Abstract

The Autistic P-Oh!-Ethics is a manifesto and a necessarity. It is a neuromixed investigation of what collectivity might be – a collectivity running through histories and text(ure)s. The Autistic Poethics is Oh! Ethics. The Autistic Poetics use the Oh! as a mode to get to the Ethics. It is a caring for the inanimate animate. It is a caring for words. It is the essayistic stylistics filtered through the monotropic language obsession. We cannot care for you if we do not care for your words. Write, write, write. Flower.

Through the form of poetry, recorded reading, and meta-text, this article examines autistic, neurodivergent and neuromixed approached to reading and writing. That includes ethical aspects of being, reading and writing in the world, violence and counteractions, play and performance.

The autistic poetics
un/empathetic ethics
tactile tactics
(in)attentive mimicry

Arne Aristotle: I promise you a complete poetics, an explanatory and regulative description of what poetry is and how it should be formed.

We: Thank you, that was thoughtful.

Socrates: I just want it said that the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is very-very-old.

We: Never mind that now.

Arne Aristotle: I think theory can be read as poetry. Why not?

Plato: I am extremely disturbed by poetry. Not only the poem, the poet too. Especially when he looks like a priest. Or like a poem.

We: Can we start sometime?

(wewewewewewewew, we write and we write and we write again and again and again, we wrote, because of the ignorance we write, they call us you, say I, but I, WHAT DO I WANT TO BE, and now we are going to talk about what I am, but I, can’t talk, for my voice is a hundred murmuring voices, a hundred voices that become, that become a we, and we are many, and we are filled with a Happy Anger, and the Text is Anger, and the Text is Euphoria, and Ooooh, wewewewewewewewwwwwweweweweee, licking the mouths with the tongues, repeating)

 

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 (e.g. the wonderful letter o, how it closes into a hole (holesbeforewholes (come back to this)) (come back to the o, the ghost, the channelling – did I write about it to you or in the compendium, there are so many letters now! )), 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. Sometimes it can mean that the autistic person becomes silent, because sometimes IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to say something, the energy to go into the word-sense is not there. Sometimes it can mean that the words flow, the unstoppable flood of words, which associates itself that carries itself that harbors everything, everything, everything.

 

Aristotle is so preoccupied with the art of poetry that HE. Of the poem’s whole-hearted construction, the successful work of poetry hinges on how the parts are joined together into an intentional entity. Ha, you can tell what the poet meant! It is possible to say that there was a poet!

 

 

Autistics say: Don’t hate me.

Autistics scream: Don’t heal me.

Autistics whisper: the poem, the poem, the poem

 

O.

oooooooooooooo

In the beginning, O.

In the beginning was O.

In the beginning was O.

O if only I could HHHHHH

you would understand

 

The autistic experience, or perception, puts the detail at the forefront. In front of the nose. The pleasure of being there, still without the poem, without the poet, the pleasure of being without knowing. Of course, words are a mind. They are felt.

Is it possible to free O from it all? To carry it in its form, to be perfect in its expression (is there anyone more whole than O), so incredibly hard to become a metaphor. But. fact. Is. O has no beginning and no end. O is thus not whole. O is a hole.

 

We write to each other about the o-functionality. We write a poetics that lets the non-functional, the non-functional brain, that heart full of holes, just be ok.

They say autistic people like to speak in metaphors, preferably incomprehensible ones, the butterfly is snowed, snowed with snow (Rodas). But we say to them: there are no metaphors in this. It’s a snowy butterfly. It’s here in my hand. This text is not a metaphor, it’s a material thing, the sensory reading, reading the snowy butterfly, freezing its wings, laughing with its fingers. The autistic poetics calls for reading as dance, the autistic dance lacks motor skills, the autistic motor skills are the richness defined.

 

Aristotle: The centaur – who mixed all kinds of verse – must still be called a poem.

That which. That which. That which. I write about a THAT that fills me, that does things to me. There is an IT in me, between me and not-me. IT breathes and throbs, IT bleeds and leaks. IT giggles violently and presses its arms against its body. All my blood is tiny molecules filled with sex. My sex is a cat that moves. Drill your fingers into the fur. Don’t wait. You must wait. I can’t wait.

 

 

Aristotle, your neurotypical poetics is leaking.

You are the philosopher who betrays philosophy for poetry.

But the poem betrays you in turn.

You fear the hole and get lost in it.

Your rules are so meticulous.

