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.