The Genius Next Door


Teach Your Children Well
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

The Genius Next Door

Genius of America
Adolphe Yvon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adolphe_Yvon_-_Genius_of_America.jpg

There was a review in the New York Times, “How to Be Brilliant,” of a book on genius and how to become one, The Genius in All of Us. The premise of the book is that everyone has the potential to be a genius of one kind or another, mathematical, musical, and so on, it just requires a bit of hard work and tenacity. According to the book becoming the best at anything is a matter of dedication, self-confidence, and a willingness to fail often in pursuit of a single thing. The research suggests that anyone who achieved greatness at anything did so by working relentlessly at developing the necessary skills. This probably comes as no huge surprise but the question that seems to go unanswered is how many worked relentlessly and did not achieve. We know who Mozart and Einstein are because they achieved the thing that they pursued, but are there others who were as relentless in their pursuit that we never heard of because they never arrived at their goal.

Of course it is probably a good thing to pursue our interests wholeheartedly and to work as best we can at developing our abilities and interests, but is that in itself enough. Is there something extra that some have that others do not that is as important to success as hard work. I suppose if our aspirations are in proportion to our abilities than the hard work by itself should be enough, but is this how dreams and aspirations operate? In an American Idol culture many are infected with a dream but the American Idol culture suggests that at best one or two will actually succeed. The American culture is built on competition and where it is true that competition can bring out a person’s best, it is also true that competition usually allows for only one winner. There was a sign at the Olympic games held in Atlanta, for example, that said, “Second is the first loser.”

The song, Teach Your Children suggests that much comes down to being true to ourselves and teaching our children to be true to themselves. Having a code to live by is important, so is knowing ourselves and our abilities. It is also important to remember that not all genius is appreciated in its lifetime. Jonathan Swift said that “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Swift is suggesting not only that most are not geniuses but also that most are resentful of the true genius when she or he appears. According to Peter Schaeffer’s play Amadeus Mozart was poisoned by another composer who was envious of Mozart’s ability. Though the history of this is a bit dubious, it does underscore that for the genius even if fame is not elusive there will always be rivals to contend with.

Copenhagen
PBS

The play Copenhagen is about a meeting between two physicists that were geniuses of their day, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The meeting took place early in World War II and is of interest because Heisenberg was a German physicist working for the Nazis and Bohr was a Danish physicist of Jewish decent (his mother was Jewish). The two men were friends before the war but their relationship was to say the least a bit strained by the war and the ideology of the German government that fought it. I think this raises another important point about genius and that is it does not protect one from embracing idiotic ideas. Heisenberg may not have believed the Nazi ideology but he still worked for it. Germany at the time of the Nazis was one of the most intelligent countries in the world if intelligence is measured by the number of highly educated men and women, men and women of genius perhaps. Wisdom and genius are often not the same thing and perhaps if the former were revered more than the latter the world would be a better more benevolent place.

Wotan visits Mime and offers him his help
Arthur Rackham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ring40.jpg

Another name for a genius is a “wiz,” an abbreviated form of wizard, someone for whom everything seems to come easily, someone who can work magic with ideas, a musical instrument, or a ball of one kind or another. I like the wizards in stories. The good ones not only can do marvelous things, but they are often wise to boot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word wizard etymologically means “wise one” (actually the word is formed from “wise” + “ard”) and it was once a word for a philosopher or sage, though even in its archaic sense it had a derogatory connotation, as it often does to this day. Still, it suggests that the true genius is not only intelligent, but also wise. If we keep Arthur C. Clarke’s third law in mind, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” than the scientists that create the cutting edge technologies we use or are waiting for are themselves wizards in the mold of Merlin or Gandalf.

For most the science that runs our technology and many of our tools is like magic, we understand that they work and know how to make the machines do what we want them to do, but few of us understand how they work, how they do what they do. Science is for many a kind of magic that we believe in because the scientists that work the magic tell us there is nothing mysterious in it, that it all works according to certain rules. But then, those in the wizarding schools of J. K. Rowling or Ursula Le Guin are learning the rules by which the magic of those books work. There is, they would have us believe, a kind of “science” to the art of witchcraft and wizardry.

