Intelligence

Fools have ways to love that intelligent people do not have. The practical part of intelligence is mostly negative. Especially in public, the surest way to do something smart is not to do anything stupid. In any situation not requiring skill fools simply have more actions to choose – some of which, though inadvisable, are ways to love.

Love is judged by those beloved not by a standard measure, but in proportion to the powers of the lover. This is just: children and pets must be loved, and their love in return must be prized in proportion to their powers. But, though just, it is problematic. I estimate a geometric increase: twice the intelligence requires four times the cause of love to love as well. The religion of romance, the civilized circumvallations of lust, do not serve the sentimentality of fools – fools do not need them. They serve a need in intelligent people, who must artfully cultivate an eye for, artfully indulge a susceptibility to, the causes of love if they are to love wholly enough to deserve love in return.

Seduction is a superstition. The increase of the human race has never waited on the art of seduction. The classes, countries, and periods that most perfect seduction are least in progeny. But while affecting nearness to the basic facts of life, and partied equally on both sides, the art is elaborated with the vain ingenuity of the astrologer, with the patient fantasy of the demonologist, according to the mode in superstition – with potions and spells, with neuroses and repressions, with pheromones and evolutionary psychology. The pursuit is in the blood; the art that overlies it only reconciles uncommon minds to being led on common strings.

Life is easy, love is easier; birds do it, bees do it. But intelligence makes things difficult – it makes us seek out difficult things. The faculty restless and capable enough to solve the problems of food, shelter, and reproduction cannot rest on those solutions. It wants challenge. It elaborates gourmandise, architecture, romance.

This is not our tragic parting with nature; it is our true nature. The tragedy – there is tragedy – is that intelligent insight is distinct from intelligent perspective; the more completely absorbed in a problem, the less the ability to judge it. The lesson for intelligent people is that what makes life worthwhile is not at all the same as what is needed to live. To expect life to be worthwhile in itself is an error; but it is another, equal error to expect that solving life’s problems is enough to make life worthwhile. Life is easier, and life is harder, than that.

Form and Content

Separating form and content is like separating language and meaning – possible, but artful. It is artful because it cannot be neutral. It cannot be neutral because content can neither be represented without any form at all, nor presented without some influence on how it is read.

In web design plain text is often treated as a non-format, but it is a format too – it raises the questions of character sets, markup versus markdown, hard wraps versus soft wraps – it is haunted by carriage returns and line feeds – and displaying it raises the question of monospace or proportional fonts, wrapping or truncating, and syntax highlighting. Non-programming designers can think of it as a non-format only because they do not have to deal with it directly, just as printers could think of handwriting as a non-format, because it was the stage in the process they had no responsibility for. But questions of form in plain text are serious and important for those who have to deal with it directly. (If you think web designers are over-earnest about grids, you have yet to ask an programmer about whitespace.)

Plain text permanently enacted what typewriters had already established in practice – the idea of punctuation and capitalization as part of content, not form. In manuscripts punctuation was so often indistinct, and its use so inconsistent between writers, that printers were free to omit, add, or exchange points as they pleased. Yet even though writers bred to the age of WYSIWYG use boldface and italics significantly – and underlining, which was once just how writers and typists denoted italics to printers – still, because bold and italic characters are not part of ASCII (the plain text standard set by typists) they are so often unavailable, inconsistently displayed, or subject to sudden disappearance between programs, that they cannot quite gain the status of content.

Of course the phrase – separation of form and content – usually frames as a goal what might be more blatantly put by web designers as a command: programmers shall not meddle with design – or put by programmers as a judgment: just get it working, you can figure out the design later.

The phrase is also misleadingly abstract. As used it is meaningful only within a certain scheme: a database contains plain text which is then filled into a template and served to a browser. This is not the only way it could be done. Quite different architectures are possible. Consider RSS, for example, where there is no browser and no design.

RSS is much closer to the intentions of the web than the web itself is. The fact that the web has any place for designers at all is the result of its abuse. In current terms, the web was meant to be like Facebook – you put information in and let presentation be handled upstream – but it turned out like Myspace. To call this system separation of form and content is a little disingenuous.

Superficially it may appear that the Ruricolist is a blog by accident. The content seems separable from the form. That is true in practice: I have printed some of these essays in books. Yet the content of the Ruricolist exists because of its form. Only because there exists a form so familiar and flexible as the blog did I feel free to try something unusual.

