Raphael Ordoñez on Adult Diagnosis

There's a post by your humble blogger over at The Mighty today. I submitted it in response to a prompt for stories by people diagnosed with autism as adults.

If you happen to be a visitor from The Mighty, welcome! Please peruse my blog and enjoy all the extremely important and relevant things I've written about fantasy, logic, beauty, autism, and chickens. You can read my awesome short stories through the sidebar; if you like those, check out my novel Dragonfly through the links at the top of the page.

Dark Valley Destiny, Part II

Well, it's time to wrap up my reflections on Dark Valley Destiny: A Biography of Robert E. Howard. The first part of this post can be found here; my crackpot theory that Howard was autistic can be found here. These reflections are, of course, quite self-centered, given that this is a blog; but Howard himself, the biography asserts, tended to see all the things he read only in relation to himself, so perhaps this is not inappropriate.

Howard's work space (but not his original desk (which
happens to be doing service as a coffee table in the town
where my sister-in-law lives)).

I had hoped to find more information in the second half of the book on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of Howard's professional writing career. The authors (L. Sprague de Camp & Co.) mention having failed to obtain permission to view certain correspondence, so perhaps this is not all their fault. What they do describe vis-à-vis Howard's daily writing activities I had gleaned for myself through a visit to the house and reading the notes to his collected works. To wit, Howard lived and wrote in a tiny walled-in porch behind his parents' bedroom, with no privacy and scarcely enough room for his bed and desk, pounding out story after story on a typewriter, usually working through about two drafts, sometimes with a preliminary synopsis and sometimes not.

Parenthetically, I must admit feelings of bemusement and chagrin at reading de Camp's estimation of Howard's various stories. He and his pal Lin Carter did the world – nay, the universe – inestimable service through their efforts to rescue various pulp writings from oblivion, but they were, I think, not the most perceptive of critics. Just my two cents.

The Howard family's living room.

Anyhow, the authors do provide a careful account of Howard's earnings. Here I was a bit surprised. Adjusting dollars for inflation, and taking the narrowness of the market into account, he didn't do half bad. Because he lived with his parents all his life, I had assumed he was unable to support himself through writing. On the contrary, although he probably couldn't have made a regular full-time job of it without some other means of support, he was a professional writer in a sense that no contemporary short-fiction fantasy author could ever be, the SFWA's six-cent-per-word threshold for "pro rates" notwithstanding.

Don't get me wrong. Living as I do from paycheck to paycheck, a story sold at six cents a word is nothing to sneeze at, and may even be the difference between (say) fixing a hot-water heater or going another month with cold showers. (Luckily I live in South Texas.) But I have a full-time job to pay the regular bills and expenses. Even if I sold stories every month to every available outlet, I wouldn't make enough money to support myself, let alone my family. Those were just different times. It was the era of the pulp magazine, before the rise of the mass-market paperback. I gather that a successful pulp writer of the thirties was something like what a moderately successful trade paperback author is now.

The Howard family's kitchen.

As I've mentioned before, one thing that makes Howard a sympathetic character to me is his utter isolation in rural Texas. He did have a number of friends with literary aspirations, and even contributed to a little circular among a clique of writerly acquaintances. But no one had an interest in anything like Weird Tales. His one literary confidant and love interest, Novalyne Price, found his work distasteful. Other Weird Tales authors were just as isolated, I suppose, but I would argue that a writer of weird fiction feels his isolation more keenly in rural Texas than in (say) Providence or California.

It's one thing to have magazine critics on the Internet say unpleasant things about your work, to which they have at least paid the compliment of reading it. It's quite another to have the people in your life despise you for your very devotion to a craft. Eventually you have to develop a thick skin, figure out – for yourself and no one else – what it is exactly that you're about, and learn to follow your own lights and not pay any heed to the hail of doubts and criticism. The danger in such a course is that you might end up going right off the deep end. It's never very safe to hardwire yourself to ignore warning signs.

Postcard from HPL to REH.

The end of Howard's life was dark. Despite my already being familiar with the circumstances of his death, I found this part of the book hard to read. There were some disturbing hints and details that I hadn't known before. Perhaps, instead of mourning his tragic end, we should be happy that it was no worse. I really do wonder what was passing through his mind during those last few days. But it's probably best to just let it lie.

This may be a disturbing admission, but reading about Howard's death called to mind a certain time of my own life, when I planned in all seriousness to commit suicide. I was in my late teens. Plenty of teens think about suicide as a way of feeling sorry for themselves, I suppose; but, then again, plenty of teens end up doing it, too. I think I would have done it. I had a lot of problems, due mainly (as I now know) to an undiagnosed developmental disorder. Things got worse the closer I got to graduating.

