Autistic people have six senses: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight, and then words. Words are a sense that cannot be compared to other senses but allows them to leak in. Words have taste and smell, they are tactile, scratch the skin, bulge in the kidneys, they look: the shape of the letters in different writing styles, they have sounds, sounds when they sound inside the brain and when they say themselves, they are a movement a dance. But all these qualities still cannot define the words. For the words are their own. Their own mind.

This is an excerpt from the poem “Autistic p–Oh!–Ethics” that I wrote together with Elisabeth Hjorth.^x From 2022 I’ve been, together with Elisabeth, part of the artistic research project “Autistic Writing,” which has allowed me to find ways of making my word-work relatable within a neuroqueer context (perverting pathologization, misspelling autistic as artistic).^x I was diagnosed with autism in 2018, before this project, I never thought about the autistic as artistic. Now, I do. And the autistic is, I think, very useful when it comes to re-think the autistic, but, even more useful, I think, when it comes to re-think words, and worlds.

Here, I will try to give a GLIMPSE of an autistic wor/l/d-thing, living being thinking etc etc.  And my struggle is: how to put everything into a glimpse and, will I explain. Where to put the fish and the ocean? Where? When? Yes. No.

A word that is central for the context: neuroqueering, explained by Nick Walker (2021) as something that might do this:

Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning and one’s ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.

Engaging in the queering of one’s own neurocognitive processes (and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s divergence from prevailing cultural standards of neuronormativity and heteronormativity.^x

In Authoring Autism (2018) Remi Yergeau writes:

”To be autistic is to be neuroqueer, and to be neuroqueer is to be idealizing, desiring, sidling”

I don’t know what “sidling”, but the Internet says:

”1. To move sideways: sidled through the narrow doorway. 2. To advance in an unobtrusive, furtive, or coy way: swindlers who sidle up to tourists.”

Yes.

Finding the autistic as artistic made me reach out and I started an autistic trans-late-ion practice. I translated Hannah Emersons poems into swedish, in a way where translation was not a strict thing but a play and a skewed conversation, where the poems continued, associated, drifted.^x The autistic word-thing means words can have magical or hidden meanings; working with the translations I find translate means Trans-Late: the lateness giving way to a queer time that opens the words to Other times.

Hannah’s name has my name inside. The words and names are also full. They need a radical empathy, the need to play.

I LIVE IN THE WOODS OF MY WORDS

I live in the branches

of the trees. I live in

the great keeping

freedom of the really

helpful down yearning

in the grown of the forest

floor. The words fall

from the sky like snow

on this day. They become

the floor of the forest.

The ground from which

all things grow into

the towards. It is great

great dream of life

try to dream. I live

in each letter that is

where you will find me.

They have been given

to us as keys to the great

breathing hope of life.

I always wanted to live

there but couldn’t live

there until the poetry

gave me life of words

                 Emerson, 2020

A BLUE SOUND

Blue fish is swimming

jumping great keeping

the world from tilting

upside down. He greets

the dawn with the freedom

of life. He goes from life

to death. In one breath.

Please help me do

what you know. I am

blue too. I help the fish

live in the keeping

of the sound.

            Emerson, 2020

TRANS-LATE / MISS-SPELL-ING / AUTISTIC MAGICAL WOR(L)DING.

Or

JAG HOPPAS DU BLIR FISK

I HOPE YOU’LL BECOME FISH.

JAG BOR I SKOGEN MED MINA ORD

Jag bor i grenarna på

träden. Jag bor i

den stora vårdande

friheten hos det verkligt

hjälpsamma nedan längtan

i den vuxna delen av skogens

golv. Orden faller

från skyarna som snö om

dagarna. De blir

skogarnas golv.

Marken ur vilken

alla saker gror in mot

Mot. Det är stort

stort drömmande av livet

att försöka drömma. Jag bor i

varje bokstav det är där

du kommer hitta mig.

Dom har blivit givna

åt oss som nycklar till det stora

andandes livets hopp.

Jag ville alltid leva

där men kunde inte leva

där förrän poesin

gav mig ordens liv.

towards : mot (preposition)                        le mot : ordet (bestämd form)

där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där där

kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär kär

livets ord lärde mig att oh my god

relegera religionen och jag känner orden på jorden

ETT BLÅTT LJUD 

Blå fiskar simmar

hoppar stort hindrar

jorden från att vippa

uppochner. Han hälsar

gryningen med livets

frihet. Han går från liv

till död. I ett andetag.

