Space Lettuce
[Prepared text of a speech given at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s 10th Anniversary Gala on November 16th, 2016]
Hello! Hello, and thank you all so much for being here. How’s everyone doing?
Great. Great, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to see you all here. We had a lot of internal conversations, over the last week, about how to go about throwing a party after the events of November 8th. And it came down to this idea, and I think it’s crucial, that joy has not gone out of the world. This is a somber time. We’re all feeling pretty grim. And as we look around and talk to each other and begin to figure out what we’re going to do now, it’s critical, it’s absolutely critical, to also set aside time to reflect on and commemorate and celebrate how far we’ve come and what we’ve done. Because, as Ari has reminded us, as Chai has told us, and as our awardees are about to demonstrate, we have come staggeringly far.
We know that change comes inch by inch–slowly, painfully, at an exhausting grinding crawl, and then sometimes all at once. We cannot move forward on grim determination alone. My job for these next ten minutes is to talk to you about what comes next, about what we do now, about what ASAN is planning and preparing for, and I have to tell you that the first thing has to be joy. We have to be able to remember and celebrate our wins and the truth that we fight for. We are looking at a long, long haul, and we’re only going to make it if we bring our joy and our love with us.
When we’re preparing for a trek such as this, it’s important to know that we cannot go it alone. The work of building strong, committed coalitions between the many communities which overlap with and make up the disability community is what will sustain us through the next few years. To return to a truism, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” I am speaking to you as a disabled women, as a lesbian, as someone who loves and works and lives with trans people and people of color and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and faiths and nationalities. We can hang together, or we can hang separately. These are our options.
Working in coalition, we have to mobilize our grassroots, right now, immediately, to defend and advance the progress we’ve made. Protecting the affordable care act. Medicaid. Deinstitutionalization. Self determination. Access to justice. As you can see in our annual report, ASAN has been systematically developing our capacity to produce accessible advocacy resources–guides to policy and action that people with cognitive disabilities, our families, and really just anyone who isn’t a lawyer can read, understand, and use. We have to build that Hidden Army, and grow our grassroots in places we haven’t before. In the past, ASAN has done a lot of very wonky policy work, and we certainly plan to continue that–let me know if anyone here wants to geek out over quality measures for MLTSS, and I’ll be there in a second! But now more than ever it is critical that we are giving our grassroots the information and the tools they need to advocate, to participate in our civic society, and to have not just a say, but the final word in decisions about our lives and our futures. Nothing about us, without us has never mattered more.
So we’re going to produce materials explaining what a bloc grant is, how public comment periods work, and how to visit your senator in their district office. We’re going to collect people’s stories about why the ACA and coverage of pre-existing conditions is so important, and we’re going to mobilize our networks to ensure that the healthcare we fought for eight years ago stays in place. We’re going to work with other organizations focusing on civil rights, voting rights, and access to justice. We’re going to make sure that whenever the minimum wage is discussed, disabled workers are included and subminimum wage is abolished. We’re going to keep fighting for Olmstead implementation and deinstitutionalization, because now is not the time to give up on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we’re going to keep advancing our work in supported decision making and self-determination, because making choices is a human right, and human rights don’t come with 4-year waiting periods.
It’s going to be hard. Yes.
So we’ll do what’s hard.
We have always overcome impossible odds. It is something out of science fiction that we exist at all. Autistic self-advocacy, self-advocacy, disability rights and the community we have built–all organizing is science fiction, as Walidah Imarisha said, and when we organize we find ourselves building a new world. I draw strength and conviction in equal measure from the fact of our rich history. We have done so much. In just the last few years, we’ve seen an increased acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact that cure, as a concept, is not an ethical–or scientifically plausible–response to autism. Can you imagine? If you had told me five years ago that Autism Speaks would remove the word ‘cure’ from their mission statement this year, I would never have believed you. We have a lot left to do there, but we did that. The number of people with disabilities living in institutions has shrunk to a bare fraction of its peak. We did that. We defined what home and community based services mean, and as a result, the quality of life for people receiving those services has and will continue to increase as we restore autonomy, self-determination, and basic human rights. We did that. How long have we worked for those things? How hard did we fight? Is there a single person here who could call it easy?