Map of “Mercury” as described in The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
David Bedell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ouroboros_map.jpg

The painting that started this off and the map above suggest the true meaning of genius and that is the spirit of a place or a person, or even a thing, one might say the spirit of a noun. The painting captures the spirit of America, some of what makes it a unique place and the painting is full of truly American images, like frontiersmen and frontiers that in the painting are a bit mysterious. But in this sense we are all geniuses in that we all have a spirit that in some way defines us. That spirit might also be summed up as our character, the spirit by which others know us. It is this kind of genius we all need to cultivate and to infuse with maturity and a bit of wisdom. Is our genius one of fidelity and courage, or of duplicity or timidity?

In most of the stories in which the great wizards appear, there is this concern for being true to something worthwhile and noble. Merlin wanted to make Britain a more just society, Gandalf wants to preserve what is best in Middle Earth, and Dumbledore wants to see magic used to promote wise and virtuous ends. The story of Ged, or Sparrowhawk, the wizard of The Wizard of Earthsea, is about finding redemption and the wisdom to use his skill with magic to better his world and himself.

Book cover art for the book A Wizard of Earthsea
Ruth Robbins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AWizardOfEarthsea(1stEd).jpg

Perhaps this is the true magic we all need to work, to transform ourselves from selfish people motivated by self-interest into more generous people who work at improving the worlds in which we live and wander. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to greatness of one kind or another. Many, though by no means all, that have been given the label of genius have not been good people. Their genius in that other sense was largely underdeveloped, or at least the more virtuous aspects of it were. Personally, I think that most of us are at some level a bit insecure and that some mask that insecurity with physical strength or some other kind of personal superiority. But even if this is not true, we are somehow diminished as people if we are incapable of living for anyone other than ourselves and in this regard it would benefit us all to develop the better angels of our genius.


One Day, Maybe


Longer Boats
Cat Stevens

One Day, Maybe

Pebble in the Sky Cover
Isaac Asimov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pebble_sky_cover.jpg

I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, my father was an aerospace engineer and I grew up with the space program. I also grew up with science fiction and the belief that very shortly, probably in my lifetime, we would be visiting other planets with an eye turned to other galaxies. Many thought that before long we would be seeing photographs resembling this cover illustration from one of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels. But somewhere between then and now other things began to occupy the culture’s interests. The song Longer Boats enjoyed a bit of popularity in the early 70’s and it is, as the singer tells us, about space ships. But the space ships never arrived, except in the movies.

In the movies the space ships brought two kinds of folks. There were those like ET who looked frightening to us (as we looked frightening to him) and the alien with his robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still who were either just curious and met us no harm or were actively committed to our welfare and saving us from ourselves. On the other hand there were those, like the folks in the Twilight Zone episode “How to Serve Man” or The Invaders from Mars that were committed to our destruction. There were also creatures like The Blob who were just hungry and had no real thoughts for us at all.

Martian Sunset Spirit Rover
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html

This photograph probably comes as close as any to resembling the cover art found on the science fiction novels of my youth. It is of the sunset on Mars and was taken by one of the Martian “rovers” that have spent quite a long time exploring the surface of this planet. It takes my breath away every time I see it. This is not a painting but the actual surface of another planet as it looked on a certain day. There are no people there to share in this experience only the machines we have sent in our place, but this is the real dirt and dust and mist of Mars. There are some for whom the spirit of exploration has not died who would like to see this story taken a step further and to see people walk this land. But I am not sure that there are any longer enough who are committed to making this happen. Our budgets are smaller and our interests closer to home.

There were a couple of articles recently, one in the Los Angeles Times on the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (“Kim Stanley Robinson maps the future’s gray areas”) and one in the Washington Post on “New science fiction and fantasy novels” that remind us that science fiction as a genre has not gone away even if the desire to make it fact has somewhat abated. These writers often focus on this planet and how life on it might be different in the future or, in the case of Robinson in the past in ways that affect the future. Science fiction writers have always enjoyed imagining a future earth that has been transformed by human misbehavior. There is one story I particularly enjoy about a man working on his doctoral dissertation who is coaxed through an opening in the wall of his apartment to a parallel universe. What fascinates me about this story is that nearly every character in it is the man writing his dissertation at different points in time. But it was Ray Bradbury’s journey to Mars that awakened my imagination to the possibility of one day doing on Mars what the Martian Rover is doing now.