What tipped me over the edge was a single phone call from an adult scout leader. Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, I'd been elected to an office with duties in several counties. I was sixteen at the time. This leader, who was very enthusiastic, set himself up as my mentor. He came to my house with his ladyfriend and had big plans for me and my year-long term. But, you see, I'm this guy to whom making a telephone call to a stranger involves working myself up for hours or days ahead of time, only to collapse in a panic attack at the last moment; to whom participating in a conversation is like solving a Rubik's cube while riding a unicycle. That's how I am now, mind you – back then it was worse. So, long story short, I screwed up, and this leader let me have it (by telephone) at the end of my term. Even now I remember everything he said to me, about how I'd dashed his hopes, how disappointed he was in me, and how embarrassed he was in front of other adult leaders. I'm more than twice as old now, and it still bothers me. Damn.

But that episode was only the straw that broke the camel's back, of course. After I hung up I wrote a journal entry about knowing at long last what a despicable worm I was, and deciding that the best thing was to…well, you know. After considering all the possible methods, I settled on opening my wrists while taking a warm bath, an idea I'd gotten from The Godfather: Part II. I read about how to do this so as to ensure death, as I was quite intent on its being no mere "cry for help." At one point I painted a large picture of a teen in the act, a picture I later destroyed. I'd been in the habit for some years of secretly hurting or injuring myself in minor ways so as to alleviate pressure. Suicide seemed only a short step further.

More than self-hatred, I think the real driving force behind all this was my paralyzing fear of moving out on my own. In the back of my mind, I knew that that's precisely what I had to do: start a new life somewhere else. But I was terrified of such a change in my situation. Suicide was, to me, an honorable compromise. A compounding of various factors during my senior year only strengthened my resolve. I was, I recall, quite cold and rational about it, at the same time as being almost completely unhinged.

In the end, I made a deal with myself: I would go to college, and see if I could make some friends during the week before classes. If things didn't go well, I would kill myself. As it turned out, the first person I met was an older student, a kind young woman who ultimately became my wife. That probably saved my life. Things have never really gotten easier, though. To tell the truth, perhaps I'm not out of the woods yet even now. But I've gone a long way toward learning to live with my limitations. Knowing precisely what the limitations are helps a great deal, of course; otherwise, I'd just be shadowboxing my way down the road.

So, maybe Robert E. Howard shared my disorder. Maybe he had something else wrong with him. Maybe he was just a seriously messed-up guy whose life went bad. In the end, to quote one of my favorite films,

He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

Was Robert E. Howard Autistic?

"I'm Robert Howard, I'm sorry if we frightened you. Patches and I are out for a morning stroll. We like to come here where there are big rocks and caves so we can play make-believe. Some day I am going to be an author and write stories about pirates and maybe cannibals. Would you like to read them?"

– Robert E. Howard, age nine

Robert E. Howard, age eight.

Robert E. Howard, pulp writer and creator of Conan the Cimmerian, committed suicide on June 11, 1936, in Cross Plains, Texas, upon being informed that his mother, who was dying of tuberculosis, would not regain consciousness. He was thirty years old. His mother succumbed the following day, and they were buried in the same plot in nearby Brownwood.

Howard has been on my mind since I passed through Brownwood a couple weeks ago, and, more generally, since I visited Cross Plains on the anniversary of his death in 2011. He was in many ways a man of his time and place, and my feelings about him are not without conflict. But I'm also a native Texan who lives in a small town and writes fantasy adventure stories, so he's something of a role model to me. "The Tower of the Elephant" is probably my favorite piece of short fiction, with several other Conan stories coming in close behind it.

Howard was a complex person. The one figure that looms largest in his biography is his mother, who, by all accounts, exerted an unhealthy influence on his adult life, particularly through her attempts to stifle his relationships with women. This has led some biographers – most notably, L. Sprague de Camp in Dark Valley Destiny (published in 1983 and coauthored by his wife Catherine Crook de Camp and child psychologist Jane Whittington Griffin) – to suggest that he had some sort of Oedipal fixation which ultimately led to suicide.

Hester Ervin Howard

Given the facts of the case, that's a certainly a possibility that should be explored. But to me it seems that de Camp and his coauthors leaped to the conclusion prematurely and allowed it to color their investigation. It's dangerous, this business of posthumously reconstructing a person's psyche.

Nevertheless, when you look at a life like Robert E. Howard's, with all its unexplained eccentricities and contradictions, there is a great temptation to ask Why? and expect a single answer pointing to a root cause. Such an expectation is, of course, naïve. That said, I'm about to engage in a little naivety of my own by suggesting a different root cause.

