Most people I meet dread the passing of time and aging.  I feel the passing of every day to be a gift, especially if it passed without too much trouble.  I will see having a white head of hair as accomplishment because I have a feeling of good fortune and privilege to make it even as far as I have.   My life has rarely been in serious physical danger, yet I feel I’ve had to claw every inch of the way out of stone.  I feel I’ve already been alive nearly forever yet most others consider me to be quite young.

This sort of mentality, this subsistence of the soul is an attitude that utterly baffles most people I encounter.  Rather, they find my actions strange because they know nothing of the code by which I act.   How would one even begin to explain face to face in a way that really made sense?  Would one want to if one could?

Do I really want to explain that every grain of rice, every red cent is another precious second of my life won from the birth society’s capricious standards and demands?

That I still make the most out of every grain of rice as I had to with every good feeling and happy moment?

That cultivating such reverence produces the sort of emotional rewards that make life worth living?

Though it could be tough to hold myself together in the worst times, I would find myself inspired to joy by things people around me didn’t even seem to notice.

Living with a lean soul has had its advantages.  I find I require far less than others around me to be content with life and therefore there are less things I fear losing.  I have an ongoing relationship with death in my everyday life while others postpone the very thought of it until telltale signs of aging can no longer be ignored or covered up with denial.

Most importantly, living by subsistence of the soul has the potential to teach one: fulfillment when distilled to its quintessence has very little to do with pleasure.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Subsistence of the Soul appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

related: Any Small Thing

related: Introverts: Denizens of a Social Ghetto

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/11/28/subsistence-of-the-soul/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/12/thinking-in-binary-recently-at-reddi/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/12/thinking-in-binary-recently-at-reddi/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:43:43 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6969 This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me:

“The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discreet, yes-or-no, symbolic language. This, in turn, often forces choices on humans operating within the digital sphere. We must come to recognize the increased number of choices in our lives as largely a side-effect of the digital; we always have the choice of making no choice at all.”

And this was exactly the invitation extended in the post being discussed below: to make no choice at all; to respond with neither a yes or a no, but to entertain the premise it described.

We have largely lost this art of entertaining ideas. The only correction I would suggest to Rushkoff’s observation is that the “discreet, yes-or-no, symbolic language” of blacks and whites and ups and downs, the 0′s and 1′s that underlie the entire vocabulary of our digital realm, is one that’s been in development at least since Descartes and ye olde body-mind dualism. The “binary” of computer programming languages was thus arguably a cultural choice forced on early programmers whose “analog sphere” had been trending binary for generations.

And never mind autism during the Enlightenment; when we look at contemporary autism through these binary, either/or lenses, we get exactly the goofy, paradoxical absurdity described so well earlier today by Neuroskeptic, in Mountains of Mental Disorders.

It’s not just the digital realm described by Rushkoff that’s “biased toward choice.” And it’s not a bias, in any realm, that favors autistics, or — as Neuroskeptic seems to make clear — those who would understand autism.

*******

Were autistics, as atheists and agnostics, the engine that drove the European Enlightenment?

Redditor 1: No, smart people did.

Redditor 2: The guy is autistic and is trying to claim the enlightenment for his own. The Enlightenment figures were hardly autistic. Many owned political positions or sought them out and were socialites even if they were only socialites among other intellectuals.

Redditor 3: this, EXACTLY

Author: Ableist much, guys?

Redditor 4: Ah, yes. Nobody agrees with you and so we must be discriminating.

Author: Disagreeing about the Enlightenment is legit. Implying that autistics cannot be smart and capable is ableist.

Redditor 4: I think the main argument is that many of the influential people were socialites and politicians.

Author: Then you know about autistic obsessions with pattern-finding and with specific subject interests. There ain’t no social joy in the world like that between autistics who share a special interest, and during the Enlightenment we were minting new special interests as fast as we could identify the patterns that wove them together.

Redditor 4: I could see that. But to say that the entire enlightenment was driven by autism is kind of a big leap without proof, considering Autism wasn’t officially recognized until around the 1940s and any speculation about people before that is based on reported behaviors rather than any actual clinical observation.

Author: Homosexuality was considered a mental disorder not so long ago, and still is in some quarters. Shift Journal is all about the big leaps; go back and read the first month or so. No one sails to new lands without consenting to lose sight of the familiar coastline.

Redditor 4: The only impact homosexuality has on the lives of homosexuals is from discrimination and possibly hemorrhoids.

Author: Not following your lead sentence, and am not sure I need or want to.

Redditor 4: I’m saying that to diagnosis someone with autism the person needs to exhibit at least six symptoms of impairment (at least two in social impairment, at least one in communication impairment and at least one in repetitive behavior). There were many reasons homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder and none of it had to do with impairment.

Author: I get your first point now but I think among the religious right you can still find the social construct of homosexuality as an impairment. Your reading of the DSM requirements is correct (though oddly subject to correction, once again, with the next edition). My point is that autistic impairment is in significant part a social construct; your citation of the DSM seems not to recognize this.

Redditor 4: I’ll probably look into it more. I just skimmed the article, but it is an intriguing thought. From what I read though the first part seems to draw conclusions from a premise that doesn’t support that conclusion.

Author: Um, how about “Autistic people do fine without belief” sted “have trouble,” k?

I literally see cats and dogs (the animals) falling from the sky along with raindrops. I still ultimately understand that it means very heavy rain, even though that’s not exactly what I see in my mind’s eye.

However, when I was a child, perhaps the first time I head the phrase, I felt very sorry for the poor cats and dogs. I mean, it would hurt to fall from the sky like rain and hit the ground! I would hear the cats and dogs mewling or barking in distress, inside my head. Until someone actually explained what they meant by the phrase, I found it very upsetting because I thought animals were getting hurt. (I’ve heard other people have similar reactions to the phrase “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing that certain idioms evoke a strong visual and emotional response in me as well:

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

You’ll kill two birds with one stone.

Don’t lose your head.

It’s no skin off my nose.

Can you lend me a hand?

You’re stirring up a hornet’s nest!

I know that each of these sentences is idiomatic, and I always have. And yet, I feel varying amounts of physical pain and emotional upset when I see the visuals appear in my mind — probably because the literal meaning of each one implies some form of pain to the body of a living creature.

So, it got me to wondering whether, contrary to popular opinion, the tendency of autistic people to see things visually might engender an intensified empathic response. Like Lauren, who talks about feeling upset at the vivid image in her mind of dogs and cats crying out and getting hurt, I wonder whether other autistics feel that same kind of upset by words that describe pain, or by images that show suffering.

The visual image can evoke very intense feelings, it seems. The idea that thinking visually means that we somehow objectify the world around us and detach ourselves from it seems altogether wrong-headed to me. If your way of thinking is primary visual, wouldn’t the visual images have more emotional power, rather than less?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this question.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg blogs at Journeys with Autism, and presides at Autism and Empathy.

Thoughts on Visual Thinking and Empathy appears here by permission.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Memoir is The Uncharted Path.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/15/thoughts-on-visual-thinking-and-empathy/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/15/the-vividness-of-memory/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/15/the-vividness-of-memory/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 06:35:40 +0000 Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6778 On September 16, my daughter will fly to California to begin life at UC Santa Cruz. These days, I find myself reliving much of her childhood in my memory: The rainy winter night we brought her home from the hospital as a newborn. The January morning she stood up in her crib in our room in Paris and patiently waited for her dad and me to awaken. The bright summer day we went bicycling in the Green Mountains. The crisp fall morning we started homeschooling.

I can remember everything in vivid and brilliant detail: The green and gold striped jumper I dressed her in before bringing her home for the first time. The pink and teal portable crib, and how we lugged it across the country from California to Connecticut, and then to Paris and Amsterdam. The Paris light. The sandbox outside Notre Dame. The baseball shirt and helmet she wore biking. Our excitement sitting in her room on the turquoise carpet, beginning our lessons on her first day of school.