Snälla hjälp mig

göra vad du vet.  Jag är

också blå. Jag hjälper fiskarna

leva i ljudets

förvaring.

///// vara för / förvara / vara före / han är för / ta andan / som ett andetag / blå /////

On writing in this context.

I want to put my piece in the context of PARALLEL INDIGENETIES, ART WORLDS AND FRICTIONS and I want to withdraw it, take it away, abandon. One of my autistic friends sent me a screendump from instagram, it said:

We are not a peopleless people.

Meaning, autistics. Are a people. I sent them a heart because I meant to send a heart because I feel a heart about the sentence.

But what does a heart mean?

In the writings of Erin Manning, the autistic or neurodivergent or neuroqueer way of being in the world is often related to the indigenous. That is a way of pointing out that the idea/ls of neurotypicality are inseparable from a Western idea/l of humanity. I find that interesting and important. At the same time. I find it problematic. I am not sure whether the finding here is a thought or a feeling. I feel unsure. Perhaps I need to.

Manning, in several texts, refer to the autistic as well as the indigenous way of being in the world as an alternative. A radical alternative that changes the concepts of experience of empathy of borders of singularity-collectivity of… everything… I fall into amazingness and feel freedom then frictions and the sensory pleasure of frictions and the cry of an eye and the…

What makes me hesitate is :

THERE IS DIFFERENT DIFFERENCES.

The minority of neurodivergence is not the same minority as the minority of indigenous people. Stating the obvious : I do, I need to, I guess I don’t know but, I do. Yes.

The concept of autism is, further, stereotypically tied to a white + semi-young + male. The category of autism comes from a medical context of white doctors working in the fields close to and inside eugenics and the oppressions of autistic and indigenous people are juxtaposed yes I love the word with the jux in it. Why do I feel pleasure when writing about pain.

Struggling and struggling with the WE is what I do. we do. I do. we do.

The i the subject (the eye) is multiple.

But I am not we. How multiple is the WE allowed (alloWEd) to be.

Who are I when we speak who am We when I speak. When I am not speaking are (who) silent.

Tired and scared.

The call for the issue says:

Today, Indigenous peoples live in very diverse environments, among different dominations, and in varying political conditions. Although the histories of Indigenous peoples have much in common, the experiences of colonization as well as contemporalities and ways of self-understanding vary.

In the arts, the intersection of desires and needs can cause many affects and frictions, even shame and silence.

Similar (same???) things can be about, autistics.

I feel the desire for my otherness. I feel also I cannot be other. I feel I am too much normal to be non-normal I feel afraid they might see I am alien, or see I am human, or not see, or pretend not to see, or believe the see, and I want to do an eye of jelly.

The fear of speaking and silencing someone else. The fear of being speechless. The fear of speaking and not being heard. The fear of being heard in a way that makes me/us/someone/it speechless/silent/silenced.

The fear of appropriating someone else of appropriating one self. Of fetishizing oneself of exoticizing oneself. Of understanding of not understanding of not understanding the not understanding of understanding standing under under under under.

So writing Sorry so sorry writing so so so.    

Other.

I changed my name: Anna N (well it’s the same, same is different!) became AnnaN – “annan” in swedish means “other”, the hidden thing inside me that I don’t know. The words are not human. The autistic has a problem with human, never being fully… being Other, yes yes. At the moment I work with a piece called “JAG HOPPAS ATT DU BLIR FISK”: it’s a video-crafting-poetry project (the words are written by the hands, material, material). It means: “I HOPE YOU’LL BECOME FISH”. But it is a spelling mistake, it was supposed to say “att du blir fRisk” = “that you will get well”, but the R disappeared, and “frisk” (healthy, sound, well) became “fisk” (fish). I wish I was a fish. To be fish. Not human. (The Fish: a secret sign for ancient christians, I love the Signs, the Secret, Hidden) (Fish, also the name of literary scholar Stanley Fish who coined the term “reading communities” – pointing at how the sense-making of texts is a collective work) I work with the miss-spellings: I work with Spells, the magic spells and rituals of witches, the magic, dark and blooming. The spelling of wor(l)ds finding hidden things in miss-takes (take care, take it and…).

the first part of the FISH published in swedish : 

Kontradiktion | tidskrift för experimentell och digital poesi

This work, this work.

