Genius

This is an embarrassing subject. Genius is so irregular, disputed and uncontrolled a phenomenon that writing about it is like discussing unidentified flying objects. To have seen a UFO oneself does not make the task any easier, especially if it has landed in one's own garden and little green men with antennae have emerged. But at least geniuses silently recognize one another by the way they come into a room and sit down.

The word genius in its modern sense first appeared in 18th Century England. This was presently exported to Germany, there blown up romantically and reimported to England in the 19th Century. It implied an incommunicable power of inventive thought found among a few very unusual people who somehow did not depend on academic education for their discoveries or performances. Fielding first used the word so in his Tom Jones (1749): "By the wonderful force of genius only, without the least assistance of learning...." Genius in this sense is now contrasted with mere talent, which means the intelligent exploitation of discoveries made by genius.

Not long ago, I overheard a group of American professors wondering about the small Greek state of Fifth Century B. C. Athens. It seemed impossible, they agreed, that an equal percentage of historically important figures could appear today in any part of the United States, despite the recent massive increase of educational facilities. But why? they wondered. One of them hopefully suggested that the title genius is too grudgingly awarded nowadays; so that most of the numerous first-class physicists working in the States, whose technical know-how would have staggered Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Zeno and all the other Athenian geniuses, are denied the title. But these professors seemed to me to be confusing historical importance with scientific talent, and scientific talent with the unfathomably original way of thought now associated with genius. For example, Franklin, Watt, Marconi and Edison were men of unusual scientific talent and attained considerable historical fame; whereas Clerk-Maxwell, Rowan Hamilton, Thompson (of the genes) and Rutherford, whose work displayed all the signs of genius, remain almost unknown to the general public. Periclean Athens, of course, fascinates modern Americans. Pericles first democratized Athens by breaking the power of the ancient religious aristocracy and glorified his own name by an expansion of the Athenian fleet and colonial empire; also by fostering art, industry and commerce.

Yet I associate genius with the Athens of Pericles largely in a negative sense. His mercilessly dictatorial government, however neatly disguised as democracy, implied the exploitation of a large, industrious slave class and the deliberate rejection of ancient religious myths that had thitherto guided the social conscience, in favor of an oversimplified political logic. He made Athens a loveless city of agnostics, famed for its prestige architecture, statuary and philosophy and sadly lacking in political honor.

Plato, who was born two years before Pericles' death, proved himself a notorious enemy of genius by barring poets from his ideal republic: I suppose because poetry at its most intense and memorable transcends logical argument, he dismissed it as "madness." Even today, the dead hand of Plato compels students to think logically; and as more and more universities are losing their independence through being financed by the state or business corporations, the more and more logical does the educational system become. This illiberal trend explains the marked decline in native American genius since the turn of the century; for Platonists hold that nothing that cannot be logically proved is true, and this includes genius.

The original sense of genius was a far simpler mystery to accept and handle than the present one. The word genius is not Greek but Latin. Other Latin words of the same formation are progenitor, generate, engender and genitals. But genius had a spiritual rather than a physical sense and implied the primitive creative power with which a man is born and which accompanies him throughout life as his highest spiritual self, his protector, his oracle. A Roman who behaved evilly or foolishly was said to have "defrauded his genius." Genius was his primitive male dignity, his sense of love and his power of instinctive thought, the preservation of which was his constant duty. Because such genius was considered noble and inspiring, the adjective generous, which in Latin implied a family tradition of honorable dealing, was formed from it. A similar formation was genial, which implied the incessant and comforting radiations of genius on a man's equals and subordinates. Yet another formation was genuine, meaning the authenticity of this power. Horatius' inspired defense of the Tiber bridge against the whole Etruscan army was quoted as a typical example of personal genius. The Greeks, however, rejected this concept by philosophically opposing the good genius with an evil one. The imported Greek notion of opposing demons fighting for the possession of a man's soul weakened the Roman's simple confidence in a mystic power that took possession of him in times of crisis.

What we now call genius cannot be wholly separated from its original Roman sense, even though the structure of modern society has become hostile to it. In a plutodemocracy, the state provides compulsory education of a logical, secular and wholly impersonal sort; all professors, from the college principal down, have their knives into any student who cannot conceal his individualism; they are required to diagnose either a criminal tendency or mental ill health.

