Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter One: The Cosmos (section)

===The Nature of Inspiration===
''There Is A Pattern In This Chaos''

''"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

''-Umberto Eco''

Ideas come from somewhere. At least the big ones do. Even the most staunchly rational peer recognizes that there is something extraordinary at work in the making of wonders. A thing outside the genius, that transcends mortal ideas of brilliance and talent, is born when a wonder awakens for the first time and stares down at its creator with eyes of smoky agate or photosensitive titanium alloy. An Inspired is nothing without Inspiration, and Inspiration is greater than any mortal mind.

But what is it? What is Inspiration? Geniuses throughout history have tormented themselves with that question, developing philosophies, theories, and incomplete, lurching models to account for all the phenomena that Inspiration gives rise to. Over the years, those Inspired that comprise the Peerage―the society of free geniuses―have produced five foundations with philosophies to explain the nature of Inspiration and to guide new geniuses through their first hesitant experiments.

To the Artificers, Inspired who delight foremost in the creation of new wonders, the universe in which we live is broken, or sick. Once, it worked perfectly, a single, vast organism. But something wounded it, ripped it apart, flinging scraps of broken life across a dozen realities and leaving howling voids between them. But so perfect was Creation that the disparate organs still function: this physical world, the world of mechanical law where people live in skins of meat, still works. It works so well, in fact, that mortals can construct explanations for how this maimed world functions. The genius, however, sees the whole picture: the physical, the psychical, the statistical, mathematical, and teleological; she sees it all at once, and those are her laws, not the half-truths and shadow-answers of mortal science. A genius performs True Science, as if the cosmos were whole and healthy. What she does looks impossible to mortals, but only because they can only see a single cell of a far vaster organism.

Directors, with their focus on social interaction, see Inspiration as the “big lie.” A genius, the Directors say, has learned the science of "tricking" the universe. Modern Directors invoke the principles of quantum mechanics: the uncertain nature of the universe means that, for very small scales of space and time, the impossible happens with troubling frequency. And like particles and antiparticles appearing simultaneously out of a common nothing, the genius' deranged inner state and the mad things he produces exist for a time before falling back into mundanity. Inspiration is the art and science of bringing those impossible things from the 
quantum world into our own macroscopic world, and greater Inspiration allows the genius to maintain her wonders―and her own perilous, half-mad existence―for longer periods of time. There is no final cheat; there's only keeping the ruse going for just a little longer.

To the Navigators, Inspired who are as interested in using inventions as conceiving and building them, there is a sort of existence even in non-existence. "Existence" is merely another property, they say, like "being green," and things that don't exist still possess properties, not as a sort of play-on-words, but literally. It doesn't matter that Darth Vader isn't real, right? He's still evil. So it's no surprise that impossible things happen all the time: a bit of genius, to break down the barriers between the real world and the infinite reaches of the Not, and a person can call the impossible into the possible realm. It's not easy, and it's definitely not safe, but it can be done. And impossible things are not limited in such mundane ways as those things that make up the World That Is. They can be contradictory, deranged, beautiful, and meaningful: they can be wonders, things that should not be, in a world all too cluttered with Stuff That Just Is.

To the Progenitors, those geniuses obsessed with growth and change, Inspiration is the result of "sheer force" between what is true and what is false. Their flexible minds embrace the paradox of Inspiration: a genius is Inspired because he can do the impossible, and since he can do things impossible in this world, he is Inspired. Little glitches in mind and nature, in the world within and the world without, add up, and at times of great internal and external stress, spiral out of control. "Impossibility" itself is a sort of power, and that power can reach a critical mass, and ignite like a new sun. When it ignites, a genius is born.

To the Scholastics, geniuses who see idea and concept as paramount, Inspiration is the manifestation of a more pure universe, a realm of Idea, as it struggles to enter this dark world. There are things in that realm of Idea, living concepts, "intelligences" of a sort, and they are curious. Not malevolent―though their intrusions can be destructive―but determined to enter. Yet they cannot survive in our ruinous world, no more than a human could survive at the black bottom of the sea or in a poisoned wasteland. Instead they have found a halfway point in mortal thoughts, "piggybacking" in minds and (now) in computer code. Some minds, the Scholastics say, are special, somehow uniquely formed, and around these minds, for a time, those beings of Idea can live for a time in our world, as the wonders a genius creates.

While each Lemurian baramin has its own ideas about the nature of Inspiration, Lemuria as a whole rejects the idea that they could be blinkered, incorrect, or insane. Today's Lemurians, like today's Directors, often invoke quantum principles to explain Inspiration. Lemuria says that the natural state of the universe allows multiple overlapping realities to exist, but that the crude and unInspired observation of regular mortals disrupts this natural equilibrium, forcing a single interpretation on the world. Geniuses, by contrast, are freed from this mundane limitation by their more refined intellects and can entertain multiple explanations and 
even realities at the same time―their observations do not "collapse the wave-form." This means that, for a Lemurian, her interpretation of the world―theories, wonders, and all―is correct, at least locally, and that attempts to contradict her opinions on the matter are not so much the result of competing ideas, formed logically, so much as a direct assault on the integrity of the Lemurian's worldview, an assault put forth for ideological reasons. For a Lemurian, communication is violence in a very real sense, as other ideas threaten to destroy the uniqueness of her perspective and replace it with the bland homogeneity of mundane humanity's 
singular interpretation of the world.

Are any of these ideas correct? It's impossible to tell. The foundations' notions of Inspiration serve to ground a new genius, to help form a model, however incomplete, of what has happened to him; most Inspired pay only nominal attention to the core theory of Inspiration put forth by their foundation. But just having some kind of a model―rather than believing that the rest of the world is mad and they alone are sane, as the unmada do, or caring nothing for mortal reason like the Illuminated―sustains a genius through the first difficult months of his new existence. Those who fail to form some kind of model―any kind of model that moves beyond "I must be right and everyone else is insane"―with which to understand their experiences are 
prone to madness and psychological disintegration.