III.
Alfred Hitchcock had his well-coiffed blondes, Orson Welles
had his tragic figures of wasted brilliance, Howard Hawks had his quick-witted
innuendo-laden battle of the sexes, John Ford had his masculinity code, Kurosawa
had his samurai code, Ozu had his families, Bergman had his alienation, Oliver
Stone has the Sixties, Stanley Kubrick had his machines, Fellini had his
carnivals, Jean Renoir had his theater productions, Scorsese has his tragic violence,
Tarantino has his comic violence, Walt Disney had his orphaned princesses who
grew up to find a prince, Spielberg has his boys and their toys, Reubens had
his fat ladies and so did Auguste Renoir, Cezanne had his fruit, Monet had his
gardens, Georgia O’Keefe had her flowers, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec had their
whores, Rembrandt had his tradesmen, Picasso had his weird faces and so did
Modigliani, Turner had his sea, El Greco had his elongated bodies, Velazquez
had his little girls, Kandinsky had his shapes, Mondrian had his primary
colors, Caravaggio had his darkness, Jackson Pollack had his squiggly lines,
Van Gogh had his enhanced colors, Goya had his grotesques, Michelangelo had his
writhing bodies, Verdi had his fathers and daughters, Wagner had his women who
die to redeem their haunted men, Berlioz had his romantic literature, Schubert
had his melodies dedicated to the women whom he loved in secret, Britten had his operas dedicated to the underage boys whom he
loved too openly, Bruckner had his Beethoven’s Ninth, Schumann had his dotted
rhythms, Bach had his counterpoint, Brahms had his classical forms, Bartok had
his folk music, Mahler had the sounds he remembered from his provincial
childhood, Rachmaninov had the Dies Irae theme, Charles Ives had his American
Hymns, Schoenberg had his musical theories to prove, Stravinsky had music
history, Prokofiev had his motor rhythms, Shostakovich had his ambiguously
ironic expressions, Dostoevsky had his tortured souls prime to express their
deepest anguish to anonymous strangers, Balzac had his money mad social climbers,
Shakespeare had his great men undone by a single bad idea, Moliere had his exposures
of hypocrisy, Ibsen had his idealists kept down by society, Sondheim has his
middle-aged upper-middle-class figures beset by ennui, Proust had his memories,
Frost had his New England landscapes, Willa Cather had her prairie hardships, Voltaire
had his contempt for belief, Montaigne had himself, Emily Dickinson had her
loneliness, Whitman had the mythical properties of America, Rabelais had his
vulgarity, Dickens had his street urchins who survived to be taken in by kindly
old rich men, James Joyce had his Dublin, Kafka had his persecuted little man,
Bob Dylan has his old American folk music, Miles Davis had the contemporary
American music of the moment, Randy Newman has the entirety of world history, Bruce Springsteen has his
blue collar working class, Neal Young has his pathetic figures, Leonard Cohen
has his spiritual seeking, Lennon had his psychedelic experiences, McCartney
has his mid-century music halls, Johnny Cash had his machismo, Lieber and
Stoller had their badly behaved teenagers, Brian Wilson has the California sun, Smokey Robinson has unrequited love, Van Morrison has requited love, Chuck Berry has/had upending the expectations of older adults, and James Brown had the physical sensations of his body.
You may like or hate the work of many of these figures – I certainly
have my preferences – but what can’t be denied is that each of these creators
has a specific obsession, an obsession which they sought to capture in work
after work – arriving ever closer to some ivory ideal in their head which never
leaves them be; and as their audience, you either respond positively to their particular
obsession or you respond negatively. I don’t know if possession of a single
great subject makes a creator a candidate for the ‘genius’ label, but what I do
know is that talent does not have a single subject. Talent is flexible. Talent is
talent because it can master things so easily, and talented people can master their
subjects because there is so little mental clutter to get in their way. And if
a particularly talented person is able to master a single subject, there are
usually a dozen more that are within their grasp. But genius is not hard-wired
to have easy fluency. A genius’s fluency is not easy, it’s superhuman, and
usually confined to a single subject. But whatever extremity of ability the genius
possesses within his scope, his brain usually compensates by a severe deficiency
of ability in a different area. All the frustration of that mental clutter in
every other part of the brain is channeled into developing that one part of the
brain which operates with pristine divinity to its maximum potential. In this
way, artistic creators are no different from scientific ones. All creation is a
process of trial and error, involving endless experimentation until the right
formula finally emerges. To immerse oneself in that endlessly boring process requires
a bottomless capacity for obsession, fascination, and monomania.
It’s often been observed, perhaps to the point of cliché,
that the line between genius and madness is invisible enough to be
unrecognizable. In recent years, it’s been more common to poo-pooh such a
statement. We see that the successful writer, composer, and painter of today lives
a far more ordinary life than his predecessors; contenting himself with regular
work hours, a full academic course load at the college or high school where she teaches, and marketing
themselves with the same savvy that any realtor would have. A person attracted to older arts like literary
fiction, classical music, painting and sculpting, is a different person today
than ever before in world history – more easygoing, more flexible, and duller.
Meanwhile, the great flights of mania and ego among today’s artistic world are
usually to be found on movie and TV lots, in restaurant kitchens, and in the hotel
rooms of touring bands. Without the danger that the lid will fall of the id,
what is there about artistic creation which compels people’s attention? The
difference between the arts in 1913 to the arts in 2013 is as gapingly large as
at any hundred year point in human history, but the rules for how art is made
which changes the course of history is still the same. And it’s usually made by
the same breed of brilliant lunatic as ever before.
I’ve met enough brilliant people in my life to realize that
they are, for the most part, not the best adjusted people. I’ve also met enough
lunatics to realize that all which seems to separate them from the neuroses of
brilliant people is pure luck. I’ve known brilliant people in my thirty-plus
years who yielded to lunacy, yet seemed too little different from before; and I’ve
known lunatics whom I never thought could do much with their lives who then
displayed a heretofore unnoticed, yet unmistakable, capacity for brilliance. From
what I can tell, the only separation between true brilliance and true madness
is the luck which enables some crazy people to organize their craziness in such
a way that they see real things which no one else sees. A genius and a madman
perceive things which no one else does, but the genius has the good luck of his
perceptions being correct.
It’s entirely possible that great creations can be made by
men and women who work from 9 to 5, and then return home to a loving family with
no real problems. But it doesn’t seem likely that such a person would trade the
stability of a predictable life for the endless pains and sacrifices which must
be made for the possibility of creating something greater.
No comments:
Post a Comment