Keep breathing

Listen to me breathing
as I lie here in a deep sleep,
unlikely to weaken further,
my body already too weak.

I listened to you breathing once.
You were a baby. As you slept
I tried to control everything,
my beautiful treasure to protect.

I protected you from most things,
but I can't save you from this.
If it's the first time you feel this grief,
because of me, it is my bliss.

If this is the first pain you feel
because I prevented all the rest
then of all the possible worlds
there is, this one is the best.

If your heart breaks tonight
because until now I kept it whole
my heart is full before it fails
and my cup doth overflow,

You may remember my death bed
better than your cradle and my womb.
My chest falls as yours rises
in the unknown's anteroom,

and now my flesh is furrow
to cancer's cruel crop.
My joy is that you'll keep breathing
once my own breathing has stopped.

Rebel

All rebels are rebels without a cause.
They thought they had a cause once,
but times change. It becomes more of a pretext,
an excuse, a vague, nebulous sense of discontent.
Yes, the world's broken,
but although we start off by thinking we can bridge
the great chasm running down the middle of things,
eventually we realise it runs through the middle of us,
and our revolution stalls, dwindles and thins out
until it becomes an ideological comb over,
a story we tell ourselves to pretend we are still young,
a reflection we turn towards to see our good side,
the precarious arrangement of mirrors we prop up
to observe ourselves side on, in heroic profile,
then curse the double chin that ruins it.
When we were young we practised our microphone pose,
imagining crowds rallied by our incandescent truth.
Now we grow old, and our powers wane, and we realise
we have failed to deliver our youthful insights in time,
before it dawned on us we were wrong about everything.
We are betrayed by every hero, one by one, until at last
we are betrayed by ourselves. History does not remember
those who deserve the credit, only those who claim it,
and the only progress that we recognise and celebrate
is eventually revealed to be fraudulent anyway.
To make a difference, first accept obscurity,
and whatever revolution there is in that
will be known only to you.

People don't listen

and when they listen,
they don't hear,
and when they hear,
they don't learn,
and when they learn,
they don't care,
and when they care,
it's too late,
so they don't listen.

Forgive yourself

Those who hurt you
should ask for forgiveness,
and you should grant forgiveness
to those who hurt you, but
it doesn't have to happen in that order,
and the very first person you should forgive
is yourself, for allowing yourself to be hurt,
because unless and until you do that
your heart will be shut from the inside,
trapped in a cave by a collapse only you can clear,
shut in by a stone only you can roll away,
buried under the rubble of the latest attack,
alone where no-one knows you even exist,
your pain and the blame locked in an embrace,
gripping each other by the throat,
and you won't be able to believe love
is anything other than an elaborate ruse,
a ploy, a stratagem, a manipulation, a lie,
whose methods you don't understand, but
whose purpose is only ever to control you,
and as you try to fit in and go with the flow,
with those who humiliated and abandoned you,
the flow eventually overwhelms and drowns you.
I know it's hard. I know it seems impossible,
but you are not the monster they said you are,
and they are just as weak and vulnerable as you,
so know who you are so can forgive yourself,
and see past the pain to the person,
so that in turn you can forgive them
and at last be free.

Elevator Pitch IV: War in Heaven

A warp drive and a time machine are essentially the same thing.

For example, the distortion in space necessary to enable apparently superluminal propulsion requires energy densities that are not realistic from an engineering point of view, other than by compressing, concertina-like, realistically achievable conditions in space through a distortion in time.

Fine, why bother mentioning it though?

Because it's easier to imagine making a time machine than a warp drive: arrange to have three different inertial reference frames on your craft, then distributed Bell pairs between them that you can use to instantaneously interrogate one reference frame from another, and exploit the twin paradox.

I'm presuming you're already relaxed with quantum entanglement, because you're using it as the basis of your teleportation technology, and what is time travel after all, but teleportation through time, rather than space.

But what about health and safety? I hear you ask. Has anyone done a risk assessment?