There is so much more to be done. Even for each of the examples I’ve cited, enormous amounts of work remain–autism acceptance and self-advocate representation must replace words like “treatment” and “prevention,”; our people still trapped in institutions must be freed; we all know far too many people living nightmarish lives of quiet desperation in what we call on paper a ‘community,’ and of course even one person in that particular hell would be intolerable. The work ahead was already unrelenting, and as we look at the next few years, I think we all feel a little knocked back, a little desperate, a little panicked that after everything we’ve done, it could all be unravelled.
But when I think about our community, and when I think about our trajectory, I am still filled with hope.
We’ve built something incredible, something that has defied the odds, and we’re not done yet. We’ve fought hard for our existence. We’ve fought hard because the idea of ASAN is important: the idea of an organization run by and for autistic people ourselves, an organization capable of sophisticated advocacy at a local, state, and national level, taking on policy and legal challenges and working to ensure that wherever and whenever issues impacting the lives of autistic people are discussed, we’re there–not just sitting at the table, but leading the discussion. That idea is important, but it’s an idea we’ve fought to turn into a reality because it comes with tangible, real-world consequences. Self-determination, access to healthcare, community integration, communication justice–these are not academic theories but lived realities, and the policies we make and the arguments we have directly impact people’s lives. We are the organization that cares about the details, because we know that the details are where our lives are lived and lost. And as long as that’s true, ASAN needs to exist, bringing light to those details and pushing for a better world–now.
Prior to last week, when I was working on this speech, I had a great story to tell you about 2 different futures. That story is still true. So I want to talk for a minute about stories, about the future, and about the stories we tell for what the future can look like for autistic adults, adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, adults with significant disabilities–whatever label we want to insert here. The stories we tell about disability, about autism, and about our lives set our expectations, and those expectations set up our futures. And right now we have stories for 2 starkly opposing visions for what we think life can look like for autistic adults.
The first vision is all about safety. Safety. Our best hope and our biggest expectation, we are told, is to be safe. In this vision, we are safe! We are so, so safe. Our housing is safe–designed specifically to keep us safe. Safe, special housing, with all of us in one place to keep us safe. There are devices that can track us to ensure that we never venture beyond safety’s borders. We have guardians, to ensure that all decisions related to us are sanctioned and sound and safe. If we work, we are working somewhere safe, of course, optimized to us and our needs and the needs of our also autistic, also disabled coworkers–safely supervised, of course, by someone without a disability. Thank god. We are kept safe in a cocoon of specialized services, cradle to grave, from the behavioral modification that teaches toddlers to stop flapping for their own good all the way through to the adult ABA that providers assure us is really just person-centered, since the reinforcers are tailored to our specific behaviors.
We are so, so safe.
Now, in case my tone hasn’t tipped my hand, I should clarify that this is obviously a story that ASAN and self-advocates find to be deeply dystopian. But it is difficult to articulate an anti-safety agenda, as it were. Safety is good! We want people to be safe! It’s an understandable motivation! And yet we know that safety isn’t safe. We know what the abuse rates for ‘safe’ segregated placements are. And we’ve seen this before. We have a century and a half of history showing us that institutions, campuses, farmsteads–whichever you’d like to call them, and when you line the descriptions up over time it becomes impossible to tell the difference–aren’t safe, even if they have a lovely pool and a beautiful garden. Any time you take a group of marginalized people and put us together and isolate us, safety leaves the equation. Every time.
So when we are choosing between possible futures for our community, I think we can do a little better than safety. Certainly our community deserves better. But what would that second story look like? What stories do we want to tell?
I want to tell stories with unlimited options. I want autistic people to be safe–but I also want us to be happy, self-determined, included, valued, and unremarkable. I want our lives and our happiness to be commonplace. I want us to be people–we are people! With boring, ordinary lives. Lives that we are in charge of. I want each of us to be free and supported to be living the best life for each of us. I want the same thing we want for everyone else.
And, handily enough, I believe we have a right to that. I have a right to be in charge of my body and my life. I have a right to live free of abuse and neglect and discrimination. I have a right to make mistakes, take risks, and to be bored. I have a right to participate, to access the same things my peers access and live the same boring, ordinary, beautiful life.
And I know that right now, on November 16th, all this talk of rights feels like science fiction. But listen, we grew lettuce in space this year. Did you know that? We grew lettuce in space this year. We are living science fiction. We can do this. We’re already doing this. The ADA generation has grown up, and with the strength of disability rights law at our back and the blessings of our community in our hearts, we are changing what the world looks like. We’re changing who gets to be in the story. We’re changing what the story is.
