Yesterday, I went to a movie about Michelangelo, the Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, and all-around creative genius. It was a good movie, appealing to my scholarly and artistic sides, and showing minute details of sculptures that must be impossible for most museum/church visitors to see. Putting genius aside, it was the first time in my life that I understood the gruelingly hard work of sculpting from stone. How he created human figures of such extraordinary realism in such an unforgiving medium goes beyond human understanding, not to mention the sheer number of works. It's almost a genius beyond genius.
And the film interviewed a significant number of women scholars and artists, which might not have happened a few decades ago. There was a bit of balance, even though all the other masters named in the film were male.
Still, I found myself squirming in my seat at times. I think what it is, is that I'm just tired of the focus on male genius. Back "in the day", I was immersed in the Victorian concept of history being a succession of great men, and I think I was at least passively comfortable with it, incredibly so in retrospect. At least I accepted that, historically, this was the way things had been. But clearly I have been shifting in a significant way. It's not that I can't see the genius of Michelangelo, DaVinci, Van Gogh, Picasso...or hear the genius of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms -- and my beloved Howells. The greats in all these forms of art were geniuses, and deserve the lavish (sometimes even slavish!) praise. And it's not just the pain of thinking about all the opportunities talented girls or women didn't get, or even my own genius never quite getting off the ground (except perhaps in this blog). More and more women of genius have had their work recognized recently, and it's clear that "we" have been there all along, even if largely invisible. As we emerge into the light, it shifts the whole picture, doesn't it?
So I guess I just cannot "do" it anymore, in effect worship the great men of history, much less those of this day, or their grand ideas, their ways to technologize human society, their savior impulses. I'm tired. I'm done. This isn't where I can put my energies any more. For the rest of this lifetime, I intend to focus largely on the creations of women. I intend to focus largely on honoring Earth, Love, and the greatest "genius" of all, this extraordinary universe's creator and/or creatrix. (I understand that this creative impulse exceeds all human conceptualization, but for now, I will look primarily through a Goddess lens. She is my model for genius.)