October 6, 2018 – to – September 15. 2022 – With some revisions to date.

Daily I’m assaulted by Genius from my library, from new publications (most of which I’ll never read), and from the developing sciences, some of which I think I comprehend. These thinkers, writers, performers, poets, professors of the past and today — these Wizards are constantly waving their wands across and through my awareness. They — prophetically-aesthetically-truly — grasped their times and responded with works that weighed and hoisted the realities home. Such are still read and resurfaced into the freshness of time’s advance/assault with its requirement for new Geniuses. I am not of their league. I’m more a water-boy-paper-boy on the side lines to assist the enduring play of their creativity, charisma, and prophesies. I can see the playing field and have even done skirmishes, as I survey the action, of plays to come. But I’m all too aware that the times are calling for strong players: warriors of wisdom&wizardly! — Rebels bursting from of the locker-green rooms — of the Absurd/the Random/the Precariousness — and onto the field&stage of win-lose engagement. — Players in the theatrum mundi who can grasp/form the flying threads&laces into a bow that ties well for the journey ahead. Well, I know my place with my bottles and wineskins of groundling poetries to nourish/recognize what wins in the perennial head-to-head crash of opposites: with the horrors of loss and exultations of winning — but also the mid-field play of balanced give&take resulting in successful theatrics of engagement-management and interpretation. See, even this metaphor needs Genius to cause the singing before and after, with all going HOME satisfied and longing to engage/enhance the future. — Actually, reactions to the assault comes from the current era as much as from these famous mentors (recalling here Koestler’s GHOST IN THE MACHINE – about those destructive forces in our psyche). I join the WE who are listening for current voices above the crowd&politics that embody the embrace of covenantal (Earth-Human) wholeness now required.

What I do is for me (so far) as I fill my own bottles&wineskins with springs&flows from my own memories and current weedings/plantings of my own backyard. I can still tie some shoes and bring groceries home to myself. But there’s a bunch of powers at play today that I can but watch, wail, and write/writhe about as I may. But, sometimes, I just must pause/stop/meditate — look away till the tremors from assaults of GEN-I-US pass and I’m my own again. Gets tougher as one gets older.

Yikes! If I were to stop writing-my-thinking and watch TV or engage all my computer offerings — I would be stumbling over my own feet. So, pardon me as I blurb-on about this age of GEN-i-US: hoping past deletes or being lost in The Cloud.

Emerging from my meditative SAHASAs (SafeHarborSanctums), I’m on the lookout for renascent-regenerative-renaissance genius — to engage the assaults of our age’s voluminous displays of tech and Big Data, war, and political authoritarianisms that are demanding it. Our species/planet consciousness is being overwhelmed with flood-states, heated environments of cultural/religious/ spiritual/psyche/climate and augural confusions of where humanity and planet are headed. Two o the most obvious assaults of our genius are the arsenals of Putin wars against the Ukraine and the Trumpian woundings of American politics, generally (conspiracy theories and Christian Nationalism, e.g.), and personal freedoms, specifically, such as voting, sexual identity issues, and abortion rights.

[Note: Researching Hesse for another entry (you’ll see it under ODDIONS), I found this comment by Edwin F. Casebeer in “Hermann Hesse,” Warner Books, 1972, p. 190, which extends this concern: “Carl Jung believed that if a man were to progress far enough in self-realization, his impact on civilization would be charismatic. Others would behold in him what their own psyches strove towards and become consoled and delighted and inspired by this great man…. I believe Hermann Hesse is such a man.” I firmly agree. Hesse was quite charismatic for me in the 70’s along with Camus, Yeats, and some others. Hesse, as those others, is clearly a “Romantic,” in that his work “clearly embodies the man who wrote it.” (p. 193). {Eliot had a problem with such auto-self-theater-embodiment. I did my critique/care of Eliot on this in ALTARPIECES.} I should also note here a brief definition of “Genius” from Harold Bloom’s book of that title. The whole book is to define it with Shakespeare as the spine (plus Emerson). These phrasings give much of his abiding sense: “…my primary aim is both to enhance our appreciation of genius, and to show how invariably it is engendered by the stimulus of prior genius….The influence of genius upon itself…will be one of the book’s major emphases..…there are common characteristics of genius, since vivid individuality of speculation, spirituality, and creativity must rely upon originality, audacity, and self-reliance.(p.8)….To know ourselves, in relation to others, for these mighty dead are among the otherness that we can know….(p. 9) Genius is “clearly both of and above the age.(p. 11) Genius, by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them. Consciousness is what defines genius…. has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered

talent, not genius. What is best and oldest in myself has not been activated.” (p. 12) Hesse is not considered (a mistake) in Bloom’s great volume on the “preternatural gifts of creativity.” So it is, genius knows how to use/stimulate talent gloriously.

Hesse died at 85 in 1962. Koestler at 77 in 1983. Bloom died in 2019 at age 89. Now at 88, I’m hoping for some more “bounce” up life’s trail leading to that nascent revelation of arriving/being closer to grasping the warmth from reality’s hearth of home. In my latest book – PORTS O’CALL – The Journey Home – I call such journey/odyssean persons striving for HOME (Humanity’sOwnMotherEarth) – as EARTH-I-SEANS: that “I” as a flaming candle of gen-i-us ign-i-tion ever-seeing the US of GEN-I-US. See this abundantly ablaze in the OIO Syntangoion Logo I’ve much described.

The assault of today is challenging individuality/humanity to find and nourish itself: overcome homesickness and to be at home with the viruses and climate changes — with an enlightened self-awareness of the hearth and its prospering hold-rise of both spirit and ignition-cognition. Identity crisis or not, humanity is undergoing a re-characterization of itself though agencies of science and compassion. The Age aches for guidance of genius. Not conspiracy theories or political power plays! That’s why I keep referring to our GENeration as GEN-i-US. Our time is full of so many who know so much–experts in everything — and the assaults of internet-AI-social media conglomerates at their command have just begun to mesh with flesh&blood midst increasing assaults of earthen climate/virus systems. A revolution to “tool” – not to “fool” — a new humanity has just begun. Global comprehension of these assaults and their management has just begun. As the JWST shows us ever-so-clearly-anew the randomness and infinity of existence –and we on a dust-mote of it all by some miracle. We must advance our GEN-i-US to fix our EARTHISEAN HOME for storms of randomness and portals to oblivion sure to come as always. The genius of our US is under assault. Our species genius of shared civilized community — overcoming the creature archetypes of predator-prey//life/consuming life structures of our being — must prevail. The inspire of aspire is on the timeline to out-rhyme the fire of dire and the host of ghost. Learning our lessons for excellent achievement means removing the fool from school: idiocy from domesticity—hypocrisy-theocracy from democracy. Yep! We’re talking need-now for genius in our HOME!

— mdok – As in ManifestDestiny’sOdysseanKairos – mdok —