Who picks the apple from the tree at the world's end? Is it the hero, or... something else?
For around half the time this blog has been around, it has had a particular focus. This has been around Hercules, a figure who, I have been setting out, can resonate with what it is like to be autistic.
I’m not going to be leaving Hercules behind. The blog will continue to look for this hero as he wanders along his roads. It will look for him too as he pauses at the crossroads, caught between the enticements of pleasure and the demands – themselves potentially pleasurable – of hard work.
But I am also going to be moving towards a focus on a different figure, one as different - perhaps - as it possible to get from a hero, and yet who can resonate with an aspect of what it is to be a hero. For I shall be turning towards a monster.
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| Tree with Apples by Salvör Gissurardóttir sourced from Wikimedia Commons here |
It might be the case that some people reading this blog will be able to guess who this figure is in light of a few talks I’ve given to date, over the past year or so. But I’ll hold off sharing who the figure is for now. Instead, for the rest of this current post, I’ll start with a problem that I began considering in my work on Hercules, namely that it can be difficult for neurotypical and neurodivergent people to ‘get’ one another.
This is a huge problem, one that runs to the heart of culture and human society. It is a problem with implications for the study of the human past and present. How the problem is addressed has implications for human futures too.
It is a problem that grows out of two distinct ways of (human) being – each distinctive, each different and each radically hard to understand by the other. For the problem concerns a split in what it is to be human due to two distinct ways of being:
- One is a neurodivergent way of experiencing the world, that is: of having a mind that functions differently from the dominant norms.
- The other is a neurotypical way of being, that is: of conforming to dominant neurocognitive functions.
The problem generated by these ways of being involves the barriers that are set up, where each differs so radically from the other that mutual understanding can be difficult.
- On the one hand, as expressed in the Double Empathy Theory proposed by the autistic academic Dr Damian Milton of the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, the sensory experiences, knowledge and modes of communication of autistic people can be hard to grasp by anyone neurotypical.
- On the other hand, as also expressed by this Theory, how neurotypical people feel, communicate, and how their minds work can bewilder autistic people.
This blog will be sharing my investigations into what happens with these two ways of being connect in the imaginative space of classical mythology.
It will explore the problem though the figure of whose identity I shall disclose in the next post. More soon...