Scientists have tended since the days of Lombroso (1836--1909) to equate genius with madness--a view natural to all who pride themselves on their logic and for whom madness means illogical thinking. But what, after all, is logic? In Greek, logikU+0113: meant no more than "verbalization," the power of thinking in an ordered sequence of words, rather than in direct imagery, sound and sensation, as animals do. Since, however, most words are no more than increasingly abstract generalizations, they can never convey the full, singular essence of any particular object, feeling or happening. Logic is to real thought as corned beef and canned beans are to the natural products. Moreover, Greek logic came to be used as a means of forcing opinions on the listener by arranging words in such a sequence that their conclusion seemed uncontradictable; not letting the victim realize how insecure these generalizations were if compared with whatever act, fact or experience they were verbalizing. From logic developed rhetoric--the art of persuading people by a deliberate slanting of logic that a good cause was a bad cause, or vice versa.

The concept of good and evil genius is a contradiction in terms. Genius implies truth and love naturally pursued. Evil is a talented logic that challenges love and truth by arguing that since all human beings are by nature selfish and fallible, any pursuit of virtue must be hypocrisy. Modern scientists incline toward evil by refusing to accept "good," "beautiful" or "honorable" as acceptable scientific terms, or to offer more than a polite supercilious bow to truth and love. They do not even foster the natural beauty of their own bodies, as Pericles' Greeks did, and tend to think with a morbid logical intellect, never with the "sane mind in a healthy body." They hold that nothing has reality that cannot be recorded either in words or in conventional scientific symbols. This is precisely why the work of genius is never strictly logical. Geniuses when at work think largely in pictorial images, and the consequent exactness of their thought tempts logicians to dismiss them as liars, guessers or madmen.

But poetry is composed of words alone: Is there, then, no genius in poetry? The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose, and is always coining newer, deader words, with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic, unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures, with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from medieval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic. In art, the equivalence of madness and genius is easier to defend wherever the artistic impulse is symptomatic of schizophrenia. Vincent van Gogh, an un-talented academic artist before he turned schizophrenic and thus lost what biologists call his "color compensation," became famous for his startling records of how schizophrenes see such common objects as chairs or sunflowers. But schizophrenia is a splitting of the mind and schizophrenic art in its later stages becomes wholly detached from reality; in genius, the mind always retains its health and integrity.

Genius in its startling modern sense seems, indeed, to imply genius in the Roman sense: a confidence in a spiritual guardian that can foreknow and deliver the otherwise impossible and that goes straight to the answer, without recourse to logical argument or its equivalent in mathematics or music. It seems that man, in his gradual ascent from rudimentary forms of life, has elaborated successive mechanisms of thought, the most recent and by no means the most effective of these being the logical use of cause and effect that is solidly linked with the cramping notion of measurable time and now rules the materialistic world.

In sleep, the mind reverts to primitive thought mechanisms that occur on increasingly deeper levels, from light trances to so profoundly drugged a condition that its dreams convey images untranslatable to the waking intelligence. Sudden reversion in waking up to a prehominoid level of thought as the result, for example, of shock caused by a blockbusting explosion, can send a group of professional men scrabbling for escape on a tile floor, rather than, as would happen under a lesser shock, merely running away or having hysterics. Some of us inherit a primitive sensibility to signs of danger that evade our educated senses, but of which cats, dogs and horses are often conscious; others are, from time to time, granted clear visions of future events, ghosts of ancient history or happenings at a distance, no doubt induced by an equally primitive thought mechanism. Yet all such psychic phenomena are rejected by scientists because they are plainly not subject to repeatable experiment.

Below the rational level of consciousness, then, lie dream levels. The deeper the sleep, the more difficult it is for the dreamer, on waking, to recall his dreams; their archaic imagery confuses him. It has now been agreed that the need to sleep is simply the need to dream: in other words, the need to store up the day's conscious experience by translating it into dream language for one's memory files. When one sleeps on a problem and wakes up with a satisfactory answer, personal genius has obviously been at work and has diagnosed the situation. Bad dreams are warnings that danger is about; the genius has pricked up his ears at some element that the rational mind had missed. The trance into which a genius falls during the creative act gives him access to the whole treasure house of personal and inherited memory. Since modern abstract painting began as an attempt to recover and record genuine dream experience, a nonfigurative painter is not necessarily the impostor that logicians assume. But neither do his paintings deserve to be described as "pure art"--art being by tradition informative--if they record personal messages that have lost their coherence even for himself. Genius will thus include the power to interpret a dream that would seem absolute nonsense if told out of context at the breakfast table.

