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1 Piece by Gray Jacobik
Genius
I dream of the elegant fury of swift thought as it burns
across grey matter like a line of sparking gunpowder
wending toward a cache of dynamite, pure
inventiveness, the grace and pleasure of connections
gathered in a flash and heaved into a vision of possibilities
so dazzling in their combinations they would take a few
centuries to unravel, an inevitable vast architecture
of shimmering design. I've collected descriptions-
my current favorite: The ability to reconcile the opposing
demands of accessibility and truth, Grossman's genius.
Reading Dickinson or Dickens, or Joyce, reading Proust,
I'm aflutter, each line blindsided by my wish that I, too,
could do as much. Kurt Gödel was a genius who proved
certain truths are unprovable within the system of logic
in which they are thought. A profound insight, that proves
the unparalleled fecundity of the human mind. But Gödel
played his cards close, told few, published little,
was reserved and suspicious, friendless, depressed,
obsessed with his health. Late in life he believed people
wanted to poison him, and when his disabled wife
could no longer cook, he died of starvation,
curled in a fetal position. Gödel's genius could not
bring him joy or love, faith, trust, delight, friends.
Envy is not so much wishing for a thing, as wishing
the other hadn't had it all. A little to rub off. A spreading
round of the right stuff as if a hand could reach into
the genetic pool and broadcast the bright green algae
of scintillate thought, and this has been my sin, to envy
genius as if it were a goodness in and of itself, a gift
devoid of example, disconnected from the whole of life.
Gray Jacobik's book, The Double Task, received the Juniper Prize
and was published in 1998 by the University of Massachusetts Press.
The Surface Of Last Scattering, which has just been published
by Texas Review Press, won the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. In addition
to these books, new work is forthcoming in Ontario Review, The Kenyon
Review, and Ploughshares.
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