I hypothesize that Robert E. Howard, if he lived today, would be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

This is something I know a bit about from a layman's perspective, as I myself have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. In reading Dark Valley Destiny I was surprised by how many of the quirks and mannerisms described in Howard struck a familiar chord. Howard doesn't necessarily conform to the popular stereotype of a person with high-functioning autism, but autism comes in many shapes and sizes. It may even come in the shape and size of a burly Texan with a penchant for writing lurid adventure tales.

Let's look at the facts of the case. I stress that this is only an informal, preliminary attempt, a setting of thoughts in order, based on secondary sources and without psychological expertise. The complete criteria from the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association can be found here, but the two that concern us are as paraphrased below:

A. Deficits in social communication and social interaction as manifested by:

• Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, which could range from: abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests or emotions; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.
• Deficits in nonverbal communication in social interaction, which could range from: poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication.
• Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, which could range from: difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or making friends; to absence of interest in peers.

B. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following:

• Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypies, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases).
• Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior (e.g., extreme distress at small changes, difficulties with transitions, rigid thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take same route or eat same food every day).
• Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests).
• Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

Let's begin with deficits in communication and interaction. The reader might find it helpful to keep an eye on the deficits listed under (A) above.

Howard in 1911.

The Howard family moved around the state a number of times while Robert was growing up. These frequent changes caused him great stress. He was shy and withdrawn, had difficulty making friends, and was the target of bullying at the various schools he attended. One person later described him as a "sissy."

When he did play with other children, he would assign them all roles (usually drawn from books) and direct their actions. Later, though he tried out for basketball, he was unable to adapt to team play – his approach was to grab the ball and try to make a basket – and he was cut for being too aggressive. This sparked a lifelong contempt for playing team sports, though he enjoyed the one-on-one sport of boxing.

As an adult Howard remained a loner, retaining friendships with a handful of young men he'd met in his school days but often treating them in an off-hand manner. He'd formed his two main friendships as the result of a shared interest in writing, and with them was fairly talkative. With others he remained taciturn. Famously, he corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft and other writers, but he was regarded as an eccentric or a "freak" in Cross Plains and had no friends there. Throughout his life he gave the impression of being in his own world; he might shadowbox while walking down the street, for instance, or stop short to peer under stones.


Howard (left) with his two best friends, Truett Vinson and Tevis Clyde Smith.

Howard generally dressed the same way day in and day out (work clothes consisting of a shirt, unpressed pants cuffed two inches too short, and high-topped boots, attire considered eccentric by his peers), but sometimes sported incongruous additions like an oversized Mexican sombrero and a nineteenth-century frock coat. These idiosyncrasies were often adhered to with an air of defiance following a period of unawareness and then social embarrassment. He paid little heed to grooming, and sported a brush cut throughout his adult life.

He took a number of odd jobs to support himself while writing, doing best at jobs in which he worked alone with an explicit set of instructions (e.g., as a geologist's assistant). The authors note that he was seemingly unable to grasp verbal instructions; he did poorly in socially complex work environments, where his employment generally ended with his being fired for insubordination. He also shunned organized religion, the one exception being his brief attendance at Sunday school to pursue a romantic interest. The girl never became aware of his affections.

In speech Howard affected the working-class diction of Central Texas to an exaggerated degree, while his writing was fairly polished and verbose. This apparent inconsistency once led a long-distance correspondent to break off the friendship in disgust after a visit to Cross Plains. Though subject to bouts of violent emotion, particularly upon seeing rules flouted, Howard's face always remained remarkably placid. He often failed to recognize acquaintances when he passed them on the street. As a young man he had a peculiar handshake (described as a "dishrag shake"). He was poor at reading the emotions and motives of others and imagined himself surrounded by enemies.

The young Howard's fear of the opposite sex was noted by his friends. When he did first kiss a girl (as the result of a prank), he copied what he had seen in the movies to such a ludicrous extent that it was noticed by the girl. (This copying from movies is fairly common in persons with high-functioning autism.) Sometime later, he thought he saw the girl in a public library, and, in a panic, escaped by climbing out the window. (It wasn't her but someone else; perhaps this was a manifestation of prosopagnosia, or face blindness, a condition often associated with autism.) His approaches toward the opposite sex were faltering and generally unnoticed.

He and his one girlfriend, English teacher Novalyne Price, were brought together by a shared interest in writing rather than social interaction. She is the one who initiated the relationship. At Howard's insistence they avoided gatherings and public places on their dates. For Christmas one year he gave her a French book about lesbianism, not exactly a typical gift.

So here we have a man who was unable to function in the milieu in which he'd been raised, to form and maintain normal relationships, or to understand and communicate with the people around him. The angry contempt for society noted by the authors was, I suspect, an emotional defense developed in response to his utter inability to navigate social settings, rather than an effect of his attachment to his mother.

Howard's bedroom at his parents' house
in Cross Plains.

