Without Genius

My father and I get together once a week. We go to our local watering-hole, Bugsy's in North End St.Catharines and have a beer, a pizza or wings. Sometimes we watch a soccer games, sometimes we discuss family, sometimes we get into politics and ideas. 

Yesterday my father brought up an article he had read in the New York Times on the weekend. My father doesn't subscribe to the Times but he gets the Toronto Star supplement and finds himself perusing the pages.  The article that caught his attention had to do with the lack of genius in our times. The writer asked "Where are the Einsteins, where are the great theorists and philosophers?"

The journalist's question has been mine for a long time. Glancing over at my father, our beer glasses half-full (or half-empty) I responded by saying that genius has been mired by the mediocrity of modern life. We have technology that doesn't so much answer our problems but become problems in themselves. The latest gadget, the latest digital device is no more a balm for the troubled human soul than a confusing distraction. Video games, iphones, ipods, texting... these are all symptoms of poor spiritual growth, arrested development.

But it also has to do with the poverty in first world countries, the lack of jobs, as much as the modern university. Twenty years ago, before globalization, middle-class factory workers could provide for their children, for their education. Nowadays students are inundated with loans, debts. Their grades are fair, they work hard not so much with the books but at low-paying jobs to keep themselves afloat. Even in St.Catharines, a city far from Toronto and Vancouver, the rent is not cheap here. I paid less in Vancouver. 

My father agreed and we fell silent but I have taken the question along with me. Last night, during an evening bike ride, I passed through the poorer parts of the city. I realized we are living in a time without genius because the young don't have the opportunity to develop. The reason schools are rampant with orgies of alcohol is because students need to dull the hopelessness. The reason they play video games is because they need the distraction. Books are the enemies, never a solace, university a prison, a hell one must get through to get the job, to find the career that may not be satisfying. 

Further on my trip, I rode across the bridge near the Henley Regatta. A lone rower made her way over the waters, her back to her destination, a pink cap on her head. Minutes later, I found myself on a street with houses backing on the regatta. Monstrous houses, pillars and beautiful gardens. Could genius come from these homes? I shook my head. Not likely. Security and safety breed boredom. The rich kids want to make their parents proud, not by rocking the boat but by being trophies. Some will make money, become lawyers and physicians, while others will pursue the arts, not to change or make the world more interesting but to become scholars. A rich man doesn't have to worry if their son or daughter decides to major in English with the intention of becoming a Ph.D.

Without struggle and strife, vision is thwarted by the emptiness of well-pampered lives. There have been instances where men and women from rich families provided us with notable artists but these artist suffered. Proust writing his novel in a cork-lined room, asthmatic; Tolstoy ashamed of his younger self, became more a peasant than the personification of a Russian landowner. Pushkin and Dante were both exiled. 

Crossing Ontario street, I saw the Brock tower in the hazy distance. I know they are constructing an arts centre in downtown St.Catharines but then, what good will it do? The university is not the environment for genius to flourish. Its bureaucratic noose makes independent thought impossible and if any ideas do surface, they are at best born deformed, a hybrid of academic rhetoric and professorial ego. The heart is not allowed to enter the ivory tower and this why the substance of so much literary work is emotionless and sterile. Inspiration dries up and the idea of publishing instead of perishing holds the professor hostage.

And it doesn't matter what you publish, so long as it astounds your peers. But what peers? The image of the absent-minded professor is not far from the truth. I remember attending an art conference at Brock University in my first year. I was excited at the prospect of being surrounded by thinkers, exploring the mysteries and deconstructing the fables behind selected museum pieces. The first and only lecture I attended, I was immediately appalled. A professor, a woman in her mid-forties stood for an hour discussing the reflection of hair in the mirror of an Ingres portrait. I couldn't believe I wasted an entire hour. I waited for her to explore other facets of the painting but no. Her entire focus was on the mirror and her colleagues lapped it up like dehydrated dogs at a toilet on a humid summer afternoon. I felt so sick. 

And I continue to feel sick at every academic encounter. The university is like a hospital (and I've been in both), dulled, clouded in florescent light, all humanity excised, all pulse and wonder reduced, flatness and vanity blown out of proportion. Give me a doctor of medicine and a doctor of Philosophy or English and what they will most share is their inability to see people, to see life. If it can't be found in a text book, what good is it then? The ivory tower is truly an institution - closer to a penitentiary than a place of wisdom and higher learning.

Art has become less beautiful and more political, every piece another statement. And it's tiring to see another opinion garbed by an artist's need to be right about something, to show the mirror to humanity and say 'see, see...see...' God... We don't need another artist mountain of garbage or a man made out of clocks to remind us that modern life is a nauseating joke, a tale told by an idiot.