My recall has always been very vivid. A photograph can awaken a whole array of visual, sensory, and emotional memories.

I have a photograph of my mother standing outside the door of the house I grew up in. It is 1966. She is standing in a sundress on the landing, leaning against the railing. My brother appears behind the screen door. He is five. Whenever I look at that photograph, I feel as though I could simply walk through that screen door and everything would be as it was. My parents, now passed away, would be in the kitchen drinking instant coffee, and my brother and I would decide what game to play, or whether to go down to the drugstore for candy and baseball cards. I feel myself there, a girl of eight or nine, innocent and hopeful about everything to come.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that my capacity for such vivid recall is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s as though no part of my life is ever really gone. I can go back in a moment and relive the memory as though it had happened just a few minutes ago. I can see it, smell it, taste it, feel it. On the other hand, there is the jarring moment when I realize that it’s gone and that I can’t go back, not really. Is this why I’ve taken so much for granted about time? Is this why I’ve always felt that things would go on forever — because they seem to go on forever in my memory of them?

Until yesterday, I’d always believed that everyone experienced memory in this way. But when I described the way I remember to my therapist, she was amazed. She kept saying “Wow!” with a look of intense surprise, as though she’d never heard anyone describe memory in the same way.

The way I relive my memories is why I can become very emotional about events and people from the past; the memories don’t fade into obscurity. Old events can creep up on me and give me great happiness, or deep pangs of regret, or tremendous sadness.

These days, I’m painfully aware that all of my vivid, precious memories are in the past. My little girl is no longer little. She’s no longer even a girl, but a young woman. And while I am excited to see her begin college in a beautiful place that we both love — and while my vivid memories of my own college years only add to the excitement of this moment — I’m also sad to feel time passing, and to know that so many things will never come again.

New things will take their place, certainly. But I loved the old things. And I still do.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg blogs at Journeys with Autism, and presides at Autism and Empathy.

The Vividness of Memory appears here by permission.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Memoir is The Uncharted Path.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/15/the-vividness-of-memory/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/07/04/why-a-true-introvert-will-never-change/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/07/04/why-a-true-introvert-will-never-change/#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:00:30 +0000 Zygmunt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6069 Introverts have wished many, many times that we could be more extroverted, that life in society could be just a little easier.  We tell ourselves again and again that we ought to ‘get out more’.  Many of the books and websites about introversion are about how not to be introverted.  As an expression of human desire, the market readily tells us that being an introvert is a difficult place to be.  Most introverts want out.  Or at least we think we do.

When decision time arrives we always stick to what we were doing before.  At some point we have to face the fact that ‘getting out more’ means spending time in a noisy environment with people who look down on us as inferiors.  When the time comes to suck it up and shed our personality for a new one that will make life easy we never move forward.  The fact is that true introverts are kidding themselves when it comes to changing.

What always stops us if we really look inside ourselves is that we don’t really want to change, not even if we could.

Yes we would like to be accepted like an extrovert, yes we would like to make life easier.  We’ve all daydreamed about it, but then, when we arrive at the decision point, reality strikes.  We suddenly realize that to even attempt to change, we would have to sacrifice everything that we like and value about ourselves.  Such a moment forces us to realize that in part we have chosen to be as we are in spite of the difficulties.  When it comes time to reject ourselves, we discover that it is and always will be worth the sacrifice required to be the selves we most admire

It’s hard to survive as an introvert.  It is considerably harder to put food on the table, secure shelter, meet all the basic needs.  Hardest of all is securing human companionship.  Life is often loneliness.  Surely it would seem, we must change ourselves for the sake of survival.  We all must put on a semblance of being someone else in order to make it, but it never seems to go beyond a skin deep conscious effort.  We merely compartmentalize the self we love and keep it safely, completely separate from our mask.  Our very deepest desires strive to ensure that our pretend identity never taints our true one.  We insist on holding tightly to our introverted ways even when survival is on the line.

Are we stubborn and irrational then?
One reader of this blog wrote to me about how he felt after spending some time out with his friends:

“I have to sit down now and find myself again as
I feel I almost lose touch of where I am.”

When introverts spend too much time matching the expectations of another environment, we start to feel a sense of disconnection from ourselves.  We stand contrary to all the forces and currents that surround us, sacrificing much and risking everything.  Ultimately, we are willing to compromise survival to be connected with our best self.  No amount of material benefit or power can compensate for losing the supreme power–

The power of determining who is to be our inseparable companion,
The self we must live with every second of our lives,
The self that colors our perception of all the world around us.

We cannot not truly desire to change even were we faced with death, because when it comes to the decision point, we realize that losing ourselves is merely death by another name.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Why a True Introvert Will Never Change appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/07/04/why-a-true-introvert-will-never-change/feed/ 1 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/03/09/small-changes/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/03/09/small-changes/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:00:57 +0000 Gwen McKay http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=5326 The news about my oven is not all stinky, I’m glad to report. I bought a new pair of cloth oven mitts, which arrived in the mail last week. While this may seem a trivial everyday purchase, it wasn’t actually that easy. Oven mitts in the 21st century ordinarily are no longer sold in pairs, nor are they made of cloth. The big-box stores are all selling sets that consist of one silicone mitt and one potholder. Although the new materials last longer than cloth and are more heat-resistant, I don’t like them because they feel so unnatural; and to me, it seems safer to have both hands covered, just in case something slips. So when my oven mitts wore out, I decided it was worth the time and trouble of searching the Internet for another old-fashioned cloth pair.

That got me thinking about the discomforts of modern life in a more general sense. Because today’s way of living has diverged so far from the world our ancestors knew, many things in our environment make us uncomfortable, either consciously or unconsciously. Andrew Lehman has suggested that autistic people may function as society’s canary in the coal mine, drawing attention to conditions that are detrimental to the health of the human species. I believe that this is an accurate observation with regard to the psychological stress caused by living in an unnatural environment.

Many autistic people have sensory hypersensitivities that make certain features of the modern environment uncomfortable or painful, such as fluorescent lights, loud background noise, and harsh artificial scents and textures. To venture a guess, there may well be a large number of non-autistics who are not fully comfortable with such things either, but who are not sure exactly what is bothering them. Although they are not consciously aware of what is causing their discomfort, they feel anxious and unsettled on an instinctive primal level. Some may take medications for depression or anxiety to cope with our stressful society, while others self-medicate with alcohol or street drugs.

To the extent that autistics tend to be more aware of uncomfortable things in our environment, while also being less inclined to put up with them just for the sake of conformity, it can reasonably be argued that autistics give our society valuable input on what works and what doesn’t. Instead of teaching autistic children to quietly endure uncomfortable situations, our society ought to be paying more attention to why our environment has become so unpleasant for so many people. It’s often the case that small changes can have significant effects, for good or ill—especially when the cumulative effects are taken into account.

Modern technology has given us far more options, with regard to both our living conditions and our public spaces, than our ancestors ever dreamed it was possible to have. We clearly don’t lack the ability to design a more flexible and accommodating environment—one that would respect our unconscious expectations and thus would be more comfortable for everyone. What’s needed here is the will to take constructive action.

At the same time, disability and its messily-defined cohorts still exist as all-too-real, all-too-potent entities, rooting around within a self-interested society’s hive mind, moving its imagination and fueling its fears – all without being much attended to.  Much as we may be seeking to starve these entities into proper perspective, in order to leave society no choice but to take responsibility for its own scheiße … there they are.  I notice them, anyway, and I suspect the attention I pay to their little ecosystem – acting as a naturalist, after the example of psychologist James Hillman, of society’s collective psyche – is what some readers of my recent entries here find to be such a foreign, nonsensical, impossible-to-entertain practice.

There may in other words be one perhaps rather narrow set of general observations that might be applied to autism, for instance, as it is experienced by autistics and their associates who understand and apply the social model, and as it is observed by researchers who similarly lack blinders and preconceptions.  And, there may be another set of general observations, possibly just as accurate even if wholly contradictory, concerning autism as it exists and affects their world from within the society in which they live.

