Journal Entry
19/02/2021
Repetitive Behaviours
The world is too loud
The world is too loud
The world is too loud
The world is too loud
And I can’t hold it.
But is it me that is repeating, or everything?
The spiral fractal of fern time, the waves of starlings in murmuration that sound exactly like the sea, the tree rings that are fingerprints that are sand ripples that are floodplains that are hurricanes over the South Pacific, the galaxies of neurons misfiring, this insistent entanglement of everything.
And isn’t the whole world (and all the worlds beyond this one) built on repetition at different scales? And what if this resistance to change, this need for the small certainties of schedules and weight is not because the world is too unpredictable, but exactly the opposite? What if it’s because the world is so loud, so impossibly loud in its insistence at every moment on these infinitely complex patterns, that I can’t hold them? I can’t block them out. What if everything is too loud because all I can see/hear/feel is this constant click clickclickclick of these patterns rubbing up against each other? Not all the time, not all the time, but enough, enough, ENOUGH that sometimes I can’t ignore how loud it is and I can’t think and I can’t speak and I vibrate vibrate, vibrate with trying to swallow it. Swallow it. Keep going. SWALLOW IT! Consume it. Consume. Consume. Consume it before it consumes you. But it all just sticks in my throat and I choke. And which smoke is it that I am left coughing up? Smoke from the forest fires, from the buildings crumbling, from the houses burning, from the orchards alight? I don’t know I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW. Isn’t it all the same smoke? Aren’t you choking too?
26/02/2021
The scientists write:
“Individuals tend to present with differences in auditory and tactile perception. Sensory problems are based on how the brain processes incoming sensory input from multiple modalities across each of the five senses (vision, hearing, tactile, smell, and taste) that is likely intimately connected with the brain’s sense of time, and ability to perceive the temporal structure of and between events.”
The scientists write:
“They are ‘lost in a sea of time’.”
Lost in a sea of time. Lost in a sea of time? Yes. Yes. Maybe. Maybe the sea. All my wordless metaphors growing up were water. Thunderstorm. Undertow. Tidal swell. Drowning. Floating. Breathing.
The poets write:
“It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst. Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.
For, to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mold.” (Gibran, of course).
What if this feeling of perpetual now-ness, this inability to plan, this ‘time blindness’ is not a defect but a signifier of connection? What if it is all now? What if the spaces in between are in fact galaxies at different scales, binding us to other worlds? What if this dis/ordered sense is an order unto itself? An order of entanglement?
The poets write:
“Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.”
(Alice Fulton, Cascade Experiment)
The poets write:
“I have just realized that the stakes are myself.”
(Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letter #1)
31/08/2021
I read once, that there are only two points of reference for people who live in brains like mine: now and not now.
The scientists write:
“Firsthand accounts often report a need to adhere to rituals or routines to compensate for a failure to predict events, and to their disorientation in time. They reveal a general lack of understanding about the passage of time, and appear stuck in the present.”
I think this must have been written by someone for whom time moves like a river – a collection of moments flowing together in one predictable direction, rather than like an ocean – with undertows and squalls and currents that reverse (even if that’s only every 55 million years or so, linearly speaking). I think this must have been written by someone who can decide whether or not to notice patterns.
The scientists write:
“Restrictive Interests and repetitive behaviours result from increased and imbalanced pattern-related perception and cognition, and social alterations result in part from the usual lack of clear pattern in social interactions, combined with the interference of restrictive interests and repetitive behaviours with social development.”
Pattern seeking, the experts say, but I never noticed this. I mean, I notice patterns. I notice myself noticing patterns (I am not seeking them, I notice them because they are loud). But I guess I don’t recognize myself in this language of pathology because the more I think about it at all, it seems like time is actually the thing that we are stuck on.
Rituals are not for ‘orienting myself in time’. Rituals are for drowning out the deafening noise of scattered patterns with familiar ones. I am not disoriented in time because time does not have to be linear for it to be orienting. I am disoriented because inside my head it is never, ever quiet.
More often than I would like, I get these notifications on my phone: “look back on your memories from this day 12 years ago”. I end up staring at the picture trying to mark the differences between my face from a decade ago and the one in the mirror and somehow I can’t square the distance between them at all. I know everyone says, “wow, that feels like it was just yesterday”, but it was yesterday, as in, it isn’t now; so it was yesterday, and a month ago, and 12 years, and also tomorrow, and the year after that – they are all equally close. This is to be unstuck in time, I guess. This is to be disoriented. Disordered.
Maybe what they’re trying to say is that not everyone lives their life swinging wildly between the expanding endless now of the artists’ flow or writer’s high (call it hyper fixation, if you want), and the collapsing endless now of overstimulation (call it autistic burnout, if you want). It is true that I can’t plan the future for shit, not because I am irresponsible (I am in fact, frustratingly, excruciatingly responsible), but because it doesn’t really exist for me - I can’t grasp it. I think about the people, the scientists who can just be in this moment and look ahead at a location called future and behind at a location called past, and plan their life accordingly in that comforting, regular flow. That must be relaxing, I guess. Like floating peacefully on a tube down a lazy river. That must be quiet.
This post is part of a two month series exploring neurodivergent experiences of (non)linear time, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the risoprint zine, How to Build a Kaleidoscope.