Passing behind the video rental stores on Lake Street I felt sad. It's no wonder we turn to the movie theatre and television for consolation. With the artist and the academic, living out their holier, self-aggrandizing roles, their lessons little more than the echoes of a megalomaniac sensibility justifying a pay check, we need the screen, the re-lived formulas and fables of the latest Michael Bay slush cinema. Not only this, with one feminist academic saying chivalry, romance and love are all dead along with the scientist exclaiming there is no soul, it's no wonder we want to watch a romantic comedy or get lost in a contrived, derivative pop song, formulated not by the well-proportioned singer herself but a small backroom network of former recording artists and studio executives who at least still have some idea of what people want. The pop singer is ineffective in offering edification. She will bring entertainment, elicit desire, become the subject of tabloids and fall into obscurity. Such is the wheel of fate.

But at least we still have books. I stopped at the mall, locked my bike and went into Chapters. I have a love-hate relationship with the chain. I was employed with them on several occasion but I was fired while working for the Victoria store. I usually feel sad when I enter, knowing these well-educated people are being paid minimum wage. Passing the history and sciences section, I smile, knowing there is some substance left in the world of non-fiction. 

As for most modern fiction, so little is worth reading. There is no modern Proust or Joyce or Kafka. They are read as classics, studied but the crap being published today is entirely mediocre and on the same level as Hollywood. If there is a genius out there, it is Michel Houellebecq. The Canadian authors published today offer historical escapes. It seems literary agents just love historical fiction. I become so disappointed walking through the local Chapters just to find another bestseller set in World War II. Come on... On top of that, the majority of chicklit out there makes me want to puke.

Is it any wonder genius is to difficult to find. Not to sound too sexist but women writers rarely appeal to me. They write about relationships, mother and daughter dribble and rarely do they become philosophical, rarely do they evolve their craft so as include thoughts on the times, offering ideas. I love Jane Austen, but she was a genius in her works. Anna Akhamtova too was a genius along with Ingborg Bachmann and Virginia Woolf. Why? Because they thought deeper. There is no depth in the majority of literature written by women. 

As for men, men don't seem to read as much fiction anymore. Who can blame them? They are most lost than women. The modern male wants a house, furniture, a good job to attract a mate. A man with money is more desirable. Why waste one's time with art and beauty? But as Desmond Morris once noted, men are more likely to become geniuses than women (on the flip-side, men are also more likely to become idiots and fools). 

We are seeing a lack of genius because men are no longer brave enough to search it out. From the digital distractions, globalization, lack of great jobs and careers, the modern male is constantly floundering, unable to create some substantial, whether a new theory or a work of a beauty. At best the man is at home playing video games or working long hours. If he is an academic, he is most likely doomed by his ego and his concerns for the trite, playing out his game of mental masturbation in front of lecture halls. If he cares for sports to bond he risks having relationships and encounters that have no meaning beyond the venue or focus of meeting. 

I left Chapters and went to a electronic store to pick up an MP3 player. I thought of the lonely rower on the waters of the Henley Regatta, her back to her future destination and myself, riding by on the bridge.  

Beauty and Its Wake

There is a line I have always loved in Victor Hugo's novel, Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la Mer): "Melancholy is the joy of being sad."

In the novel, Gilliat, a noble but modest fisherman dedicates himself to recovering the steam engine from a shipwrecked vessel off the Guernsey coast. The owner of the ship promises to whomever can bring back the said machine can have his niece, Durechette's hand in marriage. 

Gilliat has been in love with Durechette since she first wrote his name in the snow on the way home from church. Of course this should give the reader some indication of the novel's outcome. Like Hugo's other famed masterpiece, Paris de Notre-Dame (aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame), there is no happy ending. The protagonist takes on the quest but he is vanquished by the transience of human promises. 

The novel is classic and tragic because the character is doomed from the beginning. We relate to his quest (though the scenes wherein Hugo describes the method by which Gilliat recovers the steam engine can be tedious) and in the novel's final chapter, the hero resigns himself to his fate, letting the very sea he fought against take him to the next world. 

I wasn't so much haunted by the novel when I read it in my late teens,  more the ideas, the simplicity of the story. The joy of being sad resonated with me. Even to this day.

There's nothing like rain on a Sunday morning in August. I like it because it rains on the beaches where people might want to go. It rains on the soccer fields and playgrounds. It means people have to go inside themselves instead of escaping into the exterior where so much of life takes place. It means even the desolate can be beautiful.

And if we don't visit ourselves, or listen to quieter thoughts, television and other digital distractions won't help. The reason we are faced with harder things is because we refuse to see reality, to see how impenetrable and complex life is. Who hasn't returned from a terrible illness to fall in love with the mundane things one has previously overlooked? I also think of the oft quoted Tennyson remark of it being better in life to love and lose as opposed to never having the chance to love.

These thoughts have lead me to think that without beauty, there would be no melancholy. Why else would we feel down or lost? It means something momentous, something beautiful has come into our lives and passed on. Melancholy is the daily mourning for the greater episodes in life. 

