Friday, November 19, 2010

Part of the reason I'm not sure I can pull this off...

I noted in the first post that I speak in hypertext.  I also noted that I'm not sure that I can even begin to describe what I meant when I said that.

One of the more common complaints amongst people on the spectrum (which is actually somewhat misleading.  We're all on the spectrum.  Some of us just fall further out than others) is that they continually forget for most people that "How are you?" is a question that isn't meant to be answered.  It's not a question that most autistic people would think to ask unless they wanted the answer.  The phatic formulation of that isn't something that makes sense to us.  There's a first-order meaning to the phrase (Tell me how you're doing) and a second-order meaning to the phrase (You are occupying the same space as me, so I must acknowledge your presence in order to be seen as polite.  Please, please, please don't tell me how you're doing.  Tell me things are great.)  That second order phrasing doesn't come naturally to me.  Does that make sense?

Discerning the difference between first order and second order phrasings is (I don't want to say "hard") but rather, odd, for me. There's an interesting post over at MOM - Not Otherwise Specified that speaks to some of this.  I really don't find that child's behavior as bizarre as most people would.  In some sense, it's what we (even you) all do (You may note that I often use the phrase "in some sense."  You may even feel I overuse it.  There's a reason for that formulation.  We all speak in context.  For some of us, context comes naturally.  For some of us, there's nothing but context.)   But we all follow scripts.

In a conversation with an acquaintance on FaceBook, recently, she explained to me that protocol (for which one can substitute "the rules which govern social interaction") is the "formalised pretense of caring."  It's a formulation that at once strikes me as utterly absurd and yet entirely spot-on.  Social protocol dictates the "correct" response by social context rather than by "truthfulness" of response.  "How are you?" dictates that one respond "Great. And you?" rather than "Shitty.  My cat just died."  (And I'm sure many of you would argue that depending on whom you're speaking, that second answer might even be appropriate.  I really don't feel like getting into that at the moment.)

Depending on who you are and who you are speaking to, you will alter the "script" that you follow (and if you want to substitute "protocol" for "script," I think that that might help you understand what I'm trying to get at.)  For me, it's not so much that I have problems because I'm stuck on one script, but rather that there are so many differing scripts and readings of any one conversation, that I try to collapse those to the most literal one possible, to make communication possible.  Reading something like Finnegan's Wake can actually render me somewhat aphasic or catatonic.  Because there's so much ambiguity or slipperiness in the use of language there, my mind goes into overdrive.  It turns into a computer stuck in an infinite loop.  Reading a single sentence of Finnegan's Wake can send me into a cascade of word associations (or Jesse disassociations) that I can get lost in for minutes, if not hours, at a time.  I'm trying to figure out a way to put this cogently.

In a recent conversation someone related a story to me (and this may be what my cousin means when she tells me that I "speak in stories"), a friend told me of the time that someone asked one of the children of one of the band members from the Grateful Dead how he felt being the child of a famous musician had made him different from other children.  He responded along the lines of "I don't know.  How would I know what it's like to have had a 'normal' childhood?"  I can get behind that.

Language, for me, is an almost entirely associative act.  You mention the word chicken and I might start thinking about El Pollo Loco, the time my father was so fucked up that he cooked dinner and mistook the call for 2 teaspoons of lemon juice in the recipe as a call for 2 cups (it was eaten, nonetheless, my father was nothing if not a man that would not waste a dime on anything that wasn't booze), the cliff scene in Rebel Without a Cause, memories of cooking pollo al mattone, some song that I'd gladly not hear again for another five years and so on and so on.   It's actually hard for me to stay first order. 

Or something like that.

You ask me "How are you?" and my natural inclination is to collapse that statement to the first order.  You open the lid on that box and everything will suddenly fly out.  Many of the other senses that it can be meant are too terrible to contemplate.  Unfortunately, this can often leave me out of sync with a conversation.) Feyman says that "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."  Language and memory function for me functions in much the same way.  Any word brings back the whole thing, if you only follow the thread.

In earlier times, I had a copy of a poem written not long after my brother died.  It was something that resonated very deeply with me.  Serendipitously, I met the poet a year or so later.   We became pretty close friends.  There was a line in the poem that went like this "Let another separate these chapters of my life."  This separation is not something that comes naturally to me.   This drawing of life into distinct bites or posts or capsules.  Language and memory are largely recursive for me.  They're resonant.  You say this and that rings a bell somewhere in my head about the time I was in band camp (well, I never went to band camp, but I think you get the idea.)  It's redundant and functions by accretion.  It's like playing a symphony with small variations on the theme.   Repeat the motif, change a note.  It's part of the reason I repeat myself and my stories so often.  These are all touchstones in the narrative that make me me.  These are all the function of my memory.   Some play larger parts than others.  But I'm not sure that I can impose an absolute order on them from above.

And I'm not necessarily sure that this is the right format to try to use to do that.

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