Thursday, January 7, 2016

The essence of Genius: Part 1

Genius then becomes something through which you can sift anything at all and come up with something different yet familiar enough to be recognizably different. At this juncture, it sounds remarkably like creativity, or fancy, or imagination. These latter two words are often confused with one another. The critic who did the most to distinguish these two words initially was Coleridge. As we know, fancy for Coleridge was the inferior mental faculty that was content with the passive data accumulated in memory. Fancy does not combine, or in combining, create. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more dynamic faculty, by which a human being can create something new, and assert the organic principle that the Romantics felt underlay all of creation. Imagination can be unconscious, or conscious and deliberate.

True genius, inasmuch as it begets something new, lies towards the end of the creative spectrum denoted by Imagination. But this applies for literary and creative fields. What about the sciences?


Genius and Culture

But genius does not need to be isolated as stereotype. It could be the norm. One could argue that the emergence of genius coincides with a dissatisfaction with the constraints that culture places on us. Paradoxically, this very dissatisfaction would not have come about if the genius in question was not present in culture to begin with. Culture, instead of acting as catalyst, inhibits free and revolutionary thought, and the genius is one who has realized this, or as a necessity has had to realize this in order to give free reign to his conceptual process. Therefore, he is the quintessential loner figure, not out of any vaunted sense of vanity, but out of sheer necessity. His thoughts have resulted as an outpouring of sheer desire for the Real transferred onto a technique or a material obsession. From this we can conclude that genius would be the norm, if not for the inhibiting and restraining effects of culture. In other words, the genius is the purest expression of the human once he has extricated himself from the ineffectual rudiments of culture.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Stereotype and Genius

Here's the thing about stereotypes: they are both true and not true. They are true for some people, which is why they strike a nerve when brought up. But they also assume that everyone has the capacity to attach themselves to a fictionalized and reduced construct.

In other words, stereotypes are words without context. Words would reduce a concept or a person to a fixed, immutable entity if it weren't for contexts. But even in different contexts within a certain culture at any given time, stereotypes remain the same. If they change, they change gradually and seamlessly with every small change in culture, so as to not raise any alarms if their meanings are suddenly discovered to have changed completely.

The word genius is a stereotype in that regard. But what complicates matters is the fact that, fictionally, contexts can be construed and manipulated to mean various things, all or none of which may be true to culture. So a genius becomes, in one fell swoop, both word and stereotype. In the fictional sense it is a word; in the cultural sense, a stereotype. In other words, it is both mutable and unchanging, both dynamic and contained.


Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Genius

Genius is a word that is difficult to define, because it represents quality, personality or a person, sometimes all three at the same time. If genius is a matter of quality, then is it consistent in a person, or is it elusive and independent? If it is a personality, does it mean that said nature can be imbibed in someone, and therefore learned? And finally, if it is a person, does it mean that genius is a freak of nature, and it can no more be learned or created than a work of art might be replicated in toto by a different artist working in another part of the world with the same idea?

The one thing common in all three aspects of the term is a peculiar ability that distinguishes it from the usual fare, or whatever passes for the usual fare in a specific episteme. If it is scientific genius, then it follows that it lies not in the discovery, or invention, but in the genius's having seen something important in a discovery that no one found exciting enough scientifically to warrant studying, or it could lie in the ability to leap to a certain conclusion, or to recognize a certain train of thought as being that which brings about a paradigm shift.

The confusion stems from not knowing how human creativity works, and to what extent human creativity can be provoked to, as it were, think outside the confines of heteronormative rationality.

This is made complicated by the fact that the literary work that chooses to represent genius is an attempt at identifying imaginatively and hypothetically, and for certain, what passes for genius. Further, in trying to answer something that modern science is still at a loss for, and in proposing a theory through a fictional treatment of a hypothesis, the work of art could itself be one of genius in how strange and/or belittling it is of concurrent notions of morality, aesthetics, rationality etc.

There is one more difficulty which must be addressed: if we do identify something as genius, it means either that we have it within ourselves to become genius, and/or a genius is something that is identifiable to begin with. But herein lies a paradox: if a genius is something or someone so ahead of his time to warrant an outright negation or incredulity, then it follows that we would not be able to identify it in the first place to begin with. The alternate mode of existence postulated by a man or woman of genius would be too alien to the common man to comprehend and therefore, identification of said genius would be impossible. At best, he could think it to be something outre, or uncanny. But uncanniness does not always translate into genius. How then do we identify something we cannot comprehend?

The only answer to this would be to posit that genius is not identified as much as the potential he or his work has for utility, or exploitation. If what is discovered may translate into abnormal gains for a certain age and time, then it must be something worth pondering. The node of utility becomes then the only point of contact between genius and common man, at least in science.

But what then is the case when it comes to representation?

Monday, December 28, 2015

Old as the Wind

He was sitting in his reclining chair, staring at the garden in front of his porch stretching off into the bushes and weeds. In between the crumbling patches of dirt and drying leaves snaked a hose which still ran with water, thinning into the soil. The fence teetered all around the garden like a protective elder who has seen it grow and has grown old with it. And when the wind sprang up, a strange sweet smell erupted out of nowhere and seemed to ask me to enter. I was twenty seven, about to leave my town for a job in another city - a bigger one. Old Man Jonathan was a whopping ninety three, but from his expression you had no way of telling. At most, he looked a comfortable fifty.

