The death of Diego Maradona, the very flawed and tortured genius, has millions of us wearing our hearts on our sleeves as we think, write and talk about him.
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Some are already prompted to ask the hardy perennial old question of whether or not geniuses should be so revered for their accomplishments that we forgive them their trespasses. The stubby little maestro's terrible flaws, including his addictions to drugs and sex, are legendary.
Coincidentally up pops in the online The Point a smart, cranky, jaundiced discussion of genius and of flawed geniuses.
In her piece Torturing Geniuses, writer Agnes Ballard, a public philosopher, discusses genius and geniuses through the prism of some repulsive geniuses she has personally suffered.
Back to the refreshingly peevish Agnes Ballard in a moment after owning up that on the matter of Maradona and genius my first inclination is to worship him and his memory. I am a passionate fan of football, the Beautiful Game to which Maradona in his heyday contributed so much added beauty, rather like an illustrious tenor adding lustre to an already wondrous opera. My first inclination is to think that the might and magic of his football achievements makes irrelevant his off-the-field sins.
Are those of us who love Diego Maradona guilty of unthinkingly laundering his personality?
But then, making one uncomfortable with so sentimental a stance, along comes unsentimental Agnes Ballard.
She begins with four graphic descriptions of four occasions on which she personally had to suffer an insufferable genius (a different genius each time).
So for example she recalls "At a dinner after a conference, a genius was arguing with me and became frustrated with my unwillingness to accept his point. He started touching me - not in a sexual way, and not in a violent way, but something halfway in between - putting his hand on my hand, my arm, eventually my neck to emphasise his points. He did this in full view of everyone. No one stopped him, including me."
"Once I invited a genius over to my house for dinner. He came an hour late, with an entourage, and handed me a half-empty bag of popcorn he had been eating as a hostess gift. As the conversation turned philosophical, he quieted his entourage, signalling that this part of the evening did not involve them."
Ballard's piece may stimulate in all of us a kind of sudden cataloguing of our experiences with geniuses we have met. Were any of them, or all of them, obnoxious?
"Genius is a personality-laundering scheme," Ballard thinks, in which one finds the geniuses' admirers always reclassifying their idols' bad behaviour as only "charming idiosyncrasy".
"[And] it is telling that 'genius' is virtually synonymous with 'tortured genius'. The myth is of the genius 'tortured' by some internal struggle the rest of us are not smart enough to understand. [But] the real torture is the one we enact by classifying people as geniuses, to serve our own fantasies ... Geniuses are the monsters we make."
Are those of us who love Diego Maradona guilty of unthinkingly laundering his personality? Prompted by the probing Agnes Ballard I will examine my attitude to Maradona tomorrow, or the day after. Today I remain infatuated with him.
But why? Everywhere I find commentators struggling to express why his passing seems so shattering. One of the shattered strugglers, Leslie Xavier writing for the online NewsClick, tries to compare Maradona's great football with great poetry. Those of us passionate about fine football and about fine poetry may think that the struggling Xavier is on to something, is kicking a goal when he muses "Almost everyone loves football, and, yes, almost every other person you meet hates poetry."
"But then, a beautiful goal is always poetry, a flourish on the ball is poetry in motion. Diego Maradona's death is the death of poetry in football, some established names in the game [are saying]. Maybe this is because of football's perceived and inherent [poetic] beauty [as best exemplified by Maradona]."
"Maradona is much like poetry. We all want to connect with him now in death, much like we wanted to be part of him in his prime, or even in his days struggling to come to grips with the reality of a much abused body and spirit. The connection is perhaps to validate our love for football. He was born to breathe poetry into the game."