Questions on Youth

I

What ends youth, and when? First, tell me what youth is. Is it innocence? Strength? Speed? But this is glib. The idea of youth is so ridden, so tangled, so fraught, that no systematic approach is possible. So I will glance as I may.

II

Why is it easier to imagine an evil old man than an old evil man?

I can very easily imagine a man who has become evil by becoming old; and what I imagine is something serious and dangerous. But when I imagine an evil man who has become old, what I imagine is pathetic and sad. This is not a modern blind spot: the evil old man or woman is an archetype. So too (though not as often) is the evil man whom age leaves weak, alone, and lost.

The same asymmetry obtains between a wise old man and an old wise man; between a kind old man and an old kind man; between a foolish old man and an old fool.

Call this folk gerontology. It teaches that old age so divides life that, in old age, we may acquire new traits and retain them vigorously; but those traits we carry from youth into old age fade and diminish in it. (Note that traits does not include abilities – the type of the Old Master is an exception.) And it defines youth as either a time when we do not possess the qualities that will later distinguish us, or a time when we are distinguished by qualities we are bound to lose.

I see no basis in fact for this distinction, but the universality of it suggests that it is there to be established.

III

When does youth end? We have a tribal answer – youth ends with ordeal. We have a a number of civilized answers – youth ends with marriage, vocation, mastery, or battle. But none of these formal occasions are satisfactory. Compare a person the day before and the day after, and you will measure no difference.

The notion that youth has a formal end implies a tripartite division of life into ineffectual youth, active maturity, and honorable senescence. Another familiar division is simply into strong youth and feckless old age. Which is the more natural? The second division matches the general pattern of animals, but the first is more distinctively human (given our prolonged childhoods). The trichotomy is the most common division, but the dichotomy seems agreeable to high civilization – at least to ours and the classical world’s.

But our idea of youth and the classical idea of youth are not the same. The phenomenon of formal education, the conceit that children have wisdom in their mouths (if nowhere else), the sense both of the suitability of play to children, and its unsuitability for adults – these give us an idea of youth shyer and more delicate than the robust vision of the ancient world. Alexander conquered the world, not in youth, but with youth. But being young among the moderns ends as soon as anything happens to you that has not happened to everyone else. Classical youth was individualizing; modern youth ends with individuation.

IV

Speaking of Alexander, remember that Caesar, at the age of 30 and still unknown, wept because by 30, Alexander was already Alexander. But Caesar would get his chance to be Caesar. In the vigor, ingenuity, audacity and arrogance of his later actions the mark of youth is certain. Yet had a fever taken Caesar that year then his death, had his death been marked at all, would have been marked as an old death. So to the question, “Can youth be recovered?” we can answer yes – for a Caesar.

V

Can you marry and be young? Of course you must be old enough, but can old enough be young? Or does marriage imply a sobriety and commitment that is only mocked by being called young? Or can you have children and be young? Does that responsibility compel youth’s end – is youth passed on in making youth?

Once you have passed on your genes nature is done with you. Only culture has use for you, while you persist consuming resources without any direct role in the natural order. Nature arranged the habits, abilities and vices of youth toward the end of reproduction. Once that end is fulfilled, nature loses interest. Quote, “The noblest works have proceeded from childless men” (and women); is this because the refusal to get or bear prolongs youth by refusing its consummation?

VI

How seriously should youth be taken? The ancients took youth seriously and expected great things from it. We have two modern views to chose between.

We have youth as the best days of my life, a moment of strength and hope that sets almost before it has risen, our sole fragile chance at bravery, and once over beyond recall, only imitated in memory, lost only to be longed for – when not regretted.

We also have youth as a surfeit of dangerous energy, an unshielded, ungrounded, overcharged capacitor in continuous danger of shorting out, melting down, spinning free – a turbid, turgid, tumid white heat of hormonal drive limping on impaired judgment between transitory moments of release and refractory calm; something we are lucky to survive and would never wish on anyone, let alone ourselves.

This choice is important, because it determines how the rest of life is to be arranged. If youth is the best, then we should aim to be comfortable once we are useless. If youth is the worst, then we should aim to be free once we are sane.

