Goodbye Genius

The word is a conspicuous absence in the conversation. When creativity is a pastime, what's everything else?

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a genius. When I was a kid, even in Central Massachusetts, that was a big deal.

Basically it meant that you could go out to breakfast without pants and forget to pay, and the only thing people would say was, did you see who was here? Now our diner is legendary!

As a young man with mixed feelings about pants, this appealed to me. Rather than resign myself to pants, I decided to be one of those guys. But by the time I was old enough to strut my stuff, the genius-industrial-complex had seemingly choked to a halt.

Maybe if I’d been more of a genius, that wouldn’t have mattered. Late into the twentieth century, they were still minting minor geniuses, who could show up unshowered in pajamas to nightclubs and make out pretty well, and then retire to their beach houses when it didn’t.

A million typewriters

Genius is like that line about pornography - you know it when you see it. And our century is about quantity: More people, more media, more cameras and microphones and screens and places to publish. We’ve got the million monkeys and the million typewriters, so where’s the genius?

Quantity is part of why we don’t see it. There’s more pressure, less time, less money to go around. There’s less reflection and less focused attention on the part of the artists and the audiences. There’s less space between artist and audience, so original things get bullied or bought up while they’re still half-baked. You get the pitch, but not the perversity.

Goodhart’s law

What does genius sound like? A little incomprehensible, a little funny, a little unique, a little universal. How do you spot it? How do you encourage of it? How do you ensure - and own - its production?

That last question may feel familiar. There are still institutions designed to recognize and reward genius. I think they had something to do with its disappearance.

Were there too many awards? Too many accolades? When did people start studying just for the test? When did people get tired of reading perfectly prepared exam answers? When did the needle last move for you?

Why the office closed

Geniuses were bad news. They cheated on their spouses. They beat their lovers. They borrowed money and didn’t pay it back. They menaced party guests with fireplace pokers. They did drugs and crashed cars. They spoke well of tyrants. They killed themselves. There isn’t one recorded instance of a genius ever separating their garbage for purposes of recycling. The list goes on.

But that wasn’t it. In a way, genius was like a research and development department for the human condition - its possibilities, its foibles, its tragic grandeur, its capacity to generate and tolerate beauty and meaning. Even if genius didn’t make much money, it was an exciting experiment, one that the Nazis and Soviets loved as much as the Americans.

It didn’t die because of a war. And though geniuses were problematic according to the mush-mouth lingo of our day, the institution didn’t die because a political question was answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

What happened was something else, something akin to what working Americans have experienced countless times in the past twenty years: Any large-scale organization, when it’s lost its verve and is packaging itself up for sale to the highest bidder, begins to shut down certain departments. Usually R&D is among the first to go.

Ten generations

The heyday of genius, let’s call it the 240 years between the birth of Mozart and the death of Andy Warhol, is in the past. And we have to think we’re smarter than that now. It’s rude to do otherwise.

So what was genius? It was wasteful. The excesses attributed to genius can only have been proportional to how much people needed them. Why did they need geniuses? Was it pure pretension? Was it a shallow desire to pass for intellectual? Maybe they were blinkered status robots in thrall to a dying, mostly European culture, faking along with the crowd, making up ever-more baffling shibboleths to keep out the peasants. Art, and literature and culture - maybe that was all it was.

Lucky us for seeing through all that - we can just get to the porn, the Doritos, the bathtub jets and direct deposits.

Let’s try again. The more recent people who needed genius were nearly as smart as us and as cynical. Maybe after one or two world wars seen firsthand, they were even smarter and more cynical. They knew that without constant surprise, without absurd inventions, without actual and metaphorical madness, without even a fictional frontier, the whole human scheme would reveal its worthlessness rather quickly.

So drown young Basquiat in caviar and cocaine. Buy Leonard Bernstein another summer house.

Without the excesses and experiments of the genius, things get so quiet that all you can hear is a relentless billion-man screw squeezing humanity and the natural world for all it’s worth. It’s a scenario where all you can hope for is to maintain your position, a few threads above the next bastard. No muzak can drown out the sound of the screw, even in the Four Seasons.

Tormented and tortured

The idea of being a genius has other charms. You don’t have to be happy. You’re allowed and even expected to be miserable. This is hugely liberating.

The expectation to be happy is oppressive. The intolerance of unhappiness is a defining feature of American life in the 21st century. The pursuit of happiness is a commitment to frustration. Happiness is a horrible yardstick for any human experience or activity. It feels almost like a mistranslation.

Thinking about activities or experiences in terms of happiness rarely goes well. The recent tendency to compare every creature, sensation, interaction, activity or phenomenon to an antidepressant is embarrassing in what it reveals about what’s happened. It’s damning of what we expect.

Depression is part of the genius. Depression looks closely and declares that this is not enough - that nothing about what you do or think is adequate for what will be required. Required for what? Death. Even as we try to live, what’s beyond death pulls on us.

Depression demands more. Consider the nightmare that was the mind of St. Augustine, Walt Whitman or Miles Davis, anyone who had to force a heaven into the morass of our well-established commonwealth of the impossible. They didn’t submit to talk of gratitude. Happiness is the other pair of pants a genius can set aside, to instead focus on doing something.

Of course, I’m not so bold anymore. I have people to consider. I take greater care to maintain my happiness because of how it affects the people I rely on, and care about deeply.

Life after genius

Twenty-four years into a century where genius is almost entirely measured in bundles of dollars, we hear the global screw night and day. The people who would’ve been geniuses are mostly tragic figures, lost in the backwash of a civilization that succumbed utterly to what it truly was without much warning. I think of MF Doom. I think of all the artists with GoFundMe campaigns.

I remember seeing these extravagant souls flare out in Williamsburg. The galleries said one thing. But the condos said another. The condos paid the galleries to keep up appearances. Then they no longer had to.

Electing a genius

Most animals are concerned with where they are in the herd, while the herd moves according to an unspoken direction, usually following the one member it believes it can most tolerate losing. And that beast can rarely tell if it’s leading or escaping its peers.

Fine,

I’ll admit it, I wear pants of some sort every single day.

You should see the pants I wear. Khakis, navy blue, battleship gray, olive drab, as if making PowerPoints or buying chicken thighs required a military affiliation. Some even have pleats. It’s like a bad dream.

The global screw grinds in my ears, as I cling to my position, like a schnook. I wish there were more geniuses. There was more to the world in the days of that cult.

Pants all around

But I get it. I was there when it started to give out. I heard the thrilled laughter on Kids in the Hall when the mad squatter virtually crushed the head of a bust of Beethoven. I heard the derisive whine of I’m a Super Genius on a Soul Coughing CD in college.

For a moment, genius was just another fetter. It was keeping us from something. I just wish we’d gotten there.

Danny Jock did the image for this piece, and is taking commissions

Danny drawing Andy Warhol in 33 seconds