Of Secret Vices
I make no claims concerning the broader autistic community. I shall restrict myself then to my own life in composing the text which is to follow. Mind as I have experienced it is something far removed from the experience of others though I derive no shortage of pleasure stealing and hijacking facets of the culture in which I live. I should suggest that the mind of every person is a distant shore the visitation and exploration of which is forbidden for now not only by our culture but also by the constitution of the universe in which we live.
God is a distant hanging thing erected by an uncertain mind and fixated upon by a fluttering and fearful psyche. To switch off the light and embrace the darkness I think is among the most liberating experiences one can have. It is to this experience then that I now turn. In darkness one has only his own thoughts to guide and entertain him. It is in the void, free of social and ideological constraint, that the mind is most able to create.
Attrendia, the country of my youth, is a place with which God has always been at odds. Its people have neither heard of him nor have they any concerns about the metaphysical. Life and mind and thought are one and the same.
Some Aphorisms
The following aphorisms were taken from doodlings in the school notebooks of one Sere Sothor. Sere was a good friend to Christopher Michaelson, who would later go on to be a major figure in the civil war on the planet Pryna, where Attrendia lies. As to Sere herself, she was an humanitarian known in popular history for her having almost been killed in an airstrike ordered by Christopher Michaelson.
Like many youth on Pryna, Sere was captivated by tales of the warring states in the nation of Compellia, south of Attrendia. During the warring states period, societies were built upon a kind of Machiavellian social Darwinism in which individual progress in life was measured in terms of one's ability to defy the inhibiting forces of the society around one's self. It was the natural duty of every person to create an air of bitterness and cynicism for the consumption of others while at the same time trying in secret to transcend and defeat that ethos. Thus, generation of the cynical soil on which to excel was the duty of every person, as was secretive individual assertion.
1. When I see a comet, with its erratic motions about the sun I feel myself in good company. For in the universe also there is a thing which orbits about its source of life with such an eccentricity as to render its existence a most painful yet also joyful affair. In the summer of its cycle, the comet sheds its inhibitions, leaving behind the confines of hoary, icy normativity and embraces instead the fires of youth, questioning everything under the sun. In the winter of its cycle, the comet, inevitably having committed some act of indiscretion, now finds herself flung from the happy light and into the abyss of outer space. Walls of bitter ice congeal upon its surface to conceal its true nature from everyone's eyes. Even to the comet itself all seems lost.
2. With the invention of thought projection technology, I must now conduct my thoughts as though they were a performance awaiting criticism. I have derived no shortage of pleasure critiquing the shallow performances enacted in the minds of others whose thoughts I viewed at my leisure when they were the least suspecting. To one I am wallpaper. To another I am a fascination, while to still others I am a mischievous squirrel.
3. The Compellians and their history are an embodiment of all I hold dear. Sometimes I like to perform fake performances of cynicism and bitterness for the consumption of those older than I. In doing this I indulge my fantasies of being a fair lady of the courts of some forgotten country in the Warring States period of Compellia's history. I, lady of the courts of this heretofore unknown province, offer unto you a bitterness and a hardened shell for your consumption whilst on the inside I indulge my own fantasies at my leisure. Try to find me so as to deflower my innocent youth and you will meet only my eight-pronged sphere of chaotic faithlessness.
4. That suicide is best which deprives others of the individual, preserving her for the self and yielding back to society only the resource. Thus to be educated is to learn to die that one might resurrect one's self on the inside.
Gestalt
An Autism and Psychology Discussion Forum
