WHO IS A GENIUS? I have had the unfortunate opportunity to look at some pamphlets and books on my family trees. The people who wrote them were too anxious to put everyone into categories based, I suppose, on some questionnaire or superficial research. It amazed me to find my father, who died a multimillionaire, listed as a bus driver. Yes, it's true, he drove a bus part time for approximately two years while he was starting his landholding empire, but all his life he considered himself a businessman, which he was. My father-in-law, on the other hand, was listed as a businessman, but he considered himself a machinist. Some machinist - he invented the machines that he needed to set up a large door factory. I called him, affectionately, the door magnet, because he was very wealthy. I, sadly, am doomed in the family histories to be a teacher, which I was for some years while I was developing my financial holdings. As it is highly unlikely that I will be listed as a renaissance man or a talented artist, I would at least prefer to be known as a space merchant, as landlords are not often folk heroes in our culture. I have nothing against teachers, I just don't want to be remembered as one and since I never stayed in teaching long enough to get a pension, I don't see why I should. I even drive a Rolls Royce so no one will mistake me for a school trustee, school superintendent, or any of the other assortment of petty buggers who troubled my life. All this hostile preamble actually is pertinent to the question: who is a genius?, simply because it is. Being aware of how inaccurate family trees can be, I wondered what history will say about my intelligence. When I started out in school I was classified as retarded. When I entered grade nine at Jr. high school, the counselor told me I was qualified to be in grade five. He signed me up for special courses but, as my friends were in the other classes, I just joined them and got lost in the shuffle. During grade eleven we wrote an I.Q. test. The counselor said if you had such and such a score, the military would have paid for a university education after World War II, when they were retraining veterans. He read the list of names of all that qualified. My name was on the list. Another counselor told me I was about average for a high school student. At university I was told I was average for university students. I tried to point out that being average in a larger group out of which the smaller group was selected based on intelligence made it unlikely that you could keep your original average status. The university counselor just looked confused and shuffled his papers and said, "Well, what that means is that if you interact with ten students at the university, five will be brighter than you and five will not be as bright. I set out on a quest to find the five brighter ones. I never did find them. By accident, I had the privilege of being privately tested by a psychologist who was doing research on the idea of estimating intelligence on the basis of accomplishments. He wanted to have a way of testing famous people who had died before I.Q. tests. After reading my poetry, he decided to test me. His evaluation of me was that I had a genius I.Q. In fact it was so high, it was hard to measure. Now I don't know about you, but I liked that evaluation a lot better than my earlier evaluations and it meant I could stop my quest to find people brighter than me. While teaching Psychology and Sociology to first-year college students, the idea came to me that measuring I.Q. is somewhat like determining people's height by measuring the length of their shadows without taking into account where they are standing in relation to the light source. One thing is certain - the brain you have is the best one you can get. Furthermore, everyone should be given the opportunity to be rated as a genius. It is in reality not that tough to do. Simply write out 200 questions you know the answers to and give them in test form to your friends and acquaintances. The best they can do is to have a 200 I.Q. like you have. So who is a genius? You are - start functioning like one. It works for me. Return to the artist's page

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