The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (31 page)

A city such as Calcutta supplied this sort of randomness in spades and still does. No two street corners are exactly alike, no two days either. When a young musician named Arka tells me what he loves about Calcutta is how “the chaos and madness has its own rhythm,” he is uttering not only a poetic truth but a scientific one as well. A chaotic system has boundaries, and its own sort of order. It is not the same as anarchy, which is a complete absence of rules or purpose. The difference between chaos and anarchy is like the difference between a dance troupe and a melee. Chaos is order dancing.

No wonder Calcuttans find chaos inspiring and actively seek it out. They dance lustily with chance, flirt openly with coincidence, and would no doubt agree wholeheartedly with the words of Erik Johan Stagnelius, a nineteenth-century Swedish poet: “Chaos is the Neighbor of God.”

The Tagores knew this neighborhood well. Their rambling home resembled a performing-arts center, with dramas and concerts staged regularly. “We wrote, we sang, we acted, we poured ourselves out on every side,” Tagore recalled.

Loneliness pervaded the large compound as well. Tagore’s father, a landlord and merchant, traveled often. When he was at home, he remained steadfastly aloof. Geniuses almost always have one parent who withholds love, and sometimes both do. The genius grows up lacking emotional comfort, and so he compensates, in good ways and bad. As Gore Vidal once said, “Hatred of one parent or the other can make an Ivan the Terrible or a Hemingway; the protective love, however, of two devoted parents can absolutely destroy an artist.”

I step into a room, the marble floors cool under my bare feet, and find myself in the presence of Tagore’s paintings. Some are almost childlike in their simplicity, others complex and disturbing. There are many portraits of veiled women with distant, haunted eyes. Tagore never set out to paint. It happened accidentally, by coincidence, and how this transpired says much about the nature of creativity.

It began, as all things did, with his poems. They were not nearly as spontaneous as they seem. A lot of sweat went into each stanza. A compulsive revisionist, he would cross out words and lines, entire pages. As he searched for just the right words, he’d turn these markings into doodles, some quite elaborate.

One day, he showed these doodles to his friend Victoria de Campo, who glanced at them and said, “Why don’t you paint?”

So he did. At the age of sixty-seven, with no formal training in art, he painted. And painted. Over the next thirteen years, Tagore produced some three thousand paintings.

That story reminds me of the jazz drummer described by Oliver Sacks in his book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
The drummer suffered from Tourette’s syndrome and experienced sudden, uncontrollable twitches, creating unintentional, and unexpected, sounds in his drumming. Sometimes when a “mistake” occurred, he’d use it as a seed for an improvisation that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to him. Someone listening to the drummer wouldn’t hear a mistake but a riff.

The drummer, like Tagore with his doodles, surprised himself, provided his own jolt. From a chaos-theory perspective, the stray sound represented a random occurrence, but one that the drummer ingeniously
transformed into a “bifurcation point.” Think of a rushing river, where the water strikes a boulder, then splits into two streams. The boulder is the bifurcation point; that is, a junction where a turbulent, chaotic system splits into new orders. Bifurcation points look like obstacles but are actually opportunities since they enable us to “switch tracks.” All geniuses possess this capacity to transform a random event—and, yes, even a mistake—into a chance to veer into an entirely new and unexpected direction. It takes cognitive flexibility, a psychologist would say. I’d use another word to describe the drummer, and others like him:
courageous
.

In the adjoining room, I spot a black-and-white photograph of Tagore, with his feral gray hair and beard, standing shoulder to shoulder with an equally hirsute man. Tagore is staring intensely straight ahead. The second man looks more at ease and appears to be suppressing a smirk. It’s Albert Einstein.

These two intellectual giants met several times, first in Berlin in 1926 and later in New York. What a strange pair they made. Tagore, “the poet with the head of a thinker,” and Einstein, “the thinker with the head of a poet,” as Dimitri Marianoff, a relative of Einstein’s, said. An awful lot of gray matter was in that room, “as though two planets were engaged in a chat,” Marianoff recalled.