In the wake of beautiful moments, we are left with the spreading absence. A song we love can be played over and over again. For some of us, songs imprint themselves, capturing the fragments of what we once felt. I can't listen to "All I Want Is You" by U2 without thinking of a blonde, Polish girl I knew when I was thirteen. And with the song's first few lines, summer evenings unfold in my thoughts, I can hear crickets, there are walks to the movies when the local mall had a theatre. I see her ahead of me, the flickering cascade of sunlight through the trees, the luxurious but wistful gasp of summer's first cooler winds. And maybe it is because of her I love short hair that curls around behind ears, it is her that makes me think another summer of her beauty is so impossible because she has passed and the time of being young, that young has moved on. 

The song becomes a comfortless surrogate. Words and music taking the place of moments, making the ephemeral seem less harsh. And for those song writers and singers, the very music they created came from the passing wake in which beauty had come and gone.

I am reminded of the Caurapañcāśikā by the 11th century Kasmiri poet, Bilhana (Chaurus in E. Powys Mather's rendition of the poem). According to legend, the young Brahman poet fell in love and had an affair with the king's daughter. The king looked down upon the union and imprisoned the poet. On the night before his execution, Bilhana wrote his famous work.

The fifty stanzas together create a tender kaleidoscope of love and its joys. The reader can see the lovers, their frolicking, their hours spent in bed. Bilhana describes the princess with such detail, from her citron-breast to the indent of her cheek, and her black eyes. He describes her feet then her anxiety the day he is captured. Then he goes on to write happily about books, the wise men he met, the learning he acquired. He also appreciates the mountains and the people he has seen in life, from fisherman to the men in the fields at harvest.

Even now 

If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again

Weary with the dear weight of young love,

Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms

And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,

As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease

Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

I can't think of a more solemn, more beautiful, more melancholy poem to read. Powys' translation, entitled 'Black Marigolds' makes every stanza wistful yet powerful and the depth of the poet's love resonates through the translation in a way others can't.

What makes his translation so strong and clear is the use of the words 'Even now' which take the place of the Sanskrit 'adyapi'. 'Even now' gives the English reader a sense of lament and retrospection as well as resignation, the poet's being ahead of all parting, to quote Rainer Maria Rilke.

The poem is the poet's last chance to give the world his art. It is beautiful in the way beauty can be complex, uncomfortable and grief stricken. Despite the sorrow, there is no anger nor regret in the poem which is why it transcends epochs and eras. Instead of wailing and grieving, using his words to smash at the prison walls, the poet has used his final words wisely. In short, the poem is a blessing, a forgiving, a benediction for what he has experienced and will soon lose. There is understanding and release by the end. 

It is strange to think that had a man lived, been given his freedom, would we have such a beautiful work of literature? In some traditions, the poem ends happily with the poet being freed. Others suggest that the king was so impressed with the young man's writing that he let him go free. 

But are these just lies to make it easier to love the story? Hollywood endings are preferred but they rarely deliver a sense of reality. In the contrived race to the airport, in the confession in front of a room of strangers, the hero always seems too heroic and oddly pathetic. Their words of love and regret become a deux ex machina, a 'god from the machine' to save the already nonsensical story. In real life people break up but they often sleep together and get back together and break up again. It isn't cold turkey - not always - and the melancholy knowledge that two people who try so hard but are not meant to stay together is too complex for most movie audiences.

And as a result most romantic comedies aren't really beautiful the way candy isn't nutritious. We take pleasure but there is a different pleasure in literature, in art, in great music and in universal stories. Instead of the fake comfort that dissolves in the rising theatre lights, we are in the presence of questions and stranger, sometimes unsettling feelings, eyes wet, heads shaking. For what its worth, it is familiar because it speaks to the universal in us all. Life is more intriguing and the enticing mystery unquiet but worth approaching when something stirs us away from the pre-fabricated. 

The romantic comedy I saw in my friends company, my Polish girl nearby, is not memorable. But I remember the walk home, her hand to her hair, the barking of a dog beyond a white fence and the closing lips of night. When I went to a different high school than her, we rarely saw each other again but I read Toilers of the Sea, listened to U2 and discovered 'Black Marigolds'. From out of the wake of her beauty came my longing to understand other aspects of beauty, to be closer to beauty because there was a large part of me afraid of what might happen had I pursued her.

In some ways I think I love beauty more philosophically than the surface reality. I think I've fallen in love once and since then, I rarely meet beauty that matches the beauty I find in great conversations and the generosity of others. I am blessed with many wondrous moments and people I encounter and continue to know. And in the the absence of beauty I have moved on into the pursuit to find it elsewhere, in art, in dreams and ideas. With the sadness of its passing, another catalyst for understanding, appreciating, and sometimes, letting go.

For Plato, we begin with many beautiful bodies to love until eventually we focus on beauty itself. We love Beauty. In truth, it will lead us to the Good.

I don't think I can argue with that.