Bobby and other minds I don’t understand
How do we go from looking and acting normal to losing one’s mind to the point where we can’t get back to that place, that other place, that most of us live in? Why, how, did what happen to our brain, that, rob us of our freedom?
Albert Einstein happen to be at the Hollywood premier of City Lights (1931) and was chatting with Charlie Chaplin who was the producer, director, lead actor and candlestick maker of that film. Charlie told Einstein: “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you. How do we understand the truly different other mind?
Sometimes that different mind we encounter we label crazy and sometimes talented and sometimes we assume that the craziness is an ingredient that makes talent possible, and sometimes the craziness takes away from talent. So many ways that our brain pies come out of the oven.
I grew up in upper Manhattan, which we called the Third Reich since we were all refugee escapees from Nazi Germany. Like the American kids in our neighborhood we too played baseball and put together an all ref team except for one ‘native American’, Bobby Kanerak. He was the fastest kid on our team but had lousy judgment. When he stole second, he wouldn’t stop and, yes, you guessed it, he would often be thrown out before reaching third base. He spoke English with a funny accent, i.e., he didn’t have one. We accepted his quirks much like we understood that some kids would be fat and short and some tall and so on. But yes, no doubt that he was odd. For example, I remember one Sunday morning he rang our doorbell at 6:00 am. Six on a Sunday morning. Even refs aren’t up yet. My father opened the door in his nightshirt and there stood Bobby who asked “Can Günter and Berndt come out and play”. My father answered with his super thick German accent, “But Bobby they are already out playing. They have been down at the play ground for some time.” at which point Kanarek got “it” “Oh you mean it is too early, thanked my Dad and left. I heard it all from behind the front door and my brother and I couldn’t stop laughing.
We knew that Bobby was strange but that was ok because we were also odd with our accents and funny looking clothes. We also knew that Bobby’s mother was in and out of the psychiatric hospital and that his mailman father was also an uncommunicative oddball. Maybe same mosquito that bit Bobby’s mother got to Bobby.
But Bobby was really talented, or maybe better yet gifted (using the ed tech lingo). You could put a stick in Bobby’s hand and point to some soft dirt at his feet and before you could circle the bases he would scratch out a picture that would dazzle even us heathens. We somehow knew beauty and grace when it unfolded at our feet.
Bobby and I hit it off about art and he taught me to draw and then paint. We would together sketch his sister Myrna who would sit still for us Over the next many years I got more accomplished as a part time artist but could never achieve the talent that Bobby had as young kid.
Bobby struggled to stay in school as an art major. He never graduated but, instead, ended up on a psychiatric ward, first at the age of 20, and after that it was a revolving door, just like his mom. He never lost his charm or his sheepish smile. Nor did he lose his creative art skills. When we both turned 23 I went off to graduate school to study neuroscience and Bobby was “temporarily home” on tranquilizing medicine. I will never forget his painful question to me. “Is there any real help for me out there?” and I answered with certainty and optimism. “Bobby, I know that the drugs being developed now are going to make an enormous difference. You just have to hang in there. Just try to hang on.”
Six months later Bobby blew his brains out.
What made me think of Bobby is a human-interest type article that I read in the newspaper yesterday about the guy who won the noble prize in economics in the mid 80’s. Turns out that he was schizophrenic although clearly both brilliant and incomprehensible (at least when he lectured about his mathematical perspective in economics). His world was mathematical expressions and ideas and he tried to explain what he was thinking with mortals but few of them got his drift. The Noble Committee was reluctant to give him the Prize in economics because he was nuts and in and out of the hospital and maybe also because he was gay, and maybe because his crazies got played out in ways that rubbed people the wrong way, but finally they had no choice. Mostly they were ashamed to be identified with someone as odd as he was. Only as a last resort they gave him the big prize and after that people in his high-powered university were nicer to him. Some say he finally got his recognition because he got slowly better, more coherent and socially engaged as he got older.
They made a movie out of his life “ A beautiful mind”. Some parts of the flick, his insanity, his paranoia was very well done. The film did not touch the homosexual theme that was an important part of his life and really blew capturing the relationship between the “hero” and his girlfriend and then wife.
Try and understand his paranoid madness or is it beyond us. But then again, so is his thinking in areas of mathematics. I am pretty good at math and I know that I can’t go where his mind moved and played. I don’t understand his mathematical thinking. Maybe if I spent a lot of time learning more math then I could appreciate more of what he had to say, or better yet, how he got from some point a to another place b in his thinking. I suspect that even straining, I would never get it, nor would I get his madness. I know about the famous Fermat’s theorem (a theory of numbers problem dates back to, yes Fermat, who scribbled the gist of the proof in a notebook early in the 19 th. Century). No one has been able to come up with that proof until a few years ago, and then it was hailed as one hell of a great accomplishment. The guy who proved Fermat’s theorem gave a talk in New York about his work shortly after announcing that he ‘done it’ and guess what, tickets to that event were being hustled by scalpers. Imagine, a mathematician talking about his proof to folks who could understand what he had done nevertheless treating him like a rock star. Fantastic.
It is not wonderful that I will never understand that proof, never. My mind could would not let me go there. Is not understanding some thinking in math a bit like not appreciating breaks in reality? But I know something about how the brain works but only for the simple stuff and not really how minds work.
One last thing. Was cleaning out all the lifetime accumulated ‘stuff’ and found the post card that Bobby sent my brother a few weeks before he killed himself. Both sides of the card are reprinted below. Notice his note to my brother which appears as if written by a 7-year-old rather than a 25-year-old with a college education. I sucked in my breath when I saw the card. I told my brother about it and he told me that it also made him really sad, thinking back to Bobby and picturing him rounding second.