Sticklers will insist – and who can blame them – that only the first set of observations can be said to apply to autism per se.  I think this is a sticky problem but a minor one, a question of semantics or nomenclature.  What I see as a bigger problem is that there is value, intelligence value, strategic value if nothing else, in observing how society views disabilities, and what the interplay is between the actual conditions associated with them, and the manner in which those conditions manifest in society’s collective imagination – and that we are throwing away that value by cleaving too literally to the social model, as if it were fundamentalist doctrine.

An approach complementary to the social model might be to suggest that society experiences autism as if from the perspective of a dreamer.  Autism the scary monster for one instance, the voice of Autism Speaks, kidnapping children, ruining marriages, essentially a force of evil.  Anyone who’s seen the movie Inception might recognize advertising campaigns sponsored by the organization Autism Speaks as having been constructed by what the movie refers to as a dream architect, and inhabited by an actor with an agenda every bit as specific as the one carried out in the movie:  to influence the waking actions of the dreamer by planting an emotionally potent, contagious idea within his subconscious.

Against this methodology, it seems that (with all due respect to the capable fighters of ASAN) we as the opposition have been sitting here with arms folded tightly across our chests, eyes defiantly wide open, primly squeaking out in response, “Well, hmph! Conjured fears and evil goblins aren’t real, so there!”

There is a fragment in Edward Abbey’s journal, so far as I know never put to use in any of his novels or essays, in which he poses himself the question, “Do I believe in ghosts?”

With the reply, “I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.”

So do I.  I believe those ghosts are real enough, in any case, to shape our decision-making and affect our actions as a society.

So, as the content of their advertising campaigns has indicated, does Autism Speaks.

And so, I say – given the degree to which those ads got under your skin and creeped you out – do you.

Whether you’re ready to join us here or not though, it’s worth remembering that we all know of the dream where the personified darkness, the scary monster-goblin-ghost turns out to be something else after all, perhaps even an ally, or a mentor, or maybe just some character who really needs you to buy him, say, a homeopathic cup of black, black coffee.  That’s the dream, or one of them, that we need to be architecting, scripting, and setting in motion.  And I’m not sure that can be accomplished from within the social model, or from within what I see as an idealistic, doctrinaire, or even prudish reluctance to engage with autism as it actually moves and breaths within the Western unconscious.  One never discovers the true identity, intentions, or needs of the scary monster after all, save by stopping, turning around, and walking forth to meet it face-to-face – once and for all and at last.  If the effort does prove fatal, as Inception reminds, the worst that can generally happen is that we wake up in a cold sweat, and live to try again another night.

Consider for instance how we might further cement the figure of the autistic as standard-bearer of honesty and justice into the collective imagination.  As was driven home to me repeatedly in the comments this month, this is viewed as a wrong, wrong, wrong thing to do from a literalistic, science-based point of view – which reminds me, somewhere Hillman made exactly this point, that empirical science and fundamentalist religion have far, far more in common that is generally acknowledged.  Disparate as the foci of their respective literalisms may be, they still are united in their devotion to literalism itself, united in that neither wishes to place any stock in that third place, neither scientia nor faith, but from which much that moves the world comes nonetheless.

So what I’m suggesting is likely to displease full-time proponents of both perspectives.  I’m saying that one place we need to go, one place we need to be effective from in order to realize the benefits of the social model is into the space – yes, I’m afraid without a massive advertising budget – where Autism Speaks went with the autism-as-kidnapper and the I Am Autism campaigns.  And in that space, along with much else, evoking the dream-figure of the autistic as standard-bearer of honesty and justice is very much within the rules.

Granted, if I had this to do over I might not start out with a figure who carries quite so much cultural baggage.  As it happened, I just took the opening offered by Gwen’s essay, but there are after all other autistic archetypes that don’t push so many buttons.  All’s fair nonetheless in love and war and the dreamworld.  And if you didn’t notice that those ad campaigns were acts of war – or that the theater of battle in which they took place was neither of Heaven nor of Earth, neither of faith nor of science but of myth-making and archetypal conjuring – you weren’t paying attention.  And really, who better to call onto the stage as a worthy archetypal rejoinder to I Am Autism?  I’m open to suggestions …

So.  It’s always less confusing for everyone involved to know they’re in a dream – and ain’t that just like a dream, to spend the whole time fully engaged with the storyline or the conversation, yet frustrated and bewildered at how little of it makes sense according to dayworld rules?  It would have been nice though, certainly better manners, had I managed to give everybody this heads-up before I sent Leeroy Jenkins on his suicide run straight into that whirring buzz saw of righteous literalism.  But like I say, even when you die, you wake up, you get to try again.

Oh, and hey, if you catch sight of that scary dude from the I Am Autism ads in some dark alleyway in the wee hours of your slumber this week?  Don’t cross to the other side of the street, and don’t run away.  Instead stop, turn around … and be sure and introduce him to our friend the peculiarly honest and justice-minded autistic.  Take them around the corner and down the block, sit them down in an all-night diner, and buy ‘em both a bottomless cup of coffee.

Then just sit back and listen.  I bet those two have got a lot to talk about.

[image:  Edward Hopper, Nighthawks]

related:  Fault Lines

related:  This Too Is Autism

related:  If Not Us, Then Who?

related:  New Thread (If Not Us, Then Who?)

related:  Elephant on the Loose

related:  LEEEEEEEEEROY!!!!1!!!

That interpretation left me thinking about a brown folder where I had kept notes about story ideas, incomplete handwritten stories (I’m old-fashioned in that I prefer to use pen and paper for first drafts), and other material related to creative writing.  Just a few years ago, that folder was crammed full of works in progress.  But various distractions intervened, and the folder gradually shrank as completed stories were not replaced by new material.  The well finally ran dry, and the brown folder ended up being used for other miscellaneous documents instead.

Next to it I kept a blue folder, which was supposed to hold a fantasy novel, but only a few pages ever got written.  My creative energies had gotten thoroughly stuck in the doldrums by the time Mark invited me to write for Shift Journal in the summer of 2009.  Just putting together my first post took me several months.

After a while I started writing articles for Shift regularly, but I still felt that I wasn’t on top of my game.  I never could build up a reserve supply of future blog posts or notes for them in the old brown folder; and as for the blue folder, it had been gathering dust both literally and figuratively for over a year.  Although I enjoyed taking part in serious and meaningful discussions of social change at Shift, I didn’t feel as creatively inspired as I had been in the past.

So after I had that dream about the locker and got Mark’s input on it, I decided to do a visualization exercise.  I closed my eyes, took a few calming breaths, and told myself I was going to open that locker just the same way I always did, no big deal.  I imagined myself walking into a room full of lockers and finding the right one.  It had a removable combination lock that was just like the one I used in high school.  I put my hand on the lock, the numbers came to mind easily, and I spun the dial.  The lock clicked open, and I took it off.  Then I opened the narrow metal door and looked at what was behind it.

Inside the locker there was only… the blue folder.  I noticed that it had a thick sheaf of papers in it, rather than just the few pages I’d written in real life.  I visualized myself picking up the folder and taking it home.  Then I imagined attaching a tag to the lock with the combination written on it before putting the lock in my junk drawer.

A few days have gone by since then, and it still remains to be seen what else is going to inhabit the blue folder.  I haven’t yet felt inspired to do any more writing on the fantasy story; but, while composing the first draft of this blog post, I kept the folder on the table next to me.  Before typing this post into the computer, I left the handwritten page in the blue folder overnight, to impress upon my subconscious mind that the folder is ready and waiting to receive more creative works.

Many of the articles here on Shift Journal deal with the theatrical aspects of political and social change—that is, setting the scene for positive transformations to take place in the narratives that our society tells itself.  To a large extent, this process involves recognizing and tapping into the underlying images in our collective unconscious.  We also have power as individuals to bring about changes in our daily lives by strategically placing the images we see and creating new stories to accompany them. Just having a good place to keep one’s stories can go a long way in itself.