This is not the end. This isn’t even the beginning. This is the long, hard middle that gives every story its heart, its meat, and its staying power. We are beautiful and we are strong and our shared humanity is at its best when we’re all in. And that’s what we’ll be working toward for the next 10 years.
Thank you.
Dangerous Assumptions
There is this thing that happens sometimes.
Parent has an autistic child. Autistic child doesn’t speak, or their speech isn’t an accurate window into what they are thinking. Autistic child is presumed to be very significantly intellectually disabled.
Years later, a method of communication is found that works for the child, and it turns out that they are in fact very smart. Very smart! The parents are overjoyed. They begin talking about presuming competence, the least dangerous assumption, that not being able to speak is not the same as not having anything to say.
They are so, so excited.
And they start talking about all the incorrect assumptions they had. If we’d known, they say, we wouldn’t have done X. If we had known they could read, think, hear us.
And it’s a big problem, because the way they talk…..they think the problem was that they treated their child like they were intellectually disabled, and they weren’t. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that they thought their child was intellectually disabled, and so they didn’t treat them like a person.
These revelations, about presuming competence, human dignity, and the least dangerous assumption—they don’t apply only to kids who are secret geniuses. They apply to everyone. They are the most important for the kids who really do have intellectual disabilities, who really can’t read or use full sentences and who really do need extensive support. The people who came up with these terms came up with them for a population where there is very little doubt that significant disability is a factor. These terms don’t mean assume they aren’t actually disabled. These terms mean assume they are a person, and remember what you don’t know.
When the neurodiversity movement first got its legs, oh so many years ago, we got a LOT of pushback from people who thought we were denying disability. And we had to be clear that we meant everyone. And I worry, more and more, that certain very academic circles have left that behind, in practice as much as in theory. It makes liars out of the rest of us, and it makes a lot of work very, very difficult.
If I told the parents in question that I am thinking about this, they wouldn’t understand. They’re not saying intellectual disability doesn’t exist, they would say. But the truth is, they’re either saying that, or they’re saying thank god, it wasn’t my kid.
And it’s a slap in the face, every time.
Confession Of A Woman In A Refrigerator (Speech Without A Title 2.0)
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
So the thing is, most of this belongs at the bioethics conference, but, but, jesus.
I remember being in high school and not being sure why, exactly, college had to be a thing, because I was going to be dead by the time I was thirty.
(Two-thirds of the way there and I still can’t see more than ten years down the line and maybe, maybe a small part of what I’m doing is motivated by now or never, I’ll do this right.)
Why would I be dead by the time I was thirty? Well, every other girl like me never seemed to make it to womanhood, it only stood to reason.
At some point, and I’ve told this story so many times and it never stops making me want to cry, I started hearing about other disabled people. People who were older than me, people who weren’t about this thing is going to kill me one of these days, people who weren’t about living with, living with, living with, not dying from disease, people who were disabled and alive and not sick, not dying, but raising hell and building lives and screaming, screaming, screaming when we were being killed.
People who used words like we.
I thought, we, yes. We. Okay. We can make this work.
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
When you are disabled, when you are traumatized and vision-impaired and autistic, even and maybe especially when you haven’t been given those access codes yet, you learn to see yourself as the walking dead. You are vast swathes of nonexistence, cut off and left for dead at every missed milestone and swapped pronoun and bruised shin and scar on your face. There are Other People, Normal People, People, and then there is you, and you are defined by the parts of yourself that match to everyone around you, and then the vast swathes of nothing. Disability is absence, disability is inability, disability is death, and you are a woman in a refrigerator.
It takes you a while to learn that you aren’t the one who put you in the refrigerator.
It takes longer to learn that it wasn’t your body, either.
A lot of us never get to the point where we can say it was you, you tried to kill me, you made me think I was dead, you screamed about the injustice of putting me in a refrigerator while you, you were the one killing me.
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
And you made me think it was my fault.
One day, I will write a speech that isn’t this one, this choked and untitled remixed stew of you tried to kill me, and you made me think it was my fault, and now you will listen.
When you’re disabled, you see death everywhere, and it isn’t because your body stands out or doesn’t stand at all, it’s because everyone talks about you like you’re in a refrigerator, like you’re not real, like you’re dead.
And it kills you.
They kill you.
