Lover of life

 This past few days I have been reading from a book with the odd title, "Living biographies." This is contradictory to the second to last entry which gives a rather flowery account of the death of one Dostoyevsky. If he is dead, why is it a living account?

I might have laid the book aside except for the title, which makes no sense. And so, I read the first biography, of one Boccacio, who has bestowed upon me the great gift of a calling. I now have the beautiful task ahead to retell all of his tales so that the readers can enjoy what is thought by many to be a beautiful work by an entirely unavailable genius. It is hard to read. A simple statement restated and restated. I will get started on that asap.

I am an admirer of the genius mind and have written about it. I am working on impossible dreams and have become equipped with introductory and now seasoned accounts of the essence of genius. The idea behind a genius is that they are unique. I say it is uniqueness and infamy squared. Boccacio writes fiction in a time before fiction had become a development. He has been given the rare title of being a "first among a kind", his being the hugely successful novel. Of course, his stories were hardly what would be called novel material by today's standards. I tried reading them, they're impossible. 

I liked reading this morning about Boccacio because he has given me hope where I felt a bit stuck in my art. I was a painter once, but now I am an amateur painter. Isn't that funny? But being a first does have its amateur qualities. And as I am trying to create something that is, in a pun, novel, I am getting to know the genius process. To me it is the first position in all of life. (And that has made me more aware of the possibilities of what is out there, like black holes and movie stars.)  

There is a critical line drawn in between the work of the talent and the receiver. The talent is the worker, a craftsman who must please the audience in such a way as to be able to continue his livelihood. The receiver the critic. The unacquainted. The displeased or enthralled, the detail jockey, the skimmer. The vast array of critics is as compared to the wide way by which the soul must enter in. And the narrow way is that of the master.

If God were present, what would he say about genius? I know that it is an impression that is made more than it is truth or standard. And that gives pause to this writer's mind.

 It is the admixture of goodness poured in and accomplishment that makes the masterful man, and then we decide the rest.

I see in Boccacio the life loving testimony of a man who was a giver. He wrote his greatest work for those hiding from the black plague almost a millennia ago. He had a taste for love, sex, death and the grotesque. He wrote according to whim and that gifted him with an unparalleled distinction among those in known history. Where his contemporaries were of equal or greater value, he was of renown for being the sidewinder. And his prize is invention.

Life cannot be better than this.