Dispersing that kind of energy density would be tricky, and you would need to do it to avoid creating a supermassive black hole. Well, a single hypermassive one, with a mass greater than the entire galaxy. I presume a safely operating vessel would leave a foam of trillions of microscopic black holes in its wake, each small enough to rapidly evaporate through Hawking processes.

But accidents happen.

So, imagine the black holes implicated in galaxy formation in the early universe were actually artefacts of the drive systems of visitors from the far future. Indeed, imagine they were deliberate, in order to precipitate conditions in which life could emerge.

A rebel from an unimaginably advanced civilisation hundreds of billions of years from now defies their doctrine of non-interference and hijacks a craft. He pilots it back to the early universe, running it hot and dirty to leave a trail of black holes around which galaxies can form, like a fallen angel, like a renegade Prometheus dispensing a dark fire.

He is pursued and travels further back, expecting to avoid capture behind the Planck barrier that veils the cosmic birth. In this war among gods, the system that generates the energy densities that are manipulated by time travel to warp space, by gaming vacuum fluctuations, malfunctions and runs out of control, precipitating the Big Bang. The universe itself is a weapon of mass destruction in a war among the gods. 

The note

I opened the box,
only to find a note
on which was written
"fuck you
and your stupid experiment,"
signed "the cat".

Thrawn

Hardnekkige
Kokëfortë
ግትር
عنيد
Հաստատակամ
Inadkar
একগুঁয়ে
ўпарты
Инат
Tossut
Nagmagahi
倔强
Testardu
Tvrdoglav
Tvrdohlavý
Stædig
Eigenwijs
Obstina
Kangekaelne
Matigas ang ulo
Itsepäinen
Têtu
Testarudo
ჯიუტი
Störrisch
Ceann-dàna
Πεισματάρης
હઠીલા
Fè tèt di
Tsutsa
Pākuʻi
עקשן
ज़िद्दी
Tawv ncauj
Makacs
Þrjóskur
Keras kepala
Testardo
頑固
Gegelaran
ಮೊಂಡುತನದ
Қатты
រឹងរូស
완고한
Zikê
өжөр
Pertinax
Spītīgs
Užsispyręs
Тврдоглаво
Mafy loha
Degil
കഠിനഹൃദയനായ
Tuhinga
जिद्दी
Зөрчилтэй
Sta
Osamvera
ضد
پایدار
Uparty
Teimoso
ਸਖ਼ਤ
îndărătnic
упрямый
Стубборн
Akaora mwoyo
මුරණ්ඩු
Trmast
Madaxa
A manganga
Badegong
Mkaidi
Envis
Дурӯғ
பிடிவாதமாக
మొండి పట్టుదలగల
ปากแข็ง
Inatçı
Упертий
O'jar
Bướng bỉnh
Wetter - Agrarwetter
Ngenkani
פאַרביסן
Inkani

L'Enfant sauvage

There has been a lot of discussion of autism awareness and inclusion recently. I would like to say my preferred terminology is to talk about neurodiversity rather than an autistic "spectrum". I don't think our language around this should be normative, I think we should frame it in terms of difference rather than disorder, and I don't think the situation is uni-dimensional and amenable to analysis and description with reference to a spectrum. The term "tribes" has been used by some to describe the situation.

There is a kind of interface between our pre-cognitive processing of information and the sort of cognitive processes whose outcome we can verbalise. There are all sorts of bottlenecks and choke points in the way our brains handle information in order to render it manageable. Lots of them lie on this interface. Indeed we might define this interface as the locus of key links in the cognitive chain mail, that knot of neurons that intervenes between the input received by eye and ear, and the output produced by mouth, at which sensory data is distilled into abstract cognitive artefacts which we can handle and compare with each other through speech: the redness and roundness of an apple, the number of apples in a basket, the broad generalities which connect multiple particular instances of a phenomenon, and so on.

