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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE POINT IS

THE POINT IS

 

The point is not to find yourself through your art or anything but to lose yourself so completely in whatever you’re doing you forget who it was you were looking for and what you hoped to achieve. That way the whole universe collaborates in its own becoming in every mystically specific moment of you and nothing’s left out. Yours is the secret name of God written on six million leaves and you’re the wonder of whose work this is. And who can assess the number of stars it takes to make one eye that can turn around and see them? Just don’t underestimate the creative power of extinction. Or forget that silence is the ultimate theme of the music that it gives birth to. And stop treating your questions as if they were a long chromosomatic line of impoverished relatives trying to save up enough to buy their way into one blue-blooded aristocrat of an answer that quickly forgets where it came from. Separation is evil. Severance and self-containment are the eyelids of death. You should take hold of yourself if ever as if you were cupping water in your hands you’re about to return to the river.  What did the Sufi say? Be melting snow and wash yourself clean of yourself. That’s the way to get back to the root of things. Life blooms from below. If there’s a painter left at the end of the painting to say I did this, or a poet who’s still a poet by the time he’s finished writing, or a lover who still knocks on his beloved’s door from the outside, burn them at the stake of their own delusion for not being heretical enough to be consumed. Extinction isn’t the end of things anymore than mammals are the end of dinosaurs. Or God leaves off where the devil begins. But you haven’t emerged here alone in this vast space to seek the eventual forgiveness of this long night that marrows your golden bones with dark matter. You’re not the skull-bound period at the end of a long spine of a sentence that’s learned to walk upright. Pour the elixirs and snakepits out of the grails of being at your feet like stale wine and the emptiness is charged with becoming again. Lighting it up and blowing it out; it goes into action again. Ask any candle. Enlightenment isn’t a long river that anticipates the sea. The wave breaks where it begins. And its greatest delight is in being the no one it always was. With no one watching in the shadows of insight. Consider how nothing amplifies. Put zero beside one and a feather becomes a wing that’s ten times bigger. That’s how you start a universe from scratch. That’s how you take to the sky. Throw yourself like a lot of nothing into the mix and there are stars strewn everywhere across space like a nervous breakdown trying to get a grip on things like starfish and galaxies. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Water doesn’t drown in water and fire doesn’t burn in its own flames. And when you get right down to it nothing isn’t the exhaustion of being that’s run out of thresholds to cross. It’s the original homelessness that set us on this path to everywhere like a direction that couldn’t leave anything out. So bury your name in the night and forget who you are in your solitude and let the torch of your blood flame out like the setting sun. And strange stars will appear to tell stories around their fires about whose house they think you were born in. And when no one can answer for certain. They’ll pull back their curtains of light and gape at each other like wide-eyed windows staring out into empty space as if it were your face alone that they looked through.

 

PATRICK WHITE