In our society, the negative meaning of the word “marginal” has entrenched. This is probably due to a direct translation from Latin: "located at the edge, on the border." He gave the word a hue of something declassified, almost rootless. A marginal is one who is on the sidelines, not adjoining either those in front or those who seek to stop time.
That is, such a person falls out of the basic at the moment, stereotypical
perceptions of everything that happens in cultural or social life.
This definition can be applied both to completely uneducated, deserted people who live with primitive desires, and those whose creations and sayings in many years will become something like the Bible. Because at the moment they are just them. And they do not have a generally accepted position in relation to the world around. Marginals are too strange, incomprehensible. They do not fit into the framework, but it scares, makes you wary of such an individual.
Speaking about who such a marginal is, you understand that he cannot have a clearly expressed positive or negative coloring. Indeed, along with the homeless people, drug addicts and “gopniks” who failed to adapt to society and rejected its rules, among the marginalized people there may be such as Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein or Count Tolstoy. They were also “people in themselves”, those who lived by their own rules.
So, a marginal is someone who falls out of the usual, generally accepted, understandable. This is a state of “borderline”, the intermediateness between the understandable and the great, that which will shine in the future, or between the understandable and unfit, indecent, that will disappear with the death of its carrier.
The most amazing in concept, the marginal is the unpredictability of the further development of events for any person who does not fit into the everyday life of his contemporaries. After all, the carriers of this attitude to the world initially do not keep up. So, no one and nothing can affect their future fate. Time itself decides what to live and what should sink into oblivion.
After all, even those who proclaim themselves oppositionists continue to think with generally accepted criteria, obeying the norms of behavior, language, thinking, finally. For a marginal, by definition, there can be no criteria by which we can evaluate his legacy. After all, he is outside of time and situation. Therefore, it’s very easy to take someone’s quackery for innovation, and consider a “person from the future” crazy.
This is the tragedy of the situation. It is very difficult for true prophets to get through, and it is easy for false prophets to give wrong, false guidelines. No, there are no clear criteria in art and culture to determine the truth of a phenomenon.
A marginal is one who accumulates, develops the peculiarities of thinking, the principles that will be adopted in future generations. It is a kind of yeast on which a new image of humanity will rise. What is now considered non-systemic may tomorrow become the prevailing opinion and norm of perception. But it may not become!
So, speaking about who such a person is, who has left some ideas about the world and, according to contemporaries, has not joined others, we will understand - this is a marginal. The meaning of the word itself suggests that this is a rather complex indefinable phenomenon that only our descendants can rightfully appreciate.
