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Commenti (2) TrackBack (0) 9 febbraio 2009 - 23:52

Genius within, genius outside

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her peculiar views on the dangers of a career in a creative job. The burden of genius as part of the artist's identity - a maddening perspective, spoiling the life of artists in the last three hundred years. Gilbert juxtaposes the ancient concept of having a genius instead of being one, and tries (with some help from Tom Waits) to give a modern times equivalent of the spirit that channels creativity from the gods.

Call me a materialist, but I'd easily find a modern equivalent for externalizing genius as an entity that does not belong to the individual - that is society, meaning both the proximity of other human beings and their inspirational power, as well as the whole body of knowledge carried by a specific culture and the special, unique section that each single individual makes out of it.

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Alex 15/feb/2009 15:01:06

Hi Fabio,

I watched the video and found it fascinating. Intelligence is a difficult thing to define. Some have said that genius is a form of madness, and there is some justification in this, in that some super intelligent people are unstable. The films 'A Beautiful Mind' and 'Shine' come to mind - both based on real life geniuses.

Once people label you as a genius, then this can put you under considerable pressure to live up to the moniker - for some the pressure is too great. Although many geniuses would never admit to being such. After all, they are just being themselves.

A genial subject. What prompted you to write about it?

Best,

Alex

Fabio 16/feb/2009 23:23:52

Welcome back Alex! Thank you for asking, there is a slight connection with the identity theme. My interest is in how genius is perceived as an attribute of personality (do I own my geniality, or is it just borrowed?) and how much the idea can be stretched to suit the spirit of current times. I've tried to take the subject a little bit further down this road in another post, this time about heroically innovative efforts - not necessarily the byproduct of genius, but nonetheless stunning.

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