When Kekulé von Stradonitz (1829--1896) made his most sensational chemical discovery, it came to him in comic dream form. As I wrote in the Marmosite's Miscellany (London, 1925):

The maunderings of a maniac signifying nothingI hold in respect; I hear his tale out.Thought comes often clad in the strangest clothing:So Kekulé the chemist watched the weird routOf eager atom-serpents writhing in and outAnd waltzing tail to mouth. In that absurd guiseAppeared benzine and anilin, theirdrugs and their dyes.

Plato was worried by the logical crux that if we know the solution of a problem, then there is no problem; whereas if we do not know the solution, we do (continued on page 276) Genius (continued from page 128) not know what to look for and therefore cannot expect to find it. After stating this in the Meno, Plato concluded that the solution of problems involves memory of preincarnations in which the answers have already been found. How logical and how inept! The truth seems to be that genius is capable at some primitive thought level of thinking in the fourth and fifth dimensions. In the fourth dimension, one can explore the interior of a sealed chamber without breaching its walls. In the fifth, one is no longer bound by time but can see things happening in the past or future as easily as, for instance, if seated at ease in an airplane flying faster than clock time, one can watch the setting sun slowly rise again above the sea horizon. The creative act of poetry is fifth dimensional in the sense that a poet catches at the nucleus of a poem, a single half-remembered phrase, and works at it until every line corresponds as nearly as possible with his foreknowledge of how the completed poem would be. Creative genius in dancing or music follows much the same principles.

In 1958, I visited the Weizmann Institute at Tel Aviv. Professor Sonnerschein asked me what I thought of his computer. I answered that we had not yet established any contact; it was busy with a spectroscopic job on helium rays. He assured me solemnly: "This machine can do all that the human brain is capable of doing and better!"

It came into my mind to ask: "Can it ordain cosmic coincidence?"

Professor Sonnerschein did not seem particularly taken aback by the question, but I had a suspicion that he did not quite understand what I meant. At any rate, he answered: "Not yet!"

I was asking, as a matter of fact, whether this huge, complicated and costly dingbat could think in the fifth dimension, as geniuses can, discover the answer to a problem by proleptic thought and then discover the problem itself by analeptic thought. Cosmic coincidence is a fifth-dimensional manipulation of time for making events concur against all statistical probability.

Mathematics as a field of abstract thought, rather than of Pythagorean magic, conveys so limited a sense of personal blessing and its adepts enter regions of the mind so far abstracted from common humanity that they tend to forfeit a necessary ingredient of genius; namely, love. Mathematic genius is also notoriously short lasting--it reaches a peak at the age of about 23 and then declines--and is, as a rule, colored by persistent emotional adolescence. Since advanced mathematicians are too easily enticed into the gray political underworld of nuclear physics, a remarkably high percentage of mental breakdowns among their wives is everywhere noted.

Psychopaths are often mistaken for geniuses. The most common psychopath is the confidence trickster. The prisons are full of con men; so are politics. Their power to read a victim's mind and so take advantage of his weaknesses is fortunately counterbalanced by their megalomania. Every con man or political rabble rouser tricks himself in the end. Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Hitler have been hailed as geniuses; but all were psychopaths conning themselves with their own boastful legends until they ruined their own countries and died shamefully, with no sons to succeed them. So also, perhaps, was golden-tongued Pericles, who savagely oppressed his slaves, conducted outright massacres in the Greek island of Mytilene and elsewhere, and relying on his immensely powerful fleet, challenged the Spartans, his neighbors, to war. They began raiding Athenians' territory, burning crops and huts, felling olive trees, driving away stock; and Pericles, all too logically, built the famous Long Walls from the city down to the port of Piraeus, so that Athens became a secure and easily defended fortress. But one of his ships, trading in the East, brought back rats with bubonic plague. The crowded semi-siege conditions behind those famous Long Walls fostered an epidemic that carried off a great part of the population, including (by what the tragedians would have called poetic justice) Pericles himself. Julius Caesar at least was no psychopath. He had a heart, courage, mercy, a sense of humor, Roman genius and remarkable humility: and though he fought with no holds barred when his life was threatened, he kept faith with his real friends, had the future of his country at heart and knew its weaknesses.

Genius diagnoses a situation by non-logical thought and supplies the remedy. A horse-and-buggy doctor in the good old days would identify a disease first with his nose--one sniff was usually enough as he entered the sickroom--then with his ears, then with his eyes, then with his touch. He could, as a rule, dispense with a fever chart. Few of that breed survive. Today, most general practitioners have lost the sense of smell from having spent so much of their medical training in cities where smell, taste and hearing soon degenerate. Diagnosis, for them, depends on textbooks; yet, as a rule, these say nothing about that almost imperceptible twitch of an eyelid, that slight slurring in the patient's speech, that curiously sour whiff of sweat, which informed the horse-and-buggy doctor exactly what was amiss.

