literature

‘ey, aye

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all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.

the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.

ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.

ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.

ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.

ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.

ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.

ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.

ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.

but it’s so convenient. i’ll give it that.

my mother, the maker

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I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States.

My mother just turned 82 today. She has faced challenges in every measurable area of her life, that I won’t go into—that’s a different story. Her diagnosis has changed with the trends of the healthcare industry, and she has only recently been recognized as autistic. It’s hard to imagine that someone who has experienced the challenges that have been placed on her would have such a sweet and sunny disposition and enthusiastic and optimistic outlook during times when her accommodations meet her needs. During times when her challenges are centered, she can be deeply dysregulated and difficult to comfort.

I’m going to take this in a surprising direction, at least considering the thrust of my advocacy, which is that love is the missing accommodation that’s never measured in any diagnostic framework. I never want to look at a person in a way that frames them according to their worth as a producer of economic output. Yet a remarkable characteristic of my mom is that throughout every stage of her life, from the time she was 6 years old until now—76 years and counting—she has been continuously engaged in making.

Her discipline is the fiber arts, and within that her skills and output are varied and broad—sewing, knitting, crochet, natural dyes are the main ones, and she’s dabbled in all other areas of the work. She has worked for brief periods in her industry, but there are so few compensated roles in the US that she has mostly done work in highly unaccommodating environments and lived on public assistance.

She’ll spend her last $20 on a skein of yarn to make a garment for a friend she met yesterday. No amount of reminding or cajoling can convince her to practice practical economy.

Making is literally self-regulation for her. When she is focused on a project, all of the other challenges stop being centered. As long as her needs are provided for, making work is her happy place. She also loves to share information, and she delights in the opportunity to pass on her skills and knowledge. I wish more of those opportunities existed, because they provide the context for the type of social interaction that both feeds her heart and nurtures her community.

76 years and counting of continuous making. What metric in the paradigm of industrial capitalist culture and disability accommodation factors in that part of her profile? None that I’ve ever come across. And this with a history of social isolation that can be viewed as a life-limiting condition on its own.

The condition of her disability makes sense in the context of the socioeconomic realities that her culture presents to her as the standard environment against which fitness is measured—where the type of handwork she produces is only valuable in a privileged family who can afford to accommodate the person making it, or in a country designated, within the global economy, as a labor-extraction zone—where high-skill, low-output handwork like hers becomes an input in production channels serving that economic system. Using that lens, it’s difficult to recognize her as a person of great economic value to any community. Her challenges add up to a net liability, when public housing, mental health care, and economic assistance are factored in.

When we recognize this person, nearing the end of their life expectancy, which is an important stage to factor into any metric of fitness—where will this person be expected to be in their later years? Will they still be enjoying life and engaged with their community? Any metric of fitness should take in the full arc of a person’s life, and not just ability to function at the level required to be measured as functional relative to potential economic output at the age of eligibility for the workforce.

When we recognize this person independently of their cultural frame, we can notice some things that are both remarkable and unremarkable, depending on how they are viewed.

Relative to an 82-year-old person who is engaged in a 76-year-and-counting period of productivity, who is warm, congenial, and who shares information and mentors freely when she is in her element (that seems like a good standard of fitness), let’s reframe the history of accommodations she’s received.

My mom’s primary relationship has been with the healthcare system and the public assistance apparatus that negotiates access on her behalf. Looked at honestly, her mental health accommodations have been based around her ability to interact in working environments that don’t meet her needs, and in intimate relationships with people who are similarly undervalued in our society, who also have communication differences, social challenges, unaddressed trauma, and self-regulation strategies that involve substances and power-balancing behaviors that are responses to perceived loss of autonomy.

In retrospect, all of that could be accommodated quite simply in another cultural context: recognize her as valuable; provide her with food and housing, for which her needs are quite modest relative to the median; interact with her socially in ways that suit her needs—let her interact with people in all stages of life, engage her on topics in which she has deep and exceptional knowledge, allow her to mentor people who share her interests, and accompany her in gentle restorative exercise like a walk through the neighborhood; and make sure she has a project and the resources to complete it.

The culture that frames the conditions of industrial capitalism as the standard environment within which fitness is judged is in fact a statistical anomaly, a tiny blip in the arc of human evolution relative to a variety of environments—5 centuries of organization and 2 centuries of implementation—in a journey of hundreds of millennia. Changing that frame, how could her life, and her value to a community, look different?

