What did following the rules ever get anybody? Throughout history, haven't the law-breakers been the discoverers, the innovators, the imaginers, the creators? The most misunderstood artistic souls have been, most frantically and desperately, trying to forge something of aesthetic worth before they exit this boring conundrum called "civilization." Locked in a box with a light that burns them, they shine. They turn it on, hoping for fellow travelers who recognize the light. Until someone does, they quietly labor, their art speaking eloquently for them; their gift and legacy a lonely miracle.
I've seen what living by a strict set of rules can do. The first thing to go is your sense of humor, and a humorless person is a joyless person. Repressed, they tight-fistedly try and squeeze happiness out of a mistaken sense of monetary security. This "sense" which I consider non-sensible and nothing but a frightened response to living, does them little good in the end. If money is your life raft it is a poor substitute for the whitewater thrill of self-discovery that only the rule-benders know. The next thing to be sacrificed is their creativity, their self-expression. Can you name a single artist whose work wasn't (at one time) maligned, criticized, or at the very least, misunderstood? I think of Salvador Dali, the greatest surreal artist of the 20th century who accepted his not-fitting-in-ness so well that he proudly proclaimed about himself: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad."
The third thing that is sacrificed is individuality; or maybe it's the first thing that goes, but it may not be apparent they have lost their original spark until much later in life when it's too late to do much about it. This is perhaps the most tragic consequence of conformity: the soul will never know the unique and genuine contribution it could have made. To rob the soul of its right to a voice, even an odd, ill-fitting voice, is to rob the entire world of something rare and extraordinary. It is like clipping the wing of a bird so it cannot fly, something a bird knows instinctively to do.
How do we embrace and celebrate our inner madman, or the wild woman that lurks inside, if we were raised to obey and not to question? For extroverts, it's more of a natural response to object than to obey, and to head in their own obtuse direction. But for well-meaning people caught in the whirlpool of the status-quo, and those caught in ritualized and confining organized religion, to depart from the expected in favor of the road less traveled is more than risky; it is suicide...or so they've heard. Yet history is filled with trail-blazers who traded their halos for more amusing mischief. Some of these mischief makers even made history.
Take my favorite sultry movie maven of the 1940's and 50's, sex siren Mae West. When asked how she clambered her way to the top of Hollywood's female motion picture heap, cinema's cardinal sex symbol quipped in her tangy Midwestern drawl: "I used to be snow white, but I drifted." Being a clandestine garment worker in a sweat shop didn't fit her precocious personality, so at the tender of age of 14 Mae West fearlessly established her professional stage career, and the rest is history. Her temperament was brazenly extroverted so it was Mae alone who set her sails for the waters of stardom at an early age. Along the way there were bitter disappointments for the beautiful and gutsy Mae. Soon after her play entitled, Sex opened, it was raided and West was arrested along with much of the cast for public indecency due to the racy themes of the play. She was prosecuted on morals charges and in 1927 sentenced to 10 days in jail on Welfare Island in New York. The incarceration was cordial; West reportedly dined with the warden and his wife on a few occasions. She served eight days with two off for good behavior. That kind of financial loss and public humiliation would have stopped most playwrights cold, but not Mae who got right back on the horse. Undaunted by accusations of impropriety, Mae wrote and directed her next play, Drag, that dealt with homosexuality. Mae even went out with a bang; at age 83 she was still acting in a major motion picture. To say Ms. West was ahead of her time, undaunted by what others thought of her, would be an understatement. Mae is an example of a wild woman who lived by her own words: "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
Salvador Dali, Mae West, and other wild women (and men) have lived to tell the tale, so odds are good that you will, too. And hey-when you get free, "come up and see me sometime" (Mae West).
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