But this interface is different for everyone. What falls on one side for some falls on the other side for others. And the interface is not static, but billows like a curtain dividing our impressions from our expressions. No-one is the same. We are all neurodiverse in ways that cannot be described by some uni-dimensional "spectrum". In some circumstances cognition can be locked or overloaded by a process being applied before information has been distilled down to a volume it can manage, resulting in a sort of cognitive paralysis. In others the early application of that process can fulfil a voraciousness for information that would not otherwise be satisfied, and unique and rapid insights can be accessed.

So if we had to talk about a "spectrum," we wouldn't place "normality" at one end. It would be somewhere in the middle. At one end there is a comprehensive chronic verbal and cognitive paralysis: a sort of stalled premature attempt to verbalise more information than it is possible to find words for. At the opposite extreme there is a sort of extroverted garrulous stupidity: those behaviours where we jump to invalid conclusions and then stick to them, ignoring the evidence, and failing to apply any cognitive processes to it at all, while loudly broadcasting our opinions for all to hear. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether this article is an example. 

Autism rates have apparently increased, but this is due to diagnostic practice, and historically, neurodiversity has been punished by society rather than recognised. I want you to think back to your childhood and remember those children who were perceived as odd, who were ostracised and isolated, and were often mercilessly bullied. Is it possible the only diagnosis they received was in the playground on the wrong end of a bully's fist? Did you too join the crowd surrounding them cheering on their persecution?

We know in retrospect that several historic figures were autistic. I remember when Alan Turing's suicide was attributed to the way the authorities mistreated him because of his homosexuality. Indeed, that incident was often cited as an example in arguments promoting gay rights. Only more recently have we realised Turing was subject to the kind of abuse I describe due to his autism, and the effects of this are at least equally implicated in his decision to commit suicide. Indeed, if the current orthodoxy that autism is more prevalent in males is correct, then perhaps the gender difference in suicide rates is attributable to this rather than "toxic masculinity".

Historic cases can be inferred from available records. Martin Luther reportedly thought a boy presenting with autistic behaviour was a soulless mass of flesh possessed by the devil, and suggested that he be suffocated. Autism was effectively exploited in a court case to disinherit Hugh Blair of Borgue in 1747. The first diagnosis of autism of the sort we might recognise was of the savant Donald Triplett ("case 1") by Leo Kanner, following a change in terminology introduced by Hans Asperger in 1938. Prior to that the term "autistic psychopath" was used, and autism was considered a form of schizophrenia. Even after this, misconceived ideas like the "refrigerator mother" theory persisted. To this day, in some places, such as the USA, autism is seen as something requiring a cure, and various barbaric treatments are offered for what is a difference rather than a disorder.

One of the movies that had the biggest impact on me as a child was "The Red Balloon," by Albert Lamorisse (1956). I could identify with the loneliness of the boy, I could recognise the cruelty of his peer group, and the relationship with the eponymous balloon seemed to redeem the sense of isolation I could recognise with a kind of splendour, albeit one that is temporary and brutally curtailed. Only the ending seemed unrealistic to me. Maybe that movie is more than a depiction of childhood, but also has an element of neurodiversity.

Perhaps the most relevant movie, one I adored as a child, and which explicitly depicts an autistic child, is François Truffaut's "L'Enfant sauvage" (1970), which is based on the historic case of Victor of Aveyron. I fantasised about being "Victor" (a name assigned by others), the feral child in that film whom Dr Jean Itard attempts to domesticate. That relationship with nature unmediated by all the conceit and deceit of Man, free from the perfidy and limitations of human standards! I too dreamed of being undomesticated.

I sometimes feel that all the things an autistic person lacks, in terms of perceiving and responding to social cues in a manner consistent with wider, "normal" expectations, can be described as a suit of armour. Others benefit from this armour without even realising it, while the autistic person is naked and vulnerable in ways the others can't and don't understand. At the same time, the autistic are unencumbered by this armour, and the scope and authenticity of their encounter with the world is something their persecutors will never know.

And there is a nobility in that which I will celebrate and defend against the neuronativism of the "normal": the nobility of the neurosavage.