Autists, rather me as an autist found the solitary life as the most important, and that gave credence to the notion “Know thyself”, and that maxim has driven me ever since.

I was considered gifted at a very early age and received for the first 11 years of my life, a special Catholic education, that others did not receive. It was the first time I was really proud of myself. Educated in penmanship, Latin and Geography and mathematics, a trivium basis to that education to force me to think in ways, that I hadn’t. Art was irrelevant in those days, but I did endure and fight off the bullies, which made me fierce and fearless for the abuse at home was much greater that they could delve out.

I consider myself an Aspergian rather than a high functioning spectrum autist. And I was left creatively alone, and my greater visual ability to recognize pattern and systems aided my personal development immensely. I have always been a visual learner, it wasn’t until latter development that all senses took on the burden of consciousness and found excellence in the cross over.

When one develops in a visual language, everything must be taken in, and looking and seeing are different aspects of that learning. But then greater art is really about details. In painting it is the pedantic. The naked facts. All of them if possible.

It was pictures and visual learning that appealed to me most. I was moved more by what I saw; smells and taste, more than words. Touch rather than feeling. It wasn’t until decades later that I found the attractive quality of the written language and words. But that still did not correct the problem of interpretation. And it wasn’t because of understanding more, than say, my adherence to a personal language. And we all have one. Sound having color, an object in an area, having the ‘negative space’ aspect of the art and that really being, sometimes, the statement made. Knowing something deeply and profoundly without ever having met up with it before. Which speaks as loudly as the positive image to some; reality having a real effect on the objects within it. And don’t those that control know this…

I have been an artist as long as I can remember. And I believe, even before that, and I don’t mean someone who goes to a studio, or practices’ some art discipline in an arranged period of time at an arranged place. A discipline that one practices to become better at, even though that is an important thing; the technique in becoming extremely good at a thing, like painting or music.

An artist is more than that…an artist is, obsessed with realities. And there are many.

I have a tremendous and well stocked painting studio, but that is beside what an artist is, for me that is.

But I don’t want to leave what I have said just yet. There is more.

The brain is a very abstract and complex organ. It is said it is responsible for our consciousness. I am not sure of that, actually I don’t believe that at all, and I don’t think they do, in the theorizing of it. The brain it seems, acts like a radio sometimes, and a television other time, focusing on different frequencies it translates into words or images, sounds and music. The information gathered by, normally, five senses. But there is more. And those levels of consciousness are all with separate and individual languages. That is why Synesthesia is a thing.

I am familiar with Iain McGilchrist and his work on the right and left hemispheres of the brain. His books on the subject, for one the “The Master and His Emissary”, ‘The divided brain and the making of the western world’. This idea has permeated my own thinking for a very long time. Granted I have not put as much science into it as McGilchrist.

I am, in that context, right brain dominant, I feel, whereas I feel a majority of society and western civilization itself is left brain dominant. And built on a left-brain architecture. A left-brain image of the world. The world is built for left-brain people, let’s leave it at that, I will get back to this if I can.

I started, finding my own language in the beginning as a means to communicate with the world. To address what I felt about it. Because I cared about it. Rather than an obstinacy to choose to be something else. To have others understand what I was about and what ‘I’ care for, in spite of what the world that surrounded and that I was immerse in, wanted. And what I felt was wrong or right with it… that is why there are pictures on cave walls instead of words. Pictures are our first language. Seeing I feel is our strongest sense of all the five senses, at least in my case it is. It is clearer and mostly the truth in the real, although it has and is becoming untrustworthy in the present. But then there are also patterns that the adept can see through.

I don’t want to go, too far into this as it warrants an extensive writing on its own. But, seeing a crime happen and explaining afterwards what that crime was, are two different things and individuals can’t help injecting their own feelings into the latter.

The internet seems to firstly; becoming a visual thing rather this writing thing. But this writing thing involves a critical mind at work unveiling the details and the lead up and the context of what is seen or thought.

“A picture speaks a thousand words… sometimes.”  

I was desperately poor as a child, too poor for even toys many times. And so, I was left with an aging grandmother who could not keep up with a mind such as mine, and I invented worlds to live in – much of the time in that aloneness, to the dislike of those around me. I think I scared other children with my creative ideas. I was a terrible risk taker, always walking the edge. For that fact, I think I scared most adults. Asperger in his conclusion felt there was a psychopathic edge to what he was researching, but he was wrong, it is an extreme intensity, a hyper focus that is misread as psychopathy.

