Super-Societal Freedom

If you aren’t quite within the circle, you don’t have to live by its rules; this is not anarchy, more of a blossoming of creative impulses and new methods of thought. One can either live within the limits of accepted behavior and find oneself stuck within the bounds of existent patterns of reason, or cease to conform and engender one’s own path. It is possible to have freedom like this and still live among the slaves to the social order, but it’s hard. One’s outlook on everything is radically different; one’s mind would have to be super-societal, if not one’s circumstance

Freedom makes for a difficult life; it comes at the expense of many comforts afforded to those who play along. It is the milieu of the starving artist: only when outside concerns are removed, only after all pleasurable distractions are erased, does one have the freedom to fully immerse in one’s art. Freedom is severing all ties with materialism and mankind. Freedom is living out of a car that isn’t even yours. Freedom is when everything is gone and you realize how little of it you actually needed. Such a purge is what most of us expend the most effort trying to avoid: we pay the bills on time, keep a rotten job, see the doctor on a regular basis – all to stay within the circle.

I had that kind of freedom once: I had nothing but what I could carry, no place to sit, to shower, just my notebooks and my acoustic guitar. I equated my emergence from the circle with going a little “crazy”. I ceased to worry about how I looked, who saw me, or what the rest of the planet was doing. When I spoke of Freedom then, it was melancholy. Though not one person would stop to tell me the time of day, or point me in the direction of Ixtlan, I did some of my best writing during that period.

When I had that kind of Super-Societal Freedom, it was through a chain of events that I likely brought upon myself. Several times thorough the years I have come close to that situation again. It seems that either I was cursed with a pervading irresponsibility that will always keep me just above the bottom, that will always keep the wolves waiting by the door, or it is actually an unrealized part of my will to live off the grid.

Super-Societal freedom is not, contrary to what many may assume, the easy answer; I find it a great deal easier to live within the circle and exploit the system from within. Life above/outside society is hard to commit to because it is new, different, and most of all, universally reviled. Change is not something we humans embrace willingly. It’s easy to ridicule those who live outside the circle, to call them odd or stupid or losers, even for those of us who should know better. Even we who see stars everywhere, in everyone, have a natural tendency to look down upon anyone who lives this way. We see them as unproductive, if we see them at all. I find myself doing it, even though I’ve been there.

And in the same breath, I give myself credit for rising out of it. How quickly the hypocrisy returns . . .

(Some of you may have read this on my Myspace blog about a month ago, but it came up in conversation today again, and I thought it bore repeating.)

insquequo deinde
~93