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
What I am trying to say is that of course, of COURSE, of fucking course we notice, because we can’t not, because the bioethics conference has one day for beginning-of-life issues, where they try to cut us out, and then a day for end-of-life, for those of us who slipped by, because last week twins in Belgium asked the state to kill them because no one ever told them that they didn’t have to go into the refrigerator.
What I am trying to say is, my friend has a friend who uses a wheelchair and didn’t get screened for breast cancer because she’s already dead, right?
And you, you, every single one of you who said we are helping, we are saving you, something cruel and unjust has been done, and then you made disability mean death and shoved us into the fucking refrigerator. You killed us.
I didn’t know how to die until you taught me.
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
Question: if nobody but disabled people know that disability and death are distinct and not overlapping concepts, does anyone really know? Or are we just trees in the forest, falling (well, growing, would be the point,) with no one to hear?
What I am trying to say is, I am now Someone Who People Meet, and I know that there is a vast we out there, and I know that I am living and a woman and disabled and that none of these contradict, and I dragged myself out of the refrigerator by the skin of my teeth and said you will listen to me now, and this evening I felt sick when some friends offered to transcribe something for me, and I still can’t see myself making thirty.
And what I am saying is, this thing is going to kill me one of these days, and what is going to kill me isn’t going to be my back screaming at me or my eyes turning off or my head going through a wall, it’s going to be everyone who says we’re just trying to get you out of your refrigerator.
I pulled myself out of the refrigerator you put me into the day you started grading people into people and cripples. I pulled myself out the day another woman in another refrigerator told me, like passing on a secret, we aren’t dead yet. Someone let me out of your refrigerator, and you can never put me back in there again.
lol conflating disability and DEATH so casually that nobody but disabled ppl notices.
I’m disabled. I’m not dead. I’m not in a fucking refrigerator. I am living, living, living, and I am screaming, screaming, screaming.
And, just in case you should care…
Yeah. I noticed.
Truth Is
Author’s note: Yesterday in the blogosphere there was an Autism Positivity Day Flash Blog, sparked by one author noticing that someone had found their blog by searching “I wish I didn’t have Asperger’s.” Due to my own situation, I couldn’t participate, but today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, and I still have something to say.
Sometimes in the morning I am petrified and can’t move
Awake but cannot open my eyes
And the weight is crushing down on my lungs
I know I can’t breathe
And hope someone will save me this time x
Dear “I wish I didn’t have Asperger’s,”
I want you to know that I understand.
That’s the first thing. This isn’t going to work if we aren’t honest with each other, so, let me be honest. I’ve thought a lot about that mythical cure, and there have been days, many days, when I didn’t have to think at all–when I knew that, if I had a chance, I’d take a cure in a heartbeat.
I need you to know that I understand.
I do. I do. I want the things a cure could give me. I want to have the leading role in my own story, and parts in others’. I want to be able to do the same things everyone else can do in the same way without any extra effort. I want to not feel like a freak. I want to feel safe. I want to be someone my parents can love. I want to know I have a future, and I want to not have to blaze that trail by myself. I want to have worth. I want other people to not think they have a right to me and my space, or else I want it to stop bothering me. I want my words and experiences to make sense to other people, and I want their words and experiences to make sense to me. I want to have to work just a little less hard. I want to have a college degree, a job, and a house of my own, and I want to be able to live wherever I want. I want to be able to assume I’m a person. I want to not have a month out of the year dedicated to my brokenness. I want to be able to assume that it’s not me, it’s them. I want to wake up and not be terrified or already tired.
I want a lot of things.
It’s not a bad thing, to want things.
Check in: can you see, now, that I really do understand? I hope you can. I get a couple of visits from you, or someone with the same keyword search, every week, and I want you to know that you aren’t alone, and you aren’t wrong.
Okay. I’ve been honest with you. Now I want you to be honest with me. Can you look at the list of things I want, and tell me if you see a pattern?
I’ll wait.
While I wait, I figure, I might as well tell you some other things I’d like to stop being. In addition to no longer being autistic, I’d also like to be cured of
-being a lesbian
-being female
-being so obscenely tall
Really. I’d like to get be able to get married to someone I love in every state. I’d like to be able to walk down a dark street without fearing for my safety. I’d like to be able to sit in a chair designed for someone of my height. And none of those things are happening right now, so I guess I can either fight for them to change, or try to change myself.
Okay. Did you find the pattern? It’s okay if you didn’t. It took me awhile to understand it. It’s subtle.