VII

Can youth be accurately remembered? Must it incandesce with a rose radiance as it decays to its half-life, or can it be remembered justly as it was? To ask another way: is life necessarily disappointing? Obviously if youth always becomes a retrospective paradise then what comes after will always be a disappointment. At best you can be philosophical, and try to remind yourself that your vision is distorted. But I think it can be remembered justly, though it requires artificial means – old photos to look at, old journals to read, old friends to converse, old shows to rewatch.

VIII

What does high school do to people? Listening to those who go – at least to Americans – it seems to have no lasting effect besides trauma and regret, and no benefit beside the war-buddy friendships formed among survivors. It appears as a circular hell, where everyone is damned by someone, and a demon to someone else. In trying to think about youth the cosmic mass of the institution, youth’s Great Attractor, draws everything else into its orbit. Perhaps this is why there is so little good thinking done about youth: people trying to think about youth end up thinking about high school. What would youth look like without this wheel to break on?

IX

How far can the advantages of youth be extended? We are not only animals. By conscious discipline and ingenious technology we have learned to formalize or commoditize generally what life grants only as special advantage. We universalize gifted strength with machinery, gifted memory with writing, gifted health with medicine. (I would call this universalizing one index of civilization.)

If youth has any positive content, it must be abstractable. And if we find that youth is not abstractable, then we know that youth has no positive content. But we have had great success – and largely within living memory – with such abstractions. We have established that it is not unnatural or ridiculous that the old should learn, love, and plan as intensely, as bravely, and as hopefully as the young; that the use of technology to extend and preserve physical powers does not defy nature, but serves it; and that community of purpose is as much possible to the old as to the young. More may yet be done.

Peccadilloes

Before you shoot, consider the ricochet. Before you moralize, consider the peccadillo. Certainly the peccadillo is an unphilosophical idea. There is no logic in the sin that does not make a sinner, the crime that does not make a criminal. Yet the peccadillo is left over whenever sins or crimes are counted. Its inevitability implies a resilience to human behavior that is almost material. In measuring wood for the cut you must figure in the kerf of the saw – how much material the cut itself will remove. Likewise in philosophical division you must expect the measured boundaries of immorality to fall outside the marks that guide the division. In woodwork this can be compensated; in philosophy it cannot be. The name for one who calls harmless things harmful to prevent harmful things from being thought tolerable – the name is hypocrite. In this way law is superior to morality. Law, being justified from without, can blend the boundaries of the legal and the illegal to the greater security of the law, make jaywalking a crime, allow its subjects just enough breaking of minor laws that they obey the important laws without feeling punctilious or servile.

But morality must self-stand. Thus both in society and in the individual, the fervor of moral commitment trends over time into immorality, step by step as the excision of hypocrisy cuts a new brink of the immoral, which frays into new peccadilloes, which invent new hypocrisy, which being purged cuts a new brink of the immoral – and so on, until at last the philosopher sits, like the overreaching workman, ashamed among scraps – scraps cut down over and over in adjusting the fit until no material remains for any fit at all.

New York

What seems to most people to be a general economic and cultural crisis often seems to me no more or less than the rigors of the end of New York’s economic and cultural sway.

Consider hedge funds. The crisis has raised a populist anger against hedge funds in general. But hedge funds were not the cause; they did not need to be bailed out. They rode out the shock and recovered on their own. The institutions that had to be bailed out were the titans of New York, which tried to play hedge fund and broke the economy. Strategies that work for the decentralized and lightly staffed institutions that hedge funds are – these strategies were poison to the titans of New York.

Let me repeat: New York saw a set of brilliant strategies for making money; New York tried to adopt these strategies; but New York could not keep up. (High-frequency trading seems to be going in the same direction.)

The reason these titans were permitted to exist was to compete with the comparable titans of other countries. Surely if everyone else is doing it, we are only being realistic when we do it too – whatever the abstract dangers?

American modesty is that foolish. Ours is a very powerful country; and powerful countries must expect to be imitated, for no other reason than that they are powerful. When Great Britain was ascendant the world broke out in parliaments and the businessmen of the tropics sweated in black wool.

We have our New York, so other countries want New Yorks of their own – and they get them, new New Yorks more New York than New York. (What are Canary Wharf and La Défense but the cargo cults of the Atlantic?) Count one remove from reality. Then, of course, we scale up the real New York to match. Count two removes from reality. (This is the level of the junk-bond era, I think.) The rest of the world scales up their New Yorks to keep up with the American example. The world’s tallest skyscraper keeps turning up somewhere in East Asia. Count three removes from reality. So the real New York scales up yet again, mortgages the country and securitizes its mortgages. Count four removes from reality. This isn’t economics; this is pataphysics.