I’ve been haunted by this picture for many years.  Once I started realizing that my father had Asperger’s, I finally realized why.  My father is doing something with his eyes in this photograph that makes me hurt inside:

He’s looking at the camera, and not looking at the camera, at the same time.  He looks like he’s in pain and trying not to show it.  His siblings are looking directly at the camera, while my father looks almost as though he’s between worlds.

[full-size, uncropped photo here]

He almost always looked that way, like someone trying desperately hard to plow ahead while the world pressed in on him with a bewildering amount of intensity.  I don’t know that it’s possible to forgive the things he did when he was alive, but I understand him now.  He’s no longer my frightening and tyrannical father.  He was someone in constant pain.  He felt completely alone and vulnerable, all the time, every day, for his entire life, and he had no words for it, and he had no one to talk with about it, and he had no community, and he had no support.  He was the man of the house—that was the beginning and the end of everything—and he looked straight ahead into the world and tried not to flinch.

It didn’t work.  His pain came out in soul-crushing ways.

I complain a lot about the ways that the medical profession pathologizes us, but we have a big advantage over my father.  We have one another.  And the children coming up will at least have the words to describe who they are and what they feel, even if those words miss the mark.  It’s a beginning.  It’s something to work with.

It’s more than my father had.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg blogs at Journeys with Autism.  A Haunting Photo appears here under the terms of this Creative Commons License.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s memoir is The Uncharted Path: My Journey with Late-Diagnosed Autism.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is a type of bird called the albatross that glides over thousands of miles of empty sea.  But it always eventually returns to the same small and isolated island in the same place to meet with its lifelong mate.

The introvert is an albatross:

Soaring above a curved horizon
Of rolling lapis lazuli dunes
This desert of time and space is its element
It will never forget its spirit’s home
When it comes time to return to love and life’s companions
It is as though not a moment has passed.

Extroverts typically attempt to keep surrounded by people most of the time.  The bonds they form in the competitive social group require constant reinforcement to stay alive.  The typical extrovert friendship is a fire lit only with kindling.  It must constantly, emphatically be renewed or else fade away.  Its maintenance is a constant task, a drain of the self for all involved for the sake of the social artifact they wish to create.  Even the greatest of ‘pals’ are quickly reduced to sending each other cards at Christmas without regular face to face interaction.

The introvert friendship is seldom, but it is based on a deep loyalties that are not so tied to place and circumstance as a bond quickly and adeptly acquired.  More specifically, the introvert friendship exists underneath the tumultuous surface of the mass society.  Companionship, fellowship, and maintenance are all one and the same.  There are no chores to perform in the introvert friendship.  It is self-sustaining and a source of renewal for those involved.  It lasts a lifetime, outside of the larger society, outside of time.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion.  The Albatross appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr]

Around this time of year, she’ll often say something about getting through the long hard winter.  That’s not a reference to the chilly weather.  Where she grew up, it rarely got cold enough to snow; and she’s now living in a well-heated modern house with Social Security and her company pension to pay the bills.  Rather, it’s an expression that goes back to a time before any of the conveniences that we now take for granted, when people in small farming villages had to put aside enough food every autumn to get through the winter.  Harvest festivals such as Thanksgiving and the much older pagan rite of Samhain celebrated the simple blessing of having enough food not to starve.

Nowadays we have supermarkets full of food year-round, as well as other abundant material comforts; but as the days grow shorter in the Northern Hemisphere and the skies become dark and gloomy, many of us feel increasingly anxious and depressed, for reasons we don’t fully understand.  Some people find it helpful to take the herbal supplement St. John’s Wort, which makes the eyes more sensitive to light and thereby fools the brain into subconsciously believing that the longer and brighter days of spring already have arrived.  Some of us install additional lighting in our homes.  We may go out for a walk or jog on days when the sun, low in the southern sky, peeks through the thick November clouds.

But why do we find the shorter days so disconcerting?  I wonder if it might be a consequence of modern society having diverged so far from the conditions under which humanity evolved.  In the long-ago days of our ancestors’ villages, the human species might have developed instincts telling us to get ready for the long hard winter, in much the same way that squirrels instinctively know it’s time to start gathering acorns when the days turn shorter.  The people of these villages wouldn’t have gone around feeling depressed about the change of seasons; they’d have been too busy, as my mother-in-law might say, killing the duck to make him soup.

Modern humans living in industrialized countries don’t make any of the preparations for winter that once were essential to our ancestors’ survival.  Every autumn, instead of gathering in crops, we make our lawns look nice by raking our leaves to the street for the city truck to collect.  We go to the shopping malls hunting for Christmas gifts, rather than going into the forest hunting game for the tribe’s subsistence.  And somewhere deep within our minds, I suspect alarm bells are going off—warnings based solely on instinct, far below the level of our conscious awareness, telling us that we’re all going to starve if we don’t get busy right now bringing in more food.

So we get anxious and depressed.  We start to feel overwhelmed by the nagging thoughts that we ought to be doing more and that we’re falling behind, without enough time to catch up.  We may attribute these feelings to being busier at work, to having a lot of social and family obligations, or to the general rush of the holiday season.  When we do our grocery shopping, we may pick up comfort foods on impulse; and then we gain weight, which is likely to cause even more anxiety and depression in today’s weight-conscious society.

What’s to be done about it?  There’s no way we could all go back to living in primitive villages, even if we wanted to give up today’s conveniences; and of course, not being at risk of starving over the winter does have some distinct advantages.  While it may be tempting to simply medicate the problem away with a supplement like St. John’s Wort or a prescription antidepressant, I believe that what’s needed are some practical ways of bringing the symbolism of the ancient harvest season into our modern lives.

Perhaps the simplest way to go about it is to plant a backyard garden; or, for those who live in apartments, a container garden on the windowsill or balcony.  Setting aside a particular time every day to work in the garden makes it feel like a regular part of life.  Putting harvested crops on display inside the home, such as by filling a bowl with colorful assorted fruits or vegetables, provides a subconscious reminder of the work that went into producing them.  And last but not least—sharing the harvest with friends, family, and neighbors gives everyone a feeling of abundance.

There’s a stigma in Western culture against talking to oneself; anyone who does it is likely to be perceived as having mental problems.  As a result, many of us work hard to suppress any stray vocalizations when others are around, even if doing so leaves us feeling more anxious.  We don’t want to end up on the receiving end of worried or pitying glances from strangers, just before they quickly avert their gaze and walk away feeling glad that they’re not crazy people like us who ought to be on a shrink’s couch.

Without passing judgment on the attitudes involved in this scenario, I’ll simply note that in recent history there were many well-respected people who paid good money to sit on an analyst’s couch and explore the contents of their random thoughts.  Classical psychotherapy has lost much of its appeal since our culture became convinced that there’s a pill for every problem; but about a half-century ago, it was widely believed that the most effective way to deal with feelings of anxiety or depression was to spend many hours talking with a psychotherapist about what might be causing those feelings in the unconscious mind.  In some upper-class cliques, where the financial cost of being in therapy for years wasn’t an issue, having an analyst was even considered fashionable for a while.  Guests at fancy cocktail parties would chat about how their therapy sessions went.

One of the things people did on the analyst’s couch was to free-associate.  This process consisted of being encouraged to talk about whatever came to mind.  Often they needed some coaxing to do this because it didn’t come naturally.  The analyst would then discuss with them what significance their words and thoughts might have with regard to the particular issues that had been troubling them.

From this perspective, one might say that when we talk to ourselves, there’s a potential for understanding to be gained.  The random things that we sometimes find ourselves saying, even though they may seem silly or embarrassing to us, come from the same unconscious sources that classical psychotherapy looked upon as a rich source of insight.  Like dreams, they give us a view into deeper levels of the psyche.