I read Elsbeth Probyn’s Eating the Ocean, they write:

In their articulation of what they call “a wet ontology,” Kimberly Peters and Phillip Steinberg ask, “How can one write about so ‘slippery’ a subject[,] . . . how can one write about the ocean as something to think not only with but from without reducing it to a metaphor?” (2015). Fish for me are not, and cannot be, metaphorical. Fish are the very principle of relatedness that holds this book together. But they are, after all, often below the surface. This is why I insist on an embodied and dialogic ethnography that is attuned to listening to stories and relaying them, to trying to capture affective spaces through various forms of description, and to reaching for the depth of history that informs tacit knowledge embodied in individuals’ ways of being and ways of recounting.

I quote Probyn here only because I love what they write in girl and girls and girls and horses – YES I LOVE HORSES I WILL TELL ANOTHER TIME.

They write about, lesbian horses and a belonging that is a longing, and desire as method and I FEEL A LOT.

I need to say something about MONOTROPISM:

Fergus Murray (2019) summarize monotropism as following: “In a nutshell, monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel.”. The monotrophic mind is contrasted to polytropic minds, summarized by Murray as “have multiple interests aroused at any time, pulling in multiple strands of information, both external and internal. They are primed to be on the look-out for things like social implications, and effortlessly decode metaphors and indirect language.”. (F. Murray, 2019)

But most central to my monotropism is, that the monotropic interest is charged with feeling.

There is a fish whose name in Swedish is STÖR. I wrote:

stören är en fisk. en stör-ning är en inte-f/r/isk. en stör-ning kan vara av tex utvecklings- eller personlighetstyp. störningen som medicinsk diagnos, kan vara störande att ha i sin journal, kan vara, kan vara. störningen av en ordning kan vara det enda möjliga. den medicinska störningen som stör sig på medicinordningen, en Så Störig Grej. stören är en uråldrig fisk: STÖR-NINGEN FANNS REDAN INNAN ORDNINGEN DEN STÖR. störande rörande, rörande störande. Risken när nån öppnar den Störigas dörr oanmäld, att mötas av : STÖR MIG INTE. en fråga: Stör jag dig ? ett svar : Ja. stören är en utdöd eller akut hotad. störningen får inte f/r/iskas upp, Risken är stor. stör-ningen binder diagnosen till havet. stören kan vara en enstöring också. stören kan vara en mångstöring också. havet kan vara en Risk och en Fisk - FN säger på internetz: "Friska hav är grunden till allt liv" &/men jag tänker: stör-ningen är grunden till livet, jaha ja.

the sturgeon is a fish. a sturgeon is a non-f/r/isk. a sturgeon can be of e.g. developmental or personality type. the sturgeon as a medical diagnosis, can be disturbing to have in one's medical record, can be, can be. the disruption of an order can be the only possible. the medical sturgeon that interferes with the medical order, a So Disturbing Thing. the disturbance is an ancient fish: the disturbance thing existed even before the order it disturbs. disturbing touching, touching disturbing. The risk when someone opens the sturgeon's door unannounced, of being met by : DO NOT DISTURB ME. a question : Am I disturbing you ? an answer : Yes. the sturgeon is an extinct or critically endangered species. the sturgeon must not be disturbed, the risk is great. the sturgeon ties the diagnosis to the sea. the sturgeon can also be a solitary sturgeon. the sturgeon can also be a multi-sturgeon. the sea can be a Risk and a Fish - the UN says on the internetz: "Healthy seas are the foundation of all life" &/but I think: the sturgeon is the foundation of life, oh well.

(TRANSLATED BY INTERNET)

My text world is a text-ile wor(l)d and I started crafting all the fish. My parents came with a big box filled with clothes I made as a teenager, a short time after receiving the HOPPAS DU BLIR FISK letter. Yes. Forgot to say: the context: I was hospitalized, when I was thirteen, with eating disorders, and my brother wrote a letter to me, it said: JAG HOPPAS DU BLIR FISK.

I think he meant FRISK, to get well.

The neuroqueer position always need to question:

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE. WHAT IS A HELATHY LIFE STYLE. WHAT IS.