I rarely got along with others and still don’t to this day. I am fiercely independent and individual. And one of those pariahs that lives on the edges of the reality of this town…

A day-dreaming child who retreated into alternate worlds was to be punished for his lack of attentiveness. His escaping into his own expanded consciousness. Negligent of the responsibilities of being a proper student, willing to listen, to conform to the adults and their ideas of the world that was, purely imagined. And you knowing this, felt their oppression of your refusal to except it completely and undeniably as, the ‘truth’. They were now willing to listen to your theories. You were far too young and anyway only mimicking.

I rebelled against this only to receive a lot pain in the doing. But I was not going to allow myself to become its victim. I created even more dreams of a boys’ world, and retreated further into the places where I had real value. And much more substance. And imagination was my most trusted friend and the greatest of human tools. To find an answer to all those questions of why I was firstly, here alive at this time and second, why I was persecuted for what I was, autistic. Labelled as defiant, purposeful in the reluctance to become what was chosen for me. Mocked and ridiculed, bullied for my defiant interests. Intellectually at that age I could not be beaten. Time and age and the war against the individual has been trying.

One of the things that many who judge or diagnose autism as, feel that the autist lacks ‘Theory of Mind’. And has no real concept of what that may be, they have a deficit in understanding that others have a mind, and that deficit, impedes their ability to predict and interpret others correctly — the social cues. I will dare to say taboos and the gestures and body language needed and understood as normal conversation.

A functional and not so limited ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) is vital to a humans’ success in societal interactions, it is believed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you have fully excepted yourself as a product and the property of a civilization and an empire that encultures a way of speaking, thinking. Interesting to point out is the poetry that informed rap music, a revolutionary response that emerged from the streets as the predominant and proper language of that genre.

Autists understand ToM, they just have no real need for it, they are too involved in their own existence to pay attention to group ideologies, or hierarchies of empire. Are they solipsists? No, they are not interested in the status quo. And then again yes, a little bit as one can only know the self completely in response to what is outside of self?

Or finally systems of thinking. Which are vital for societies to work. Psychology through its testing and trials believes that a proper ToM is vital for society to work, it is necessary for those who hold power, in whatever measure they hold it, to utilize and use that power over the groups that they govern. Truly, individuals as the true self, have no care of such things as stable governments or institutions. These are exterior things to the proper understanding of the world. And it can only be properly understood from a singular and individual point of view. Because the world is a product of an imagination. And each imagination, sees and understands a different thing. We swim in ocean of universal consciousness, do we not?

I have suffered the slings and arrows of a past world that did not even know autism existed, or cared to know it existed. It was a rare thing, and I am one of the old ones. I was thirty years old before the ideas of ‘Rain Man’ came along and made it a thing. Having survived the wars and not locked up and drooling from decades of medicating in some asylum. I avoided the cuckoos nest, by carefully becoming very private.

Civilization and its psychiatry and psychology have imprinted a stereotype of what a functional and damaged human minds represents. Creating categories of each to be addressed, without clearly knowing what a perfect specimen of a human is, rather than seeing them as separate and distinct in their own rights. There is no such thing as the alpha man. He does not and did not ever exist. We can see examples of perfection according to the beliefs and practices of a specific society, but that in itself does not equal perfection. One being possibly right brain dominant, over left-brain dominance. Or subtle and spectrum variances in between. The Alpha is closer to a psychopath or sociopath than he is to a well developed and adjusted perfect human male specimen.

Alpha males are simply those who are free from the poisons, their development having not been arrested at an early age. They matured at the rate unimpeded by a vaccine. Autists have always been there; it is just that now the vaccine and a sociopolitical norm causes a greater impedance. We have a perfect image of the Alpha as we do in the perfect female. And that is based on something the Roman, thought up. And we are still stuck in that myth of man.

Man has fallen long ago, and he has fallen many times since. Bouncing back, we have been inbred because of lack of number through history for different reasons. Each and ever civilization and empire had their own ideal about what a perfect male or female was… survival, cultural norms, isolation…and I think some hyper function of nature as it recognizes that something is in threat, that it has not yet finished working out, as if self correcting.

It is now, at the farthest end of my life, that it is now beginning to be known, and still quite unknown. Autism is seen as a dysfunction, rather than what it is, an evolutionary difference now, an adaptation to what was, not to its deterrence as some crime or mishap of biology or society. It is I believe in its development an ultimate adaption to a poisoned world. The future holds a world filled with people like me, the future is autistic.

