The intricacies of our idiocy. Its filigree. It’s delicacy, even. Idiocy could be quite a refined thing. Like some complex confectionary.
The taste of such delicate idiocy. The savouring of such idiocy. Only a connoisseur of idiocy, like Cicero, could really appreciate it. It’s too bad we never learnt to appreciate it ourselves. Too bad that we were incapable of enjoying our idiocy. But that would require a non-idiocy that none of us possessed.
To dream of greatness! Despite everything: to want greatness! To think that we were capable of it, greatness. That because we could recognise greatness, and even appreciate greatness, that we thought we could become great.
Us!? Great!? Hope against hope. Hope, despite being near certain of its impossibility, that we might become great. Hope, even as knew, pretty much, that we would never achieve it: greatness. But hope nonetheless.
Hope that it might happen still. That it could surprise us in the final hours. In our later years. That we might awake, like Kant, from our dogmatic slumbers. But we were sleeping very deeply, that’s the thing. We were nothing but slumber …
Which meant that we were condemned to idiocy. That we could only ever be idiots, when our idiocy measured against greatness. Because we could only ever be less than great, and therefore – by our own measure – idiots.
Non-idiocy was not in us. Non-stupidity.
Shouldn’t we have been content to stay with our idiocy – within its confines? To keep to our stupidity – to be reconciled to it. To accept it. To start a plan a life of non-greatness.
But there we were, working under the delusion that we might become great. Didn’t we spend hours in our offices in search of greatness? In the hope that … With the dream that …
What could we feel but thwarted? But deprived? What could we conceive but that greatness had been stolen from us? Our birthright!
How could we not be resentful at our idiocy?
Couldn’t we learn to be happy with our idiocy? Happy within its limitations. Wouldn’t then our sense of our idiocy begin to fade?
After all, we were not especially unintelligent. We weren’t low in IQ. In problem-solving. We didn’t have special needs in real life. We could function, after all. Hold down jobs. Go about our daily business.
Didn’t we have jobs? Flats? Didn’t we live in a real city? Couldn’t we afford our mortgages. Our bills? Our weekly shop? Did we live with our parents? We weren’t scrabbling anymore. We weren’t living hand to mouth? We stood on our own two feet.
We’d launched! We’d made something of ourselves! We had jobs. Open ended contracts. We weren’t failures in that sense. Wasn’t that consolation enough? Shouldn’t we be happy enough? We had summers – open summers!
But the worm of failure ate at our breast. Devoured inside us. And isn’t that what Cicero loved?
The genius shatters the world. The genius breaks the world – this world. The genius is the wrecker of all the mundane pieties. The genius is the re-maker, the reconfigurer. The paradigm-shifter.
The genius is the re-forger. The one who transforms. Who awakens. The genius is the overcomer – and the self-overcomer. The halo of the genius! The aura of the genius!
And wouldn’t we leave ourselves behind as geniuses? Wouldn’t our lives be burned up in genius? Wouldn’t everything that happened to us be justified? Everything to led us to the genius-thought, the genius-idea?
Nothing else would matter. All this, the years of struggle, would be a distant memory. What would matter was the work – the labours of genius. The great making of genius.
And the feeling that we owed everything to genius – to the genius that had possessed us. That life was simply a clearing away of all the obstacles of realising genius. That wasn’t even our genius. That had touched us from on high. That was heavenly fire. That traversed us. Burnt through us. So that we were capacitators of genius, merely. Conductors of genius. Genius is always apocalyptic, or nothing at all.
Work in Progress 