The Roman view of genius as guardian of the male creative process has much to commend it. Man's strongest concentration of mental power occurs when he falls in love. The gonad glands control this impulse; but in the course of millenniums, the power of love has become enormously extended and diversified. The first awareness of genius comes, it seems, with the common mystical experience of prepuberty, in which a child is convinced that he knows everything or can do everything and keeps his illusion for some hours. Since this experience can be related to the first active awakening of his gonads, we may presume a continued relation between gonad and genius. The relation, however, tends to weaken whenever genius is defrauded: for example, by the discovery of how much easier it is to steal than to earn, to cheat than to work, to lie than to tell the truth and to do whatever one pleases rather than obey one's conscience. Yet a recollection of this mystical assurance of superhuman powers and a belief in its basic reality will, I believe, support whoever dares make that sudden leap in the dark, that escape from the tyranny of time, which fifth-dimensional genius implies.

A remarkable contemporary genius, Dr. Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian immunologist, began his investigations by a poetic opposition of the self and the nonself. How does the self recognize nonself and expel it from the body? Dr. Burnet's answer was that the self occasionally makes mistaken experiments that defraud its own genius and set chemical bodies acting against the body's component cells. This view has at last made such diseases as rheumatoid arthritis intelligible to biologists and led to a startling new concept of immunity. One can now study which cells control the self's defenses, and how they do it. The non-self is not, however, a built-in evil genius, as the Greeks would have seen it, but, as the Romans would have seen it, an invader. The principle of immunity is, roughly, that the self dispatches a cell to take stock of the nonself, find out what it is projecting, then return and advise its fellow cells exactly what chemical repellent to manufacture for spreading over these projections. They keep on at this task until they have manufactured enough for their purpose, which explains the two-to-three- or seven-day period of an illness, followed by rapid recovery.

Genius was a word loosely used by expatriated Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Twenties is Being Geniuses Together by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle--Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures, but too many of them developed defects of character--ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity--that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons à la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Winston Churchill, whom I knew off and on from 1916 until 1948, had escaped the educational routine that inhibited so many of his university-trained fellow politicians. After a bad start at school, he was admitted, through family connections, into the cavalry, where he educated himself. His was an inconsistent genius, frequently defrauded by political commitments; but his courage, humor, generosity and loyalty to his friends were beyond exception. I once met Lloyd George, Churchill's onetime colleague and national hero of the First World War: a rabble rouser with a golden voice and little personal honor, who passed for a genius during the First World War. Having plotted against his colleague Asquith, he seized power from him, kept the War going at enormous cost of life and treasure for two years longer than necessary, left his country all but bankrupt and, at Versailles, helped sow the seeds of a second, still more disastrous War.

After a brief glimpse of Einstein at Princeton in 1933, I could not doubt the early genius, which corresponded with his later humility, kindliness and sense of humor. His theory of relativity had been classical and humane, and his universe made good geometrical sense, however startling at the time. But his successors have broken through into a postclassical phase of algebraic thought so far beyond practical human apprehension that the cosmic observations now summarized by computers make no intelligible terrestrial sense. Though this obviously wholesome limit set on human thought may one day encourage a reappraisal and reform of human society, at present it has tempted advanced scientists to despise all creative human values. How many of these ratiocinative cosmonauts have defrauded their genius is shown by the shambles that they make of their private terrestrial lives and their readiness to encourage terrestrial nuclear warfare. That warfare is a natural human function need not be disputed--most young men are pugnacious--yet I agreed with T. E. Lawrence when he told me that war ceased to be human at the battle fought in August 1346 at Crécy, where the English first used artillery on a battlefield. Military genius has now come to be a contradiction in terms; all modern wars are fought at a distance with pitiless logistics, with scientific poisoning of the enemy's land and water and with a singular absence even of military talent.