They were like planets in separate orbits, since these two geniuses didn’t see eye to eye. Their meetings, quipped the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, amounted to “a complete nonmeeting of minds.”

In a discussion about the nature of reality, Tagore expressed his belief in a “relative world,” one that does not exist without our conscious awareness of it.

Einstein retorted: “If there were no human beings anymore, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?”

“No. This world is a human world.”

“I agree with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.”

“Why not?” parried Tagore. “Truth is realized through men.”

After a long pause, Einstein, the hard-nosed scientist, said in a barely
audible whisper, “I cannot prove my conception is right, but that is my religion.”

Should we be surprised that they didn’t see eye to eye? I don’t think so. Recall how Michelangelo and Leonardo sniped at each other like petulant teenagers. Contrary to the hoary cliché, great minds do not think alike. If they did, civilization would never progress.

The fact that Tagore met Einstein while traveling overseas comes as no surprise. Tagore was a restless soul, and once said the reason he traveled so much was in order to “see properly.” Yet time and again he returned to Calcutta.

This makes sense. Creative people thrive on ambiguity, and you don’t get any more ambiguous than a city such as Calcutta in a country such as India. Tagore didn’t dodge this ambiguity. He embraced it. He delighted in the contradictory and the unexpected and most of all, notes the writer Amit Chaudhuri, was “mesmerized by coincidence.”

I read that, and T.P.’s “possibility of coincidence” springs to mind. What exactly did he mean? And what does coincidence have to do with genius?

Try this experiment. Spill some water onto a highly polished tray and watch how it beads into complex, often beautiful forms. This happens because a variety of forces, including gravity and surface tension, often working at odds with one another, act upon the water. (Gravity wants to spread the water across the tray in a thin film, while surface tension wants to consolidate the water into compact globules.) Repeat the experiment and you’ll get a different result each time. That’s not because the process is random—it is not—but because it’s extremely difficult to discern the subtle variations in play. “Tiny accidents of history—infinitesimal dust motes, and invisible irregularities in the surface of the tray—get magnified by the positive feedback into major differences in the outcome,” explains M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book
Complexity.

The tray of water is an example of a complex, not complicated, phenomenon. I realize most dictionaries define these two words synonymously. They are, in fact, very different. Complicated things can be explained by examining their individual parts. Complex ones cannot. They
are always greater than the sum of their parts. This dynamic has nothing to do with the number of parts or, say, the cost of the object. A jet engine is complicated. Mayonnaise is complex. You can easily replace a part in a jet engine and not alter its fundamental nature. It’s still a jet engine, though possibly inoperable. With mayonnaise, if you change one ingredient, you run the risk of altering the essence of its mayonnaise-ness. What matters is not the components alone but how they interact with one another. (Speaking of interactions, people tend to describe themselves as complex and their spouse as complicated.)

Complex systems are more likely to produce what scientists call an emergent phenomenon. A simple example of emergence is wetness. What does it mean, from a molecular point of view, to say that something is wet? You can examine individual molecules of water yet not detect anything resembling wetness. Only when enough molecules coalesce does the quality we call wetness emerge. An emergent phenomenon represents a new kind of order created from an old system.

Genius clusters, such as that of Calcutta, are emergent phenomenon, which is why they are so difficult to predict. British and Indian cultures collided, but they did so in complex (not complicated) ways. Alter one variable and you no longer have a golden age.

As we saw in China, creativity is inextricably tied to a culture’s ancient creation myths. The West’s notion of creation ex nihilo, “from nothing,” is only one way of thinking about creativity. There is also an Indian way, and I suspect this, too, explains the creative flourishing.

In 1971, Ralph Hallman, a professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, wrote an obscure academic paper called “Toward a Hindu Theory of Creativity.” Hallman concedes right off the bat that such a theory requires a good deal of guesswork. Nowhere in the Hindu texts is the creative act described explicitly. But consistent threads and themes are found in this ancient literature, and Hallman pieces it together for us.