Let's proceed to the second criterion. The first deficit listed is not particularly noticeable in the data cited by the authors, but may certainly have been present. The second (insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior), is, I believe, supported by their statements.

I have noted the strain put on the young Robert by the Howards' frequent moves. As an adult he continued to live in the tiny walled-in porch behind his parents' bedroom until his death at the age of thirty, despite his modest commercial success. His dress, as we have seen, was markedly unvarying. His mother cooked for him throughout his life, and he experienced distress during her absence, when he was forced to fend for himself by eating out. In an emotional letter, Novalyne Price makes reference to his constant irritation at having his "the well-ordered routine of [his] life" disrupted by his love interest. Even small changes seem to have made Howard deeply insecure, while large life transitions were met with something verging on horror.

Bust of Cleopatra purchased by the
fourteen-year-old Howard.

As for the third deficit (highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus), we have, among other things, Howard's lifelong fascination with weapons like knives and guns. He had an extensive collection with a number of unique items, stored, for lack of a better place, in the family bathroom, and experienced intense anxiety at the prospect of traveling without a pocketknife.

But his main preoccupation was, of course, writing. In the epigram to this post, we see the nine-year-old Howard interacting with an adult by spouting off his interests, which indeed remained lifelong, and well-nigh excluded all else.

A few facts might point toward the fourth deficit (hyper- or hyporeactivity). Howard was, for instance, quite agitated by the sights and sounds of night life in a boom town. His work as a tailor's assistant caused him significant distress for reasons having to do with the senses, and his eccentric choice of wardrobe may indicate tactile hyper- or hyposensitivity. He could also take a good deal of punishment as a boxer, indicating an insensitivity to pain.

There is, admittedly, less evidence either for or against his having the deficits listed under (B), for the simple reason that the de Camps were not looking for it. As I said above, this post is only a proposal; a systematic search of existing correspondence, interviews, and other evidence would have to be made before a more certain conclusion could be drawn.

Apart from all such biographical details, however, I think it's worth considering Howard's writing in light of a possible diagnosis. I find it significant that he wrote an autobiography (Post Oaks and Sand Roughs) while in his early twenties; perhaps this was an attempt to cope with a life that didn't make much sense. His stories almost invariably consist of a single protagonist thrown into a world of strangers, pushing through a kaleidoscope of transitory allies and enemies. Relationships between characters range from simplistic to juvenile, especially when it comes to dealings between men and women. He's been derided as a hack who specialized in male wish-fulfillment fantasy, but I think he might equally well be viewed as an autistic writer trying to find order in a confusing world and work his way through the rigid framework of his mind.

Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard

It's easy to assume that an unhealthy sexual fixation on his mother led to Howard's death, especially as she was so skillful in thwarting his attempts to find love. However, his father also expressed anxiety about losing him to Novalyne Price, and seemingly had a hand in separating the two. Both parents engaged in their own forms of manipulation. Howard was, in fact, caught in a lifelong tug-of-war between his mother and his father, and between his parents and the outside world.

And then, too, there is the fact that, when the family dog Patches was close to death, Howard was so distressed that he took a room in Brownwood until it was over. He returned only after the dog had been buried and the yard plowed so as to hide the spot, and carefully avoided alluding to it in conversation with his parents.


Bedroom of Dr. and Mrs. Howard, with Robert's bedroom visible
through the window on the right.

Howard had a morbid apprehension of death and a lifelong preoccupation with decay and corruption. This was, I believe, tied to his fear of transition. Speaking from personal experience, I can affirm that suicide may indeed seem a positive alternative to a life change as seemingly innocuous as moving out of the family home. The approaching death of his mother must have been like the brink of a cliff. Yes, there was something deeply unhealthy in their relationship, though not, I think, of a sexual nature. But I see it as one of many factors. Indeed, perhaps Howard's fear of transition and difficulty outside the home contributed to his mother's overbearing protectiveness just as much as her protectiveness contributed to his difficulties. In fact, given that autism is tied to genetic factors, I wonder if Howard's mother exhibited many of the same deficits, though in different ways.

In the end, of course, a man is a man, not a bundle of disorders and complexes. Howard's life was a desperately lonely one, and ended in darkness. Any simple explanation of that fact is going to fall short. Perhaps the hypothesis I've offered here is the key to new understanding of Howard's life and death; but then again, perhaps not. At any rate, I think it's an idea that merits further exploration.

I Encounter No Dryad

This is a post from 2013; I'd intended to continue it at the time, but other things came up, and I forgot about it. I've been thinking about the topics lately, though, so here it is again, in slightly modified form, to be followed by its continuation shortly, unless something comes up and I wait another two years.