Every single one of those things I want?
Have nothing to do with being autistic.
Really. Not a single, solitary one.
I should have a leading role in my own story. When I don’t, it’s because other people aren’t treating me like a person. That is not my fault. Pretty sure the one in the wrong there is the one who thinks that a disability means you aren’t a person.
Why do I want to be able to do the same things as everyone else? Why is that important to me? If I lived in a world where it was recognized that there are multiple ways to do something and that this is okay and the things I do and the ways I do them are valid and important, would I care? Would I even realize this was something to care about at all?
I would know that I have a future, and that it’s a bright and near and real one, if I knew growing up that autistic adults existed. Guess what–they do, they have for thousands of years, and on the whole, they’re doing just as well as anyone else.
I want to have worth–okay. See, if I had a friend who felt worthless, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t tell that friend “you’re right, you’re pathetic. Please change everything about yourself.” I’m pretty sure I would tell that friend that the people making her feel worthless were abusive assholes, that she was good at plenty of things, that she was a fantastic person I was lucky to know, and that human worth isn’t some tangible thing we can gain or lose. And if I can say all of that to a friend, and mean it…why can’t I say it to myself? I’m not special. I work by the same rules as everyone else. And that means I am worth something, whether I believe it or not.
I can keep going through these. I do make sense to a few people, who take the time to listen to me the way I need to be heard, and they make sense to me. That is how relationships work, and there are lots of different ways to communicate. I can have a job, a living situation I am in charge of, and all the education I want, with the correct supports, just like everyone else. It is not my fault that the supports I need differ from the majority, and that is not an excuse or invitation to mistreat or discriminate against me. Etc etc etc.
In the end, there are really two things I want when I say I wish I wasn’t autistic or I want a cure. I want to not feel like a freak, and I want to feel safe. Those are hard, scary things to feel and to admit. And, because I’m being honest, I have to ask something even scarier.
What if being cured didn’t fix those things?
Because ultimately, if I took a cure, I’d be surrendering. Instead of fighting for my right to be treated and valued as a human being regardless of disability, I’d be letting go, giving in, and letting myself be changed into someone easier, someone acceptable, someone convenient. And I want to be clear–there is nothing wrong with wanting things to be easier or wanting to feel safe or accepted or just being done fighting. That just means that you’ve been asked to be much, much stronger than everyone else for much, much too long.
But if, in order to be safe I have to stop being me?
Then I’m really not safe at all.
As long as being disabled means being unsafe, then no one is safe. Not really. Disability is a natural part of the human experience according to the ADA. Most people will experience some form of disability, for some period of time, at some point in their lives. So long as we as a society keep permitting exceptions to rules like everyone is a person and treat people like people, none of us are safe. Safety earned by staying within acceptable margins isn’t safety at all.
I promised to be honest. Part of being honest is looking at what my words actually mean, what lies beneath them, what ideas are controling what I say. And underneath every I wish I wasn’t autistic is a I wish people would stop hurting me or a I wish the world had room for me or a if I blame myself, I can feel like I’m in control.
And it’s okay that I feel this way. Well, it’s not okay that anyone ever has to feel this way, but I’m not bad or wrong for feeling it. Neither are you. But feelings aren’t the same as reality, and in the end, if we weren’t autistic anymore, there would still be people hurting others just because they can and just because no one ever told them to stop, and we’d still know that it takes only the slightest deviation before we’re vulnerable again. A cure won’t ever be able to change that.
What will change that is something a lot harder than a magic pill. What will change that is enough people saying enough is enough and doing the hard work of making our world one where everyone is welcome, all communication is honored, and everyone is safe and valued. And that is going to take time, and there are going to be days, still, as we work to make that happen, where you, where I, will wish we weren’t autistic, because sometimes it just hurts.
But it will change. It’s changing now. And you shouldn’t, and don’t, have to. You are amazing and sufficient and lovable just the way you are, and I really, really hope you’ll stick around so that one day the rest of the world can know it, too.
your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful
The thing about not-being-a-person is:
They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all.
They will have no idea who they are talking to.
You yourself will start to forget, too.
They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them.
You will do math, constantly.
How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this project to succeed? How much honesty can I afford? How much dishonesty will kill me? What is the cost of coming out? Is there a way to delay, soften, transmute? How long can I survive as half a person?
Your dreams will be reduced down to breathing.