But I have slipped away from what I wished to talk about, and that is the artist. The artist is the true persona of man. It is lost in a world of group thinking and the collectibve. And societies are made of many, many groups.

Jung’s posit of the twelve; the archetypes that rule or obey the ruler of our personality comes into question here. The twelve are; the Innocent, Orphan, Hero, Caregiver, Explorer, Rebel, Lover, Creator, Jester, Sage, Magician, and Ruler. All might be called artist, some more than others. Some distinctly purer in that definition, as in, the Magician. The trick it seems is to keep the ‘Ruler’ on the throne and the other 11 are subservient to his needs, advising, according to their specificity rather than being the ruler. A jester that is ruler is indecisive; an Orphan as ruler is weak and lives in fear. The Explorer is never present and always over there, and never content, separate from the real self, always looking for greener pasture.

Which brings to mind the four Jungian archetypes. The four Jungian Archetypes, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, the Persona. and finally, the Self. Speak more to the artist that the other twelve. Although histrionic of the theory of psychology, purporting it to be an authority, it supports an argument that might otherwise be difficult in the translation. Shadow is the most misunderstood facet of human consciousness. A power and a lead-in to the supernatural, to the esoteric.

Shadow is a courageous friend so vitally important to a true artist, that which he holds back, and most times is afraid of in himself, but is hallmarked by its potency, the unrequited, and yearning and that which is held secret. The life lead, which and when no one else is around. Shadow is a dark power that can be dangerous, but does not need to be so, many fear its possibilities, it is unrestrained at every instant, its undeniable belief in the absolute and final. Shadow speaks probably more intimately about truth, than the science theory that created it.

The Anima/Animus in its importance to the gender of the artist and the use of masculine and feminine power in the creative act. And masculine and feminine power is not gender related, or sexually in its purpose. It is the cave painter from ancient times, the seat of a potent sexual being and not of it. The man knowing, he is a man. The man willing to morph to understand the other.

Persona so very important in who the artist thinks he is, the mask he wears publicly in each and every situation life takes him to, and from. The father and family man, the lover and husband, the warrior and protector are some of these, with each a persona with different concerns and powers, and other masks.

And there are many masks. And the autist like masks.

The Self the wise figure, developed, and sure. The real and actual ruler. The soul itself. The real individual, that takes the world on in fight or fancy. Present and existential in a vast and unknowable universe, immortal and forever, moving from lifetime to lifetime. The grounding of the real artist, immersed in an existential reality, not of his making — but wanting something that is, his reality, instead, of something created and forced on him by other powerful artists — many times darker artists that are creating this global cultural reality we all now attend too. This most times, is an extremely oppressive force that must be overcome or resolved.

Artist was the only thing I could become, even though I thought at a younger age I was choosing it. In fact, it chooses me and the dynamics of a true self took hold and made sure that I have always been it, never more fully than when I am not painting, or writing or playing my instrument and singing. And never more than what I saying here.

At present the artist is what thinks about this writing.

Art is not practice of a craft or a skill, the perfection of something repeated often enough. Rather it is a place arrived at after a long journey. Sometimes years long. Possibly a whole lifetime. Being an artist is a personal religion, a philosophy of life. Being an artist is the most natural way a human can be; it is deeply personal and individual. Why do so many fight against it?

I believe that the only state of man is the artist, and that being said — that confronts an overwhelming universe with his intellect and ability to cultivate a talent/s into something of greater personal power. The attempt to immortalize the physical being in reality. It will always fail, but we have some incredible examples of artists in the past just doing that… Immortalizing their art, and in that immortalizing themselves. Their names remembered, centuries after they have passed on. Realities that are still here and able to be experienced.

We can never meet those greats of the past, some long dead and past the state of dust, but we can met them in their struggle on canvases or their writings, their music…

Modern art, if I can call it that aims to destroy art and the individual, the digitized world of art neglects what a true lone individual can do on a canvas, in stone, with an instrument of his invention. With a word or a dance… Digitized art is a collaboration with a machine, with cameras for eyes it stalks the circumference of real art. And fails miserably in its creation of art. It is impossible for a computer to be an artist. And I will not banter over the logic of that point.

AI is creating art, and many are titillated by its excursions into the aesthetic, but it mimics the real artist. And it will, never understand the autist.