Over the past few months I’ve sometimes found myself saying out loud, as if about to tell an old-fashioned story, “Once upon a time…”

I don’t know where this might have come from, but it’s interesting to speculate on what it might mean.  Do I have something significant to tell the world?  As I grow older, am I taking on the role of a wise elder with the responsibility to pass on our shared knowledge to the next generation?  Maybe I’m starting to sense changes in humanity’s collective unconscious, the first stirrings of a new story that’s about to be told on a grand scale.

I guess I’ll just have to wait until the page turns to discover how it goes.

People who have hyperthymestic syndrome (also known as hyperthymesia) sometimes report that they are haunted by old memories.  I’d never claim to have full hyperthymesia, but I do believe I have some elements of it.  Old memories sometimes cast a large shadow, and they can return uninvited and unexpected in amazing detail and freshness.  Sometimes these are memories of places, and sometime it is people that I recall, but they are often not the people that one might think one should remember in detail.  I’ll strain to recall much at all about some deceased relatives, while bit-players from long-ago scenes in my life who were more interesting to me as personalities, and people that I felt more empathy with, are sometimes recalled as if we met yesterday.  It’s creepy to think that some of these people are dead and others could also be dead for all I know, but their images and funny mannerisms and personalities and voices still exist somewhere in my brain.  It has always been the case that I’ve focused on some people with a sharp intensity, while the rest have been little more to me than human wallpaper.  Even knowing this, I’m not sure why Donald has popped up recently.  My attitude towards Don was always much more suspicion than empathy.

Donald was the one who hired me, and he made that clear to me right from day one on the job, for which I was qualified with my degree.  It wasn’t my first position as a graduate, but Don seemed to be fond of the idea that he had given me my first big break.  He gave me the tour.  He took care to show me where his desk was.  I can still see that desk now, in the antiquated building full of old and yellowed pine furniture that our operation moved out from during the time that I was there.  Don’s desk was a bit hidden away, next to a window and isolated behind some hideous fabric-covered office partitions in an open-plan office.  Pinned up on one of those fuzzy partitions was a print of an artwork in a Fauve style that featured lots of nude women who had fleshy thighs and full but feminine figures (like me at the time) and who just happened to have hair of the same style and colour as mine at the time.  I wondered about this.  I knew I just didn’t know enough about life or men to judge whether I should be disturbed by this.  Donald would have been thirty-odd years older than me.  Our relationship was clearly a very unequal one in terms of power, life experience and physical size.  Over the months (or was it years?) that I was there Donald spent a fair amount of time explaining things to me, but everything that he said was so general, so vague, that it seemed a waste of time to me.  It seemed to be a nothing job.  I felt that I was learning nothing new there, and doing nothing intelligent there, while at the same time I felt that I must have been misunderstanding some basic things about what I was supposed to be doing.  All the time Donald played the part of the kind mentor, with little effect.

What was I to you Donald?  Just a misjudgement?  Did you want to look after me?  Or was I just a young interest for a dirty old man?  A substitute for the daughter that you never had, or the daughter that you wished you had?  Was I a person that you felt was strange and a mystery to be figured out?  Why did you try to get me interested in learning the same foreign language that you were fluent in?  So that we could carry on intimate or secret conversations?  I still wonder, but one thing that I know for sure was that at that time I was starting to hate the way that I was expected to be a part of other people’s lives at work, when the only thing that I wanted to do was sit down, do some work that involved the firing of synapses, achieve something, be recognized for the work done, maybe even learn some new skills or master some new technology, get paid, maybe even progress to a better job, and then go home.  Was that too much to ask?  Evidently it was.

I never understood why I didn’t seem to be going anywhere in that job, which was all about dealing with people, and I didn’t understand why I hated being there so much.  I loathed the times when Donald made a fuss and a social spectacle of me in front of others, but in hindsight I think he expected I’d enjoy it.  I can only guess that Donald had no idea why I was failing to thrive.  Eventually Don’s boss started giving him a hard time for hiring an oddity such as myself, and one day I decided I’d had enough, and told Donald I was happy enough with the other part-time job that I had, and wouldn’t be coming back.  I have no idea what he felt or thought about that.  Maybe I should wonder, but it was so long ago.

There you are Donald.  For all I know you could be dead now, but I can see and feel you so clearly; your build, your hair, your gentle voice, your age, the way you moved and stood and the weird way that you would show me a piece of paper while holding it with only your index finger and thumb.  Was that gesture supposed to mean something to me, Don?  The thing that I sense the most now about you is the “feel” of your personality and the part that you once played, or tried to play, or pretended to play.  The feel of a mentor, the feeling of having someone in one’s life who is one’s intellectual superior, the feeling of being in the presence of educated and intellectually alive company.  It’s a feeling that I have recently started missing, and haven’t felt for such a long time.  Maybe that is Don’s message.


* Not his real name.

Lili Marlene blogs at Incorrect Pleasures.  I See Dead Blokes appears here with her permission.

That, as Daughter would say in the words of her generation, was an epic fail.  By the time we got home, it was apparent that we’d had a major overdose of caffeine.  Husband spent the night on the couch watching whatever TV sports were on.  Although I got in bed, any hope of being able to sleep was futile.  All kinds of disjointed thoughts paraded through my head, including snippets of the blog post I’d been planning to write; but by then I didn’t have enough physical energy to get out of bed and actually do any writing.  I probably slept for about an hour before it was time to stumble through my workday.  Needless to say, that blog post never got written.

Looking at this unfortunate incident from the perspective of turning bitter food items into lemonade, however, it’s a useful example of how things we encounter in our environment can cause problems for us.  When behavior analysts take detailed notes on how a child acts in certain situations, they’re trying to identify the antecedent environmental causes of whatever behaviors they want to modify.  That approach may sometimes work when there’s an obvious cause-and-effect relationship, such as my consumption of bad coffee causing the undesirable behavior of failing to produce a timely blog post (for those who may be wondering, I didn’t start writing this entry till late Tuesday night for a Wednesday posting).

In most situations, though, the interaction between human beings and our environment is much more complex and can’t be effectively reduced to simple behavioral equations.  We go through our days reacting not only to things that can be readily observed and measured, but also to a host of subtler influences below the threshold of conscious perception.  We often have emotional feelings about particular places without understanding why.  Maybe they trigger fleeting impressions of long-ago events that have faded from our thoughts, or they bring to mind ancestral memories or cultural symbols that operate at a level even farther below our conscious awareness.

Feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice of adjusting a person’s environment to promote mental and physical well-being, has a strong focus on the symbolic aspects of perception.  Although many people dismiss it as superstition because it is traditionally worded in terms of bringing good fortune, many of the underlying observations are quite sound.  For example, having a house that faces north is considered unlucky.  This may not seem to make any sense at first glance; but in the Northern Hemisphere, where most people live, north is the direction of the least sunlight and the coldest and most severe weather.  A feng shui practitioner would say that a person who walks out the front door every morning to face a shadowed porch and a chilly wind is likely, on a subconscious level, to perceive the world as a darker and less welcoming place than if the door opened onto a sunny and pleasant southern view.

Perhaps, instead of trying to manage our children’s behavior by analyzing their observable reactions to specific events, we might do better to take a more holistic view of the surrounding environment.  Such an approach would focus on reducing exposure to anxiety-provoking situations and generally providing opportunities for a positive view to flourish.

How might that be done?  Well, now I’ve gotten back around to my originally planned blog topic.  Stay tuned till next week.

As I wait to pick up the kids in the car I slip into sleep-deprived but not tired drowsiness, and an exquisitely sad, shimmery, mauve-coloured emotion washes in, in gentle little waves.  It seems to be about longing for some pleasure permanently denied, and a vision is evoked of a tiny, dry, airless, browned and bare windowed room that has been sealed for many decades.  The music on the car stereo becomes subtly louder and my mind focuses with a strange intensity on every single note as it is played.  Let me look inside at the floor.  I’m curious, are there any dry, disintegrating bodies of dead insects in there, or has the room really been properly sealed for all of these years? Emotions can be places when you have synaesthesia.

