Be Unruly (for Creativity's Sake)

On weekdays, when I return home from bringing my daughter to school, I find myself with a 30- to 40- minute block of so-called “free” time. If I were married to my job, obsessed with productivity, and completely dead inside, I’d spend it by taking a quick shower and then getting right to work well in advance of 9:00 am, my “official” (read: company mandated) start time. But I am not married to my job, obsessed with productivity, or dead inside. On the contrary, I am a free-thinking and often impractical individual who generally dislikes being told what to do, so instead of taking that quick shower and then rushing off to work, I crawl back into bed and try to sleep for another 20 or so minutes. I refer to this period of the day as “clandestine sleep,” but that is something of a misnomer because I don’t always sleep. Sometimes I just lie there and think. Sometimes I peruse Google News and read whatever articles strike my fancy. Sometimes I write.

Now, I know I shouldn’t do this. I know I should take that shower and then ease into the workday like a responsible person, but I don’t. I could come up with a bunch of bullshit reasons to justify or rationalize my sloth-like behavior,  such as how my job (which I don’t despise) already takes up too much of my day, how I’m not a morning person, how it takes me a long time to get going in the morning because I typically stay up to late, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the truth is that I don’t run headlong into the workday because I don’t want to.

 Undoubtedly, such behavior could be called unruly, and I bring it up here because unruliness has been on my mind a lot in recent months. I think it’s been on everyone’s. After all, I’m writing this on January 9, 2022, just three days after the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection. In addition, we’re all suffering through the latest wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a scourge no doubt made worse by people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks. On top of that we’ve got emotionally distraught people with gun fetishes shooting up workplaces, organized mobs committing smash-and-grab robberies in cities around the country, and (around here, anyway) people living out their Fast and Furious fantasies by driving like maniacs on the roads. (Seriously, that movie franchise has a lot to answer for in terms of the truly reckless driving I see on the DC Beltway and I-95.) Therefore, I’ve been wondering: is unruly behavior ever a good thing?

The dictionaries in my house seem to suggest it isn’t. The American Heritage Dictionary defines unruly as, "difficult or impossible to discipline, control, or rule." Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language defines it as, "hard to control, restrain, or keep in order; disobedient; unmanageable; disorderly; refractory; not submitting or conforming to rule or discipline." And the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as, "not amenable to rule or discipline; ungovernable; disorderly, turbulent." If these definitions aren't enough to make you wrinkle your nose at the word, just look at some of the others J.I. Rodale's Synonym Finder likens it to (note: I'm just listing words not already mentioned): "intractable, lawless, riotous, mutinous, insubordinate, wild, irrepressible, contumacious, uncooperative, recalcitrant." Ouch!

Still, I can't deny that at least a few of these words and phrases — irrepressible, unmanageable, not conforming — bring a certain mischievous smile to my lips. I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't want to be "managed," "kept in order," "governed," or "controlled" all the time. Like most folks, I want to make my own decisions, to forge my own path, and be king of my own castle (even if, deep down, I know I'm really just a powerless figurehead). Therefore, you can imagine my delight when I came across the article, "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions" in the New Yorker. (The article first appeared in July 2019. I found it sometime later.)

The article begins, harmlessly enough, with a recap of the (aptly titled) essay, "Unruliness," by the philosopher Agnes Callard. Callard has a thing for flouting the rules of the road, albeit not in the way you might think.

Sometimes, when [Callard is] on a deserted road at night, she likes to walk on the double yellow lines. One evening, she decided to lie there in the middle of the road. She kept her arms pinned to her sides so that cars could pass on her left and right. A policeman approached, alarmed, and confused. Was she drunk, high, suicidal? Callard explained that she had many reasons for being there; she wondered, among other things, what the stars would look like from the road’s perspective. Mostly, though, she wanted to know how it would feel. “Lying on the road is not a thing one does,” she writes. When one is in an “unruly” frame of mind, such an act can be appealing for precisely that reason.

As the New Yorker article points out, the aim here is not rebellion.

By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules."

This style of unruliness, the New Yorker article asserts, is more akin to minor, generally harmless perversities (i.e., like sniffing spoiled milk to see how bad it smells or crushing a daisy to relish the feeling of it smoosh under your foot) than outright insurrection. Conceivably, these "perversities" may be mere losses of control or lapses in judgement, but as the article also acknowledges, deliberately choosing to listen to the devil on our left shoulder rather than the angel on our right can also be "strangely satisfying."

The decision to lie down on the double-yellow lines doesn’t flow from a cognitive glitch. Rather, it’s a way of establishing oneself as an authentic and autonomous being. We might call it existential perversity. A person can ask: If I only do what makes sense, what use am I? Why is my consciousness relevant at all? The desire to exercise your autonomy might motivate you to turn against the expected, the reasonable, and the moral—to show yourself, and perhaps others, that you are free.

I don't know about you, but this paragraph resonates with me to an immense degree, and it explains so much of my recent thoughts and behaviors, some of which I've shared with you on these very pages. This impulse to exercise my autonomy and turn against the expected and the practical explains everything from my desire to drag a grandfather clock around town to my dream of never going back to an office (and even to start this magazine). It also helped me better understand why I’m so reluctant to end my clandestine sleep.

But wait, there's more! This meditation on unruliness has also helped me understand that when people dismiss a work of art as “weird,” or they wonder why someone would want to spend his or her time building a giant ball of twine in the backyard, what they're really objecting to is an instance of existential perversity (aka: unruliness) — a person's visceral impulse to assert his or her existence and exercise his or her autonomy regardless of the prevailing cultural norms or preferences. Cue Willie Wonka's not so subtle reminder to Veruca Salt that, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams."* 

If there's one thing I want to do with his blog, it's to promote this existentially affirming type of unruliness. I want to encourage people to make that music and dream those dreams because I have first-hand knowledge of how a little unruliness and a shot of existential perversity can enrich — and maybe even save — your life. It is the balm to the daily acid test of 9 to 5 servitude, the never-ending obligation, and the omnipresent responsibility that, left unchecked, can drain the joy and wonder from existence. It is an active form of "self-care" [Ick. I hate that term. – Ed.] that electrifies the soul rather than sedating it in a tub with aromatherapy bath balls, and if you make it a habit, it'll improve everything.

Of course, as Mr. Wonka knew so very well, our making the music and dreaming the dreams, as awesome as they may be, won't protect us from the soulless business types, the critics with stunted vision, and the fearful haters who see such expressions of individual authenticity as “impractical,” “a waste of time,” or “weird.” (Incidentally, this is why Mr. Wonka wanted to meet those who would assume control of his factory.) Some people just don't have the ability. Some — the truly dead inside — don't want it. Fuck 'em.

Don't waste your time with these impractically impaired persons because time is the most limited of resources. You may not get a second chance to get going on that novel, to compose that song, to paint that picture, to build that sculpture, to sew that quilt, to launch that podcast, to do it, whatever that it might be. As I've said so many times, you can no longer afford to wait for the perfect moment (it’s not coming), to give in to the self-doubt (it’s never leaving), or to listen to the naysayers (you’ll never win them over). All you can do—indeed, all anyone has ever been able to do—is to embrace that spark of unruliness, trust in its warmth, and let it ignite the creative fire inside them.

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* I describe Wonka’s actions here as “not so subtle” because he not-so-gently grabs Verruca Salt by the face. If that happened today, he’d be slapped with a lawsuit!  

Note: This article first appeared in Issue #5 (Winter 2022) of Alternative Incite magazine.