As this is not a dissertation, but meant to inspire dissertations based on different paradigms and cultural assumptions, I’m going to share information without proof. I’ll leave it to the inspired and informed reader to explore the connections I’m pointing to. Let’s continue having these conversations.

Consider that a cross-cultural examination of precolonial land-embedded societies around the world reveals a consistent pattern—deities and portions of cultural mythology that represent the role of the maker—the smith, the weaver—as the one who provides the necessary bridge from the natural world to a world of order that human habitation demands. The mythology directly legitimizes a person like my mother as the person who makes human existence possible—the skills they possess to transform raw materials into the tools, roads, clothing, and artifacts of material culture are seen as literally connecting humans to their environment in the exact ways necessary to support a community sustainably. Not as decoration—as vital infrastructure.

A culture with these embedded myths would have recognized my mother early, and, knowing her value to the community, would have nurtured her unique qualities.

Keep in mind: my mother acquired her skills at her own expense, in pursuit of her personal interests. The type of obsessive attention to detail that is required to turn raw fiber into garment, implement, or tool does not come easily to many people. To take the average person and force them into a program of training would be an energy-demanding exercise that would place possibly debilitating demands on most people. The demands of industrial capitalist economies force people through training programs like this as a matter of course. She pursued her program with joy, determination and pride, not to meet the demands of a credential, but to satisfy her precise curiosity, to regulate her life, and make it meaningful.

How would my mother’s brain, her nervous system, her psycho-emotional development, her ability to connect socially, have grown differently, had she been recognized within a community that valued her unique qualities? I’ll leave it to the reader to do the emotional and cognitive work of making those connections.

For me, understanding is inseparable from grief. If you understand, let’s pause, and reflect, and grieve. But also celebrate, and repair.

Back to my opening statement: I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States, at least without radically reframing our metrics for how autistic people are judged relative to the societies they are embedded within.

Many will dismiss my argument as lacking data, as naive projection onto indigenous cultures of inclusiveness that wasn’t present, as mythologizing an idealized past I wasn’t present for. My hope is that the smiths and weavers of paradigms will sew together the threads of our precolonial collective past and show where specific human cultures crossed the boundaries of acceptable behavior by making portable mythologies that didn’t keep the connection legible of the natural world to humanity’s space within it. I hope they might show how specific cultures subjugated the role of the highly interested woman that weaves the community together to that of the warrior bent on destroying anything that doesn’t resemble it.

I realize that I’ve forced the ending here. I’m rushing an idea that deserves more space, for the comfort of the reader. How is this functionally different from rushing my mother into a diagnosis and cultural ghetto for the comfort of a diagnostic committee that is suffering cognitive overwhelm, too tired to assess the arc of a person’s life? And, if we’re kind, this is not an indictment. It’s the gentle reminder to the researcher with low interoception that it’s time to go to bed. Because you are an important asset to the community and we recognize your value.

I have such mixed feelings here. I feel terrible, having reduced my mother’s life to a case study. But having rendered her as valuable, and worthy of the recognition of a community that values her specific qualities, I rest, hoping that in making her legible, a community might find a better way to organize itself.

Pause. Reflect. Grieve. Celebrate. Repair. Rinse. Repeat.

adulting and its opposite

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here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:

as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,

growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:

walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.

the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.

we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.

instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.

what. the. fuck. happened?

and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?

do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?

help me here.

what’s the deal with literacy these days?

by

Let’s take a moment to say something out loud:
there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world;
and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons
many of our kids are not excited

to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent
lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows
of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper
or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,

someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not
important enough to take the time to craft.
Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to:
Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;

Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics
are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find
a rhyme, if they know that one is coming:
(you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when

the person reading leaves out the last
word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?)
(If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend).
When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad

were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms
and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited
memory to do the work of storytelling,
passed from tongue to tongue for about as long

as Europeans have occupied the Americas–
you might start to wonder which skills we should be
focusing on, when passing information
along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.

You can do the human math–(I’ve done it,
and with confidence can say what I’m going
to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most
of the poets and writers of ages past were people

who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent;
for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm
was just the way they knew their brain would remember it;
and in doing so, made the event accessible

to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen,
you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow;
the calming force of human expectation,
and satisfaction of expectation, over,

and over, and over, and over, and over again,
like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders,
that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount
of time. (who has time for that, these days?)

