GENIUS ISN'T A GOOD GUESS

GENIUS ISN’T A GOOD GUESS

 

Genius isn’t a good guess that thinks it knows what it’s talking about. It’s not an eagle that can be lead around by a jackass like an eagle on a leash. It’s not the happy ending of a lot of puzzled fossils. It never answers itself the same way twice. It hasn’t got doors and windows and stairs and a threshold with a welcome doormat. It isn’t a house like that. And even the great thieves of fire don’t know how to get in. Its keys and locks are mercury and it’s founded on quicksand from Mars. It doesn’t possess and it isn’t captivated by anyone. It’s not the hot point of a spear of insight flintknapped from the cold stone of the moon. And it’s not the igneous bend in the argument that pours a luminous river of gold out of the dark ore of the amusing philosophers who think they need to defend it like a windmill. It isn’t the will. It isn’t the idea. It isn’t the world as we know it. Its eyes aren’t the muses of seeing nor its ears the sirens of hearing. There’s a breeze of dark matter blowing through space but you can’t raise a sail to catch it. And it may weave the light into the cosmic web of a dreamcatcher but there’s no jewel of a spider to bleed your butterflies like lovenotes to a hadron collider. It’s not the God particle that everyone’s looking for or the unified field theory that explains the light to the stars as if you had to hold a candle up to a candleflame to see what’s burning. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. You can’t reserve it like a table in the corner of a private conversation. Like water it goes where it wants as if its own nature were its only direction. And you can lie about it all you want but it doesn’t care if your constellations are true or not. Or if you’re just flying kites with long lifelines that end in the palm of your hand. It’s not an asylum for fugitives who’ve got one foot in the boat and the other on land. It doesn’t mean anything and there’s nothing it’s trying to understand. You can call it freedom. You can call it enlightenment, liberation, moksa, kensho, satori, the abyss, the void, the blaze or a black lightning bolt from the brainpan of the Sahara that struck the tree of knowledge like the dawning revelation of miles and miles of treeless grassland. But however you try to squeeze a sphinx out of a shapeshifter you’re still just scrawling pictures in the sand the wind will efface like a human with the head of a dandelion. Because genius has no likeness anywhere in the universe. No simulacrum, mithal, or metaphor you can point to like a myth in the sky and say that’s where the light comes from. You can squander the moon in a wishing well but the black mirror still isn’t urgent to be known by your reflection. A donkey looks into the well and the well looks back. It doesn’t echo with answers like a voice with a change of heart and a course correction. It doesn’t show up like a used compass at a quest for perfection. The moment you take it for a guide it leads you astray. You can’t run from it or hide your face in your hands like the dark side of the moon because the light’s too strong. It can rise up like a gust in a backalley and blow stars in your face that can blind you for years and then it can flow the way of water like a luminous path out of the labryinth of your disillusioned tears. There’s not enough content to it to maintain a teacher but all teachings are mere whispers among the shadows of it. Silence within silence like the end of the play within the play, the dream within the dream. But when the buddhas have nothing to say. It’s a good time to listen.

 

PATRICK WHITE