Recently in my Technology and Society course, we watched The Imitation Game, so the students would know something about this guy who made this thing called the "Turing Test" that I keep talking about. The film was a stock Hollywood bio-pic with appropriately placed musical swells, with emphasis on finding adult problems in childhood traumas, and the idea of the solitary, misunderstood genius.
So what is genius? Well as with most ideas, there's a history that's pretty interesting. Here's the upshot. To the Greeks one was possessed by genius. To us, a person just plain old is a genius. So what's the difference and does it matter? As I see it, the idea that one is possessed by genius means that anyone appropriately sensitive could be possessed by a moment where they feel taken over by a force outside themselves. Sometimes we call these "epiphanies" and sometimes they are attributed to something called a "muse."
The example that sticks out to me is the story of Archimedes sitting in the bathtub. If anyone is unfamiliar the legend goes like this: The king does not know whether his crown is real gold or not and he tasks Archimedes with finding out, except Archimedes doesn't know how. So after an unproductive day, Archimedes, exhausted, takes a bath. He notices that when he sits down in the bath, the water rises: displacement. "Eureka," he shouts, running naked around town realizing he has solved the puzzle. In this example, Archimedes isn't walking around just being a genius all the time; rather, he was overtaken in a moment of genius and saw a solution that was previously unseeable.
Genius, at least as we use the term, seems to imply someone who is singularly focused: one learns that David Lynch ate lunch everyday at Bob's Big Boy because he just couldn't be bothered to waste any time thinking about what to eat for lunch. All he could think about was creating Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive etc. Or Cezanne paints the same mountain over and over and over because he cannot capture the essence of the mountain - and in doing so he becomes so obsessed that he can't find time to clean up after his pet bird. We have a genius painter in a room full of bird shit. This fits the stereotype perfectly. Or the movie The Devil and Daniel Johnston where we see a musician who is not talented in any traditional sense write hundreds of love songs about one girl who couldn't love him back. While watching that film I remember feeling so conflicted about whether I was seeing someone who was possessed by genius or someone who was just awful and could not accept the fact.
It seems that we don't call someone a genius who is a generalist. But why? Could someone write the most brilliant Intro to Philosophy book or what about someone who was just an amazing film critic because they were incredibly sensitive to film, not because they had seen hundreds of films or because they could direct a film. That is to say, could someone be a genius as an amateur? Or to circle back, is genius something that someone actually is?
I can't imagine someone just walking around being a genius all day. What would that look like? Oh my god did you see the way Bob just turned right on red? Fucking brilliant? Oh wow - did you see how he ate that tuna salad? Impeccable! Have you seen him urinate!
So that leaves the concept that we can have moments of genius - certainly a more democratic idea, but wait a minute - genius can't be democratic, right? Well I guess this is what I think: if one is sensitive, thoughtful, and quiet one can have moments of insight that can reconfigure the world. Turing supposes that only a machine can defeat a machine; Einstein supposed space-time instead of space and time, Derrida presents a paper at Johns Hopkins and gives the world Deconstruction; Jimmy Hendrix places the Vietnam War inside of the National Anthem. These moments changed what came before - rendering much irrelevant, making things that weren't relevant more relevant - they made reality taste differently, feel differently, and we're all better for it - I hope.
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