Worse, it is a game that New York cannot win. New York had to get that way; it is burdened with history – with the awareness that things could have been otherwise. The new New Yorks can take New York as a revelation, build it dogmatically. Hong Kong will always be a better New York than New York can ever be.

All finance is capital allocation – discerning where money obtains its best return and transferring it there from other, less profitable uses. Once, for this to be done at a national scale, it was necessary that all the financiers of the nation be in one place, have all their seats on one exchange, so all the nation could come to them. Because New York was where information could be had, New York was where decisions had to be made.

But this no longer true – a Bloomberg terminal in New York knows nothing that a Bloomberg terminal in Shanghai does not know. Indeed the opposite is the case; New York impedes capitalism. By being the center of both finance and the economy it simply removes many industries from rational analysis. Look at publishing or music, for example. Suppose you are an investor with a thesis about the future of books or music. What instrument allows you to express it? There is no such instrument, because publishing and music as businesses have been absorbed into New York conglomerates (even if headquartered elsewhere, possible only in a world that includes New York) – conglomerates whose bottom lines would not tremble if tomorrow some rapid plague killed off every author and musician on the planet.

There are, of course, the indies – indie labels, small presses – but even if they were publicly traded – even if there were some exchange where they could afford to be listed, with regulations they could afford to comply with – still they are individually too small to absorb enough capital to make a return meaningful to an investor.

The cavernous empty middle between conglomerate and indie is New York’s path – New York sweeps it clean the way Jupiter’s gravity clears out the asteroid belt.

For culture I think the case is stronger and more straightforward than it is for finance. In almost anything written about the crisis the words publishing, journalism, music, art, can be qualified with “New York” without loss of meaning – with gain in clarity.

I admit that this perspective explains nothing new. My intention is Copernican, not Newtonian. I do not attempt to resolve mysteries, only to provide a more parsimonious formulation of the mechanism behind certain appearances known to everyone. To the naked eye, the sky would look the same if the earth were the center of the universe. The crisis would look the same if were were universal or had New York at its center. I find the latter formulation more plausible and more interesting. If the crisis is general, then there is nothing to do but ride it out, suspend our minds and abilities, wait for some vision to reveal what comes next. But if the crisis is New York’s, then there is work for all in imagining and effecting a great devolution.

Airplane

There is a poem I would like to write
About the airplane lights between the stars:
Unheard on cloudless nights, they do not fall
Now red, now green, and still they do not fall.
Somewhere a poet at thirty thousand feet
Looks down in thought. He sees the night earth black
He sees the city lights, they tint the sky
He stretches out, the engines soothe his bones
He settles in, he summons all his craft
And presses one last drop of grainy oil
From something dry and rancid lodged in him.
I, earthbound, see him passing like a god
And measure poems I may never write.

Fame

Why be famous? Subtract sleeping, eating, working – how much time remains for being famous? Of course fame has benefits, comforts, luxuries, considerations – but all these are available, in degrees equal or better, to people who are not famous. A star may not be better off than a dentist; most, not so well.

Why be famous? To have your name, your face known? But no one is present in a picture. Heroes do not feel people wanting to be them; sex symbols do not feel people wanting them. And as for names – though his name is taken a billion times a day, what good does fame do the Earl of Sandwich? People recognize you, but what do they recognize you as? Not as a person; the recognition that fame supplies is less than being personally known. It is the kind of recognition that people give to types and roles – that a proper name is used does not make the recognition different than the patronizing recognition given to one who matches an ethnic stereotype.

Why be famous? What is gained when the switch flips in the brain between “I am not famous” and “I am famous”? Is it self-respect? But you do not respect people because they are famous; why should fame give you respect for yourself?

Why be famous? Is it attention? That is a little stronger: attention is enough like a commodity that famous people can lend it out on their own credit. But that only when they are not too famous: the movement that recruits too prominent a spokesperson only adds a cause to fame, not fame to a cause.

Not all fame is permanent; people who have been briefly famous seem to value the experience, but not wish to repeat it. (Though whether as a drug too addictive to return to, or an ordeal that leaves them with nothing to prove, I do not know.) Sometimes a person with transient fame can be observed having found a worthy cause to spend it on. This seems healthy and sane.

