(2016-01-15) Evans Bowies Genius And Enos Scenius

Jules Evans: Bowie's genius and Eno's scenius. In the mid-19th century, the grand old sage of Victorian culture, Thomas Carlyle, was worried that Christianity (religion) was wearing out, that the West needed a ‘new mythus’ to bind us together and connect us to the infinite. Carlyle decided that a substitute for the worship of Christ might be the worship of heroes.

Oscar Wilde predicted how British culture would develop after WWII, after the decline of the cult of Christianity and the cult of empire. Britain became what Dominic Sandbrook called the Great British Dream Factory, forging identities and attitudes for the world to gaze at and buy into. Pop culture became a new religion.

David Bowie was very conscious of pop as cult – ‘til there was rock you only had God’, he once quipped.

Frederic Myers, the great British psychologist, defined geniuses as those who are particularly receptive to ‘uprushes’ from the subliminal mind, in the form of flashes of inspiration, insight, vision and epiphany.

While some contemporary psychologists like Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso thought geniuses were pathological degenerates, Myers thought geniuses were actually instances of the evolution of homo sapiens

There is another, more collaborative, model of genius, which Bowie’s ‘soul-mate’ Brian Eno has outlined, called ‘scenius’. This refers to ‘the talent of the whole community’ – Florence in the Renaissance, British pop culture in the last half-century – when ‘new ideas are articulated by individuals but generated by the whole community’.

Bowie was this kind of ‘scenius’ too. Firstly, he had a sort of sponge-brain, able to soak up and retain impressions and ideas from his environment, as a cloud absorbs moisture until it bursts in lightning. Different cities were important to his creativity as inspirations – New York, LA, Berlin. He absorbed these environments like a fly stuck in milk, as he put it. In this, he was like David Byrne of Talking Heads, who has described cities as his ‘muse’: ‘If you look and listen in a city, then your mind gets expanded automatically’

*Sponge-brain Bowie had an amazing memory-bank of ideas. He said:

I’ve always found I’m a collector. And I collect personalities, ideas…Everything I read, every film I saw, every bit of theatre, everything went into my mind as an influence. I’d think ‘that’s going in the memory bank’.*

Bob Dylan also puts his creativity down to his juke-box memory, able to file away songs and ideas to draw on in his own compositions.

The secret of creativity, Dylan suggests, is ‘love and theft’ – curating (curation) your own inner juke-box or storehouse, and then shamelessly plundering it. Oscar Wilde agreed: ‘It is only the unimaginative who invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.’