Real Genius
The word genius is etymologically derived from "a guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation."
In this recent TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert explores the notion that rather than a person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.
Gilbert discusses the origins of "genius", considering ancient Greek daemons, or the divine, attendant spirits from distant, unknowable sources that influence creativity. In ancient Rome, dismebodied creative spirits were called a genius, believed to live in the walls of an artist's studio.
She encourages the idea that creativity can be a "peculiar, wondrous, bizzare collaboration" between a person and a "strange, external thing."
Image: "Einstein Image Painted on Hazard Marker" by the bridge on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
Image: "Genius of Water" by jstealth03 on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
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- 2-23-09
- Morgan Maher's blog
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Frantic for the Muse
I feel that any act of creativity is an offering on Earth's altar...the marriage of Eros and Psyche...
"...the overflowing circularity of time, the dance of being, the affirmation of an eternal moment. Poetry becomes a means of attainment, the reconciliation of opposites, a way of participating in an abundant universe. It becomes a form of creative love that annuls the temporal world. Here ''all is transformed, all is sacred, / every room is the center of the world, / it's still the first night, and the first day, / the world is born when two people kiss.''
In his splendid book on love and eroticism, ''The Double Flame,'' Paz explicitly links the erotic act and the poetic act through the agency of imagination. ''Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor,'' he writes. ''The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with.'' I am moved by Paz's suggestion that love, like poetry, ''is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.'
Edward Hirsch
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/bookend/bookend.html
"Wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking". Antonio Machado
Pasito a pasito,Todo quiere ser querido.