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Since I first posted the entry below I took a self-administered test to check out my tendency for "high-functioning autism" or Asperger's Syndrome by taking this test at a Wired Magazine site:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html
I didn't even come close to having the score that would indicate I'm autistic, high functioning or not. I had a score of 23 and the lowest score needed for Asperger's was 34. Average score was 16.4. I still display a low-grade dose of the behaviors Aspies apparently kowtow to, but maybe my symptoms are not all that extreme. Mostly I guess I'm looking excuses to use to forgive my own shamelessly arrogant behavior. Maybe the real difference is how deliberately I engage my shamelessness.
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Autism is a familiar word, although sometimes I forget it and it gets left on the tip of my tongue and messes with the taste of my cheap red wine. Cheap red wine is about all I can drink without my autism showing up, because I don't naturally know how to read people's feelings and emotions. I do know how to read people's feelings and emotions artificially through the esoteric systems I've mastered. Perusing this preview/trailer of a movie that will be shown on PBS served as an epiphany that helped get me over the hump:
http://www.horseboymovie.com/Film.php
It was the fact that the parents of this autistic boy took him to a shaman in Mongolia who was himself autistic that laid out the problems I've had with people all my life. It's the reason I studied so many esoteric systems and read so many palms and made so many natal charts by hand for years. I had to find an artificial way to grok other people's feelings, and I'm always the last to know.
My inability to "read" other people's responses to me is also the reason I declined an invitation to accompany an old friend to hear his favorite old-time music band play last night about an hour away in Wilmington. I didn't wanna take a chance of inadvertently insulting his friends he told me would be there. I wouldn't even realize I'd done it until the shunning started. Then my friend would be stuck with a social leper the rest of the night instead of enjoying the night out with fond acquaintances.
The only dependable way I have of man-handling my detachment is to take the advice I offer other people. It might be better if I knew to do this in the real time of me offering my ridiculous advice to the other. I do pay attention sometime.
On unpredictable, but pleasingly auspicious occasions I do remember to remember that I just might be ignoring the other's feeling more often than in the past, and attempt to change horses in mid-stream. I wouldn't bet the farm on my doing that, however, because sometimes it's the most sagacious ignorance I get possessed by.
Sometime I ignore the practicality of going along to get along in most social situations as if my fits of extreme objectivity belonged to somebody else instead of me. I've made myself a bright guy in some cases simply because I'm more desperate than other people to get it right the first time.
The social amenities not only don't come easy to me. It's impossible for me to play them like a natural. I've studied a lotta systems because learning is easy, but application of the principles of the systems I've mastered is where the going gets tough with me. It casts shadows over every decision I make in regard to other people.
One of the most hurtful aspects of this situation is how it affects people who might innocently take a liking to me. It doesn't happen much, and I'm usually okay about it when it does, but I have to look out for the people who like me.
Defending other people's right to be friendly with me can be a burden I often shuffle the coils of impulsively. Until the other has time to grasp the reality of my non-attachment, they have nary a clue about how I am is can get cold as ice faster than it can warm up to them.
I have forever used other people to mirror me to myself fairly disdainfully, as if how they felt about it meant little or nothing to me. It's embarrassing. I am is a sha-me-d man. A shadow of a man. No real man at all, but a pretender to the throne. The docetic spirit I attempt to commune with is me. It gnows, that fucker! I am has to settle for mere knowledge. Who wants that disparity hanging over one's Damocles-like haid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles
If I hang out in the non-attached state of being that allows me to reach for a broader and more profound source for my nomadic juggernauts. then that state of being has to dismiss the mundane judgment of the Earth without amenities.
I'm trying to describe a balance point as a state of being that, in a way, is like Damocles sitting under the sword more so than the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. Like Damocles, once I discovered the sword hanging over my head by a horse's hair, I'd jump and run skeered outta mah wits.
The Wikipedia article is probably the first time I've actually read the story of Damocles and the double-edged sword. The myth that existed in my memory of Damocles and the sword was that the sword was suspended above his prostrated body getting closer and closer to cutting his throat with each pendulum swing. Maybe there is more than one version.
Alexander Pope wrote one particular sentence that impresses me, and I don't know a whole lot about Alexander Pope but that one remark. Who cares? The remark was something similar to: Modesty is the art of power. Incrementally I've concluded Pope was saying that the only way to manage power is by comporting oneself modestly. Is this pretty much the same as what Shakespeare wrote quoted in the same Wikipedia article, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"?
In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching the virtue of Modesty is the subject of an entire Hexagram, and it has no negative lines attached to it's judgments and omens. It's the only Hexagram like that in the entire book. A comment of explanation states that the I Ching only teaches caution. The sort of caution required for living a life of no blame.
This morning, however, I'm currently impressed with the metaphor about the sword hanging over a power-hungry neophyte. It's like the Youth scampering along the edge of the abyss with only his doG as a companion in the Fool card of the Waite deck.
Reading palms was sort of like sitting under a double-edged sword for me. Hell, I was just playing around with the idea of something to do to attract a little money of my own say so while I hitch-hiked around the country while it was warm. I did it on the lam for a long time. I was only trying to run away from myself, not nothing illegal, but that's another story.
The big deal with reading palms is finding something to say to the person you're holding hands with. That's the only-est reason the great majority of them hold hands with an out-and-out bum for. For the bum to say something they could make a mountain from a molehill with. For that to-happen-for-them, ya gotta have something to say. It really doesn't matter what.
The reason it doesn't matter what I said to them is the same deal with poetry and painting and music and every other art I'm currently aware of. The perceiver of art perceives what they think is sot before them. What the artist intends by their effort to express wot's what to them doesn't matter to nobody but the spooks up in the corners of the gallery, and in the minds and hearts of their wannabes.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
