Time Doesn’t Build Assassins in the Blink of a Chainsaw: On Writing Whoosh

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Whoosh is the first poetry collection I’ve written since being diagnosed as living inside the Autism Spectrum Disorder but it isn’t really about ASD. Although there is one section of the book that openly addresses ASD and mental illness, “The Barefoot Avalanche Machine is Grinding,” what’s important to the composition of the book is that I’ve understood that my writing technique has been not only influenced by ASD, but also that this style of writing corresponds to our contemporary moment. In other words, to be autistic and to write about the present is complementary.

To explain what I mean let me say that my first collection, Accidental Animals, is largely composed of traditional lyric poetry. That is, each poem largely embodied a single voice, and most often a poem gathered itself around an occurrence, a few images, or psychological state. A poem often ended with a kind of epiphany that had been slowly building line by line. Autobiography was never far away. Fourteen years passed between this book and my next collection, Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah. Composing the second book, I found it difficult to hold steady inside a single lyric voice because so many outside things slammed into this voice, almost like tremendous winds that pushed this voice, like a small sailboat, pushed it all over the place. Whether it was global warming, loss of species diversity, my own mood disorders, the vast numbers of migrants around the world, or events that happen in ordinary life—all of these things impinged upon the poems in Guillotine, and what I tried to do was channel these various forces, voices, concerns. Often in the same line. The result was a kind of zany environmentalism and a multi-faceted espionage of the now.

Whoosh is similar in its avoidance of direct autobiography, the epiphany, its channeling various voices though this practice has become more intense, loopy, and possibly more disciplined. The verbal choreography more derelict.

The mind gone rogue, the mind a sample a passport

that looks delicious but don’t drive while you’re eating.

This is my proof: pity the sample. Pity the life

that happens in its own time. Contingency =

the inheritance of the prefrontal cortex = this is

the Wyrd you’re triggered to think about when folks

in limbo show you how you should behave—

(from “Officials Refuse”)

Does an autistic person experience chaos differently from other people? I can’t know, but I recognize the veracity of the experience Theresa Joliffe describes:

Reality to an autistic person is a confusing, interacting mass of events, people, places, sounds and sights. There seems to be no clear boundaries, order or meaning to anything. A large part of my life is spent trying to work out the patterns behind everything. Set routines, times, particular routes and rituals all help to get order into an unbearably chaotic life. Trying to keep everything the same reduces some of the terrible fear. (qtd in Tony Attwood The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome) 

If reality’s a f** mob coming straight at you, how do you write? What I try is to let in something of this mob, this mess of forces into a poem and then monitor all of this through form. Though this is classic Dionysios meets Apollo as Nietzsche pointed out long ago. Even though I feel as though my inner GPS is out, maybe because it’s out, I need to go slow. With a nod to Georg Büchner’s sentiment in Wozzek, here’s a snippet from the book’s title poem:

It takes nearly nine hundred liters of water to cast a horoscope reading.

Tarot is different. Respond within thirty days or over as many years.

As biology often does. As the world’s what’s coming to. Colloquial

as anxiety. As Dürer’s rhinoceros was doomed to fail. Do you have

a moment? Are your memories usual? Who is your we? There’s

good reason for worry. I’m irascible. Unkempt, too. Addicted to

repair. But you’re very kind. Are you having a party? Someone’s

self-taught future. Are we supposed to die? I wouldn’t last a single

year in heaven being put to work at making collapsible thunder—

The reason I see this book as manifesting an autistic sensibility without overtly being about autism is the autistic recognition that everything is sentient. I’m typing this on a Tuesday morning, near a snake plant, a plastic grey whale and a stone my father stole for me on the site of ancient Corinth in Greece; each of these phenomena is distinct—just as each day of the week has a different flavour (Wednesday the most beautiful, Tuesday the most bland), and the whale gives off an intensity no less vibrant than the plant or stone. There isn’t a hierarchy among us. To Erin Manning, this form of perception means that “the autistic dwells in an ecology of practices that creates resonances across scales and registers of life, both organic and inorganic, not solely in the so-called human realm.”

Because words are separate from us, poems try for things people haven’t, and the poems in Whoosh differ from my earlier more straightforwardly lyric work in that they embody this multiplicity without elevating any part over the others.

Various threads, or rivulets, pass through the collection. Some of these connections are thematic: such a fear for and horror of what are species is becoming and what it’s doing (“Collective guilt writes in disappearing ink”); the vagaries of aging which is like “sleepwalking through lightning,” and various engagements with cultural and visual arts theory. Trying to imagine Henry James as a form of AI.

Aging is weird, cognitive decline is awful and it is also very dismaying to realise that my own aging has correspondences with our civilization. In the old days, a middle class person such as myself had to ponder mortality, face new limitations, fear, but it was an existential thing. What is utterly disturbing is to enter one’s final decades and understand that there’s worse things than personal deterioration. Our civilization is carrying on as though it’s a young person. But it isn’t. It’s approaching senescence, just as I am. I mention these details because sometimes my poems weave together my experiences of aging along with larger issues. Having to confront my own finitude seems to amplify the deepening finitude of our world. Everything feels utterly marooned.

Boundaries seem arbitrary to the autist; instead, let’s shuffle the deck, observe the ocean’s longing for unprotected sex and recognize the uncanny is listening in, a fog of nearly naked neurons. Things are readymade: while the poems aren’t simply reporting per se, there’s not a lot of need to make things up. Let me close with this:

Ordinary Beauty

The words snagged.

Peepholes.

                 Impromptu.

                                    Cobblestones.

Conjure: tangerine, the Stylites resting upon cross-pollinate.

                                    Skip to pre-war stashes

of ice. Next, online furniture for dummies. At the end

of it, a carnival of ordinary Japanese lollypops. The letter

named yolk-amazed.

Curtained. A part of the head.

Not-so-hidden, the squat. Allegiances ache

unperturbed. Still no word from you. A late-life, ousted

narrative. Metal grates pulled down. Lose

your ticket. Then find it again. Restore but you

can’t reclaim. Memory is thought crime, so unlucky

even the plastic laundry baskets want to  /   start to: flee.

Unanchored, though not cut off, words are     see you

in a minute, sometimes musical, though hardly a social

gathering. Gather here recently. Nobody panic if you

do. A lot goes on. Appears. The fellowship of eels.

Intruding blockbusters. Cobalt-the-real. Happy

happy. Sane. Be sane. Come closer. Sanity’s nearby

the squeezing of stupid. Apparitional. Years of

symptoms. Withering, the sequential.

The commune’s scavenging but we ain’t nothing close to an ant.

Self-deception’s all around the brilliant

camouflage of not

so easy to find. Mountains

of sooner than expected. Still no

word from you. Those

metal grates they’re

pulling down ←