Student riots all over the world seem symptomatic of an approaching change in the modern way of life, since the focus of disorder is almost always the philosophy department of a university. Such riots are a natural reaction against the growing control of education by the political machine, big business and a body of docile scientists who conduct experiments on lines laid down by their directors. The students are protesting, however blindly, in the name of genius against its antonym logic and in clear agreement with Plato's enemy the sophist Protagoras, who held that "man" (meaning, as he explained, man with an inborn sense of justice, nobility and holiness) "is the measure of all things." They are also, incidentally, protesting against wars fought against ideal communism--which, after all, is no more than a different theory from ours as to who should direct and control the flow of money--in contravention of international agreements about permissible means. Male students in these riots, now sporadic throughout the non-Communist world, are more active fighters than their girlfriends, who, as a rule, seem content merely to incite violence. Yet in Mexico, just before the recent Olympics opened, I learned that on four separate occasions, a pair of Bonnies had assisted their Clydes by the same womanly stratagem. The girls would wait for the approach of a single, unsuspecting police officer and then start ripping each other's clothes off, tearing out each other's hair and screaming abuse. When he gallantly tried to separate them, out would come daggers and slide into his lungs or stomach. Dirty work; but Jael, Delilah and Judith had set the Biblical precedent. It is, indeed, women who stand to lose most by a further strengthening of mechanically directed and computed thought, which threatens to hasten men's physical impotence--a phenomenon now reported at an increasingly premature age among steady-going married executives.

The Romans refused to credit women with an individual genius, on the grounds that, instead of engendering, they parturiated: and regarded them, instead, as lying under the divine guidance of the goddess Juno Lucina. This implied that men themselves were ruled by a male code but women by a divinity that absolved them of obedience to any code at all, except that of being true to their own bodies. And though a patrician Roman's appetite might casually involve him in affairs with women from whom he declined to breed children, his social conscience opposed a corresponding instinct in his female relatives. Roman women at first accepted the practical value of this ban on their sleeping with men who lacked the generous tutelary power of patrician genius; but by Catullus' time, female morals had noticeably relaxed. The goddess Juno Lucina, as he reminds us, was not only the wife of the Almighty Jupiter and the protectress of women in childbirth; she was also the powerful, enchanting, lecherous, perpetually virgin moon goddess--huntress, prophetess and healer.

Western high society still deprecates mésalliances; but wherever acceptable alliances are judged not merely by a man's wealth, influence and talents but by his integrity, women too often create trouble by falling in love with outsiders whom their fellow men recognize as cads or crooks. The male proverb "No woman is wise below the girdle" is, of course, a libelous exaggeration; but few married women like to be cheated of their traditional satisfaction in the marriage bed--which the Romans called "the genial couch." Moreover, in choosing their lovers, few women of spirit realize that a man who has forfeited his sense of honor by some disgraceful act can never be redeemed by even a perfect woman's love. That women themselves are infinitely redeemable makes it hard for them to realize that what the Romans called "a lost man" (meaning one who had assassinated his genius) is like a drinking glass, which, however neatly repaired after breakage, will never again ring clear when tapped with the fingernail. I wrote once about a womanfriend of mine:

She is no liar, yet she will wash awayHoney from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,And, dressed at dawn in clean white roses will say,Trusting the ignorant world to understand:"Such things no longer are; this is today."

That was not written in anger: I was merely echoing the text of Proverbs 30:20.

Under normal semicivilized unmechanized conditions, a man's physical metabolism used to change so little from the age of about 15 to 80 that his genius was held to remain with him until he became incapable of generation and took to the chimney corner. Thus, in Deuteronomy 34:7. Moses was extolled as having kept his virility and eyesight until he died on Mount Pisgah at the age of 120. By contrast, not only does a woman go through a dramatic change both at puberty and in middle age, after reaching her menopause--Sarah, who gave birth to Isaac at the age of 90, was a remarkable exception!--but during each pregnancy, the presence of her unborn child, which has different genes from her own, will noticeably affect her character. However, even throughout her nubile period, any woman unspoiled by education is capable of using her mind in the timeless, nonchalant way characteristic of genius: which will be to make extraordinarily complicated problems seem as simple as counting on one's fingers--by the genial manipulation of time. And women are granted the mystical prepuberty experience of "knowing everything" as often as boys; I have even known one who had it under an anesthetic during the birth of her first daughter.

Once I wrote of a woman genius:

If strange things happen where she isSo that men say that graves openAnd the dead walk, or that futurityBecomes a womb and the unborn are shed,Such portents are not to be wondered at,Being tourbillions in Time madeBy the strong pulling of her bladed mindThrough that ever-reluctant element.

In real love, as opposed to confused sexual groping, or a simple decision to marry and settle down, genius is always present, and manifests itself with its usual suprasensory bending of time into a manageable ring. Only a few advanced mathematicians have so far become aware of this phenomenon, of which, being professionally free of the tender passion, they claim no personal experience.