"Genius is not a gift but the way one invents
in desperate circumstances."
Jean-Paul Sartre
"Genius" is a concept best experienced at a distance,
ideally in time as well. Up close, it's likely that the individual
perceived as extraordinarily gifted is likely to be a driven, obsessive,
in some cases mildly - or not so mildly -deranged.
One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, whose brilliantly surreal
hallucinatory fantasies seem to have sprung directly from his fevered
unconscious, or, in a very different mode, the Norma Jean Baker who
was transformed into 'Marilyn Monroe' by way, essentially, of her
desperation to survive and to achieve an identity, in conjunction
with the Hollywood of her era, comprised of individuals, nearly all
of them male, who understood how to manufacture, market, and exploit
a certain sort of female beauty.
This enigmatic quotation of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Twentieth Century
French existentialist philosopher, is one of the epigraphs for my
novel Blonde which is an imagining, from within, of the life of Norma
Jean Baker. It is clear that this fated young woman was driven to
'succeed' as a way simply of survival; she had no father, and her
mother was a mentally disturbed woman who withheld love from Norma
Jean throughout her life.
To those individuals, many of them artists, actors, and other sorts
of "creative" people, who feel that they do not deserve
to live, nor even to have been born, the desperation to achieve an
identity is surpassingly powerful and can never be satisfied.
