For Sacred Writing tonight, my classmate Harley played for us a reading of Charles Bukowski's poem, "The Geniuse of the Crowd." Then his prompt asked us what that phrase meant, who or what it was referring to, and as we wrote, we were to narrow our focus on what he meant by the word "genius." Here's my answer:
The crowd is the "genius" in this poem, meaning that mob mentality rules because it is the only genius accepted by civilized society. People who think on their own are ostracized, much like the man in "The Allegory of the Cave." People are utterly convinced that the world exists in just one way, and if anyone tries to show them a different reality, they are destroyed or exiled, be it physically, mentally, or spiritually. I have Asperger's Syndrome, and one of the telling symptoms of it is that I belong to no social group. This is not because I am an outcast. No, it's because I choose it. I've always marched to the beat of my own drum. That way, if I go over a cliff, it's because I chose to and not because I was following the ass of another lemming.
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