Galaxy Photograph (Crossfield/Beletsky)
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html

The image above is a photograph taken of a distant galaxy. I think it was taken from the Hubble telescope orbiting in space, but I am not sure. But it, and others like it, resembles paintings made by Jackson Pollack, or at least these photographs suggest Pollack’s paintings to me. I do not know if Pollack had an interest in science fiction or astronomy but this resemblance interests me. Is the universe, like a Pollack painting, somewhat chaotic in its organization or do the kaleidoscopic displays of colors and patterns in both the painting and the universe suggest creative imaginations that think alike. The resemblance certainly suggests that art does not need to be representational to be beautiful.

Perhaps the imagination that sees beauty in random placements of color on canvas is not unlike the imagination that sees stories in the stars. We look at the stars and see bits of color on a dark night sky but our ancient ancestors saw bears and hunters and creatures of various kinds going about their business. Perhaps what we call mythology was a kind of ancient science fiction. That those that told these stories got the same thrill from them that I got from Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. I am told, and what I have read of the mythology suggest this is true, that the classical mythmakers believed the stories they told, that they were not merely the products of vivid imaginations but a kind of history. Plato believed (or suggested he believed) that those that told the stories of Homer and the other classical writers of myth were possessed, were not in their right minds, but a bit mad. Many think the same thing about Pollack and painters like him. Perhaps his is a mythic madness as well.

Lavender Mist
Jackson Pollack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lavender_Mist.jpg

The stories change us though or at least they changed me. The myths from antiquity suggest we live in a universe populated by many strange and wonderful beings. The science fiction I read as a child and as a young adult and still read to this very day, suggest the same thing about the universe, that it is inhabited by strange and wonderful beings and if some of the beings that inhabit these stories are not kind or benevolent, well, the same was true of many of the beings that inhabited the popular myths of the ancient world.

But what makes a storyteller. As I have grown up I have seen film become the avenue of modern storytelling. I have seen its special effects grow from the sparks that propelled Flash Gordon’s space ship to the warp speeds of starships and the grace and elegance with which these starships moved. But it also seems that as the ability to make magic with special effects increased these effects started to replace the stories. Aristotle acknowledged the place of spectacle in story telling but he believed that spectacle oughtn’t to become the story but should always serve the story.

James Cameron TED Talk

James Cameron talks here about his love of science fiction and of how that love helped to shape him into a storyteller. Like many skillful storytellers he has been accused of borrowing his stories from others. There is probably some truth to this; there are only so many stories to tell, after all. But he creates worlds where wonderful and at times terrifying things happen. Do his stories exploit their special effects, does the spectacle over shadow the stories his films tell? Some think so. But even if they have their limitations they are powerful. Personally I have been more troubled by the limitations of some of his actors than by the inadequacy of his stories.

Three Suns (JPL)
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html

It probably does not matter that much of what happens in a good science fiction story uses flawed science, they are exercises in what might be and perhaps in the worlds they travel different rules apply. How would we be different if we orbited three different suns that appeared at different places against the sky? The three sunned landscape of this illustration has a kind of beauty and I wonder what kind of life could develop on such a planet. But how does imagining such things make life better on a planet with one sun?

There is something in the human character that is curious and wants to know even if there is no practical value to knowing a thing or in speculating about an outcome. Stories often help us to entertain this curious bent of the imagination. And it has often happened that in entertaining the mind with such nonsense great things have been accomplished. The space program may not have solved the world’s problems but it did give us Tang, microwave cooking, and the laptop computer. Jonathan Swift ridiculed the speculative scientists of his day by accusing them of attempting to pull sunlight out of cucumbers. Science may not have succeeded in pulling sunlight out of cucumbers, but they have given us ethanol, something not very different.

Is the object of science to make our lives better, to make us more comfortable, or to understand how to use our resources more effectively and to understand the forces of nature that have created those resources. If the former, science only has value if it can solve our problems. It must produce practical results or it is not worth the investment. If the latter the results are somewhat superfluous because the study of science is not about what it can do for us, but the knowledge it gives and the insights it provides into the universe we occupy. It has usually happened that this knowledge has brought with it practical applications that have solved many problems, but this is just a by-product and not a purpose. So, is the joke on Swift or on us? Perhaps it depends on whether we view science as an end or as a means to an end, as spectacle without much in the way of a story to tell or the intelligence, or an aspect of that intelligence, behind the scenes that drives the story.


