A reader says she considers Matt an artistic genius and wonders whether Matt believes in the idea that painters can be geniuses, just as physicists such as Einstein and Hawking can.
Matt responds:
A genius in one culture might be a drooling idiot in another. To designate someone a genius is to give them a title they may or may not be able to live up to. I hate titles with a passion, because they instantly classify people along some set of principles. It’s like the ABC’s. A must always come first, then B, then C. In arithmetic we have 1, 2, and 3, and so on... We’re constantly looking for easy answers to very complex questions. I’ve come to the conclusion that finding simple answers in a very complex and chaotic universe is like looking for a needle in a haystack. To me, it’s a shortcut to understanding, and it leads to all the common stereotypes: the beautiful people, the ugly people, stupid people, geniuses, enlightened sages meditating on the sound of one hand clapping...
We’re always talking about the great explorers of the world: the Columbuses, the Neil Armstrongs who set foot on the moon... But to me, the greatest explorers, the greatest, most enlightened geniuses are people who are constantly probing within themselves to find their higher meaning in their own lives. There are probably millions or billions of them in the world that are undiscovered.
Civilization is not a great, flashing light that descends upon the world like tongues of fire on each of our heads, but a slowly creeping caterpillar that turns into a butterfly and adds new meaning to its surroundings: from a crawling, supposedly mindless grub, to a multi-colored manifestation of the metamorphosis of the universe. Can we become butterflies? As I see it, that’s one of the great tasks we have within ourselves. Can we stop crawling and start walking, running, flying? And what will we call that manifestation? That’s the next discovery. What do we call that complete change of our identity from one struggling human being to an enlightened genius, not on a one-person level, but on the level of millions and millions of people? Is it possible to have the whole human race in that state of being, where we’re not all doing the same thing, but we know we’re growing and learning and being together?
I think Gandhi was a genius. There are composers who are next to heavenly. There are paintings that are so strong, they move something inside me that is of the spirit and not of the flesh. I was just watching a documentary about Groucho Marx’s life. He was a great commentator on the pomposity of the human being, how to bring everybody down to reality. I would call that a kind of genius. Recently I saw a long presentation about Pope John Paul II, and it talked about how physically he went from being a very fit, strong person to an almost immobile person, until finally he couldn’t speak—but he was still out there teaching in different ways. So as a teacher, he was a kind of genius. I have a little box in my head that very sparingly I open and throw in a genius, and those are some of them. They open my mind to possibilities by their example. If someone can do that, then what can I do? If Gandhi can take off his bowler hat and suit and put on a white loincloth and walk barefoot through the world with millions following him—what a transformation! And what a legacy to lead!
On the other hand, I’m sure that in many communities, the hiphop stars are geniuses of their own type of music. There are geniuses of the computer, which I don’t even know how to turn on. So as the old saying goes, it’s in the eye of the beholder. To each his own. Who is genius? I really don’t know, and as Clark Gable once said, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Matt