The Hindu cosmology in some ways resembles the Chinese one. As you recall, the Chinese adhere to a cyclical conception of time and history. There is nothing to invent, only old truths to rediscover and combine in
imaginative ways. “Since man cannot create out of nothing, he can only bring existing materials into new relationships,” says Hallman, noting how this contrasts with the Western view, with its emphasis on novelty.

So ingrained is our fixation on novelty that we can hardly imagine a concept of creativity where it doesn’t feature prominently. If the creative person isn’t actually creating something new, what is she doing? The answer, says Hallman, lies in “substituting
intensity
for
originality
.” For Hindus, the genius is like a lightbulb illuminating a room. The room has always been there and always will. The genius does not create or even discover the room. She illuminates it. This is not insignificant. Without that illumination, we remain ignorant of the room’s existence, and of the wonders that lie inside.

Different faiths emphasize different senses as pathways to the divine. For Hindus, it is vision. When a Hindu goes to a temple, he doesn’t go to “worship” but for
darsan
, to see the image of a deity. Seeing isn’t part of worship, it
is
worship. Seeing, when done properly, is an act not only of devotion but of creation. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Yahweh speaks and the world is created. In Hindu cosmology, Brahma sees that the world is already there. Likewise, the creative person sees what others do not. “He has a capacity for noting things, for allowing them to fill his full field of vision,” says Hallman. It is vision as a form of knowledge.

This elevation of vision, above all the other senses, explains a lot. When I look at, say, an Indian bookstore, I see only chaos, with everything from Tagore to Grisham stacked floor to ceiling. The clerk, though,
sees
a hidden order, and when, one day, I request a particular title (a historical novel called
Those Days
), he expertly retrieves it in seconds.

I realize all of Calcutta, then and now, is like this. Hidden order is everywhere—the way the chai wallah prepares each cup of tea in precisely the same manner, the way the rickshaw wallah expertly weaves through traffic. John Chadwick, who helped decipher the ancient Linear B code, once said that it is “the power of seeing order in apparent confusion that has marked the work of all great men.” So, too, does it mark the work of all great places, for in these places good ideas are easier to see. They pop.

Looking at creativity this way changes everything. It’s no longer about
knowing but about seeing. Steve Jobs was no Hindu and may or may not have been a genius, but he clearly recognized the importance of vision. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty,” he said in a rare moment of humility, “because they didn’t really do it, they just
saw
something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

The college that David Hare founded all those years ago (now called Presidency University) has, like so much of this city, seen better days. Everywhere the paint is peeling and chipped. The words
faded
and
decaying
spring to mind. If I try, though, I can picture life back in the day: the crush of students, the sense of infinite possibilities, that feeling that you were, if not creating a new world, certainly re-creating one.

I stroll among the stolid red-sandstone buildings, with their significant archways and important columns. I spot the requisite painting of Tagore in fulsome white beard and black robes, along with busts of revered professors from the golden days. All very interesting, but not whom I have come to see.

Finally, I spot a small sign that directs me toward the physics department. On the wall, someone has scrawled a piece of highbrow graffiti: “Space and time would have evolved in a better way without us.” It strikes me as a very Bengali thing to say: cerebral, in an inscrutable way, and mildly subversive.

The large office I step into now requires no squinting. It hasn’t changed at all since the nineteenth century. Inside, I find an elegant silver samovar, a blackboard, a wooden “grievance box,” giant steel filing cabinets, an old Parisian clock, a photo of Einstein, and in one corner a jumble of rusting laboratory equipment.

The office once belonged to Jagadish Bose. He was the Bengal Renaissance’s scientist extraordinaire, the first Indian to break into the until-then closed club that was Western science. Bose invented one of the first semiconductors, for which he reluctantly accepted India’s first patent. (For years, Bose had resisted, arguing that scientific breakthroughs belonged to the world.) He also conducted experiments involving radio waves and, according to some accounts, invented the radio itself years before Marconi.