On Prodigies Part I

On Prodigies

Part I

If the earth continues its revolution around the sun, if my heart continues to beat and there’s still breath in my body, I will turn 27 come this November. And as I do every November—it’s my version of a pumpkin-spice latte—I will read Keats’s Ode to Autumn, and I will be so impressed with this ode that I will read another one of his odes, Ode to a Nightingale. I won’t end with his Ode to a Nightingale, though. Ode to a Nightingale will only sharpen the appetite. After reading these two odes, I will read his masterpiece, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and then, depending on the strength of my inclination, I might read Hyperion and Endymion, two of his longer works. But this year reading Keats will be slightly different. It will be slightly different because at 27-years-old, I will have already outlived Keats. Ode to Autumn, Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode on a Grecian Urn, not to mention his other fabulous poetry, were all written before Keats passed away at the tragic age of 26. Tuberculosis snuffed him out in the prime of his life.

Keats will now be a member of that cruel constellation of writers who wrote their masterpieces when they were younger than me. He will join the ranks of Mary Shelley, who put her final touches on Frankenstein at 19, and Arthur Rimbaud, whose Season in Hell was written when the poet was...19. I will continue to labor on my own short stories and my own novel underneath their young and contemptuous gaze.

There’s a pressure when you’re young to be above average, which sounds noble and, within reason, is noble. Why not strive to be above average, to be great? Shoot for the moon and if you miss you land in the stars, unless you’re JFK, in which case if you shoot for the moon, you damn well better land on the moon.

But the problem is that we don’t just aim to be above average. We aim to be in the 99th percentile, to be valedictorians, to be summa cum laude. We aim to be the best, to be extraordinary, to be on lists that proclaim we are the 30 best entrepreneurs, the 30 best writers, artists, and musicians under the age of 30. And this aim to be the best while still young has fostered the poisonous cultural phenomenon known as “the prodigy.” To be a prodigy one must meet two criteria. The first criterion is that they are extraordinary, that they possess skill and ability beyond ordinary comprehension. The second criterion is that they are young. After a certain age, you can no longer be a prodigy.

There’s a pressure to be a prodigy. Many parents quietly nurse dreams that their child is a prodigy, and so they pump their newborn prodigy full of Mozart for babies, hoping that the baroque music will somehow inflame the child’s innate brilliance. And it’s fitting that it’s Mozart for babies and not Brahms for babies because Mozart was himself a prodigy. He was young, and he possessed extraordinary powers beyond ordinary comprehension, thus meeting both of the prodigy criteria laid out.

I don’t mean to suggest that this pressure to be extraordinary disappears when you grow older or that this pressure is unique to younger people. At this current moment in time, and in this country especially, the pressure to be extraordinary is strong and irresistible. But when you’re young, there is a particular intensity to this pressure. And this intensity springs, in part, from the desire to be a prodigy and the understanding that in order to be a prodigy one must be young. And as one ages, the prodigy window closes and closes until it’s shut.

The media provides us with no shortage of prodigies. Social media spotlights the extraordinary talents of young people. To consider the media’s diseased brain, to consider its pathology is to consider our own preoccupation with youth in general and extraordinary youth in particular. The media is giving us what we want. We are also at fault it seems. But the media has, in large part, amplified this obsession with prodigies. And the media has helped formulate the two different career paths available to prodigies.

If you’re a prodigy, your career options boil down to two distinct alternatives. The first option is that you disappear. You fade from our national consciousness, evanescing until there is hardly any memory of you. This is what happened to my beloved Bob Dylan, who had distinguished himself as a prodigy by writing and recording tracks like Blowing in the Wind when he was a mere 20, and Like a Rolling Stone when he was 24. By the 1980s, though, Dylan was in the awkward position of being an ancient prodigy. He was no longer young. He had released some flops. People no longer regarded him as a teenaged soothsayer, as a spokesman of his generation, as a reedy-voiced troubadour who could walk on water. He was forgotten. Of his life in the 1980s, Dylan wrote in his memoir, “I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.” And that’s what can happen to prodigies. They can be all but effaced from the record. Their accomplishments are rendered null and void. As Gore Vidal put it, this country is “The United States of Amnesia.” We are obsessed with the here and now. We are quick to forget.

But time passes. People begin to remember the prodigy or performer. They wistfully think of the performer and of the performer’s music. The music, once forgotten, is now evocative of a simpler, more innocent time. And so the performer, on the shoulders of nostalgia, is able to climb up out of American oblivion.

I said there were two distinct alternatives for prodigies. The first, as I’ve just described it, involves being forgotten, and after a period of time, being remembered. The second career path for prodigies is much easier to describe because it’s so much simpler. The second career path for prodigies is death. For some, this career path might seem disagreeable because, well, it involves one’s death. But for others it’s a way out, an escape route from the mounting public pressure. Pioneers of this career path are people like Jim Morrison and James Dean. Jim Morrison, who always cherished a bit of a death wish, died under mysterious circumstances in Paris at the age of 27. He was in Paris to get away from it all—the pressure and the attention. He hoped to pursue his lifelong dream of being a poet. James Dean—who also cherished a death wish—died at 24, crashing his Porsche Spyder in a head-on collision outside Cholame, California. Reflecting on Dean’s death, actor Humphrey Bogart said, “it’s a good thing Dean died when he did. If he’d lived, he’d never have been able to live up to the publicity.” The same can be said for any prodigy. Through death, they become a kind of martyr. They are canonized and their memory is immortalized. They’re able to escape the pressure, too.

It’s dangerous to be a prodigy. It’s an existence littered with corpses. And yet, many young people feel themselves to be worthless since their talents fall far short of those of the prodigies. It’s a dismal set of affairs. Who’s to blame? The media? Yes, to a certain extent. But obsession with talented young people who die early deaths is a phenomenon much older than the media. It’s a phenomenon that was forged by poets thousands of years ago, and it’s a phenomenon that we’ve never been able to shake.

Poets? Yes, poets are to blame. Don’t let their meek and harmless and diffident exteriors fool you. Despite their innocent interest in words, despite their pretensions to truth and beauty, poets have contributed more to the obsession with talented, and therefore damned, youth than any other body of people. They’re the ones who established the dangerous precedent of praising an early and glorious death. And if we trace this precedent to its wellspring, we see that Homer was the first poet to do so.

To be continued in Part II of On Prodigies. It will be available next week.