I’m smiling kindly to strangers.  (Do you feel as lost as I do? Poor thing if you do.)  I almost enjoy the company of another Mum, chatting as we wait and watch in the playground.  Knowledge that there are so many things that we don’t have in common does not evoke the cold resentment that it usually does.  I don’t consider her motives.  I almost feel like talking with people my age rather than silently staring in at the innocent and beautiful world of the children playing.  I have no special access to any special world.  I am nothing special. My proper role in life is to be a nobody, and suburbia is a safe hiding place.  People rest happily inside boxes in the suburbs.  People rest peacefully inside boxes in the cemetery.  But why am I feeling so restless?  Why do I have to be different?

Attractive people have lost their charisma, and the misshapen take on a beauty that simply cannot be accounted for.  I’ve noticed two people in two days who have the same physical deformity.  I’d never noticed this before.  I feel compelled and revolted by the human race.

The myths that we live by are exposed for what they are.  I re-examine the fact that important relationships can be held together as much by shared fears and shared horrors and shared hatreds as they are held together by nice things.  It’s a grim reality but it’s certainly not without virtue, or beauty.  In my mind I unforgive people in my family, again.

The low tide has exposed what lies beneath, and I can see some gaping holes where important things are missing.  I’ve come to the realization that one of the few things in my life that seemed so easy has grown up weak because it didn’t need to fight for existence, and I fear that the harm can never be undone.  I felt so smug for so many years.  Why did I never see that coming?  Why do I have these ridiculous problems that no other person ever has?  Oh yes, I remember, it’s because I am a freak.

Husband is trying to be kind.  Do you mind if I don’t cook anything much for dinner again tonight?  I’m not that hungry.  I’m living on coffee made with a harsh and potent brew of robusta beans, and paradoxically my usual heartburn and stomach irritation has disappeared.  I cannot comprehend the currently popular obsession with cooking and sharing food.  From where I’m standing, it makes no sense at all.

Purple hardinbergia creeper is starting to bloom, and clicking frogs are calling.  Please, stop, I’m not ready for a springtime surge of energy.  I have no plans, no direction, but I feel that maybe things will never be the same again.

Please bear with me.  I’m just not myself today.

Lili Marlene’s I’ve Lost My Focus first appeared at Incorrect Pleasures, and is republished here with permission.

“Time to get rid of it,” I told myself, on more than one occasion, as I sat there looking across the dinner table at all those bare branches.  But the plant had been in my home for such a long time that I didn’t feel right just throwing it out with the yard waste, especially after it had gone through such a hard struggle to stay alive.  Even so, I knew that I had to do something about it.  After all, keeping a mostly dead plant in my dining room wasn’t what you’d call ideal interior decorating.  It might also cause negative energy flow, according to the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui, which involves arranging one’s environment in harmonious patterns to promote health and prosperity.

For those who think feng shui is just woo, I noticed an article last week that discusses in more scientific terms the relationship between our health and what we see in our environment.  Researchers studying the visual perception of people who had been diagnosed with major depression found that their retinas were significantly less sensitive to contrast than the average person’s.  That is to say, they literally saw the world more as a gray and featureless place.  The researchers hypothesized that the difference in their subjects’ vision was related to the changes in neural chemistry that caused the symptoms of depression.

The first comment posted in response to the article mentioned that we live in a polluted world which, in some ways, really does look grayer than it once did.  That raises an interesting point.  Because there are many complicated feedback loops involved in depression, I’d speculate that the visual effect observed by the researchers may also work the other way around—that if we don’t have enough bright colors and visually pleasing objects in our environment, even if we are not consciously aware that anything is wrong, we may end up being more susceptible to the biochemical changes that cause depression.

Perhaps the lack of contrast in the modern world may be one of the reasons why such high rates of depression are found in wealthy industrialized countries.  Many of us work all day in offices with bare walls, dull gray carpet, windows that don’t open and that look out on rooftops and parking lots, and rows of identical cubicles.  We go home to suburban cookie-cutter houses decorated with bland features and neutral colors to ensure a good resale value; as with everything else these days, they’re commodities.  We destroy every dandelion we find in our neat green lawns, and we whack every weed that dares to invade our carefully trimmed hedges.  By day our skies often are hazy, and by night many of us can’t see the stars because there’s so much artificial light.

Years ago, before I knew it was a stereotypical autistic trait, sometimes when I brought new brightly colored or shiny things into the house I would just sit and stare at them for several minutes, letting the contrast percolate through my brain.  I haven’t done that recently, in part because I’ve let myself get too busy to think much about decorating; and to be quite honest, I started to feel self-conscious after learning that such behavior had been stigmatized as pathological.  But now I wonder if it might be a perfectly healthy adaptive mechanism to ward off depression in a world with far less visual contrast than the natural surroundings that our brains evolved to anticipate on a subconscious level.

There’s a partly shaded empty spot in my front garden where I recently took out a few small plants and moved them to the back yard because they looked like they needed more sunlight.  Tomorrow I’m going to trim the dead branches off my houseplant and move it to that spot, where for the next three months or so—until the frost comes—it can enjoy the natural light and the rain and the breeze on its last remaining leaves.  I’ll buy another plant to take its place, something that has bright vivid contrasting colors.  And then, if I feel like it, I’ll sit at my dining room table and admire my home’s new interior landscape for a while…

Autism itself, I propose, can be regarded as either egosyntonic or egodystonic, and when it is experienced as egodystonic, whether diagnosed or intuited, autism is subject to the same defense mechanisms as is any other unwelcome psychological fact.  I further propose that the implications of this may be far-reaching, and in any case have yet to be considered.

Now, whether we happen to have a clinical condition or not, the fact is that we are all egodystonic to some extent in that we all have character traits with which we are not all that comfortable.  What I want to focus on here is a curious and rather spooky defense mechanism that often kicks in when there are aspects of our character with which we are unable to achieve any sort of comfort level.  Psychological projection is a trick the mind plays on itself which allows our own unwanted character traits to be perceived as if they are “out there” in the world rather than inside us as individuals.  Once they have been “cast out” in this manner, they retain their disturbing nature, but can then be seen as external threats having nothing to do with oneself.

Much as it seems we are treading in the land of woo here, projection is a well-established phenomenon in psychology, one of Freud’s discoveries which has become so widely recognized that it’s no longer thought of as being all that Freudian.  Moreover, projection can operate not just on a personal level but on a group and even national level as well.  All this said, it is a strange beast, both to experience and to observe.  For examples we need look no further than recent headlines; several from just the past four years were collected earlier this month at Alternet under the title, 7 Gay Sex Scandals of Career Anti-Gay Crusaders.

For all that we are moved—and rightly so—to hoot and cluck over the hypocrisy and dishonesty revealed in such scandals, it’s worth recognizing that these career anti-gay crusaders are in the grip of a terrifically effective self-delusion as well.  This is the case to such an extent that it can be said their right hand truly does not know what their left hand does, or perhaps that their big head knows not what their little head does.  That, at any rate, is how spooky an animal projection is.  The level of personal discomfort or egodystonia these men have with their own sexuality is so high that their awareness of it can actually become unconscious.

Given, then, that the stigma which currently applies to autism is at least as strong as the stigma which currently applies to homosexuality (which has at least been de-listed as a disorder for decades now), is it reasonable to ask whether projection operates in society to any comparable extent in regard to autism?  I propose that it is, in at least five areas:

1)  Career anti-autism crusaders.  This is the obvious parallel, and one I had intended to bypass for now.  Having realized however that I have the makings of a list here, I’ll simply include it and move on to …

2)  Autism researchers.  Hans Asperger was a man who claimed, rather than projected, his own tendencies to be like the subjects he studied.  While I don’t have a citation handy, I recall that he explicitly stated that he recognized some of his subjects’ Aspergian qualities as being very like his own.  Given however that autism research that is oriented towards the eradication of autism will be attractive to those who do project their own autism (in the same way that anti-gay stances and careers are attractive to those who project their own homosexuality) this seems an eminently reasonable question to raise.