Masters of the interior life teach that it's inadvisable to dwell on one's own mystical experiences, and especially to speak about them with others. As John of the Cross has it: The Bride says in her heart, my secret for myself. Part of the danger is that we come to regard them as a species of personal property or, worse, as spiritual cosmetics; still more dangerous is the fact that true contact with the divine takes place, not on the plane of concept or feeling or experience, interior or exterior, but on the plane of relation. To speak of experience is to savor the peel and throw away the meat.

O secrecy without a secret! O accumulation of information!

So I will not attempt to quantify my own experiences (insofar as I've had any). But any writer's mystical and metaphysical outlook inevitably colors his writing; my own has been profoundly affected by I and Thou (1923), the slim but rich volume by the great Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber begins by asserting that man's twofold attitude toward the world accords with the two "primary words" that can be spoken by man.

     Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
     Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
     Primary words are spoken from the being.

The two words, he says, are compound words. Each involves the I; when I speak a primary word, I enter it and take my stand in it. Any use of the word I is really a use of one or another of these words.

     The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
     The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

He goes on to say:

     The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
     The primary word I-It is never spoken with the whole being.

To speak I-Thou is to be in mutual relation. To speak I-It is to objectify. Think of talking to a person you love, of looking them in the eyes and addressing them as You, and how different this is from talking about someone not present as He or She. The thing is, you can use the word You and still mean It; there are people out there – narcissists and flatterers and manipulators, objectifiers and personifiers and conceptualizers – who are incapable of speaking in any other way. Such people never really live; the present is to them not the realm of eternal being, but the infinitesimal endpoint of the past.

The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring. The object is not duration, but cessation, suspension, a breaking off and cutting clear and hardening, absence of relation and of present being.
     True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past.

Our relation with other men stands in the middle place. Below it is our relation with the world of nature; above it is our relation with the divine. Our address of I-Thou to (say) a tree may be somewhat mysterious, and take place on a dark, subliminal level, but it is real for all that. The I-It analyzes the tree according to utility, or form and color, or chemical composition, or what have you; the I-Thou sees it as it is in itself.

It can…also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. […]
     The tree will have a consciousness then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

When we speak Thou on any plane, says Buber, we address the eternal Thou. But there is an attempt to evade this dichotomy between the past and the present, It and Thou, object and subject, by appealing to a world of ideas, by raising up a conceptual structure and dwelling in it as a bulwark against the onset of nothingness.

But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved. Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them; they wander amongst us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied; but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible.

When we erect such a framework and dwell in it, we barricade ourselves from relation with nature, with man, with god. Yet how frequently do men try to scale the divine heights by such means! There will come a time – in the afterlife, if not sooner – when doctrines and confessional differences will fade in significance. For there are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the divine, and the dividing line cuts right across the world of ideas, confessional boundaries, and the human heart. It isn't the division between polytheism and monotheism, but between what I (for lack of better words and at the risk of being misunderstood) will label the pagan and the mystic. It is possible to be a pagan and yet believe in one god; it is possible to be a mystic and believe in many gods. Every person is at least part pagan. A pagan is someone who speaks only I-It. To him the gods are objects to be acted upon; to him a tree is nothing unless it be fictively personified, or conceptualized, or dissected and analyzed.

[W]ithout It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man. 

Think of the old atheists' myth about the ebbing of belief. In the beginning, the legend goes, man believed that spirits inhabited trees and springs and other such things. As his familiarity with the world in which he found himself grew, he moved the divine agencies to the relatively inaccessible mountaintops. Further exploration forced him to relegate the gods to the distant heavens. And now, enlightened by precise astronomical observations, man has to locate god in the realm of abstraction.

Whatever the historical merits of this myth – asserted by some people with the ardent faith of the fundamentalist – I would counter it with a myth of my own construction. I would say that the peopling of hill and dale with rational spirits represents an attempt to deal with a fall. (Perhaps this is the source of the myth of the Fall, as hinted by Buber.) Man, alienated from the life of things, sought to regain his place by superimposing fictive animating agencies on the world of nature. No longer able to address the tree as Thou, at least on a subliminal level, he created the dryad. The impatient atheist is indeed fighting against one front when he denounces dryads and intelligent design. He is fighting paganism. But a pagan is really only a dishonest atheist; and there are atheists who, without realizing it, are mystics.

I've written a number of posts about how my perception of nature became warped when I was a teenager, due in part, perhaps, to my cognitive disability. At the time, I sought desperately to people my increasingly empty and meaningless world with minor gods. With all the data-acquisition-lust of my autistic mind, I pored over books about nature deities, demigods, elementals, fairies, and the like, collating and cataloging. I actually sought such beings in the woods and rivers.

Surely, I thought, the testimony of so many diverse cultures could not be without foundation. And perhaps it isn't! But I never found my fairies. Despairing, I sculpted goddesses from clay; I began the construction of a pagan shrine in the backyard, never to be completed. (My parents finished the garden after I went to college, but without the statue that was to have crowned it.) My point is that my alienation from the world of nature went hand in hand with my retreat into paganism.

