THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

The Expulsive Model: From Planetary Biology to Creative Genius (Text from 2025©)

What if we freed ourselves from the anthropocentric illusion that leads us to believe we are active subjects in the great comedy of biological existence? The truth might be cruder and at the same time more fascinating. We are all, from the Californian sequoias to the intestinal bacteria, products of a gigantic discharge operation that the planet enacts when its innards fill beyond the limit of tolerance. Think of that pimple that appears on your face before an important appointment, it is not the pimple that decides to emerge and ruin your evening, but your skin that can no longer contain the accumulation of sebum, bacteria and cellular debris fermenting in the deeper layers of the epidermis. When the tension becomes unbearable, the organism finds the shortest way out and pushes that infected mass to the surface, creating the swelling you so dislike. Now multiply this mechanism by the entire planet, the Earth is an immense organism that continuously accumulates solar energy, organic decomposition, chemical reactions, tectonic movements, and when these processes reach critical thresholds of concentration, the terrestrial system is forced to release them through the expulsion of living forms. The tree you see growing in the park is not "growing" in the romantic sense we give to that word, it is being literally fired out of the ground like a biological projectile charged with all the geochemical energy that has condensed in the subsoil. The roots are forcibly extruded by the concentration of mineral nutrients seeking dispersal through drainage channels. The trunk rising toward the sky does not follow a noble heliotropic impulse, but obeys the physical laws of hydrostatic pressure that pushes sap upward to relieve the tension accumulated in the root tissues. The leaves opening to the sun are not intelligent solar panels, but release surfaces through which excess photosynthetic energy can finally evaporate into the atmosphere, avoiding the implosion of the vegetable system. This expulsive dynamic governs every biological manifestation with an implacable logic that admits no romantic or teleological exceptions. When two gametes fuse to give rise to an embryo, we are not witnessing the miracle of life blossoming, but the inevitable consequence of the accumulation of genetic information that has reached an extremely high density within the egg cell and must necessarily be discharged through the construction of a complex organism. Human behaviour too, in its most sophisticated manifestations, is nothing but a refined form of tensional discharge. When you speak, write, play an instrument, make love, laugh or cry, you are simply releasing neurochemical excesses that have accumulated in your brain and must find outflow channels to avoid synaptic overloads. The evolution of species loses every halo of purposeful progress to reveal itself as a succession of genetic explosions determined by the growing instability of hereditary material. When DNA accumulates mutations beyond its capacity for self-correction, the only way out is the expulsion of organismic variants that function as safety valves for the excess genetic information. Natural selection does not reward the fittest, but simply allows the survival of the most efficient expulsive configurations in draining evolutionary pressure. Mass extinctions do not represent random catastrophes, but moments of systemic rebalancing in which the planet massively discharges the biological accumulations that have become unsustainable for the global energy economy. We are not the protagonists of the evolutionary drama, but symptoms of planetary imbalances seeking compensation through our temporary existence. Biodiversity is not wealth in itself, but an index of environmental instability: the richer an ecosystem is in species, the more it reveals the system's need to multiply discharge channels to manage energy accumulations beyond tolerance limits.

But it is in the phenomenon of creative genius that this expulsive logic reveals its most extraordinary and paradoxical manifestation. Genius represents the extreme consequence of that same principle that pushes the tree out of the ground and the pimple through the epidermis, applied however to the sphere of human experience and symbolic production. Here we must make a fundamental distinction that dismantles centuries of terminological confusion: the ordinary artist is a craftsman of expression, a skilled worker who masters consolidated techniques, applies compositional rules learned in academies and produces works following aesthetic canons codified by tradition. His brain functions like an efficient but limited processor, capable of manipulating pre-existing symbolic materials without ever reaching critical densities of experiential accumulation. The artist works by subtraction, eliminating excess to achieve balanced and recognizable forms, always operating within neurological safety parameters that allow him to maintain control of the creative process. Genius, by contrast, is a completely different biological phenomenon, a nervous system that has reached a very high capacity for experiential accumulation, becoming the receptacle of such a massive quantity of stimuli, sensations, traumas and environmental inputs as to generate expulsive pressures of extraordinary intensity that exceed every normal threshold of containment. While the artist consciously chooses what to express and how to express it, the genius undergoes the expulsion of accumulated material without any possibility of rational control, producing works that often surprise and frighten him with their unexpected intensity. The difference is not one of degree but of nature: the artist is a technician of beauty, the genius is a neurological victim of his own capacity for experiential absorption. Creative genius is not a divine gift nor a mysterious talent, but the inevitable physiological response to the abnormal accumulation of lived experiences that sediment in the nervous system, reaching very high densities in the neural circuits of the individual. When a genius stands before the blank canvas, the empty page or musical silence, he is not about to give life to a superior inner vision, but is about to discharge an explosive concentration of lived images, emotions layered over time, fragments of observed reality and biographical tensions that have condensed in his perceptual apparatus with an intensity such as to require channels of liberation of exceptional power. The brush tracing its first strokes does not obey a conscious artistic project, but follows the lines of least resistance traced by the gradients of tension accumulated in the cerebral cortex. The colours chosen, the forms that emerge, the final composition are not the fruit of considered aesthetic decisions, but the automatic result of the direction and intensity of the internal pressures seeking liberation through the painterly gesture. The gifted writer who sits at his desk to compose a work is not about to construct a literary creation, but is about to lighten the superhuman load of words, images, narrative situations, overheard dialogues, encountered characters, lived and observed conflicts that ferment in his memory and must be expelled to prevent the collapse of the linguistic-cognitive system. The plot that develops with apparent spontaneity, the characters that seem to take on autonomous life, the dialogues that spring forth as if by magic do not arise from creative imagination, but from the desperate necessity of the brain to organize into coherent narrative structures the superabundant psychic material that would otherwise produce mental fragmentation and loss of cognitive control. Music too reveals its nature as a purely expulsive phenomenon when we consider that the gifted composer does not create melodies dictated by some superhuman entity, but transforms into sound waves the neurochemical vibrations that have accumulated in his auditory-emotional apparatus through years of listening, study, existential suffering and immersion in the sonic environment. The notes chosen, the rhythms developed, the harmonies constructed correspond exactly to the frequencies of the internal tensions that must be discharged through acoustic organisation. The gifted performer executing the piece is not communicating emotions to the audience according to a conscious expressive will, but is using the audience itself as a discharge surface to release the sonic pressures that the musical work has generated in his nervous system during study, memorisation and technical preparation. The audience, in turn, does not aesthetically engage with the performance according to categories of the beautiful or the sublime, but functions as an absorber of the genius's expressive tensions, allowing the circulation and redistribution of psychic energy through mechanisms of emotional resonance that maintain in equilibrium the entire social system involved in the artistic event. Even the reception of works of genius by the general public follows this implacable logic. When we visit a painting exhibition, attend a Bach concert or read a complex novel, we are not enriching our culture or elevating our spirit according to the clichés of humanistic formation, but are using the work of genius as a release valve for the existential, cognitive and emotional tensions that have accumulated in our daily life and require channels of liberation. The aesthetic emotion, the artistic pleasure, even the feeling of being moved before a masterpiece are nothing other than symptoms of the discharge process in action, physiological signals indicating the achieved liberation of psychic pressures through contact with expressive structures that function as conductors for excess mental energy. Genius, in this perspective, ceases to be a creator and becomes a transducer, a biological device specialised in the conversion of experiential accumulations into symbolic forms that allow the social circulation of individual and collective tensions.

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