3)  News media that uncritically report stories painting autism to be a result of injury or harm, without fact-checking, perhaps because reporters find it all-too-literally “self-evident” that autism is a form of damage.  News reporting, after all, involves the imposition of order on information, an activity—as Tyler Cowen points out—appealing to those with an autistic cognitive style, and therefore a line of work likely to have such people over-represented in its ranks.

4)  Parents or others genetically connected to autistic children who may find their own unacknowledged autism so abhorrent that they are willing to subject their younger kin to any equally abhorrent and irrational treatment simply in order to “make it go away.”

5)  Everyday people.  This is the group I’d intended to write about when I first set out, my larger theme being how it is that the autistic spectrum can appear to be missing a swath which connects it with the larger population.

Along those lines then, and in furtherance of my analogy with sexual orientations, I want to point out that sex researcher Alfred Kinsey demonstrated that sexual orientation, very like autism, does exist on a continuum or spectrum, one which he designated as running from 0 to 6.  Kinsey, in other words, was able to identify seven different shades of sexual orientation (as confidentially reported by his subjects), and yet we all know that virtually no one will publicly admit to being “just a little bit” gay.  The parallel here is that virtually no one will admit to being “just a little bit” autistic either.  None of this is particularly rational of course—but it doesn’t have to be.  It was less than a century ago in these United States after all that many states operated under the infamous “one-drop rule,” in which one forfeited one’s status as a “white person” simply by having an ancestry which included a single “drop” of “Negro blood.”

What this sort of irrational taboo makes for in the case of autism, I suggest, is a population of closeted, projecting autistics acting as a passive, approving, and unskeptical public who in turn—because they are for example relatives of, reporters on, or researchers and “experts” involved in the lives of certified autistic people—are deferred to by others as opinion leaders on autism issues.  This then enables the work of anti-autism crusaders and movements which subject already-identified autistic people to outrageously inhumane, unsafe, and therapeutically meaningless treatments, deny them needed vaccinations, and in fact threaten them with slow-motion genocide by way of eugenics.  Once set in motion, this dynamic self-reinforces in a vicious circle, further motivating those who occupy paler swaths of the autistic spectrum to hide and deny their own commonalities with and similarities to the population of identified autistics.

The autism of diagnosed autistics, in this light, can be seen to be functioning as a scapegoat.  The perceived defects or sins of the people, otherwise known as hidden, deniable autism, are loaded—or projected—onto a goat, otherwise known as obvious, undeniable autism, and that goat is then driven towards a tall cliff edge, a ritual otherwise known as “saving our children,” or “fundraising for the cure,” or whatever.  And everyone (well, almost everyone) feels better, until it all has to be done again, because The Dread Autism (along with The Dread Gay) is in most all of us to begin with, and we are just not comfortable with that.

So, ‘twas ever thus, at least since—though perhaps not prior to—the days of patriarchal desert gods and actual flesh-and-fur scapegoats.

And so it goes, still—though perhaps not for so much longer.

related:  The Unbroken Spectrum: Ridicule

related:  The Unbroken Spectrum: Self-Hatred

related:  The Unbroken Spectrum: Stockholm Syndrome

related:  The Unbroken Spectrum: The Shared Closet

“Whatever else it may be, autism is a way of being in the world.  It is a style, a manner of behaving and perceiving, and of being perceived.”

Classical Greece had a whole lexicon of different “ways of being in the world.”  Human styles of consciousness in all their diversity were recognized and honored with festivals and in architecture.  We know these styles of consciousness today by names such as Apollo, Persephone, Dionysus, and Aphrodite.

When our enthusiasm for instance is to shed light on a subject, to dig it out and lay it flat, pick it apart, expose its inner workings, and see it in the full light of day, we are experiencing an Apollonian style of consciousness—one to which autism does not yield easily, not to date, and conceivably not at all.  But the Greek root enthusiasmos does after all mean “to be possessed by the god.”  Apollo today, Dionysus this weekend; we all are tossed back and forth, our enthusiasms making the rounds between and amongst gods and goddesses—or styles of consciousness—both named and unnamed.  This is, as the Greeks saw it, what it is to be human.

That autism also would be a god—an archetypal style of consciousness—seems strange enough at first blush. Who would have suspected?  Well, there was that old Unitarian dropout Emerson, who observed, “… no one suspects the days to be gods.”  Substituting “autism” for “days,” we might get “No one suspects autism to be of the gods.”  And who would argue with that?  How about Carl Jung, who not only suspected but explicitly claimed, “The gods have become diseases.  Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting-room.”

So it is that we are still in search of the literal “curious specimen,” the neurological anomaly that will open the door to an autism with its component parts laid out plain to see on the glowing flatscreen monitors of radiologists the world over.  There are though other, less Apollonian ways to understand, to stand under these things, other more humble ways to gain access and insight.

Key to that humility is one’s position in the first place on the subject of many gods versus one true God—or, one true style of consciousness.  To be clear, I am not speaking literally here. I have known practicing monotheists (those whose god is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) whose style of consciousness was as polytheistic as the day is long; also, several assorted banes of my existence have been professing pagans or atheists who were in fact unyielding monotheists at heart.

But yes, when you are able to comfortably entertain multiple, competing and contradictory notions of truth or reality, when you can face ambiguity without needing to do anything about it, your overall style of consciousness might be said to be polytheistic.  When you behave as if there are not all that many right, healthy, or justifiable ways to be human, when you see differences as deviations from an ideal rather than variations on multiple ideals, when you discount gray tones for black and white, when you focus on the literal rather than the metaphorical, your overall style of consciousness might be said to be monotheistic—yea, though you are still tossed around and toyed with by various lesser gods, just like the rest of us.  Eros for instance makes fools of us all at times; never mind whether you “believe” in him, portraying him as a ridiculous cherub on Hallmark cards doesn’t begin to make up for the kinds of suffering he can bring.

At any rate, I’m sure you can intuit where my preferences and prejudices lie; I’m sure you can also see how these competing styles line up with the split in thinking over whether autism is an unambiguous pathology to be wiped from the face of the earth like smallpox or malaria, or an ambiguous logos we would do well to—and by—to listen to before we assume we know what it’s asking of us.  What Jung was getting at after all was that styles of consciousness, when ignored or blocked from consciousness, will get our attention via whatever avenues are left open to them, human suffering be damned—particularly when human suffering happens to be the only open path.

In this way they are very like gods, whether jealous, vengeful ones like the Old Testament’s Yahweh or yet older ones like the similarly petty, prideful inhabitants of Mount Olympus. And very like gods they make claims upon us which we must attend to, or there is hell to pay.

How then, do we go about hearing what autism wants of us, perhaps especially as it presents in non-verbal autistics?

My colleague Andrew Lehman, founding editor and regular contributor here at Shift, proposes Gregory Bateson’s understanding of Freud’s concept of primary process as a root description of the style of consciousness that is autism.  To be sure, depending on which section of the autistic “spectrum” one happens to be transiting at any given time and place, one can expect to experience a greater or lesser degree of primary process.

As a bumper sticker, Bateson’s take on primary process would read, “One Time, One Place, No Opposites.” There are connections there to dream consciousness, to animal consciousness, and to the human collective unconscious, all of which can be difficult to relate back to the everyday experience we think of as autism.  And without corroboration, it’s all too easy to presume that non-verbal autistics are mute simply because busy basking in primary process—though who knows, it may not be far from the truth.

I don’t know that either of us is proposing anything quite so direct, though.  There’ve been a few posts of mine where I’ve danced around this subject, but I’ve yet to find the opening I’m looking for.  And I’ll confess that even today, I’ve not caught up to Andrew’s grasp of the connections here.  What I’ve liked about it from the beginning though is that considering primary process as a taproot of autism invokes a respect for mystery—without, I think, descending into woo—and thus provides a framework for respecting the autistic experience, human suffering included, that is sorely missing from every other approach to autism with which I’m familiar.

