How do we grasp the flaws of genuis?  Pablo Picasso, one of the twentieth century's most famous and innovative artists, is unfortunately equally known for how he mistreated some of the many women who passed through his life.  He was indeed a flawed genuis.
     Lest we be too hard on Picasso and without excusing his episodes of misogny, we ought to say that sometimes the ones who deconstruct our reality (as he did with his cubism and his techniques of printmaking) best are the ones who create the most profoundly.  In taking the world apart, they put it back together in new ways, ways that encourage all of us to embark on new journeys into the visions of our imagination.  We all grow into a deeper appreciation of what it means to be human.  When the artist wrestles with reality, we find incentive to wrestle with it, too.
     Not that reality, as it is presently constituted, is necessarily bad, for it is not, but that when we wrestle with reality, when we take apart what is, we often find what really is.  We come before the "why" of create, the "why" that lies beneath the surface of the "what" that is merely a cause, not an effect.  We learn that although we, like Picasso, are deeply flawed yet marvelous beings who live in a deeply broken yet vastly amazing world, we do so as creators, those who can make reality new, at least in our perceptions.  Yet we are only creators who create because we live in a universe pervaded by the omnipresent and mysterious creative genuis of God.
     As Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, pointed out many centuries ago, if the created purposes to create, the created ought to remember that she, too, is a flawed creation, a fractured genius living before a creator who causelessly and sovereignly creates.  Otherwise, all we have are effects.
     And without a cause, effects mean nothing.