August 24, 2002
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Fear The World
There’s always a moment in a good haunted house movie, where some person is walking down a hallway, and there’s no visible indication of anything at all bad about to happen, but the scene is created in such a way as to impose dread and fear and even frustration in the viewer. The reality of the situation (person walking down hallway) is lost in the implication (the undead walk among us, and there might be one at the end of that hallway).
The world can be a fearful place. It vibrates with implication, and you can easily resonate with dread and horror.
I’m thinking about this because I’m thinking about when I was a little kid. I’d always (that is… ALWAYS) watch horror and sci-fi movies on TV on Sunday afternoon. Always alone. I sometimes joke that I was raised by Roger Corman. And I still love those Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe flicks.
The point here is that something drew me to them. Certainly it wasn’t the writing or the acting. I think it had to do with that resonance I mentioned.
Being a little kid wasn’t easy for me. It could have been much, much worse, but it was hard for a number of reasons. The world was a big scary place. And I think also that autism played a role beyond the obvious psychological one; the way I sense the world is askew. Regular patterns (bold carpet patterns, venetian blinds, the endless array of raised bumps on a Lego base piece) ‘trap’ me, and hold my entranced attention. The pattern seems to shimmer in my perception. Staring at a blank wall, I can watch my nervous system try to impose a pattern on it. Stuff like that.
So to a 10-year-old, it’s all a little frightening. None of this registered on a conscious level. I think Roger Corman (as an archetypal stand-in for all the horror movie directors I watched during those formative years) gave my subconscious some kind of validation. Monsters just might lurk in the regular, symmetrical, high-contrast, narrow dark slit between the folding doors of the closet in my childhood bedroom… Not to mention the regular patterns of life – going to school every day at the same time, going through the ritual lunch line like clockwork, coming home just in time for the one TV show, playing for a certain amount of time, dinner, Star Trek at 6:30, and so forth. It’s no wonder I did everything I could to disrupt those patterns, while paradoxically needing them absolutely. As in the case of the Sunday afternoon horror movie ritual.
I don’t think the world of the neurologically-typical is all that different, either, in a general sense. The conflict between order and chaos in anyone’s life looms omnipresent. Both order and chaos are about relinquishing identity; chaos in an obvious way and order in a way where you become your boundaries.
Comments (4)
I know the feeling. Blogged about sometime ago:
What a strangeness always the world brings when you open yourself up to it vastly. No room for routine as each succeeding surprise washes upon you like a tingling ocean wave. One learns how foolish mundane *expectations* can be. One learns to live like a tourist in a potentially predatory universe…
As another neurologically different person (though not so extreme as you) I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the differences and trying to make them work for me instead of against me.
Your post is appropos right now since I just finished reading an excellent book on intelligence by one of its foremost researchers. (Now, alas, deceased) One of the points he makes, which I don’t agree with is that high intelligence and creativity always have aspects of psychopathology. Even though he knows that psychopathology is a continuum, he fails to consider whether there are traits that are pathological only at the extremes. In their mild forms they contribute to creativity, and automatically labeling them as pathologies merely makes it harder for people to understand and acknowledge those traits in themselves. When combined with high intelligence those traits are not weaknesses, as he claims, but strengths.
Not sure whether this makes any sense, but from your posts, you seem to be trapped in self-defeating perceptions of your traits. Believe me, you’re not a loser or a defective. But you do need to turn around some of the ideas you’ve accepted about yourself and look at them from a different angle.
I have nothing intelligent to add. But I understand what you are saying and I think that’s a very interesting (and smart) way of looking at things.
i haven’t had my neurology studied….
but i *still* get lost in patterns.
studying tile on the floor, the ceiling, the monotonous noise of the washing machine…
straight lines seem so unnatural to me. catch the mind, stop the flow of gaze across a landscape…
but i spent my time in books. television was off limits for the most part.
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