All people who are famous and sane seem to have certain qualities in common: a sort of fatalism, a sociable sense of irony, and taking their fame as a windfall, not a right. But most people who are famous are not sane; and though it would be tempting to argue that fame only attracts the insane – as it likely does – I do think fame drives people insane.

But I am begging the question. If fame is so insubstantial, so inconsequential, what traction does it have to drive anyone anywhere? If there is no good answer to “Why be famous?” there cannot be a good answer to “Why not be famous?”

Contrast fame and glory. Glory must be earned with great difficulty; glory is impersonal – has never invited presumptuous familiarity, instead discouraged it; and glory is enduring – is sought as the one thing in life that lasts forever. Altogether glory seems a finer and more human thing than fame. Yet the love of glory – so we are warned by the records of the times when it was in fashion – the love of glory was itself madness. If so straight a thing as glory is confounds us, how much more so must crooked fame?

The real question is not “why be famous” or “why not be famous” but another: Why give fame?

Fame begins with a humane feeling – with the recognition that there are no rewards reserved for extraordinary merit. For the invention of calculus and the discovery of gravity, Newton was made Warden of the Mint; but what did his predecessor do? His successor? There is no prize or position in the world where merit has not been mixed with legacy, celebrity, and safe choice. There is no recognition which the world can bestow on the worthiest which has not sometimes been bestowed on the unworthy.

So when we are moved to admire something extraordinary, we search for something within our power to bestow, something that cannot be bought; and we find only our attention. This is well meant. Attention is the kindest thing we can give. But what is kind from one person may be cruel from many.

Hamlet's shield

In the book of Saxo Grammaticus, where the story of Hamlet (née Amlethus) is first told, Hamlet survives the act of his revenge. First he pins his false uncle’s men drunken beneath their festival tent and burns the palace around them; then he finds his uncle’s bed and there, with a needless fillip of cunning, first warns Claudius (née Feng) that Hamlet is come for his revenge, then kills him as he rises with his own sword – while his uncle fumbles to draw Hamlet’s, previously riveted through for the seeming-mad Hamlet’s own protection.

This bloody-minded Hamlet’s first act as king is to command his story – from the murder of his father through the accomplishment of his splendidly premeditated revenge – all to be painted on a great shield for him to carry.

Remember that a knight’s shield was as good as his name – the means by which he would be known in battle and in travel, known both to friend and foe. Having become king, Hamlet desires that his story shall protect him and that he shall be known by his story. Both terms of this resolution come to pass in an unexpected way. Soon Hamlet falls into the hands of Hermutrude, Queen of Scotland – wise, clever, beautiful, proud, unwed. So impressed is she with his story – with the more than human cunning of his revenge – that she decides first to spare his life, and second to wed him – he the only accepted and the only surviving of her many suitors.

The shield itself is of course invisible in Shakespeare, though I cannot call it absent. By his story Hamlet enters the company of kings – so Fortinbras hails him; by his story Hamlet is known, when Horatio tells it before the confused witnesses of Hamlet’s end in a Hamlet ending; and by his story Hamlet is saved – saved from England and returned to Denmark that he may end – in the Spartan phrase – with his shield or on it – but not without a shield.

Bourgeois

Bourgeois is a curse word. When I read the word bourgeois, I generally stop reading. When it slips out, I forgive it. But when the author persists in repeating it, as if they have just made a discovery, I leave.

Yet I am not sure that I disbelieve in the bourgeois. At times I almost see a class of people – a very large class of people – who have in common a quality that only bourgeois names: they contrive to live in their time as its living posterity. They are free in their judgments and free in their indifference because for them anything that really happens, happens in the past. Then the feeling passes, and once again I see people whose characters are separately conditioned by their particular situation and occupation – not by some class oversoul.