The violence being done in the name of Good Health.

I started to fill the old clothes with soft fish.

OH!

I ALSO WANT TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT STRANGERS AND THE FUTURE. WHICH IS ALSO AS IT IS ALL CONNECTED, CONNECTED TO THE OTHER

Morton (2010) refers to the concept of ‘strange stranger’ in association with Derrida’s notion of the arrivant:

“I use the phrase ‘strange stranger’ because Derrida’s notion of the arrivant is the closest we have as yet to a theory of how the mesh appears up close and personal. The arrivant is a being whose being we can’t predict, whose arrival is utterly unexpected and unexpectedly unexpected to boot. The strange stranger is not only strange, but strangely so. They could be us. They are us. […] Our encounter with other beings – and with our being as other – is strange strangeness. […] Strange strangers are uncanny in the precise Freudian sense that they are familiar and strange simultaneously. Indeed, their familiarity is strange, and their strangeness is familiar. Strange strangers are unique, utterly singular. They cannot be thought as part of a series (such as species or genus) without violence. Yet their uniqueness is not such that they are utterly independent. They are composites of other strange strangers. We share their DNA, their cell structure, subroutines in the software of their brains. They are absolutely unique and so capable of forming a collective of life forms, rather than a community. […] Yet because of strange strangeness, this choosing cannot be a totalizing grip, or final pinning down. Collectivity is ‘to come’, in the sense that it addresses the arrivant, who is necessarily to come, evanescent and melting to the exact same extent as she, he or it (how can we tell for sure?) is disturbingly ‘there’. “ (Morton, 2010, 275-278)

When using the concept of the strange stranger, I am tweaking it a bit (sometimes a lot). I think there is (maybe) a problem with the Freudian thing inside the concept, but choosing to mis-interpret, I also feel a certain amount of pleasure in the skewing of the uncanny. To further explain, I need a list:

1: Using the concept of “arrivant” rather than uncanny, places the stranger in a temporally place rather than a spatial (as in the uncanny valley), this, I think is key, and I think about it as a queer time, a sense of time that is sensory and messy, but also a hopeful time, of something from the memories of the future.

2: Neurodivergent people have been described with Freud’s uncanny-lingua. Joanne Limburg writes about this, in Letters to my Weird Sisters, from the point of view of being the uncanny person, not meeting. In my use of the strange stranger, I suggest that all parts in the meeting (there might be more than two there might be in-numerous meet:ers, and the meeting is not one-way but multiple), are strangers. They-we, are strangers to each other, and they need to stay strange, and know they will stay strange and not pretend they know each other. As a neurodivergent being in a neurotypical way, we are used to perceive the world as strange, as a strange stranger, and this position has an ethical potential.

3: The strange stranger is also strange to themselves, i.e.: I don’t know myself. This might be a counter-position to what we have previously written, since neurodivergent people are often used to be told that they-we don’t know what’s good for you, or being told by others what we are. But the point is: No one knows, it is the knowing that is the thing that needs to be changed into a strange-thing, it is a shared strangeness, it is a pleasure in the strangeness, that the concept of the strange stranger want to keep, stay with the strange.

On the future:

José Esteban Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, use the concept of no-longer-conscious to imagine a not-yet-here of a queer futurity.

The internet say:

Consciousness is a mystery. It’s impossible to know what an animal, or even another human, is experiencing. We cannot ask a fish, we can only observe it. Fish can learn and have long memories. When stressed by being held in a net, they display ‘emotional fever’, meaning they increase their body temperature.

I think about a memory of the future.

I am getting too tired now.

I think about a strange fish. I remember putting the clothes on and becoming a FISH.

I WRITE:

IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE IMP LESB

WANTED TO ADD SOMETHING HERE ABOUT LESBIANISM AND USING MONIQUE WITTIGS WRITINGS AS AN AUTISTIC MISSPELLING OF SEX AS A FUTURE THING AS A BODY I DON’T KNOW IF IT’S A FISH OR A HORSE BUT AN OCEAN OF QUEER STRANGERS

A HORSE IS ALSO A FISH IS AN AUTISTIC LESBIAN OCEAN IS ALWAYS A BECOMING, BECOMING BE-LONGING AS COMING ARRIVING AS FOLLOWING AS YES YES YES.