Notes from the Editor’s Desk - 10/15/21

We often fail to differentiate receptive talents from the creative. A receptive talent can do with greater regularity what is their ken, and this means that academic, media and literary institutions get filled with mediocre talents, these especially nacreous because they take their apparent success as an indication of their romantic ideal of what it is to be a thinker. A creative talent is far likelier to go through periods of confusion and is generally unreliable. Both can be great or mediocre. When receptivity is mediocre, an appeal to pedigree is required for engagement, and so a generation’s creative talents and receptive talents generally look past one another. Their concordance likely constitutes an epoch, but for this to occur again would require the death of our institutionalized values. A dismal obsession with superheroes as the primary medium of America’s self-expression illustrates the impossibility of this happening anytime soon. In the realm of literature, and likely in realms in which I have less experience, no institution long endures where the receptive talents allow for the creative to prevail. Superheroes, although useful in that they are ultimately uncomplicated totems for the telling of stories to children, have become absurd to the degree that they represent what cultural aspirations the most adamant and deluded of us wish to achieve: immortality, imperviousness, irrational fancy, impossibility, godliness, righteous individuality, unbridled power, and a persistence that continues long after the original substance of the ideas has been exhausted. To better cement this aspiration in reality, a willingness to mutilate one’s body or lose one’s mind has been demonstrated. Between Falstaff and Superman, look for instruction in the one that can die, not only in himself, but also in the context of how he came to be. Literature founds nations, and institutionalized values, when they outlive their origination, ring its death knell.