Is It Real


Tupelo Honey
Van Morrison

Is It Real

Education (Center)
Louis Comfort Tiffany
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiffany_Education_(center).JPG

There was an article in the Guardian a few weeks ago about hoaxes, “The greatest literary hoax ever?”. The article talks about how the writer William Boyd got together with a number of influential friends to invent and promote an artist who never existed. Before they were done, they were exhibiting this artist’s paintings and getting well known, and not so well known people, to talk about how they knew and admired this artist. Before he could bring the hoax to its planned conclusion a co-conspirator let the secret slip out. It makes for an interesting story and illustrates the gullibility of people. The song is about placing values on things, and recognizing the best and being willing to make certain investments (all the tea in China, for example) to demonstrate this value.

The picture is of one of three stained-glass panels done by Louis Comfort Tiffany celebrating education. If we are well educated we are perhaps less likely to be caught in a fabrication and more able to access the accurate and true values of things. But maybe not. Boyd’s crowd of art admirers included well educated people who ought to have known better. Perhaps this was what the hoax was playing off of. If these people expected to be taken seriously as knowledgeable appreciators of art they must not let it be supposed there are influential artists of whom they were unaware. Perhaps the first thing the truly knowledgeable learn is that they do not know everything and that there is nothing wrong with not knowing everything.

Of course the story that Boyd invented was a good story and perhaps what truly lay at the heart of the deception was a human desire to be a part of a truly good story, even if that means inventing a personal history that is different from one’s true history. Or maybe the story was so good it suggested artists from these people’s past whose names they had forgotten but whose work they held onto. Maybe the works they shared were done by a corps of unknown artists that met early and tragic ends. Maybe the invented story was the story of many unknown and unappreciated artists that gave into despair. In the stained glass panel celebrating education at the top of the page the two disciplines represented are “science” and “religion,” two disciplines that often interpret the truths they encounter by different lights and maybe both offer a truth that resonates even if at times they conflict. Each often accuses the other of perpetrating hoaxes and each answers these accusations rationally according to their separate understandings. As one dubious judge once remarked “What is truth?” Perhaps all truth begins with faith in something and it is on that something that all that follows rests.

Illustrations from Old French Fairy Tales
Virginia Sterrett
http://www.subtlebody-images.com/virginia.sterrett/vs.fairy.tales.html

As an English teacher I think stories teach basic truths about the world humans inhabit. These stories are fiction and it would seem by definition are not true. It is something of a paradox, perhaps, that something that is fabricated, like a story, can illuminate so much and give such insight. The illustration above was done to illustrate a fairy tale. Fairy tales introduced most of us to the world as it is, a world of “evil stepmothers” that cannot be trusted and “fairy godmothers” that can. Yet there is in this something of a life lesson, many that should be trusted cannot be, and many that should be doubted can be trusted. Much of life revolves around sorting out these kinds of problems.

There was an article last week, “Mind your language,” also in the Guardian about language and how we use it. The specific word in question was the word “skeptic” and what that word literally means. According to the article a true skeptic is a seeker after truth and questions everything in order to discover what is true. Yet the word is being applied to those that question nothing their own ideology teaches and doubt everything that challenges that ideology, often without doing very much to sort out which is in fact true. In other words the very opposite of a skeptic in that they accept one body of knowledge without question and challenge any contradictory body of knowledge without examination.

Corner House
István Orosz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cornerhousey.jpg

The illustrations above and below are interesting in this regard in the way they play with perspective. The one above is of a corner of a house. But is it an outer corner or an inner corner, does it open on a courtyard or a sidewalk. As I look at it the perspective changes, one minute it is turning a corner and the next it is at the back of a corner, one minute one window is invisible to the other, the next it is facing the other. Which is true? Of course, in this picture anyway, they are both true, it all depends on how we look. Is this a work of art or geometric gamesmanship? It is hard to say, but it is kind of fun to look at.