When man fell, Our Father Who Art in Heaven became Jupiter; literally, the names mean much the same thing, but I speak in terms of connotations. Again, I'm not opposing monotheism to polytheism. Certainly the objectification of the divine lends itself to a multiplication of gods, which is always a movement of rationalization and conceptualization. But who could argue that the polytheist Socrates lived exclusively in the world of I-It?

I have some thoughts about how these two primary words, these two attitudes, play out in art, especially in the fantasy novel. Perhaps that would best be relegated to a second post. For the time being, you, my reader, who find yourself trapped in the world of objects, consider the following, as I have, and find hope and a path to life:

Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that "craning of the neck" in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.

Alone with Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov'd — I lov'd alone —

—Edgar Allen Poe

When I was a boy I never fit in. Growing up in the big city, this was no problem. My school was cosmopolitan enough that eccentricities were tolerated. But things changed when we moved out to a small town in the country. I was nine at the time.

For one thing, I discovered that I could make rather cutting remarks without meaning to. This didn't improve my social status any. But I had little use for people anyway. Entomology was my great passion. I'd memorized the orders, families, and so on, but chiefly I was interested in hymenoptera. I often spent my recesses watching honeybees at the trash can. This bothered the monitors, who were always trying to make me play with other children, so I eventually took to collecting twelve-spotted cucumber beetles in the back corner of the playground. Another great passion was Greek mythology. I pored over the family trees of the gods and heroes and great houses, and decorated my bedroom with genealogical charts. My specialized interests have carried over into adult life, though I've managed to route them into productive activities.

Other peculiarities abounded. Anything colored, such as cereal or candy, I had to eat one color at a time in spectral order. I talked to myself under my breath. My appearance was always disheveled. Certain loud noises made me almost frantic, as did buttons on clothing. (To this day I don't even like saying the word "button.") I stuttered. I had about as much difficulty telling faces apart as some people would have distinguishing two sheep, which led me into embarrassing situations. (This is still the case. Once I recognized my wife's nose from a distance in a crowded public place, but it wasn't until I was walking past her that I realized my wife was attached.) Direct eye contact was unbearable, and I was sometimes accused of lying, as often happens now when I have the misfortune to interact with law enforcement officers or border patrol agents. I am also often accused of being on drugs.

Eventually I did make two friends, boys, and we joined the scouts together. Without them, and the scouts, I don't know what would have happened to me. They helped me to become a more integrated person. I'm friends with them to this day.

At any rate, adolescence was bad enough as it was. The cracks and crannies of the school day were filled with jabs of physical pain against a background of fear. But even when I was safe from the maladjusted, overdeveloped cretins who swung through our junior high like rogue orangutans, I was constantly reminded of my deficits through being unable to interact with my peers. They were maturing in ways that I was not. The social cues they thought obvious were to me a secret language. Also, I felt remote from myself, watching everything through inverted telescopes, moving my limbs as though my body were a skill crane, hearing my voice as from the mouth of a stranger.

As I've matured, I've come to realize that I lack the ability to interact with strangers or acquaintances. I have to study a person for a long time, learn their mannerisms and way of speaking, before I can interact with them in anything like a normal way. I have a set of rote responses and gestures that I use on people I haven't researched, but when these run out, as they quickly do, I become an inert object. Before I knew better, I generally gave monologues on my interests, but my schoolmates broke me of this habit.

It wasn't until grad school that I started to realize there might be something wrong with the way my brain works. Once I passed my qualifying exams my difficulties suddenly became almost insurmountable. It wasn't that I was unintelligent. I'd graduated with a 4.0 in my upper-level math classes; on the GRE, I'd scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on the analytic portion, and in the ninety-sixth on the language. But, you see, I'd gotten to the point where I was no longer able to learn from lecture notes and books. Taking and passing tests wasn't enough. I had to learn from people, and this I was unable to do. It just sounded like gibberish to me. And I couldn't socialize. One time, for instance, I asked my wife to the department barbecue. My mute inertness, to which I was of course quite used, so distressed her that she burst into tears, and we left early and never went to such an event again. (It didn't help that my political and religious views were, shall we say, in the minority, but that's another story.)

I also discovered that I had a hard time seeing the mathematical forest for the trees. In all things I have this narrow, hyperfocused, and perhaps rather pedantic view. What's worse, my field was differential geometry and global analysis, which is all about the big-picture view. What drew me to the subject and my advisor was this very view, and I believe it had a salutary effect on my mind. But at the time I was continually vanishing down rabbit-holes and getting lost in a maze of abstract considerations. My advisor, by all accounts a most terrifying teacher, a renowned geometer who contributes to string theory and listens to research lectures in his car on the way to work, had a way of turning me into a gibbering lump when I tried to tell him what I'd been about, and in order to communicate with him intelligibly I had to spend a significant part of my week just rehearsing for our regular meetings. My officemates sometimes referred to me as a "robot" (a term used by my junior high schoolmates) or forgot I was in the room, I was so intent on my studies and unresponsive to anything that went on around me.

