You Can Find Genius Anywhere

I wrote about the total eclipse and how an influential voice is a similar alignment of the right elements. I posted about Manhattan and my realization that periods of enlightenment are always temporary. I wrote about hashtags too and how the conversations they corral must start small before trending far and wide.

The genius of an author or an age or a viral idea is a moment. Each is the arrival of a new mixture that one can plot on a map and a timeline. If an idea arrives too early or too late in history, or among the wrong people or culture, the audience will either not recognize the message or not care.

Which makes me think of both the Galapagos and rap music. Charles Darwin’s finches needed the isolation of the individual Galapagos Islands to mutate and proliferate just like hip-hop needed ideas and communities to develop in the Bronx before they caught on nationally and then internationally.

Mutation and evolution happen in isolation, at the biological and cultural levels. Darwin arrived on the islands at the right moment for his discovery. Hip-hop had its right timing too. Turntable and sampling technologies arrived in New York City during the economic crises of the 1970s.

Sometimes, cultural mutation happens within an individual. The genius of Darwin, his seclusion and the aligning of all his thoughts and ideas, was a single Galapagos too.

Now the Web has turned all of us into plotted points on a graph. Global positioning, a Facebook status, a laptop IP address, the pingback of a WordPress post—the mass of our personal metadata—defines and tracks each of us in time, space, and thought. Where and when we are is who and what we are. As often as the hashmark (#) categorizes our writing, the at symbol (@) precedes our name.

I’m @prof_kalm, one of several avatars and locations.

When we ask if we have a voice or if we have influence, we seek to be at the right place at the right hour. This made me think of the roots of the word “genius,” which have an interesting relationship with place too.

Genius is the singular Latin for genii. Genii were household ghosts or fairy godparents. (Genies are the Anglicized form of the Arabic jinn.) Gens were the guardian angels of the Roman family—gentile meaning tribe or clan—and genius loci were the same supernatural figures, but for locations.

In the golden age of Rome, genius was a common guiding spirit of an individual, group, or place.

I like this interpretation of the word and our world. Genius is local. As much as it exists in the significant moment when Darwin landed among his finches, we also might find it when the right two people meet or a small group rises to a challenge or you have the best day of your life.

Everyone or every @ has the potential to be the right set of circumstances in the right scattering of plotted points. It doesn’t take away from the magic or miracle of genius, but it removes some of its exclusivity and allocates it more democratically.

It’s an understanding too that you can’t plan for something as elusive as creative epiphany. You can only follow your unique curiosity, try deliberate mistakes and unexpected connections, and keep an eye out for your moments of alignment in the ever-turning universe.