A tragedy

He might be a nutter, but at least he name … checked (Boom! Tish!) a great fillum: Seven Days in May.

He is insane. I don’t think there is any great mystery; nor do I think we should take what he says remotely seriously.

It is a tragedy, just as it is for all those people you see in the distance shouting in the street, or filthy in lines outside a caravan offering a warm feed of sorts.

The brain is a staggeringly delicate mechanism involving trillions of processes, which is normally very robust – until small things go wrong in significant places.

Bobby’s of Mittle Europa Jewish emigre background, uncertain of who his real father was, grew up with no friends of his own age and spent all his waking life and more of his dreaming life fixated on chasing the always just over the horizon yet perfect harmony that’s somewhere there in the infinitely manifold permunations of chess.

He could recognise the ultimate hermatic mandala of pattern information that chess opens the door to. He could only touch its perfection with a fingernail a few times but enough to keep him scrabbling to the edge. Sorta like a superbright punk Kabbalist.

Then his mind blew up. Went nova.

At his best, he was unearthly. At his worst, unhuman.

We’ll not see his like again for quite a while. Whether that’s bad or good depends on who’s opening.

Also, looking at the vid again, doesn’t he look so Russian? Certainly not the calm, open-eyed and comfortably-filled face you’d normally see on American superachievers.

Bannerman is eagerly awaiting a commenter to prove that blogging in Oz isn’t an old fart’s passtime by asking “Who’s Bobby Fisher?”

While just reading some bio notes, Fischer always was a bit flakey; he did take a fair bashing from George H. W. Bush over the Yugoslavia incident. Also brains are not delicate mechanisms like fine clockwork, but are rather gross and resilient biological masses. Fischer had a talent for patterns and strategy at a high level, perhaps he sees something that cut through the illusions ordinary people suffer. Another interpretation is, that is what a society like U.S. does to exceptional people. (Like Australia on steroids without the safety net.)