Albert Einstein’s office Ñ just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it Ñ taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955.
Having been the butt of derision and mockery for too many years for my “messy” desk (and office), I believe I have at last found an effective remedy for silencing my many sneering critics once and for all. This despite the rise of those obnoxious “Tidy Up” books purporting to tell one how to clean up and organize every last post-it covered with IMPORTANT ideas for future reference as well as grocery store lists going back at least ten years. Coiled like a snake among the lines of these dangerous self-important “books” is the implicit promise to painlessly and effortlessly defenestrate one’s indoor habitat of all points of visual and intellectual interest, rough drafts of potential award-winning novels, important phone numbers, email addresses. Whew. Just thinking about all that crap makes me dizzy.
[Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618, which became the spark that started the Thirty Years’ War.]
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, by way of introduction, you will recall that it is a well known fact that writers and artists are sloppy slobs (a redundancy, so what? It’s called for). Disordered personal space is one of the chief signatures of the “artistic temperament.” It simply cannot be “improved” upon or otherwise corrected. It is as indelible and compelling as one’s DNA. Housekeeping is not a strong suit of the creative types of our species. You can quote me on that.
The tidy freaks of this world are the common enemy of the artistic impulse. Everybody knows that. Chaos follows genius wherever it is inspired (key word) to go, ever careening and zig-zagging through the unexplored wilds of the universe. Nay, such is a veritable sign and irrefutable proof that one does indeed have great talent, and the bigger the mess that accompanies an artist, the greater the talent. For chaos is itself the womb of the masterpiece that nourishes and makes ripe the essential fecund circumstances for the birth of artistic masterpieces (begging your pardon, I may have already used that word two or three times in this sentence), if not seismic rearrangement of space/time.
Following me?
If we can agree on that, I can defend my customary (though not deliberate) office disarray as the normal consequence of my artistic labors and indicative of talent to some degree, however small. [See photo below]
Some points of interest:
- Given the drifts and piles of paper obscuring the surface of my desk (see photo above), it would appear that whatever my faults and short-comings when it comes to “genius,” (or talent), the work space of yours truly here (vis-a-vis my desk) seems to indicate that, if nothing else, I am the more “productive” or possibly experimental or possibly verbose, when viewed side by side with Einstein’s rather meager, puny drafts.
- He was obviously parsimonious with words; it is clear I am not, often having more to say on any given subject than any given subject warrants.
- When viewed side by side with the authentic in loco parentis of true genius, any point of comparison, however broad and lacking incontrovertible evidence, falls short. Have I made myself clear? I believe the forgoing substantially demonstrate that.
- The really Big Brains among us would seem do most of their ruminating and cogitating inside the craniun, spurning paperly exegesis for the Internet, and leaving to others the miserable task of translating the complexities of the artists’ thoughts into the crude lingua franca of the hoi polloi, typing out mundane explanations of their break-through of the moment.
- ? forgot what I was going to say . . . .
- Professor Einstein’s desk has a serene subtle sense of order that mine lacks: His books are mostly stacked at right angles, his papers are gathered into sly stacks, implying that each stack has an underlying theme or a cohesive organizing principle.
- The photograph of Einstein’s desk is in black and white, suggesting, or perhaps re-enforcing, the notion that his theories are as true as true can be, everything about them is black and white self-evident, while the snap of my magic carpet of a desk is a wild profusion of colors and shimmerings of light.
- Though I cannot be sure at this far remove of space and time, I would wager, given the whirlwind antic profusion of color on my desk and its surroundings versus the the stiff and grim setting of Einstein’s desk, that one would be hard pressed to find a book of poetry or set of earbuds on it.
Summation and conclusion to follow after I find some mumbling spaced out genius to explain what all that blackboard chicken scratch behind the desk means.
Thank you for your time, fellow geniuses, and thank you, Albert Einstein, for sharing your space with us.
To complete the comparison and really understand, requires photographic evidence, please!
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There are two large photos.
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I swear I looked for them, but maybe they just show up on my computer. Will try again!
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they show up on mine in WP at my site. The post makes not much sense without them
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Sorry they are there now. Now everything is crystal clear. WordPress is acting really clunky, or maybe it is just my computer! Sorry about that!!!
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Glad you can see them now!
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Despite all evidence to the contrary, the state of my writing space indicates that I, too, am a genius!
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Post a picture!
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A tidied version exists here: https://robertokaji.com/2017/07/07/my-writing-space/
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I
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I’m stunned. I’ve never known a genius poet so neat! Just think of all the masterpieces you might have penned if you hadn’t spent all that time straightening up and pushing a mop!
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I have to admit that I straightened up before taking the photos. I’ll post today’s photo on my blog, with a link to your post. I think my genius really, uh, shines in it. 🙂
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Ah, that’s the spirit! If your’e a genius, post that everywhere, send out a press release. Not everybody is, you know.
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Has anyone written a good poem on messiness?
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I know that I’ve read several, but can’t seem to remember where or by whom. Surely something will come to me. Probably at 3:00 a.m.
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Well, don’t keep it to yourself
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I’ll be sure to share.
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Everybody shares everything today. You might need some proof or evidence. Make lots of copies of your photo to keep in your back pocket
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It’s up on the blog!
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Yay, this might confirm my own genius!
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Robert, you could write a haiku on it.I’d tape it to a wall right over the slippery sliding mass of 20 years of New Yorkers
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Now that’s a thought!
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You two remind me of my stint in a doctoral program, during which I realized in reading scholarly articles that a handful of authors were always citing each other’s work, creating a great tautological masquerade for authority. Of course, I am saying this only because I am neat, and by your theorem, now assured of my creative mediocrity, which I have long suspected. Thus sadly affirmed, I am off to clean my house to comfort myself.
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When you finish, you are welcome to clean mine
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Ha! Cate, your creativity is anything but mediocre, no matter how neat you are. You are obviously an outlier in the data set. 😀
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Margaret, you and Professor Einstein make me feel SO much better about the state of my desk and home office. This made my day. 🙂
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Yes! And there even worst cases! See Jill Kremitz’s A WRITER’S DESK
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Pingback: I May be a Genius | O at the Edges
What may look like a mess to most may really be organized in the one who works there and knows exactly where everything is when you ask.
Dwight
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Absolutely. Einsteindid win the Nobel for neatness
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Sometimes there is a method to the madness!!
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Whoops, make that Einstein did NOT win the Nobel for neatness
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Love this! Especially love the inviting 5th bullet … which could apply to any number of specifics on either of the two desks under focus.
I promptly stood up to take an impromptu photo of my workspace [image of Einstein’s desk on my computer screen – thank you!] which becomes one more oddity in my “Still Life” photo file.
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We’ve all had too much fun with this! Most of us are writers, artists and photographers. Boy are we a messy bunch
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Send me the photo! Let’s see how truly messy you are and how much of a genius you are!
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Well, now. I can clearly see at least one way in which you (and Mr. Okaji, and I) are clearly superior to Mr. Einstein: That man had EMPTY BOOKSHELVES!!!!! What is wrong with him?!?!? Clearly not, as you say, the space of a writer. Tsk, tsk.
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