The picture below is of two roads, or bridges really, that cross a body of water but at some point beyond where the two cross each disappears into its reflection in the water. The pictures are Escher-esque in the way they play with perspective, but they offer a kind of pleasure in the way they play with how the eye focuses and sees. Stories often teach us that life is about maintaining our perspective on things, about seeing things correctly, even though life often presents itself in a confusing and incomprehensible manner. Is the nice lady in the gingerbread house inviting us for dinner or “having” us for dinner? The answer to this question, whether it is literal or metaphoric, often determines whether the day’s events have a happy or unhappy conclusion and as with the pictures, appearances can be deceiving.

Crossroads
István Orosz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Keresztut.jpg

A good story often challenges our way of viewing the world and in so doing reminds us we have to be careful in our judgments and not lean to heavily on our own understanding. It is not always easy to tell where the line falls between being gullible and being open minded, between being generous in our treatment of others and being foolish. Stories do not always help us resolve these problems but good stories make us aware of these problems and the need to resolve them while being true to our character and values. The most dangerous people in the world are those that understand us and what we believe and know how to exploit those beliefs and in the process exploit us. Stories cannot solve these problems perhaps, each situation must be addressed by its own merits, but they can make us wary and wise in our approach to circumstances and events.

The Dot and the Line
Metro Goldwyn Mayer

I like this little story because it addresses the romantic and the realist in all of us. Both the dot and the line are vulnerable to their romantic inclinations and these inclinations lead them to make unwise choices. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the squiggle perhaps, the story has a happy ending and both the dot and the line are able to experience romance realistically, though I am not sure that means of their deliverance is itself realistic. But we understand when the story ends that the dot and the line are “right” for each other.

Is this story true to life, do things often resolve themselves so neatly? Probably not. The value of the story lies in its pointing out the blindness that romance can bring and hopefully put us on our guard against it. But than other stories, Great Expectations, perhaps, suggest that even when we realize that our emotions and romantic attractions are leading us astray we are powerless when it comes to resisting them. We often find out the hard way, through pain and disappointment, that our affections are not always reciprocated and that those we have never harmed will seek to harm us.

Screenshot from the film Metropolis (1927)
Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann (cinematograpers)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metropolis-new-tower-of-babel.png

Anyone who knows Breughel’s painting of The Tower of Babel will recognize it in this landscape from the film Metropolis. This knowledge should shape the way we view this cinematic landscape and the story this film is going to tell before the film begins to tell it. The story of Babel ends in tragedy and it is about human arrogance and presumption. The film addresses another kind of human presumption and arrogance, one that has more to do with exploitation of others than of usurping the powers of God, though there is a bit of this as well. But allusion is one way stories tell stories without actually telling the story, they prepare us for what is coming and help create a frame of mind in the reader (or in this case the viewer) that attunes itself to what appears to be coming. We see this picture and knowing its origins we know that what follows will be tragic, or with a different set of cultural signals, comic. The film The Music Box with Laurel and Hardy is, at least in part, a comic retelling of the Myth of Sisyphus. We catch on to how the film plays with the myth early on but because it is a Laurel and Hardy film, we expect a comic and not tragic retelling of the tale.

Poster for the 1911 Ballet Russe season showing Nijinsky in costume for “Le Spectre de la Rose”, Paris.
Jean Cocteau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nijinsky_-_Poster.jpg

Nijinsky was an influential Russian dancer and the ballet Russe an influential dance company. The ballet is The Spirit of the Rose. I know nothing about the ballet, but the name is suggestive. “A rose by any other name” and The Name of the Rose are just a few of the literary associations of the rose. It represents beauty and a kind of excellence. Another odd bit of serendipity in this poster is the artist that painted it, Jean Cocteau. He would go on to become a 20th century pioneer of the French cinema. He told powerful film stories. One of his best known films was Beauty and the Beast, not the Disney version by any means, but still a forceful retelling of the original fairy tale, which kind of brings us back to where we started, or near to it. Fairy tales do not just prepare children for the cruel world they may face as adults, but they often remind adults of the darker side of the world they have grown into.

Cocteau’s film was not made for children, though its characters, themes, and settings come from a very well known and beloved children’s story. The story he tells is very dark, but at the same time childlike. There was also this week an obituary for the last Yiddish poet, Abraham Sutzkever. One thing he said that is true of stories and storytellers was “If you carry your childhood with you, you never age.” As children the stories we read help us age wisely, as adults these same stories help us to age gracefully, preserving in us what is best of youth and maturity.