The Curse Of The Dangerous Mind
Thursday, August 12th, 2010 by Mark | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | CommentsAnyone who watched the film Rain Man knew, instinctively, that the idiot savant played by Dustin Hoffman was part genius, part crazo.
The line between intellectual and\or artistic genius and derangement can be a slender and precarious one. And when the genius veers off the deep end, the downfall can be tragic, operatic and absolutely amazing due to the fact that there is a dynamic at work here that humans cannot comprehend. A kind of weird algorithm that is embedded in a dimension beyond our grasp.
Fermat’s Theorem makes this one look easy.
Take the strange case of Bobby Fisher and JD Salinger.
The former emerged as a chess wunderkind who took the world by storm, broke the Russian grip on the game’s dominance and was touted as an unusual genre of American hero, disconnected from Hollywood or the Super Bowl.
Salinger, a clean cut young man from a respectable New York family, comes out of nowhere and writes the greatest American novel in history, “Catcher In The Rye.” It is virtually impossible to grow up without it.
Years later both of these men collide with reality and skid from the stage of greatness to the back waters of mental illness. The idiot component suddenly, and with little or no warning, precedes the savant.
Fisher becomes a raving
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