And you will be grateful.
And no one else will know. And so it won’t be real.
You will become an expert at folding away pieces of yourself, quietly and automatically and with perfect obedience.
And you will forget that, forget all of it, forget yourself, and then come back to yourself violently as someone smiles and talks, academically or hatefully and there’s no deciding which is worse, about those people.
And you will remember that you are not a person. And you will have to decide, all over again, how much longer you can take that.
Metaphors Are Important: An Ethnography Of Robotics
First, a story. (A little Christmas story. I call it: the story of Schmuel. Tailor of Klimovitch.)
*****
(The best part of the story is what I leave out.)
*****
I met a mini!Kurt the other day. He was very blonde, with intense brown eyes, but he was very particular about his hat, and his dad was Burt Hummel in all the ways that counted. I’d guess he was about four–his voice was still all exclamation points.
“I’M MATT!” he said, hiding his face from me, and then trying to run out of the waiting room. It was cool though–I don’t know if I even managed ahi.
He was at the stage where he was still mainly echolalic, but he was learning how to store and recombine and modify phrases to work for him. I was excited for him, and almost proud, because he’d mastered two essential skills for that–swapping pronouns, and prompting other people to remember their lines. His dad, trying to bundle him into his coat, was not playing along at first.
“I’M SO CUTE!” mini!Kurt reminded him, trying to make his arms go into the right sleeves. “I’M SO CUTE!? I’M SO CUTE?”
“Yeah,” Dad sighed, wrestling with the zipper. “You’re cute.”
“SO CUTE?”
“So cute, that’s right.”
Mini!Kurt, satisfied that everything was going according to plan, was ready to leave. “BYE!” he called, waving his hand backwards at me, a perfect mirror image.
I waved. Had my mind been more together, I would have flapped.
*****
Echolalia is metalanguage.
*****
Echolalia is an unexpected treasure hunt. You can be watching a bootleg musical you never thought would be any good, but turns out to be beautiful, and suddenly they’re going up the scale singing hot hot hot hot, and you’re back with Kimba, and he’s saying hot hot hot hot–only he’s got this elaborate metaphor about fire and anger going on right now, and here it means I think you’re mad at me, so I’m mad at you, don’t touch me.
And then you’re back at your laptop, wondering when he started watching musicals and rethinking half the things you thought you knew.
*****
Echolalia is what you use when language is too much. It’s just also what you use when it’s not enough.
These things are not opposites.
*****
Walt knows my name, but he’d rather call me Mulan. We’re on the swings, trading movie titles.
“101 Dalmations?” I offer.
“Mulan no thank you!” He chides. Considers. “Rio, with Jesse Eisenberg?”
I grin. I’d only said that once, but he’d picked up on my crush, and he offers it back to me when I am having a hard time with the conversation. I try to remember his favorite, as a peace offering. “Kung Fu Panda II, in theaters now?”
I get it right.
Months later, it will still be the best conversation of my life.
*****
Echolalia, from Echo, of Greek mythos, cursed to speak only through the words of others.
We make it work though.About the cursed: opinions aren’t the same as facts, and no one ever asked Echo.
To be fair, no one would have listened, either.
*****
As much as I can hate words, I delight in them, too. When I’m echoing, referencing, scripting, riffing and rifting, storing and combing and recombining, patterning, quoting, punning, swinging from hyperlexic memory to synesthetic connection, words are my tangible playground.
Make me talk like you, and you’ll get a bunch of syntactically sophisticated nonsense. Let me keep my memories and connections, my resonations and associations and word-pictures, and if you slow down enough, you might hear something ringing true.
These are the words I’m using right now. It’s okay if you can’t see the picture yet; I can’t either. It’s coming together though, the more I practice them.
Ethnography of robotics.
Neuropoetics.
Girls like you always get to see Ireland.
Send my love to the leprechauns.
Please don’t special-episode me.
Why don’t you trust me? Because, honey, you keep setting things on fire.
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
I think they might be four separate pieces. The joy is how they come together.
The bestworst part is no one ever knowing.
*****
(The best part of the story is what I leave out.)
*****
I don’t trust my words on my own.
That’s not why I echo though.
I know it’s tempting, but, listen.
*****
Or maybe I’m lying, because I’m not brave enough to explain.
Don’t worry though. I know that Kimba loves musicals now, and Walt named me after a warrior.
We’ll get there.