Tuesday 11th September 2018 - Musings on Genius

[Retrospectively written - copied from handwritten diary]

There are those that walk or have walked amongst us to make mere mortals feel wholly inadequate.

I am certain that I could acquaint myself with many more if I could stand the mental torment but amongst those whose paths I've come across and who spring readily to mind include authors and broadcasters Stephen Fry and Clive James and scientists Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking. S.F. and C.J. have had careers that span my mature life and I count myself fortunate to have followed the meat of both careers. S.H. obviously achieved popular fame with A Brief History of Time, an accessable but still difficult quantum physics introduction.

R.F. on the other hand was the subject of a Horizon (I think) programme a couple of years before his early demise which I happened upon by accident as a TV repeat or on YouTube. I recall him explaining some complex theory or other in such plain english that it was impossible not to be able to follow the thought processes. However, by the time he'd reached the end of his monologue I couldn't for the life of me remember where he'd started or how we'd reached his conclusion. Maybe, it's because the minds of great thinkers are wired differently.

What, then, is genius and how do those so endowed deal with it? I mean, how do they suffer 6 billion fools, where does the mental stimulation keep coming from and how are they able to release the energy of ideas?

Suffering fools is the most difficult for me to comprehend. Maybe it's as simple as never having known any different and they have developed systems of behaviour and the thought processes to enable them to dumb-down for interaction with us mortals. Afflicted with a high I.Q. myself (but not the 170+ of these gods) I find myself socially awkward, easily bored and endlessly frustrated by the stupid who seem to have been put in charge of everything.

The mental stimulation and release aspects are easier to fathom. They simply disseminate their original work through art, writing, lecturing and association with contemporaries.

How do we define genius? Da Vinci is universally held to fall into this category and it would be impossible to argue otherwise given the quantity and quality of work produced, much of which was years and even centuries ahead of it's time. But what of Van Gogh, an oft-called flawed genius? I beg to differ here. There is no evidence of the precociousness in youth generally associated with the label and frequently assigned to chess and musical maestros; Mozart springs immediately to mind and I've no doubt it applied equally to Kasparov, Fischer et al. Van Gogh on the other hand was a tortured soul , tortured by the folly of religious indoctrination whose focus became art and crutches were wine and women. It is easy to argue that he produced original and great art but this came from the intense focus of a damaged mind on a specific task - to paint what he felt.

But who am I to judge. I know I'm more Van Gogh than Feynman but without the focus or talent.