Then by chance I read a story about an eccentric mathematician who never looked anyone in the eyes, and who, when invited over for dinner, ended up under the table with an encyclopedia. I'd never crawled under a table, exactly, but I'd done plenty of peculiar things, and his traits reminded me so much of my own that I felt certain we shared the same disorder. He had been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.

So, I sought out a psychiatric clinic specializing in cognitive disorders, where I was given a battery of tests. The upshot was indeed a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome. The results of the IQ tests were especially intriguing. They showed that I was at the top of the population in some respects, but below average in others. This spiky pattern is apparently quite typical in the autistic. It explains why I can do some things so well, but still be hopelessly incompetent in others. Most significantly, I have a slow processing speed, so casual conversation is difficult, especially in the presence of background noise or music. Thinking about math while talking to another person is out of the question.

Paul Klee, Ad Parnassum

I gathered that my psychiatrist found my case an interesting one. I suppose I should be honored. At any rate, the clinic had asked for samples of my work (in younger patients this would be schoolwork), so I took in copies of my paintings. They were mentioned in the evaluation because of their obsessive, repetitive detail. This tendency of mine is something I'm conscious of, and have worked hard to bring under control.

At one time I'd wanted to be a fantasy artist like Frank Frazetta. But I was put off by the lack of freedom most illustrators have. After I switched from art to math I continued to produce fantasy illustrations, mostly not very good because my sense of proportion (or lack thereof) makes it difficult to draw good figures in a global sense. I've been practicing a lot, though, so perhaps one day soon I'll start producing some pulp illustrations. Recently I held an art show in a local gallery and sold ten pieces or so, and not all to my mom, either. But my approach to art is so different from my approach to writing that these days I'm feeling stretched a bit thin. So I'd like to illustrate some of my stories soon, as a way of relieving the tension.

And I guess that's really what this post is about. I'm analyzing where I've come from and where I'm headed because, for various reasons, I'm feeling discouraged right now. Teresa of Avila* says: begin and end with self-knowledge. So, what am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Is it really worth it? Is every single thing I do, every thing I produce and every judgment I make, warped by my disorder? Am I truly able to make contact with other people, or am I just shouting at passers-by from my little island in the middle of Town Lake?

Let's say I'm considering self-publishing my novel, with a Ballantine-style cover, maps, and illustrations prepared by yours truly. If I knew that only ten people would ever buy it (nine of them being me, my mom, and my seven aunts), and that only two of those (me and my mom) would actually read it, and that my mom would write a glowing Amazon review that would somehow make it clear that she's my mom, would I still do it?

And the answer, of course, is yes, because what the hell else am I going to do?

* I'm in formation as a Carmelite Secular, about to make First Promises, if the Council approves me, which they may not, since I make trouble for them just like I do for everyone else.

Literary Fantasy and Ecological Comedy

I’ve never formally studied literature and I'm not terribly wide-read. My way is to find a vein of metal that appeals to me and mine it for all it's worth. Also, I approach fantasy as a writer, not as a critic; one belongs to the sphere of making, the other to the sphere of knowing. But I do like to read critical theory from time to time, to give myself some perspective if nothing else.

Right now I have a copy of Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, courtesy of the county library’s ILL program. One excerpt I've particularly enjoyed is Don Elgin’s "Literary Fantasy and Ecological Comedy." Ordinarily, theories of eco- this and ethno- that and Marxist so-and-so turn me off. But any theory of fantasy for which Frank Herbert falls naturally into place beside Tolkien and Lewis is sure of piquing my interest. The piece doesn’t quarry works for evidence of ecological awareness or supposed eco-symbolism or anything like that. Rather, it probes the ways in which fantasy expresses a certain attitude toward man's complex relationship with his environment.

