What's a Scenius?
Something I really want to be a part of
Ever since I was a little kid hanging out alone every afternoon because my mom worked, I wanted a community.
Debbie Muir lived in a neighborhood and there were always kids around, thinking up ways to adventure, riding bikes through trails they built together in the New Hampshire woods behind her house, jumping off shed roofs in wild games of tag. Tracy Alsheskie? Same thing. She lived in a fancier subdivision and we’d sneak into houses that were under construction and collaboratively make the coolest games ever.
Now that I’m ancient (that just means older than 24—just kidding!), I still long for that collaborative nature of creation and joy, that combination of brains to make things bigger or better or fun, the support that comes from having a pack of friends.
Yes, I realize that novelist isn’t the most logical career for that, but what I love in the novel-creating process for traditional publishing is how many people get to work together to create your story, make it the best it can be, and then send it out into the world where readers do the same thing, making fan art and fan fiction and trailers and TikToks and Instagram posts or just making things in their brain.
Still, I get lonely about creation though and the book creation process isn’t all that fast. It’s nothing like listening to Debbie Muir get an idea for the best place ever to jump your bike off of.
We often think of Chagall or Picasso or Hemingway or Angelou as lone geniuses. There’s a whole myth around that: the person who excels all through the power of DNA and gumption.
It is kind of silly. Everyone is influenced by things. Everyone learns from others—or unlearns from others.
SCENIUS
Brian Eno (the record producer of U2 and others and a musician himself) has this thing call a scenius. It’s a made-up word, but it means genius, but that genius isn’t about just one person. It’s that super creative interaction that happens with a group.
He says it “stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.”
Super cool, right?
Or as Austin Kleon writes, “Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.”
It’s communal and collaborative. It’s supportive.
According to Kevin Kelly at Wired, scenius requires:
Mutual appreciation. Risky moves? We’ll applaud them. Subtle ones. They get props, too.
Quick exchange of tools and techniques. The knowledge and ideas go quickly back and forth.
Success gets claimed by everyone, not just one.
Protecting the outliers, the free-thinking mavericks and the renegades.
This has happened so often: The Bloomsbury Group, Burning Man, Algonquin Round Table, The PayPal Mafia, the circle of Socrates, the Scipionic Circle, the Transcendental Club, or even just Eno and U2.
Seneca said, “Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those who you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.”
And it’s about that, too. We all get to learn from each other when we’re open enough to listen and generous enough to share what we’re good at and also when we’re generous enough to be inclusive and cheer each other on.
Ursula Franklin said:
“The dream of a peaceful society to me is still the dream of a potluck supper. The society in which all can contribute, and all can find friendship. Those who bring things, bring things that they do well. [We must] create conditions under which a potluck is possible.”
I think we can find that in each other.
Last Week’s Podcast
Awe can get us through time times, scientists are saying. We’ll check this theory out, define awe a bit, and obviously–get goofy.
DOG THOUGHT FOR LIFE
Sparty says: Slow down. You move too fast. Smell every tree and fire hydrant.
LINKS WE MENTION
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_awe_can_help_us_through_tough_times
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35200-w
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_incorporate_awe_into_your_daily_life
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Last Week’s Be Brave Friday
I tell the story about one of my grandmother’s a lot. She was born in 1896, which means she’d be 127 now if she was still alive, which is kind of staggering. She died in 2001, which if my math is right, means she made it to 104, which is pretty staggering, too. My dad was her youngest child and I was his youngest child by a lot, which is why I’m not 80 right now.
Anyway, my grandmother was about 4-foot-10 and she loved art and books and music and deep thought. She wasn’t a positive person. This was not a woman who would give you a pep talk. Ever. I mean, if you think about it, she’d lived through two world wars and a depression.
She painted. She was embarrassed by her creations and would hide if her sons bragged about them.
She wrote poems. She said they were swill.
But she had this appreciation—this state of awe—for so many things.
She’d see a perfectly formed tomato and tears would come to her eyes. She’d touch her grandchild’s (or great grandchild’s) arm or cheek and marvel at the softness, the texture, the youth of their skin, the clarity of their eyes. She greatly appreciated things—small things and refined things.
A painting by me.
Because she fed a family during the Great Depression in Staten Island, she would wax poetic, in total awe, over butchering a piece of meat and bemoan the state of meat in grocery stores in the 1990s (and probably before that).
According to the Greater Good Magazine,
“Awe is the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world, like looking up at millions of stars in the night sky or marveling at the birth of a child. When people feel awe, they may use other words to describe the experience, such as wonder, amazement, surprise, or transcendence.”
Every time I put something out (art, a news story, a blog post, a book, even something as simple as a Facebook post), I think of my grammy and how cool it would have been if she could have been okay with not being perfect and with sharing things she might want to share. I remember my little kid self looking at her paintings with awe and reading her poems and trying to understand the mystery in the enjambments and in the lines. I had fierce grandmothers, too. But Grammy Barnard? She was the one who fell in love with the world, one skin touch, one tomato, at a time.
May you feel awe today. May you be brave enough and open enough to let a tomato’s perfection bring you to tears. May you marvel in beauty of skin. May you inhale the world around you and embrace those things that make your understanding a tiny bit bigger.