Of course I accept the existence of the strict-sense bourgeois, the medieval burghers – I accept that the world I live in is descended from the one they created. But trying to understand the world in terms of class makes me uneasy (and not only because if there were a bourgeois, they would not be the masters but the helots of our capitalism, pressed between the entitled poor and the empowered rich). No, there is a brink ahead; its name is Marx. I feel the same way when I try to understand the world in terms of markets – there is a brink ahead; its name is Mises. But the Marxist case is more uncomfortable than the libertarian, because libertarian ideas pass on libertarian credit. Marx is the philosopher we agree with under other names. When You-Know-Who is mentioned we throw salt over our shoulders and intone: “He was wrong in his conclusions but right in his basic approach,” or “He was wrong about everything, but at least he cleared away old ideas that were even more wrong.” But folk magic will not protect you if you look into the forbidden books. To read Marxists, to follow principles familiar to you and found among all educated people of good will – to follow these principles step by step plausibly to inhumane conclusions, is to realize how untenable the compromise is. You cannot chain up the devil indoors; you must serve him or put him out. Either social class is a valid principle and deserves to be applied far beyond its present polite limits; or social class is an invalid principle, and any current idea which depends on it should be recalled and melted down. But what else is there? Whenever I ask the question I feel a tense quiet like the party when the parents’ car pulls up early – because if Marx was just wrong then somewhere all the old grave solemn words are waiting to return.

(If you substitute psychology for economics, Freud for Marx, cognitive psychology for libertarianism and neurosis for class, the above essay contains another essay.)

Poetry

I write poetry but I will not call myself a poet. My experiments in poetry are as much tinkering as writing. The way meter, phrase, caesura, and alliteration combine into poems fascinates me like an exhibition watch, or a dissection. I try to follow the articulations and disarticulations; to test my understanding, I try to build or animate for myself. But prose has never failed me; I turn thoughts into poems not because I must, but because I can. And for the most difficult thoughts, I turn to prose first.

In writing about poetry it seems obligatory either to defend or diagnose Modern Poetry. But there is too much to generalize about, and I do not want to generalize or judge. I only want to ask a question. “If poetry did not exist, would anyone invent it?” It seems to me that all poems now must answer this question; and that most of them answer “no.”

(Admittedly, I dislike hermeticism in poetry. I am indifferent to whether poetry is accessible – inaccessibility no more vitiates good poetry than accessibility excuses bad poetry – but I resent hermeticism, not because it is elite, but because it is the ape of elitism. A secret society imitates how an elite looks from the outside, substituting loyalty for merit and ritual for sympathy. [That is, an elite is the only true secret society.] When poetry has a hermetic seal, I am content to leave it shut.)

How could poetry be invented in a world that reveres songwriting? It has the flavor of a brainstorm: “You know how there’s that piano piece, right – ‘Song Without Words’? Well how about a song without music?” Remember how uncertain the boundaries of poetry and song have always been. Much that is read as poetry was written as song or chant. And modern singers are adept at setting poetry to music.

It is not even cheaper anymore to be a poet than to be a songwriter. If you add up the cost of your Moleskines you will have saved little over the cost of a laminate guitar, an electronic tuner, a digital recorder, and a copy of Guitar for Feckless Morons. Three chords will get you far; if you can type, you can fret. If your poem cannot be set to music, why not call it prose? What give a special name to prose with whitespace? Why elevate a typographic distinction into a literary one? And if your poem can be set to music, why should anyone pay attention if you cannot be bothered to take the extra step?

Music only vitiates the form of poetry; photography displaces the need for poetry. The impulse to preserve, embody, and share an experience, the impulse poetry satisfies, photography satisfies just as well and much more easily. Poetry is intensely osmotic. Doggerel is not inept poetry, but dry poetry – poetry squeezed from a mind already drained of what poetry should absorb. Photography is another valve on the same vessel. If you would be a poet, leave your camera behind.

Poetry will go on losing: losing to music, losing to photography. It has already lost; yet I will not give up on it. Poetry has been cornered before and survived. Writing relieved poetry of its responsibility for history; printing relieved poetry of its role in education. Textbooks of math and grammar were once written in verse, to aid memorization; that is a revival nobody wants. Now recording and photography are relieving poetry of its responsibility for contemplation and confession. What is left for it, I do not know.

Poetry does not need a savior. The question has been answered, many times. But each poet who has found an answer has found their own answer. No one has established a general answer that imitators can build on. And simply being original cannot be the answer. Imitation, both imitating and being imitated, is indispensable. An art where every achievement is unique, where nothing can be built on, is unsustainable. And an art where only genius is adequate is not worthwhile for anyone, genius included.

“If poetry did not exist, would anyone invent it?” Because I cannot answer this question, I am not a poet. I will call you poet if you can.