The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
~ Hunter S. Thompson
A friend of mine sent me this link, and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it. I get a real kick out of reading biographies about people we now see as artistic geniuses because they deflate a rather shallow myth, genius as the divine blessing, and replace it with a much more nuanced myth, genius as both gift and curse, at war with everything including itself, in constant doubt. When someone gets on a real roll, of course, he has to play it up. “I was just sitting there one day, and it clicked! It just clicked, man! And I knew what I had to do!” I call bullshit. Are there those moments? Of course. But they’ll come and go many times in everyone’s life. If we knew how exactly a genius capitalizes on these moments, or if he could somehow explain it, we’d all be astounding each other. But those astonishments are rare. Because genius likes to destroy itself and doubt itself, and at times, it’s just plain lazy. This example… it’s completely unpolished. There’s stumbling over words, beat switch-overs that don’t quite match up most of the time, and there’s some slightly dry subject matter. But I listened to the whole rambling mess, and there were moments where… (more…)