"Come in, Richards."
"Morning, Mr. Jonathan. I came to say goodbye."
"Leaving town, I hear."
"Tomorrow, yes."
"Sit down, sit down. Tell me about your new job."
"Oh, it's nothing much", I said, as I swept away the leaves from the only other couch in the garden. "It's a job maintaining a power station. You know the kind. Night shifts and paperbacks."
"You like reading, don't you?", he said, old fingers lighting his pipe.
"Oh, very much, sir."
"Didn't you wish you could write for a living? I remember you telling me that a while ago."

The only other times I had visited him was some five years ago — back then I used to frequent his home a lot. It was a much cleaner, much more colorful place then. Mrs. Jonathan had been alive. I used to come over with a book, maybe borrow a few from his stack inside the living room. He would agree every time, with a mock grudging expression on his face. But inwardly I'm sure he felt glad the books were being put to some use after all, instead of yellowing out inside their cheap glass cases. I had had plenty of friends with parents with a strict you-can-look-but-don't-touch policy that extended even to books. I never understood the point of keeping books for show.

"That was a long time ago, Mr. Jonathan."
"Is it now?", he said, an eyebrow squinting. This wasn't his mock-grudge expression, I calculated secretly. Strange how memories storm in, and how vividly.
"Yes. You had geraniums in that corner."
"I don't anymore?"

Poor Mr. Jonathan. "No, sir. It's a bald patch of mud. I think some animal's been digging there."
"Oh, that must be old Tom. Little rascal. I let him out early today morning. Whining like the earth was about to fall apart."
"Sir, do you mean your dog Tom?"
"Who else?", Old Man Jon chuckled, between wisps of smoke drifting up his face. "He's been quite a handful since we adopted him, I can tell you that much."
"He...he died five years ago, Sir."
"Now wait just a second, Richards!", Jonathan sat up, visibly disgruntled and angry. "What do you mean he died five years ago! There he is, right as rain, coming up the walkway!"

I looked to see and there he was: the dog I used to play with almost every Saturday afternoon. That same patch of white under the neck. That same limp where he had been hit by a car. He trotted up to me like a miniature pony and nuzzled against my leg.

"Why, he...he looks exactly like Old Tim!"
"That's because he is Old Tim, Richards! What the devil's gotten into you, lad?"

So the rumors were true, he'd clearly lost it for good. All of last week people had seen visitors ambling about his place like so many ghosts. They'd started worrying something was up with him. Ever since Mrs. Jonathan passed away, he'd stayed mostly by himself. No relatives to speak of. Who had been these people, everyone wondered. Scheming family members come to sniff out money because he was keeping ill? That seemed like the most likely solution. The visitors looked vaguely familiar, and some of them had kids. The kids seemed to stay on some days.

"Look, Mr. Jonathan", I explained. "I was worried that I would leave without saying goodbye, and..."
"And never see me again?"
I grew red in the face. "What I meant was, I was concerned about your health."
"And guilty that you never came all this time?"
"That...that too. I did so much like visiting you as a kid."
"What changed, I wonder", he said again, chuckling to himself.

The wind had changed again, mellowing into a soft summer breeze that seemed to tug at my memories. Funny how the wind never seems to change. Winter does come around later nowadays, but mostly the air always seems able and willing to bridge past with present: the one sole constant in an ageing city.

"Well, let me answer for you. Nothing did. You have come. Ever so often."
I was a little taken aback. "What...what do you mean?"
"I picked up a few things from my travels before I settled down for good. A few...abilities, if you like. One of them was to revisit times I liked in my head. The catch was that the memories needed to have mattered, and I can tell you this, boy, that you don't have much say in. Memories happen. If they matter, they matter. You can't make them matter, anymore than you can make someone fall in love with books by making them read everyday."

I was already eyeing the old stacks which peeked out of the living room, through the door that stood ajar temptingly. I could already identify a few of the paperbacks.

"So this ability of mine lets me live out those memories with more clarity than most people can. It's an ancient technique I picked up from some ancient people not from...well, certainly not from anywhere around here."

I had entered the room, the old floor creaking with every step of the way. The wind had turned something angry but soothing, in spite. So few storms here. There were so many when I used to come visit. Gave me an excuse to enter and start gaping at the shelves.

"And I do that ever so often. It never grows old, even though, you know...", he smiled again, "I do. And so does everyone else."

The sky had darkened to a sinister shade of grey, and it started drizzling a little. Tom, or whatever the new dog was called, came running inside, dirtying the carpet as usual.

"Well, looks like rain. Stay a while, boy. Let me show you a few of the books I got last week. There's one on pirates. I know how much you like pirates. Here comes the missus now, just in time."

Mrs. Jonathan came in from the kitchen, beaming. "Why, if it isn't Gregory Richards himself!"

"Hello, Mrs. Jonathan", I said, cheerfully, as always. "Mind if I stick around for sometime?"