  1. Speech as a whole has the following elements
  2. There are three kinds of letters
  3. A syllable is a sound without meaning
  4. Words are of two kinds
  5. Even the words of animals are indivisible, but none of them I call a letter
  6. The most important thing is to be metaphorical

 

Then you wrote this: “As for the demands of poetry, what is impossible but plausible should be preferred to what is implausible but possible.” Is that /not/ autistic poetics?

(Isn’t that completely in line with the complex discourse that on the one hand claims that the autistic cannot be anything but authentic, on the other hand calls her pretentious and pompous? Isn’t it the opposite of the unbelievable autistic person, the one who doesn’t know anything about herself, who has to be told how to function, who has to learn at rehab how to shower and clean, who has to read a book about her diagnosis to understand how to manage herself? Isn’t it, everything, everything, everything.)

 

 

 

To h(ij)ack

a conversation

an agreement

a subtext

 

a room

a speech

 

To hack

Acute

Ableism

 

Be mute

Be smooth

 

Hackhackhackhack

Abrupt

Autism

 

 

Order in order in order

the p-oh!-ethics, the bitch, the snitch, the prick.

The words in the mind in the words in the words that feel like they’re being pushed every time into the heart-pea-sover on the pea-brain-brain-grace

So hard for

Not to draw the letters like butterflies

Gathering facts

Facts-facts.

Beware my auti-heart

 

The most important thing is to be metaphorical. This text is not a metaphor. En snöad fjäril i min hand, the butterfly is snowed, snowed with snow, with snow, with snow…

Why are some people made into metaphors? Why deprived of flesh and blood and humanity?

Why do writers love the metaphor “autistic”?

You could say that I hate that metaphor.

 

with snow

with snow

 

A metaphor that lacks motor skills

The feeling of O

Braces bleed

through

Theory of Mind

behind

the falshcards of

barabarism

 

“the metaphor” can not be meta

When you write about us

You write our meta- power away

We even lack ToM

No reflective reflection

None of those mirror neurons

We lack the metaphors you turn us into

Do you want to write us away from us

Do we want to drill ourselves away from a place that turns away from meadows and seas away from angels

and navels that see more than your navels and strings, your uptight looseness,

we LACK by implication

IT HAS TO BE THE RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT WORD

You must not hurt the words in this way

You must not discipline our discourse like you do, because

It feels like you force this selfharming stuff upon us, I can not cope sensing the skin,

an irritatating label, crumble my brain, masoschim must adore you, and we have

to live with your

Words about

Us

Ans we choose to

Fuck up your brains

Thanks but no thanks

 

The autistpoetics uses the pathologization as party trick. The autistpoetics use the monologue

as masoschism. The autistpoetics works with temporalities as plate models. Our heart, our heart.

 

The Autistic P-Oh!-Ethics is a manifesto and a necessity. It is a neuromixed investigation of what collectivity might be – a collectivity running through histories and text(ure)s. Melanie Yergeau writes:

I believe in the potentialities of autistic stories and gestures, of neuroqueering what we’ve come to understand as language and being. I believe that autistic rhetorics complicate what we traditionally hold dear across a plurality of fields.[1]

To be autistic is to be neuroqueer, and to be neuroqueer is to be idealizing, desiring, sidling.[2]

We are queer. Not necessarily through sexuality but through textuality. We use the words. As poets. This is an a(r/u)tistic writing practice. Being together in the text is the most intimate thing (we can manage). “To write,” Marguerite Duras remarked, “is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.” We write because we do not speak. I like you as a person, but I love you as a text.

Julia Miele Rhodas writes:

Autistic Disturbances is about autistic voice, words and speaking, autistic text, autistic writing; structure, tone, inflection, and echoes; it is about iteration and pattern, invention and constructions of silence; it is about language that is unexpected, outspoken, rich, florid, nondialogic. Queer language. Both unruly and prescriptive. It is the language of the everyday, but it is not ordinary language.[3]

The Autistic Poethics is Oh! Ethics. The Autistic Poetics use the Oh! as a mode to get to the Ethics. It is a caring for the inanimate animate. It is a caring for words. It is the essayistic stylistics filtered through the monotropic language obsession. We cannot care for you if we do not care for your words. Write, write, write. Flower.

Elisabeth Hjorth, Anna Nygren and Hanna Bertilsdotter, Mutating Metaphors, 2021, © Elisabeth Hjorth and Anna Nygren and Hanna Bertilsdotter

Footnotes

  1. Yergeau, Melanie. Authoring Autism. On Rethoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press. 2018, 5. ↑
  2. Ibid, 18. ↑
  3. Duras, Marguerite. Att skriva. Translated to Swedish by Kennet Klemets. Lund: Ellerströms. 2019 [1993]. p. 25. ↑