Genius or Crazy Person?

I've always been convinced that the line separating genius from just plain batshit crazy was blurry, at best. Perhaps virtually nonexistent. And yes, that bothers me (because I'd like to think I'm not crazy, so my hopes for ever being thought of as a creative genius are slim to none). But it also just makes sense. You can't be mind-blowingly talented at something without being fairly mentally unbalanced.

I'm thinking about this again because I just read the Adam Gopnik article from TNY's October Arts Issue about "abridgment, enrichment, and the nature of art." He talks about the Orion abridged editions of classics like Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina and basically decides that, while perhaps "better" books from an objective critical standpoint, the abridged versions lose that unbalanced edge that make them masterpieces. When you cut out the shit from a novel, sometimes you cut out the very weirdness that made it great. I think he sums this idea up best by saying:

"The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldn't be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses and self-indulgent excesses ... What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental."

I like this. Very much. It gives me hope for my own writing process. Time to stop trying to make everything objectively "perfect" and just focus on what I want to say, whether or not an editor would approve.