Sunday, February 18, 2007

Cherubs.

Tell me if this sounds odd to you, that my friends and I often joke about being autists. "Mulligan, the evidence you've got Asperger's is mounting day by day," is not an uncharacteristic example. Often this sends me--don't know about the others--into a careful reconstruction for reevaluative purposes of the events leading up to the gybe in order to figure out when I went too far (out).
For a bunch of smart kids, we exhibit an uncommon--no, unexpected--frequency in our faulure to get just what's going on in a given social setting. In an earlier, Romantic world, such outsidership would be marked as a sign of giftedness--but we've been told we were gifted since grade school--as a sign of uniqueness--but everyone we went to school with was unique and all the unique kids quite often failed to get it, only the uninteresting ones never at a loss for words--as a sign of an unexpressable knowledge--but again, the point here is that we're not getting something.
This is the tricky bit, because we're not punished like an Eckbert or Werther but smiled at with mild worry and wonderment for not being so common--with an expectation, though, of our ability to get it--they think either that we refuse to or are not ready yet. But either way, it's an issue of maturity, wherein our inabilities are used to fend off societalization.
Becauase when we do get it, when the game is explained to us, there's the sort of dawning of realization that made older metaphysicians believe in a priori truths, the, "yes, I feel I knew that all along," feeling.
And the point is that we are postmodern angels, we genius incapables, who are children to our parents whose failures, we in our latent abilities and material unsubstantiations, seeem to make choices, who simulate asceticism in our apart-ness and casually validate truth in our joy at understanding, who are the survivors because when the shock goes down the chain of everyone jostling won't we be distracted, just a little aside, and this unelectrocuted by accident? We who are the glimmering dead who will have to become those who died when they then do not care for us anymore.

1 comment:

John said...

Oh, please.
You're weak because you groove into the valorization of the wrong (which is a mere inversion of values), that is, equate it with, a realization of freedom.
Which, by the way, involves floating nonconformism of the highest degree. The sort that bother words.