Tormented genius

By I. M. Soni

IT may be embarrassing but in times to come we shall have to take note of the fact that many a men became genius by acquiring a disease. The healthy person is simply unable to accomplish what mankind is longing for. Genius is not harmonic but nervous with a tendency for psychic difficulties even if not actually demented.

Alfred Adler explains the achievements of genius due to excessive efforts to acquire prestige and power by cultivating existing one-sided abilities and thereby to overcompensate a perceived insufficiency. Beethoven’s work, for example, was intended to overcome the insecurity stemming from his deafness.

Byron’s tragedy disclosed how deeply the sense of his physical deformity preyed upon his sensitive mind. How it had stimulated his ambition to achieve heights which were denied to the perfection of form. The deformed is transformed and inspired.

Such a person is less reasonable than the average one. He yields more readily to momentary impulses. He is inattentive, absent-minded irritable, subbornness and unpredictable. There is in him a reduced capacity for adaptation, a lack of ability to shape his own line of conduct, to create his own framework of values.

In short, his innate quality of being different is either a sick mental disposition or he is an unfavourably abnormal varient of the human race. He is negative so far vital functions are concerned. He suffers from abnormal mental attributes and in turn makes others suffer from them.

Intense concentration is a indispensable for the accomplishment of extraordinary achievements. This shows nonomania, absentmindedness and a craving for solitude.

Disreaeli remained engrossed in his thought even in the presence of several people. Byron said, "Society is harmful to any achievements of the mind." Goethe: "Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute loneliness. Wagner: "A master needs quiet. Calm and quiet are his most imperative needs. Isolation and complete loneliness are the only consolation and my salvation."

Wagner once wrote, "When I find myself in a state of inner unrest, no picture, no piece of plastic art has any effect on me..... I am dead to everything that is outside me... I see nothing but my inner visions and they are crying out for sound nothing but sound...."

Nietsche, Van Gogh, Maupassant not only derived from their dreamlike ecstatic conditions an intensification of their achievements, they also reached the highest summits of their artistic creation shortly before their final destruction. Dostoievsky, of the periods preceding his epileptic fits, says "In this condition I write much better much more than usual."