The Genius In the Room
Inspiration Is a Fickle Thing.
Smell
Are You a Genius Or Do You Have a Genius?
The lightbulb of inspiration is something all creative people desire. However it's not quite like turning on a lamp. No matter how many times you may flick the switch there's guarantee the light will come on. Where then, does inspiration come from? No one is really sure, but most people seem to agree that it comes from outside one self. In fact in the Western world creativity is often linked with something supernatural or otherworldly. This connotation can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece where to receive inspiration the ancient Greeks invoked the Muses, daughters of Zeus and goddesses of the arts. The Romans, however, preferred the idea of geniuses.
The idea of the genius in the room refers to the fact that sometimes although every preparation is performed and the person desiring to be creative is skilled enough to realize their vision, the creative spark doesn’t light. Many creative people speak of their ideas coming from outside of themselves be it from a muse, a deity, or from the universe - this is what the Romans called the genius. This genius visits creative people and from time to time he whispers something truly inspiring to them.
Work can be created without the genius, but these are termed feats of creative skill. Such works can be quite nice, but they lack the shimmer of an idea that was whispered by the genius into the corners of our minds. These ideas are the heights of creative genius.
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When we talk about a genius we usually mean someone with incredible mental ability. However, a genius used to be something you had not something you were.
The word genius dates back to ancient Rome. The Romans would refer to the presence of a djinn or a daemon in the room that would whisper the inspiration an artist, writer, or philosopher needed. Socrates described this phenomenon as a voice “murmuring in his ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic” that “resounded in [him] making it impossible for [him] to hear anything else”. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the daemon - for which the latin word was genius - was a spirit somewhere in between the gods and humans and was thought to accompany each person through life as a protector. This genius was responsible for one’s morals and eventually one’s character as well. Over the centuries, that meaning was extended to cover ability, and eventually genius referred particularly to "very great intelligence" and "people of great intelligence." Thus, the transition was made between a genius watching and guiding someone and someone being a genius.
When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, obey.
-Rudyard Kipling
“The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft
So Now What, Genius?
In many ways the idea of a genius providing inspiration took the pressure off of the creator to always make something spectacular. The unpressured individual is free to skillfully create as he or she pleases until the genius gives them the seed to bring everything they have created together or inspire him or her in an entirely new direction. However, modern school of thought has shifted from the presence of a genius to the individual being a genius. This put significantly more pressure on the artist as it presents the idea of being solely responsible for the creation of an idea or the failure of an idea.
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Inspired by this idea of the unpressured artist, I delved into the mysterious world of creativity to see if there were a way to link this lack of pressure to more creative ideas touched by genius. In other words, can we invite a genius in and if we can how do we do it?
Still Curious?
For more thoughts on the Genius in the Room and how that relates to a healthier artist, I highly recommend the TEDTalk given by Elizabeth Gilbert's that inspired my research entitled: "Your Elusive Creative Genius".