Godzilla! Save us!

by

When a child grows up in an environment where there is only one source of support, and that source of support is unpredictable, unstable, and capable of harm, the child’s identity becomes tied to that of the person they rely on. They may learn that if they go along with their caregiver, their needs will not be met. In this case, it can actually be a successful adaptation to learn to counter the caregiver, if that means getting their needs met.

The problem arises when this child never gets the experience of being supported by a field–by the wider community. They lose their ability to form bonds with a variety of people who might meet their needs in more healthy ways. Their whole identity calcifies into a constant state of opposition to the only person they recognize–their unstable, unpredictable, possibly abusive caregiver.

Sound familiar? We see this type of dynamic within families all the time. We also see it in our national politics, and more and more on the international stage as well. Leaders and governments are galvanized around opposition to some party, population, or set of policies. In doing so, they lose their ability to live in the world of phenomena: the only thing that exists is that to which they are opposed. It’s toxic, maddening, heartbreaking – overwhelming to anyone paying attention.

So what do we do, when this state of affairs arises? Providing coherence, context, nuance only gives more information to be pushed against. In psychology, there is the idea of triangulation: ceasing to engage in dyadic entrapments and focusing instead on a shared field of engagement.

We have had many opportunities to form cross-cognitive bonds with those who are oppositional by constitution: nuclear proliferation, climate change, Covid 19: these all appear to be the kinds of existential threats that we can unite around. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive bias, not a rational train of thought. None of these threats are fast-moving enough that we can recognize the danger before forming an opinion about it. This opinion gets formed by the same framework that locks us into oppositional mode in the first place.

I’m more and more convinced that only a fast-moving apex predator like Godzilla will be recognized as a force of triangulation that we can unite around opposing. In fact, the original Godzilla film from 1954 had a humanist, anti-nuclear subtext, which, of course, was stripped out when the film entered the US market.

Please, Godzilla! Please save us from ourselves!

Portrait of a Scientist (early 20th century)

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He was probably a university student, or a post-doc, or maybe already a professor.

He was probably married and probably had a new child at home,

(and might have even had an idea of what university he hoped his child would attend).

He was probably an only child, or if he had siblings, was probably somehow isolated from his siblings–

(maybe because of the way he thought, or acted, or experienced the world)–

(he was just a child in his environment)–

they might have called him awkward, or deviant, or different, and maybe even criticized him harshly, and might have neglected to look at certain parts of him with loving eyes.

He was probably criticized harshly by a well-intentioned but misguided teacher or parent,

(whom he probably loved),

for tap-tap-tapping his pen when he was deep in thought during exams.

He was probably criticized harshly for daydreaming by another teacher or parent,

(whom he probably loved).

He was probably feeling the anxiety of his wife–

(as the wife of a university student, or post-doc, or professor, with a new child at home, is probably going to feel a lot of anxiety, truth be told),

(which he probably hated, knowing his role in that anxiety)

–anxiety about the ways her husband’s schedule isolated him from the family, and anxiety about the ways his eyes didn’t meet her eyes lovingly, and seemed so unemotional,

(and about the ways she didn’t understand how she could be a loving mother and still lack so much understanding of her child, and feel so much anxiety),

(which, as we know, is just the nature of motherhood)–

and she probably felt bad about it–

(and the child was just a child in their environment).

His wife might have been very religious, or at least she might have felt a lot of conviction,

(there’s often a conflict between conviction, religious or otherwise, and scientific inquiry),

which added to her anxiety, and his,

(and added anxiety to their child’s environment).

In feeling this anxiety deeply, she might have criticized her husband harshly,

(as she probably felt criticized by his very existence, though she probably wanted to express herself lovingly in the spiritual language she was given, if he would only meet her eyes lovingly, and make the space for the spiritual language of love she was given),

and in receiving this anxiety deeply, he probably defended science,

(not knowing how to hold both sides),

and criticized her harshly.

He probably wanted to say something to soothe his wife, but the words would never come at the right time,

(or awkward words might have come out, that seemed to make things worse, despite intentions),

and he felt bad about it.

Enthusiastic about the new language of science, he was probably mistrustful of religious language,

(and not trusting strong emotions, due to being harshly criticized for having strong emotions as a child, mistrustful of emotional language as well),

further divorcing him from the world of his wife, and his ability to meet her eyes,

(lovingly, with his eyes, and come up with satisfying language to express his love),

and all of the wise language of the past, in every language,

(divorcing him from the past).

