Genius. It’s what moves artists, inspires thinkers, drives inventors, feeds the ones that shift the world. There are people who are good at what they do — skilled, adept, well-studied, even talented — and then there is genius.
Genius is the speaker who can enthrall the minds and hearts and ears of thousands. Genius is the artist who creates sculptures and novels and tall buildings out of his hands. Genius is the man who invents something the world had never conceived of before.
Genius is a person made of magnetism, of gravity — someone that has an essence that draws others towards it, like the moon pulls the tides. It’s something inexplicable, innate, undeniable.
Some people have it. Can you go out in search of it, find it, adopt it for your own? Draw it into your blood so you breathe it out onto the stone, on the sheet, into the air in the words you speak and the ideas you create? Or is it something innate — you’re either born with it, or you won’t ever have it?
Genius — being in touch with the universe, in tune with it. You’re resonating to its vibrations.
You go somewhere deep. You get lost in it, sometimes. It moves you until you can’t breathe right, until you’re panting with the need to express it, express it. You hit a vein in the great flows of the universe and whatever force it is that moves the tides and the currents of culture and history and the wind in a storm and the patterns of the growth of the universe, it wells up inside of you, and you desperately, desperately, desperately need to get it out. You need to create.
The universe is expanding and the sun rises every day and humans are moved by passion — have been moved since before they invented time — and there’s this force we call genius, and some people have it, and sometimes we don’t know it when we see it. We say, it’s either crazy or it’s genius.
Some people don’t know they have it, but they do. You can see it pulsing in the way they move.
You can’t explain it with science. To explain it with science is to render it dead, to kill the gift that it is. It is the place that science comes from — it’s beyond science. It belongs in the same category of things as the idea of God and miracles, except that it offers tangible proof of its own existence. It likes to be known.
You have genius and you become a pinnacle from which a work that transcends the world it comes from is born.
We all crave genius. We gravitate towards it. We idolize it, and sometimes we tear it down — in an act of ugly, blind jealousy, the kind that consumes you, because we want it and we can’t have it, we smother the thing that does, beat it to a pulp until it’s bloody and smashed, just meat — the same thing we’re all made of. In our petty, blind, helpless rage, we think we’ve won; don’t realize that this is something we don’t have to win, the crushing of genius.
Genius — an expression of whatever you believe in. The universe, or inspiration, or God. It’s an expression of something deep.
We live in a world created by humans, and it shifts when humans move it. It’s the geniuses that inspire these shifts.
Genius — we’re hungry for it. Our thirst for it makes us raw, and we bleed.