Elgin describes two fundamental views of man's place in nature. The first, the tragic, sees man in opposition to his environment, its user and its ruler. The second, the comic, sees man as one dependent part of a complex whole. The first Elgin associates with the purely "literary" or experimental novel, now in a state of effete exhaustion (reflected in the destruction of nature), and the second with fantasy. He sees these as the two basic types of novel in the world today, and avers that it is through the latter, however "disreputable," that mankind will find his way forward.*

Comedy has been the somewhat embarrassingly omnipresent, somewhat disreputable black sheep of the literary family. And within the comic tradition lie the basic traditions of sound ecological practices. When combined with ideas inherent in the romantic tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the result has been the production of a new kind of novel, the fantasy novel. And, because of this merging of form and theme, the fantasy novel has become one of the two major strains that the novel as a genre will be taking in the coming years. This does not guarantee the continued existence of the novel or of humanity, but it does offer to both the promise and opportunity to take the wandering, unknown road of which Bilbo sings. And it offers to both the opportunity to go beyond the tragic ideal, with all the horrors which its abstractions have brought to western humanity… [L]iterature, especially the fantasy novel, offers humanity a way to reintegrate itself into the natural world and, in so doing, invites a new relationship between itself, its fellow creatures, and the science and literature that mirror that world.

Tolkien’s novels are held up as the prime example. It strikes me that what Elgin writes concerning the end of the Third Age and the farewell to the tragic attitude there symbolized dovetails with Tolkien’s own view (expressed in his letters) of the "sin" of the Elves in wishing to keep the world static, which is what caused them to fall under Sauron’s power through the Three.

One reason I resonate with the essay is that there's always been an acutely painful tension in my relationship to the world around me. I've described this in some of my earlier posts; perhaps it's related to my autism disorder. At any rate, my attempt at novel-writing is tied to my attempt to reconcile myself to my ambient reality, to the brutally innocent world of nature as well as to the rape of that world by the society of which I am part. Books like Dune and The Lord of the Rings and Titus Groan attract me because of the role of the secondary world in each.

On a final note, I don’t know that I agree with Elgin's statements (cited from other sources) about the role of western religion in the tragic view. The attitudes there crudely ascribed to traditional Christianity regarding man's place in nature are actually held to have been consequences of the Fall, not of Creation. Man was to hold dominion over the earth, it is true, but we are told that all that was made was good, and that the mutual antagonism came after the expulsion from Eden. Seeing man as the pinnacle of creation is not the same as seeing him as nature’s tyrant.** No, I don't think it is necessary to look beyond post-medieval Europe for the causes of our present situation, and it strikes me that the holistic views espoused by Elgin are profoundly Thomistic. It is Tolkien’s inherited philosophy that gives his work so many of the qualities that Elgin admires.

* For this reason and others, I think it unfortunate that some contemporary fantasy authors feel the need to adopt "experimental" poses in their fiction in order to validate it. It is against the very nature of fantasy to be experimental. "Experimentation" in fantasy always amounts to copying some technique from a "literary novel," to the detriment of both technique and fantasy. There is nothing worse than clever, self-conscious fantasy.

** And man knows that he is the pinnacle. If he were wrong in this, then he would at any rate be the only creature in all the universe capable of posing the question or being wrong.

Genesis of Antellus

The world of Antellus was born out of anxiety. It began as an attempt to work through my horror of decay and entropy and the eternal silence of the infinite spaces. My grandmother, to whom I was close, had just passed away, and the rapid deterioration of her mind—which became incarnate and lingered after her death in her disordered house—had troubled me. It still does. Antellus was not the first project I had undertaken, but it was the first I was driven to complete.

Despite its origins, Antellus is, I hope, far from being mere private musing. It represents a bridge between my mind and the outside world, an attempt to give others something worth reading, something rich yet entertaining. It aims to take a place in the canon of fantasy—in my own mind, if nowhere else—and to dialogue with the works I revere, while retaining the stamp of something written in our age of atomization and anxiety. It is not about autism, but it uses autism to probe the sense of alienation that seems endemic to modern life.

The idea of a living-fossil world of Paleozoic life-forms surviving at the cosmic antipodes had grown in my mind for a long time. The denizens of Antellus—moss-trees, giant mollusks, arthropods, primitive fishes, armored amphibians—all belong to archaic tribes now represented on Tellus only by what is most lowly. They slipped through to the counter-earth at the opposite pole of the universe in primeval times, then ceased to evolve because the demiurgic vicars had rebelled and forsaken the ministry of creation. The framing device with which the story opens represents a geometrical conceit that I entertained myself with while I was lost in the labyrinths of 11-dimensional theoretical physics. The world of Antellus is intended as fantasy, however. Its hierarchy of spiritual agencies owes much to the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, but also to Greek mythology and Arabian and medieval European folklore. The social structure of the world-city of Enoch is inspired by the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The level of technology is stationary, and might be described as Iron Age / Industrial Age / Art Nouveau. Religion is more or less “pagan,” but the various sects that come into the story are significant for their approaches to life rather than their doctrines.

My tales take place against the lurid backdrop of the heat-death of Antellus and the accession of its predestined god-emperor. The setting is a major force: it serves as a projection of the protagonists' anxieties and preoccupations. Their progress through the wastelands, moss-jungles, and ruinous cities of Antellus reflect the tortured landscape of their own hearts.