Day 25: Fay Zwicky, Joy Williams, Lisa Appiganesi
Poem: Fay Zwicky - The Stone Dolphin
A good poem from Western Australian poet Fay Zwicky, not online anywhere so quoted here in full:
from THREE SONGS OF LOVE & HATE
- The Stone Dolphin
I have prayed for the end of his breath
(and mine)
to what end?
Anger's words have been hugged
and released.
The language of tyranny had to be
learnt if anything were to be said.
What has been said has been said
is still said after the panting
mouth has been clamped by despair.
But led by the devils
do angels leave too?
True grief is tongueless when the dumb
define love's death.
In a fiercely fathered and unmothered world
words are wrung from the rack.
Bury love's face
Bury love's bones
Bury love's tongue
in a place where the cataract groans,
where water is wedded to stones.
My dolphin, you'll leap in the sun,
Caught sweet, without hate,
Without grief in perpetual summer.
I sang you through gentler seas
than you knew, nor will know never.
Time full and perfect made heaven to
laugh in its mercy, made flower the apple,
showered me with innocent petals,
shook birds and fish in the lightning
tides where wind and water merge, melt,
melt and forever melt.
Drowned in the boon of his breath
I gave thanks for his dolphin pride,
for the creatures of water and air
keeping our pace.
Even the airs of the oncoming night
couldn't chill our far fathoming.
Warned, yet unwarned, beguiled by far
kinder griefs, swimming alone and
drowning, I embraced in one
shining sun track a dolphin of stone.
I love the musicality of the poem. Zwicky's poems are great fun to read aloud. I love the imagery of the stone dolphin, and the oscilations between love and hate.
I don't really know what she is talking about a lot of the time in her poems, but I have been enjoying this collection Kaddish (1982) so far.
Story: Joy Williams - 99 Stories of God 21-50
Twenty more very-short stories. Many of them made me laugh. My favourite from this selection is Story 35:
An artist who had just won an award and was enjoying a nice midlife bump in her career was rumored to have died. The rumor did not, as they say, spread like wildfire, for she was not well known.
This minor incident affected her deeply and negatively however. Her work suffered. She became obsessed with how her so-called friends reacted to this rumor of death. ...
Once again, it reminds me a lot of a good Lydia Davis story- simple and psychologically accurate.
Essay: Lisa Appiganessip - Dr Death
Recently I figured out that I am most certainly on the spectrum. I am not formally diagnosed, but I am not sure if I see the point when:
- I am endlessly battered by sound and light. Flourescent office lighting is intollerable and a McDonalds beeping environment feels like hell.
- I find communication with normal people very difficult. Most conversation feels as if I am trying to tune a banjo that has just been removed from a really hot car. As soon as I am strumming along, the banjo slowly detunes itself.
- I don't have any typically "autistic fixations" other than reading and writing, but it does seem that I don't take seriously the things other people do, and the things I take seriously are the things others pay no mind.
- The people I get on with best all tend to be on a similar level of spectrum too, whereas I find neurotypical people fairly alien to me.
- My art and writing are prone to "autistic thinking", though perhaps I have unconsciously mined that for comedic effect. Eugen Bleuler in 1911 wrote that "Autistic thinking takes place “in symbols, in analogies, in fragmentary concepts…in crude offenses against logic and propriety.” I think that this kind of thinking is very good for art, literature and music.
- Furthermore, on eye contact: I don't find it natural to do unless listening. My eyes always focus on their teeth because I am worried about my own. Then when I talk to people, they tend to physically disappear in front of my eyes. All I can see are the words I am saying.
- In classes and work, I have always sought to make people laugh and have been fairly good at it. Doing this, I could understand how others felt about me.
I only figured out I was autistic when a friend of mine I thought was very charismatic and normal was diagnosed. We were chatting and a couple people asked me if I had been diagnosed too. I have thought about it off and on, but basically repressed it. I already have a mental abberation that is highly stigmatised, and had only just gotten used to having that on my medical record. I don't want people to pigeonhole me straight off the bat, or look for symptoms when they talk to me. But I think everyone probably knows.
Until now, I thought I was inhuman than others. But I'm not particularly happy to call myself autistic. Perhaps I have a lot of internalised fear from my mum's choices in partners, who has always preferred to date stereotypically autistic men who are particularly rude and insufferable. To look at the last couple partners, then in my eyes if I am like them I am not worth knowing. I know a lot of really good, cool, kind neurodivergent people, but the fear of being like the "male role models" is very horrific to me. It feels like a curse. I know I should be glad to be part of a community, or that I am not a waste of space and time, it is a brain thing- I should be glad, but I am not so happy. It is apparent that I cannot change who I am even if I really try.
Well this essay reviews a book about the history of autism/asbergers that overlaps with the history of the nazis. Asberger was the name of one of the doctor whose diagnosises led to the deaths of thousands of autistic children getting killed as part of the German eugenics program. I am not sure if he was a nazi, but he certainly was a nazi sympathiser. Yet I don't think a historical reason is a good reason for the name "Asbergers" getting discontinued. Now the high functioning autists are placed on the same plane as the non-functioning, which is "equality" apparently, but I don't think it is a productive kind. If I say I am autistic, people will naturally be watching my every move to see just "how autistic" I am. If people are doing that, then I want to be left alone.
So this essay- the one in the NYRB, is just some history lessons, or, a review of a history book. It was an excuse for me to talk about autism. BUT I do want to read more essays on aspergers and autism to understand what I should do with myself post realisation.
If you know of any good books/essays please send them.