Lazily Considering Genius

The racket described in the book [Foucault's Pendulum] conformed to details provided to me by friends in publishing – the types themselves anyone associated with academia is familiar with. Boundless intellectual energy combined with a complete lack of genius.

This passage is pulled from The DaVinci Clods, an essay by Sterling Newberry that compares The DaVinci Code with Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The essay is thoughtful and I am doing Newberry a complete disservice by pulling these sentences out of context, but statements like this — and I see them from time to time — always stop me cold —

because, as with any dividing of sheep from goats, I always figure I’m going to wind up with the goats. And anyway goats are pretty neat and enterprising creatures with minds of their own while sheep are mindless and helpless without a shepherd. And some one must have considered that The Good Shepherd image is really sort of creepy because, when you think about it, the shepherd is the biggest, most successful predator of them all.

But I digress.

In a division between genius and boundless intellectual energy without genius, I figure I do well to wind up in the latter category. And I wonder what it is we energetic non-geniuses should do with ourselves, assuming, as I suppose the essay does, that we cannot somehow transform ourselves into geniuses. Perhaps run energetically off cliffs like lemmings? Give up all intellectual pursuits to dig ditches? Who knows. In a world full of geniuses, the ditch digger might be king. Worked out pretty well for my brother.

In about 1950, my brother’s eighth grade year, he had to make a transition from the one-room Harris School (where everybody in my family but me got their early education) to a graded school at the county seat. The change did not go well. You can imagine what kind of scorn these few country kids encountered from the townies. My brother failed eighth grade and the teacher made a perpetual enemy by telling him he’d never be anything but a ditch digger.

If you are the perceptive readers I think you are, you know the outcome of this story and can probably guess which member of my family is now a millionaire. (Hint: it’s not the poet.)

And with my boundless intellectual energy I have wandered far away from the point, which is (I think) that I am uncomfortable with elitism — though it may be that it’s been a hard summer and I don’t have a lot on my mind right now. Or maybe it’s just about digression.

Anyhoo, I was amused yesterday, sitting in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room with my copy of Best American Poetry 2005 (speaking of elitism), to run across this passage in a from a poem by Lyn Hejinian:

…Meanwhile we are slowly to lay out our differences.
Language writing rejects the notion of genius
and the New York School embraces it, I am sure,
it is somewhere here in the room, D said so, but so are paper breads
and notebook cheeses.

— from The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003)

Note: In Best American Poetry 2005, Hejinian says this book-length poem, The Fatalist, was “derived entirely from all the letters and e-messages (as well as a few blurbs and introductions to poetry readings) that I wrote over the course of one year.” It is certainly a poem that rejects narrative, as perhaps I have myself this morning. I do however want to quote one more little passage that comes just before the one above. This one is for Georgia:

…I like the tether
and send a message to a fugitive more and more
taken by the nightingale’s information which is all about
the desperately ungraspable vastness of meaning
everywhere and the fact that as flesh and blood
mortals we are doomed always to lose meaning
for lack of adverbs.