DIOGENES - DIRECTOR'S CUT

In what, for want of a better expression, I’ll cringingly call The High-Functioning Autistic/Asperger Community we like to lay claim to famous personages. Beethoven? Aspergian. Newton? Einstein? Aspergian, Aspergian. Napoléon, Cleopatra, and so on. The fact that Hitler and the Emperor Tiberius also fit the profile is less widely acknowledged.

To my mind however, the best portrait ever drawn of high-functioning autism in operation is a fictional one: Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft. Although writing while psychoanalysis was in its infancy and sixty-odd years before Hans Asperger first described the syndrome, I’ve often thought Conan-Doyle must have been drawing from personal experience. That strange, mannered, misanthropic creature hiding out in Baker Street until something captured his interest, whence no earthly consideration could divert him from his object, could have stepped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (IV). Oh, and it runs in families – “art in the blood”, Holmes tells us in The Greek Interpreter, “is liable to take the strangest forms”.

Which brings us to Mycroft: even more hidebound and misanthropic, and possibly more brilliant, than his little brother. Mycroft lives like he’s on a rail. To find him you need look only at Whitehall, around the corner in his Pall Mall rooms, or across the road at the Diogenes Club, founded by Mycroft to accommodate “the most unsociable and un-clubbable men in town”. “The Diogenes Club”, Holmes relates, “is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft, one of the queerest men [different times, people, different times]. He’s always there from a quarter to five ‘till twenty to eight”.

Amongst the agglomeration of quirks, rituals and eccentricities that pass for a personality in your average Aspergian there is, more often than not, a remarkable gift or two hiding away. Given that the aforementioned eccentricities generally preclude squeezing into a “normal” occupation, the only shot we have at being either happy or useful is to discover and develop these gifts – as early as possible. These days the inborn titanic attention span is an asset. Sadly, it comes with an inability to take any notice whatsoever of that which doesn’t interest us: when we first met Sherlock he was capable of delivering a lecture on the subtle differences between two hundred and forty types of tobacco ash, but ignorant of the earth’s movement around the sun; the ash was more useful to him.

At least as important as the gift seems to be the environment in which it is developed – or not. Einstein didn’t speak for his first few years, but when it became apparent that his silence concealed an extraordinary, inquiring mind, his family moved mountains to ensure his unhindered maturation. We most of us know the Mozart story; Freud is another example. Newton, whose mother didn’t see the value of school beyond basic literacy, was fortunate in coming to the attention of a benefactor who not only gave him access to scientific books and equipment, but also argued the old girl around. Napoléon’s upbringing was harsh – sent to military school in a foreign country aged nine – but he found himself in a situation where he could exercise his Aspergian resentment of authority while still learning discipline, and his analytical and mathematical gifts were channelled into a productive arena; being the right man in the right place at the right historical moment helps too, of course.

What happens when the mix is wrong? Looked at without prejudice, Hitler showed early promise as an artist. Surviving works display considerable skill, though difficulty depicting life and movement suggest his talents lay elsewhere; an architect, perhaps? His father was brutal, but died before he could at least impart some discipline with the violence. His mother lived a little longer – just long enough to leave a bright, indulged teenager convinced that all he need do to succeed was turn up. Life had some shocks for Adolf, but history, again, intervened. Had the First World War not diverted him to the army, he might well have lived a quiet life as a Vienna street tramp. The post-war army noticed his oratorical gifts, and diverted him to politics. Here he was able to benefit from that strange personal charm which often goes hand in hand with social awkwardness in Asperger. Another Aspergian trait is taking roles very seriously: once it was suggested that he may be Germany’s saviour and Führer, he came to totally believe it.

So, maybe a manufactured psychopath (or Antisocial Personality, as opposed to a born or “pure” psychopath) is in some sense simply a failed Aspergian. At any rate, we can see why early diagnosis and intervention is important, as well as a nurturing, supportive – not coddling – environment.

Many believe that high-functioning autistics don’t feel empathy, and can’t experience emotions properly. Not true. Of the two types of empathy, cognitive and affective, we’re fine with one: I can’t instinctively read your emotions from your face (aside from the obvious, like smiling or crying), but I’m perfectly capable of understanding your feelings if you explain them, especially if I can relate them to an experience of my own; we use a different part of the brain, that’s all, like a computer rerouting to perform a task when it runs into trouble the usual way. As to emotions, we feel them all, easily and constantly, with no means of filtering them. This explains the rituals and habits, a means of imposing control, and the difficulty with eye-contact (although I learned long ago that if you look at people’s mouths, most won’t realise you’re not looking at their eyes).

Gifts are funny things. My intuition can be extraordinary: I’ll often flash on the personal traits of a new acquaintance at the first meeting, to be proved right later on; it’s not unusual in the first twenty minutes or so of a movie for me to blurt out the ending. I don’t know how this works – it’s Rain Man seeing a pile of matches on the ground and telling you at a glance how many there are. It doesn’t render me any more capable in interpersonal relations. Where Beethoven, Einstein, Sherlock and I intersect is that this gift is useful in my chosen field; each of these make mention of the intuitive flash. Newton and Einstein certainly made use of them: Einstein famously said that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. And remember Sherlock: “I’ve devised seven separate explanations, each of which would fit the facts”. The hard work comes later, when you have to make sure your intuition matches up with the real world.

I say “chosen field” and “gift”, but they’re both double edged. I’m a writer, a poet. I didn’t choose to be, I was born one. As a child my family thought I was an artist; but I liked writing stories. Even as a teenager who wanted to be Mike Patton or James Hetfield when I grew up, I wrestled with the question: “can rock stars publish serious literature?” Compulsive behaviour is a big part of this syndrome, and there’s no compulsive like a writer.

Most gifts come with their antithesis. As a poet, it’s useful having a brain wired up to see and think differently to the majority of people. However, I’m also wired up to be unaware that everybody else isn’t thinking the same thing as I am – this accounts for what is mistaken for arrogance in some Aspergians. So, even if I do think of something I think is remarkable, the next thought is usually “if I’ve thought of that, surely everyone else has, therefore why bother writing it?” Compulsivity can be a wonderful antidote.

I’m sure you’ve all thought of a lot of the things I write here, but I flatter myself that occasionally I light upon a different or arresting way of expressing them. I’ll keep doing my job if you keep doing yours and read the stuff. Let’s face it, I don’t have a choice.

THE DIOGENES CLUB

In what, for want of a better expression, I’ll cringingly call The High-Functioning Autistic/Asperger Community we like to lay claim to famous personages. Beethoven? