thanks charyl.leverette. she was able to start a dialog on ‘genius and creative’ and the ‘creative genius’ in poetry circle. this is good. we have to ask ourselves how we know the concepts and humiliate ourselves in thinking how we’ve had to defend ourselves from linears by calling ourselves ‘genius’.
in my world, ‘creative’ and ‘genius’ are icons. icons are a button pushed to go to another level or another place. ‘level’ is a place, but not all places exist on another level from the discourse you’re pythoning.
“creative” is to do something unexpected with material no one values beyond its material worth. here, ‘creative’ and ‘genius’ are the same concept. ‘you’re a genius!’… ‘you’re very creative!’. context.
moving over to the people talking in the corner, understanding the ‘material’ itself is a thing in itself. you step into the shoes of the canvas or the curtain. you become the soul of the material. that’s special. that’s synesthetic… that’s tasting the texture and hearing the color. which means that enough sense data has been returned from the object that you can make a story of it. you not only know the quilt is laying on the old bed, you feel the wood of the bed reacting to the quilt’s wool and imagine the old woman remembering. the old woman who’s always at the back of your mind and who isn’t your mother… who’s the avatar of dissolution. you make an intimacy with an event in the world, and you can use that intimacy to tell an unusual and effective story. that’s the intuitive of ‘genius’.
but, you’ve got to present, and how that’s done is also a creative. images aside, suppose you want to tell a joke but you’re not sure of the audience… your experience would tell you to not show off, to slow down the delivery and make each word and gesture count as a sense experience in itself. like writing a poem, no? you create the listeners into an ordered experience for you as you speak. you’re intuitive, and you know that if the joke isn’t also discovered by you as you say it, that it’s not a working joke. children’s creativity is like this — they know how to act like grownups when it counts. they can’t invent the idea of making words musical, but they can invent a clever song.
for genius, nothing is working. you accept the subjective because the intuition is your soul and energy — it’s what you have to form the world as livable. you have a good memory — all geniuses have some kind of memory that stores experience and can be referenced when needed — when there’s a creative blank in creative space that needs to be patched with a concept and sound and image. you have a good memory, and you’ve studied hard, you’ve killed yourself trying to understand what’s supposed to be good and what’s obviously only a successful fad and called ‘art’ or ‘science’. you’ve absorbed both fad and brilliant into the concept of what is created. and, it’s not enough. it’s not you. and, one day you just can’t try to be like ‘them’ anymore. you turn your back on whoever loves and trusts you as this maker of things in their way, and you make something which is so off the wall and yet so perfectly beautiful to you that you feel like you’ve made nature itself. of that, from that, you’ve now got a ‘style’. genius is ‘style’, the ability to be creative over a range of ideas and materials — turning the world into a musicality of connected physical melodies.
what are your thoughts?
poetryandpoet 