[Olson's] inability to control his addictive 'whoring after culture,' his involuntary adherence to the role of hopeful artist as past generations had defined it, brought him nothing but shame. ...And once he finally stumbled into his vocation - teacher - some delightful description of his initial classrom forays:
Now, faced with money problems that were obviously temporary but very real, he stubbornly dodged the whole annoying work issue, squandering what little cash he had in compulsive book-buying sprees, sometimes spending whole afternoons prowling dealers' shops in search of the one line, lost in an obscure volume, which might spur him forward to new writing discoveries. ...
Drawing unexpected connections with breathtaking speed, he leaped across space and time, linking Troilus and new astronomy, Frazer and Freud, field physics and Frobenius, projective geometry's 'gains of space' and epic poetry's timeless mythic archetypes, creating an open-ended architecture of knowledge that placed twentieth-century man in vivid relation to cosmic patterns of eternity. ...Confused though his students might have been by such utterances in 1948, said one, "We got his big message: stick to where your passions take you."
"We are a perpendicular axis of planes," he declared, "constantly being intersected by planes of experience coming in from the past - coming up from the ground, the underground tide - going out to the future."
His life, foreshortened as it was by the alcoholism that seems the inevitable refuge of every male (artist or not) who is so obviously high on the autism spectrum, seemed destined for greater things even than he managed in his confusion to accomplish. No one understood these neurologies back then. With their (our) retarded emotions, inability to function as adults at the ages society expects them to, confusion as to purpose, and yet an unquenchable thirst for learning (the child's inbuilt seeking that in our case does not switch off in the adult), and curious inability to interact effectively with humans in the human world, the high-spectrum character doses himself more and more heavily with anesthetic until - JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN HIS MATURITY WOULD CLICK IN AND HIS GIFTS BECOME OBVIOUS - he succumbs to its physiological effects.
That's my theory, anyway. I read this same sequence of events over and over again in the alcoholic male artist. Kerouac, Pollock, Olson. They never knew then that this was nature's weird painful way of holding them back until they might blossom in old age.
Females, whose hormonal makeup enables them better to mimic the neurotypical world and blend in at least a little, seem less likely to succumb to substances, but if they have made families, they seem equally inevitably to end up stranded in some remote place, completely estranged from the love their youth brought them so abundantly. I do not refer to myself only but to my female forebears who each in turn have ended up this way, and also to every stranded mother I have befriended out here in the wilderness. Bewildered, they are, to a one. What did I do? Where did they go? We can reach out no better now than we could then. We are wounded animals at our core, and the best we can do is crawl off to be alone.
But I've figured it out, kind of. The closeness with offspring seems to persist until the child is in his or her 30s. Then he stands solid on his feet and no longer needs to reach out to Mom. In neurotypical families, this is when Mom takes over the reaching, calling and visiting and sending little gifts, doing the chitchat required to keep the extended relation strong and vital, earning her contributing role of grandmother. But us folks who score 25 and above on the diagnostic spectrum (Husband is a 28; I am a 34) have no clue how to do that. Our efforts are awkward, sporadic, and after the first failure or two makes for sufficient embarrassment, we retreat, confused, and wonder why everyone around us gets those visits and calls and gifts while we get only silence and dark misunderstanding.
I fear nothing can be done about this. It's a matter of hard wiring. Certain areas of our brains simply don't connect properly. We contain vestiges of wild animal behavior. Terrors and solitarinesses. I don't want to be tranquilized into a false sociability. So perhaps I will fade away.
And now it's time for my own old age to kick in. I feeled somewhat healed and certainly more mature than I was for most of my life. Wait, though ... No I don't. I feel exactly as I felt at 6 and 10 and 14 - those childhood years when I was regarded as a litte adult with wisdom beyond her years - and I stuck there into adulthood - when I was regarded as an incompetent infant.
I think you have to be here to get it.
Anyway, back to work.
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