The language of science, he probably believed, was the wisdom language of the future, and this belief probably caused a certain dynamic to happen:

Being divorced from his connection to the wisdom languages of the past, he probably felt compelled to create the wisdom language of the future.

So, in the course of his study,

(which was probably the study of sensory, cognitive, and behavioral differences in children),

when viewing a child brought in for viewing by a concerned parent,

(who was just a child being a child, in a clinical environment, at a moment in time),

with all the traits that in himself had been criticized harshly, or that he had anxiety about, or simply didn’t understand the nature of, relative to time and relationship–

delayed speech, social awkwardness, heightened sensory response or sensory processing difference, gender- or sexual-nonconformity, extreme behaviors, repetitive motor expression, deep knowledge of a special interest, tendency toward routine, differences in eye-expression or affect, cognitive disengagement, hyperfocus, slow emotional processing, nonsensical or novel language processing, cognitive dissonance

–and blind to himself,

(because objectivity, by nature, is blindness to the self),

and isolated from the ways that the wisdom of the ages might have made sense of a person with these traits, he created new language to represent the combination of traits he was viewing, as expressed through this particular child, at a certain moment in time,

(being that his thesis was due, and he had to come up with something novel):

Autism, possibly with attentional disengagement, with comorbidities of gender dysphoria and possible homosexuality. Investigate possible narcissism, or emotional immaturity, and possibly unbalanced sensory processing. Probably undeveloped moral sensibility, possibly brought on by the parents’ insecurity.

Let’s stop, and reflect,

(and in reflecting, possibly reframe):

In looking only forward, with hyperfocused eyes, and in trying to be objective, he missed the part about himself.

He was nothing, if not a well-intentioned parent,

(and the child was still just a child).

And, like all well-intentioned parents, sometimes we get things so backwards.

But in recognizing the point of view of the scientist,

in context, we can

(hopefully)

forgive all of his projections, and his well-intentioned but misguided ideas about children, and childhood, healthy and unhealthy traits and what it means to be a healthy child in a loving environment,

(and all of his anxiety about relationships, and reliance on routine, and emotional stuckness, and failures to articulate, and failures of eyes to meet the world lovingly, in trying trying trying to understand); and

(certainly)

it’s easy to forgive the scientist’s wife, with all she was dealing with, in relative isolation; and

(hopefully)

we might even forgive the scientist’s parents and teachers, whose harsh, well-intentioned criticisms so affected the scientist and his point of view; and

(hopefully)

we might even forgive the harsh, well-intentioned convictions of his wife’s religious parents and teachers,

(which resulted in so much anxiety and conflict and cognitive dissonance).

And in recognizing ourselves in our own mistakes, we always have the opportunity

(hopefully)

to forgive ourselves:

to pause, to reflect, to reassess, to connect with all of the wisdom that the ages have to offer,

(including the language of science),

and to step backwards, with loving eyes,

(even when it’s awkward),

into a new understanding.

How could the scientist’s diagnosis

(based on what we now know to be a moment in time within a historical and emotional context in a clinical environment)

be reframed, in light of this new understanding, that includes forgiveness, and time to develop, and an environment to move around in freely?

Child shows emerging language with delayed but steady progress. Social style is unique, with moments of awkwardness typical of age. Strong sensory awareness observed, with vivid responses to environment. Repetitive motor play and preference for routines indicate self-soothing and learning strategies. Shifts between disengagement and deep hyperfocus reflect flexible attention patterns. Emotional processing is ongoing, with gradual maturation expected.

Is this reframing any less accurate or concise? Does it come with less anxiety? Are we noticing something intimate? Something that moves toward ease?

Are we noticing a possibility

(or even a probability)

of how the future might actually work, for all of us?

We’re all right here, in this very environment,

(and still, all children are just our children)

and opportunity is all around us,

(and within us).

tldr; never summarize the plot of a story into a moral–that’s the work of life: in resolving life’s complexity, within ourselves, we find our unique way of being in the world around us,

(and within us).

❣️

by

all the little things you do are done for love.

don’t doubt it. shout about it.

shout about the things you do for love.

(it’s about the little things)

little things are moved toward love.

(If you are moved, move the little things toward love)

love this, sweetie

lovethislovethislovethislovethislove