“Part of the relationship between prodigy and madness may be usefully explored in the following theoretical framework, which, whether or not it is entirely accurate, gives us a starting position regarding this peculiar relationship from which we may proceed and correct our projection in-process.

A wide range of the ‘disorders’ we attend as disease or malfunction are actually developmental assets that have been damaged by long immersion in hostile cultures. If we actively developed intelligent cultures that were commensurate with our nascent assets, these assets would emerge not as disease, but prodigy.

Since our cultures are pointedly abusive toward and about these assets in general, and all of their expressions, our developmental trees are filled with incidents of insult (in the medical sense: biostructural or relational damage) to the degree that when these assets are activated (often in response to accident or crisis), the resulting expressions are deformed, and difficult to abstract or reshape into applicable frameworks.

Were this not the case, even if they were not aided by our cultures, and they remained at least undamaged by them, I suspect that many of these assets would emerge in forms of prodigy so astonishing that they might become the leading lights by which our species’ relational, intellectual and technical intelligences would evolve.

In essence, we’re assassinating our prodigies in childhood, and when they molt, displaying at last their long developed wings, those wings are damaged and distorted. They are thus unable to fly, and their wings are not the long-hoped for blessings they might otherwise have become — but monstrosities. Yet even this has remedy, for many of those whose wings were deformed can be trained to refine their use… and fly in ways otherwise impossible.”

— an anonymous informant