For all that though, it’s still not entirely clear to me how we go about propitiating the “curious specimen” that is autism.  Before we try festivals and architecture, one thing I do believe needs to happen is that we learn to recognize it as a style of consciousness.  This, both in the sense of recognizing that it is a style, meaningfully self-consistent across the millions of people who “have” it; and also that we learn to recognize it when and wherever we see it, not just when it produces itself “for the doctor’s consulting-room.”

First things first.  One step at a time.  There are rituals after all, surprisingly similar, for establishing communication whether with animals, people, gods, or whatever.  You begin by respectfully recognizing the Other’s presence.

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This is in no small part because science representatives of evolutionary biology, such as Richard Dawkins, purposely confuse evolution with natural selection, usually linking Neo-Darwinistic interpretations of natural selection with evolution. This is further complicated by creationists or followers of intelligent design focusing exclusively on the theory of natural selection, interpreting the principles of that particular theory as identical with science’s understanding of evolution.

There is evolution and there are those theories we use to interpret evolution. It just so happens that many evolutionary biologists, creationists and members of the media don’t see a difference, or prefer we not see a difference. It seems to be in the interest of many individuals to muddy the difference between a theory and what a theory represents, to confuse a map and the territory.

When a metaphor seeks to represent not a particular experience, but an interpretation of an experience, the result is something like a metaphor of a metaphor. It is perhaps useful when we know that we are engaged in this particular process. A problem is that using metaphors to describe metaphors for experience is a whole lot of what being human is all about.

Maybe 4,000 generations ago, an eyeblink in evolutionary time, humans thought differently. Culture had not yet engaged. Language may still have been gestural. Our brains may still not have lateralized for speech. Most of us may have still been random-handed, like our great-ape cousins. Primary process consciousness may have been our night and day.

Primary process is a Freudian process, interpreted by Gregory Bateson to be the foundation animal consciousness, featuring one time, one place, no opposites. Primary process is the experience of an ever-present now, with little ability to estimate different times or to consider more than one location at any one time, and no ability to imagine something’s opposite. Trying to imagine something opposite results only in the appearance of that which is the thing you want to imagine the opposite of. Six different consciousnesses are associated with primary process: animal consciousness; human embryo and infant consciousness; human dream consciousness; the human unconscious; particular human altered states accessed through drugs and alcohol; and autism.

Humans, like our animal brothers and sisters, lived and breathed primary process. Something truly peculiar happened and humans evolved split consciousness. We could still access primary process, but our everyday existence featured an experience dramatically different from our sleeping nights. Split consciousness gave us the ability to exercise imagination and simultaneously have more than one time and more than one place and conceive of opposites; moreover, split consciousness was accompanied by primary process. We became both split and nonsplit beings in our daytime waking lives. Imagination and dissociation were mated with a tendency to experience the world in a way that merged a thing and what a thing represented.

Primary process does not differentiate. With primary process, a thing that represents, and a thing that is represented, are the same. In the world of dream, symbol and symbolized are merged.

We live deeply peculiar lives characterized by both extreme dissociation and compulsion to merge. This unique consciousness is understandable when approached evolutionarily. Humans feature two kinds of consciousness, and one of those two consciousnesses is unique. Accompanying this experience is our usual tendency to not exercise an ability to accompany the experience, or observe how exactly we engage in two kinds of consciousness. The result is that we often confuse the map with the territory.

As theories of evolution develop, the theorists, critics of theorists and the media describing combating viewpoints seem to specialize in forgetting that theories of evolution are metaphors for evolution. When theorists purposefully confuse evolution with a theory of evolution, when myth-believers purposefully confuse a personal experience with information that transcends personal experience, when the media focus only on describing battles instead of how battles came about, we are encouraged to confuse a thing and that which a thing represents. In other words, both science practitioners and myth-believers are often lodged in primary process and do not know it, so effortlessly are they engaged in dissociation.

This is the paradox of being human. While fully engaged in our imaginations, we often don’t notice when we are confusing a thing and what a thing represents. Able to be in multiple times and multiple places while seeing opposites, we at the same time merge two things that are different, experiencing them as the same.

There is a solution to the paradox. Identify with that part of us which is aware of, observes and patiently embraces our experience of being both split and nonsplit beings. Accompany self.

For some reason, a rather strange and astonishing result of accompanying split and nonsplit selves is an experience of compassion, interconnection and not being alone. Consider theorizing from a position where everything is relative. Map and territory are understood in the context of consciousness location. There is no truth, no answer, no right interpretation. There are no arguments. There is only sharing of experience.

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To understand evolution, we need to accompany ourselves.

Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/03/29/accompanying-the-metaphor/feed/ 1 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/03/10/performance/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/03/10/performance/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:36:34 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1489 Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream.  Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?”  (Jane Goodall Through a Window (Boston:  Houghlin Mifflin, 1990) pp. 241-242.)

I found Bill’s page within the janegoodall.org site while searching Google for evidence that chimpanzee or bonobo babies or children respond to music with movement or proto dance.  Although I’ve hypothesized in several places on this blog that dance emerged after the chimpanzee/human lineage split, probably during homo erectus as brains grew at lightning speed, yesterday’s entry has me thinking that if music/dance is a postbirth manifestation of womb ontogenetic epigenetic processes, then perhaps there is evidence of a response to music in chimpanzee and bonobo youth.  With bonobo exhibiting more neoteny than chimpanzees, bonobo babies and children would more likely exhibit an attraction to what we could interpret as proto music.

Evidently experiments have been conducted on human embryos in the womb to determine if brain waves suggested an integration of surrounding music and sound.  It seemed that was the case.  Click here.  Do bonobo exhibit the same predilection?  What other animals might reveal these trends?  What might be common among different animals that do show a tendency to be sensitive to rhythm?

I am fascinated by the relationship the autistic have with music and rhythm.  There is evidence that when language is tied to melody, it is easier for many with autism to absorb the words.  The autistic have been observed to retain perfect pitch in higher percentages than the nonautistic.  Several of those with autism that I have known personally felt a close affinity to music and dance.  One autistic boy I worked with almost never spoke, yet occasionally he would break out into dance.  In a subtle and interesting way, performance may be tied to the autistic experience.  There are rhythmic features to chimpanzee displays, particularly with the aggressive repetition of loud noise.  Perhaps the obsessive repetition associated with physical and aural exclamations in autism can be viewed as a combination of, or transition between, display and performance.  Autistic communication often feels to me to be a performance of information featuring a repetition of remembered or rehearsed songs, jokes and snatches of conversation.

I am reminded of Baron-Cohen’s exploration of Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimpanzee explorations regarding theory of mind.  If a chimpanzee demonstration can remind us so closely of a human performance, then perhaps certain autistic behaviors can be seen as a bridge between the two.

If obsessive repetition, rhythm or music are often integral to the autistic experience, and on occasion seem to behave as bridges that provide access to words and what words represent, then would an early and deep immersion in rhythm perhaps provide the autistic with an environment through which they could establish firm connections?

Clearly, if this experiment were conducted on the very young, it would more likely have a positive effect than when they are older.  I don’t estimate there would be negative repercussions.  If we surmise that autistic attraction to repetition, rhythm and performance suggests a need for an environment that reflects those features, perhaps a rhythm-and-performance-infused environment of the type experienced by humans just before or during the transition to culture and split consciousness will encourage a making of connections.

There was a time, perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, when we did not trade in symbols.  We were still steeped in primary consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives) but were likely dancing up a storm.  Waterfalls and thunderstorms no doubt moved us, but there is a good chance we often moved each other, performing movement to rhythm and sound.

The autistic may be a mere 4,000 generations from us, a couple neurological anomalies away.  Perhaps all that is needed to bridge this distance is an ability for moderns to evolve a feeling for wordless, rhythmic performance, a feeling for living in the autistic now.

…

Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here.