know that we must not steal, we must not murder, we must not imbibe in all those things legal or illegal and then drive a stole tank through the streets of Los Angels. I do not find the higher laws of the artist or the writer to be in direct opposition to the laws or morals of modern society. Rather than complementary, the laws of the system the laws of the artist are both parallel and perpendicular.

I believe that the person who grows up to be an artist or a writer does not have a choice in it. No one in their right mind would say “I want to dedicate my life to my art and I don't care what the cost is.” Rather, it is often the reverse, “I have dedicated my life to complying with the system and all I wanted to do was make art.” And that is the greatest travesty of all, the artist who cannot escape the confines or prisons of modern life to pursue all that has been assigned in the higher laws of the artist.

It's perhaps another question, if the artist is an artist by nature or by nurture.

I have my feelings on this, of course. I have known many artists and writers and musicians over the years. And although no two of these people have been alike, I have found a few similarities in all of them, myself included. It seems as if many artists come from families of artists. I feel like many artists suffer from one of these conditions: being a misfit, a loner or a perfectionist. I have met my share of artists who came from very abusive or neglect childhoods. Many artists have retreated into art as a way to see the world, make sense of the world, define the world. These are observations only, I have nothing but my own experience to draw from.

For me, I was blessed with an early life steeped in uncertainty, volatile and often hostile living conditions that I at once populated with kind imaginary friends who overcame larger adversities than I faced. They say imaginary friends at a young age is a healthy facet to the imagination. I never wanted to leave my imaginary friends and that's why I became a writer. My imaginary friends are still very kind and they still overcome larger adversities than I face. My imaginary friends are the characters in my novels and short stories.

I suppose that I believe this: an artist is not born that way. An artist is made whether in a nurtured way or the opposite. In this way, I think we all become what we become because of the environment where we are spawned. This is perhaps a simpleton's view, and there are probably many many more factors. What I see, and my own experience especially, we come from our own manufacturing.

As writing begins, it is often cheaper versions of all the influences that writer reads. Sometimes scandals arise from this. But this is how we learn. When we first put words to a page it has to be in the familiar, it has to be what we know or how we've seen it done. I think many people have gone through this, those who have become writers and those who only tried it out to see if it would or could stick.

Things must progress. I have always been of the thought that we should either make art or make love. I have always felt this way only because I have never seen the value in living life as part of the machine. I feel like too often, and especially now, that to simply go to work to earn money only to pay it out to everyone else, that way we live devalues us as workers, as humans and especially as artists.

At the very nature of it, the life of a writer, it has very little do with anything else than the higher laws. We write as a collective, we write alone, we write in vacuum because we must write, we have to write. We have to work. The compulsion comes from the same fire in all of us even if the manifestation of feelings the act of writing invokes is as different as what we each craft.

It has never struck me as odd, or funny in this western accomplishment driven world that a writer would labor for days or weeks or years on any given piece of writing for no financial gain or social recognition. It seems very natural to me that a writer would work for the sake of working because a given thought needed painting in a poem or a particular story needed told. It makes complete sense to me to do, no matter what the cost.

What is the cost? Nothing. Just time. It's just time and how precious little of it we really have. It just takes time to write a story, to write a poem. It's the time that we all have, 24 hours in a day 365 days in a year. In our ever increasing world of technology and entertainment don't have more distractions than we ever had, it's just that our distractions are much more personalized now. Our modern day distractions can predict and suggest the next distraction and all in the name of fear and consumption. These times are no stranger than the rest, they just seem to have a screen involved.