Higher Laws

The sun came through that famous brown cloud one bright November morning. Lit like it was, complete with the soundtrack of suburban commuters in individual cars, the wash of the morning was at once peaceful and depressing. The dirt worn asphalt seemed like it was a century old, and neglected nearly as long. The errant weeds of summer were dry and in their spiny grasp were the wrappers of fear and consumption: cigarette boxes and butts, beer cans and soda bottles, the waxy wrappers of fast food burgers and tacos. In each car, hermetically sealed from the outside world, animals that resembled human beings moved along this road, insular and cellular.

At the base of it, there seems to be an order. People wake up alone or in small families inside individually wrapped houses. There, they turn on any number of electronic media screens and get the news of the world. The news seems to give off a little more than events, it seems to give off a little of xenophobic fear which can easily be quenched with the purchase of any number of things, mostly data packages, big cars or small pills. Then, when the morning sermon finishes, it's time to seal up in a vehicle and move off, alone, to an institution.

One the bright November morning in question, along that route in the suburbs, there seems to be nothing more than the task at hand: getting from one place to the other. This is the appropriate time, this is the mandate. This is the system: get up and go, get to work and make money and pay it all out to tax, to utilities, to all the things the media said you need. These are the unwritten laws than govern the system. We all know this, some of us minimize it, some of us fight it and some of us glorify it.

Thus, order has settled upon modern man.

This critique is not new. This critique is not original. This is the way most of us live. Many of us belong to higher orders of things. We got to work, we pay into our government and vote like fanatical lunatics during election season, sometimes on bright November mornings. Many of us belong to a church, to yet another set of beliefs which are sometimes very personal and sometimes given to us in dogma. Then there are the screens which make us do the things we do: the TV, the smartphone and the car.

These all boil down to the laws that have been established by the church leaders many many years ago. These are the laws laid down by our political establishment, founding fathers like heroes and devils. These are the laws given to us by marketers who want to sell one product more than others and gentle persuasion nudge on by a celebrity endorsement.

It seems like a pretty substandard and marginalized existence, at least to me. I do not mean to claim that all people live in the doldrums of the system that they may or may not think they participate in. I would never go so far as to agree with Thoreau when he says that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Not all desperation is quiet.

In this increasing pressure of the world we have inherited where the numbers of animal and plant species are in decline and the number of people and cows and cars and pills is on the rise, there must be questions like how did it come to this, and why hasn't come to this earlier?

We have made a shift somewhere along the line from the feral creatures than humankind should be to docile beings. We went from being wild hares and become hutch bunnies. The creature comforts offered to us, and those in which we strive for, may be nice, but what is the real cost? When I consider the high rate of depression, stress and anxiety, I wonder if life inside the hutch is a better life than one out in the open air. In the open air we can look out into the wide world, a world that is filled with miracles and wonder. Miracles and wonder even in the brown cloud of an early November morning commute along chipped and faded asphalt rivers whose banks are filled with the refuse of the modern world.

Varlam Shalamov comes to my mind often, mostly because of his description of the artist as the pioneer. In the opening story “Through the Snow” of the collection Kolyma Tales, a single man must walk through the deep snow followed by a group of five. These men trample the snow, the lead man as the artist or the writer. Only after the group has tiredly beaten the snow down will a road be formed and the horses and tractors driven by readers will come instead of the poets and authors.

I often wonder how true it is anymore. I wonder how true it is that poets and artist can be the pioneers. It seems like the poets and artists, the writers and the makers driven by thoughtfulness and creativity have taken a minor role in modern litany. The modern seems to be driven by smaller and smaller pieces of technology that has grown increasingly strange and invasive. The pioneers now are the purveyors of media which has somehow replaced knowledge, compassion and humanity.

So why be a writer or an artist at all? Why spend the time it takes to really focus on something and create something great, or angelic or horrifying or trite in a world dominated by either the next best thing or the allure of the next best thing? I cannot come up with a single reason why someone would put paint to canvas or words to a page. Not now. It's too late to make art. It's no longer the time of history for such endeavors. No, we need to focus on new technology and promptly discard all that came before it. We need to move through our days eagerly awaiting the next thing, the next technology and the next mandate.

Whereas this prediction may hold some truth for the system or even the larger mechanisms of society, it can never be true of the individual. I hope it cannot be true of the individual. And I hope it will never be true of the artist. It is my sincerest belief that the artist, the musician, the writer and the poet, and anyone else inspired to the creative obeys much higher laws.