But let’s not forget the many female trailblazers …
By The Landlord
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein
“To see things in the seed, that is genius.” – Lao Tzu
“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.” – E. B. White
“I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” – William Blake
“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift
“Genius is an African who dreams up snow.” – Vladimir Nabokov
“Genius is patience.” – Isaac Newton
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.” – Oscar Wilde
“I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.” – Igor Stravinsky
“One science only will one genius fit;
So vast is art, so narrow human wit.” – Alexander Pope
“What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Talent talks; genius does.” – Theodore Roethke
“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” – Woody Guthrie
“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller
“This man has talent, that man genius
And here's the strange and cruel difference:
Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,
Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.” ― William Henry Davies
“People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.” – Stephen Hawking
“[Andy Warhol] is the only genius with an IQ of 60.” – Gore Vidal
“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” – Lewis Carroll
We mostly all recognise talent when we see or hear it, and are even likely have some unique of gift of our own, but very few us really manage to find, untap, or use it to the full. Perhaps then it’s no coincidence that an anagram of the word talent is latent. But this week it’s time to again stretch test out that much practised Song Bar ability to lyrically pinpoint and synthesise songs on this theme. It could be about any kind of talents, mild or extreme, steady or extraordinary, when referenced centrally or significantly in song, related to a famous individuals or in more general terms.
We can’t all have the sublime mathematical ability to think in pure, consecutive abstract sequences, like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, to see the world in new visual forms like Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí or Pablo Picasso, to instantly hear and recall musical notes and reinvent new forms like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludvig Van Beethoven or Igor Stravinsky, to have instinctive spatial awareness, tactical guile and sublime hand/eye/foot coordination like George Best, Lionel Messi, or indeed Ronnie O’Sullivan, or think so out of the box to design and create world-changing inventions, like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Ada Lovelace or Marie Curie. But then again we don’t all suffer from chronic mental health issues, alcoholism, phobia of all germs, disastrous obsessional behaviour, or one hopes, tragically die in poverty.
“A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself,” reckons Samuel Johnson. But often others come into the picture and help that tragic process, as per Swift’s remark on a confederacy of dunces.
Brilliantly talented people can sometimes be very odd indeed. The groundbreaking palaeontologist and theologian William Buckland (1784-1856) kept hundreds of animal specimens in his house, on many of which he liked to dine (and force upon astonished guests), including mole, bluebottle, panther, crocodile and mouse. Buckland was so voracious, when shown the heart of a French king (believed to be that of Louis XIV) preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket, he simply could not hold back his curiosity, and to the astonishment of all present, gobbled the precious relic straight up. Whoa! Have a heart, man!
As the saying goes, men, and women of great talents, at times have little balance.
But for a balance of perspectives and further inspiration, on top of those who have already spoken, there’s an army of talented people here to add more to this subject.
Many people in in the genius category are often misunderstood, because they are ahead of the curve. And Ralph Waldo Emerson is first to pipe up on this, asking: “Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
James Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann compares his subject with the another great innovator, William Blake and the perception of madness. “Joyce acquits Blake peremptorily of the charges of insanity and vague mysticism: For the first, 'To say that a great genius is mad, is no better than to say he is a rheumatic or diabetic.' For the second, he was a mystic only insofar as he could be one and remain an artist; his mysticism was no swooning ecstasy like that of St. John of the Cross, but a western mysticism filled with an 'innate sense of form and the coordinating power of the intellect.”
Beethoven, who also challenged those around him, is at our corner piano, and while his hearing is gone, he is still able to explain some of the source of his own visions and frustrations. “The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.”
Wolfgang and Ludwig
One who flew close the sun is Marilyn Monroe, and has more to add. Sublimely talented, but because of her looks and the sheer pressures of fame and culture around her, became also deeply troubled. “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring!” she declares. Here also is another pearl from her: “A career is born in public - talent in privacy.”
And as Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Genius lasts longer than beauty.”
But where does talent come from? “Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility,” reckons the actor Alan Rickman.
In childhood many of us have a shoal of abilities swimming around within us, but the trick is to find them. “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm,” adds Aldous Huxley.
“Man is a genius when he is dreaming,” adds the pioneering film director Akira Kurosawa. But ow do we capture our dreams and the fertile imagination of a young mind? Perhaps it is by knowing our oeuvre early on and acting on it.
In his Essays, George Orwell recalls a conversation about the unknown and untapped. “‘I knew I was a genius,’ somebody once said to me, ‘long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.’”
Undisputed genius Albert Einstein is a friendly regular in our Bar, and sums up the difficulty of your direction perfectly: “We're all a genius, but If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
This misdirection and lack of opportunity is also summarised by Hilary Clinton, declaring, hitting nail squarely on the head, that: “Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.” But let’s enjoy more of those who did break through despite all the barriers in their way:
But what is the difference between talent and genius? The latter term is regularly and inaccurately overused.
“Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien,” reckons Edward Dahlberg. And perhaps that’s why the film executive Samuel Goldwyn, who no doubt dealt with talents of all kinds, declared: “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day!"
Here are some distinctions. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see,” says Arthur Schopenhauer.
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction,” adds E. F. Schumacher.
Such is the gilded age of this week’s topic, the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has arrived to entertain us, but first, gives us this distinction: “A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.”
A whole school of learned writers with a thirst of this subject have now swum into our Bar. Here’s George Bernard Shaw: “A genius is a person who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents.”
“I’d say that the principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers,” reckons Arthur Koestler
“Genius is finding the invisible link between things,” says Vladimir Nabokov, more succinctly.
Frédéric Chopin
Talent, and especially genius, must be constantly watered and fed like a hungry beast, and the one who possesses it needs to be always immersed in their work and their environment. Here’s George Sand rather poetically talking about Frédéric Chopin and his Preludes:
"His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.”
The equivalent to this is Henri Matisse and colour, as he describes: “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”
Forever immersed: Henri Matisse
But for all the colourful descriptions of talent and/or genius, an overriding theme by all those who possess or write about it simply cannot thrive without putting in the hours and endure all the hard knocks that go in pursuing your talent.
“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature,” says William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing.
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work,” says Émile Zola.
“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer,” adds Kurt Vonnegut.
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance,” adds an uncompromising James Baldwin.
But let’s finish with a serious point from an unserious figure of the film world, the great comedy writer and director Mel Brooks, who sums up all of our potential creative talents with this fabulous remark:
“Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.”
So then, it’s time to channel your talents into this subject, and to welcome this week’s gifted and geographical guest in the chair, Loud Atlas! Place your songs about talents and genius in comments below, for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week.
Difference engineering: computing pioneer Ada Lovelace
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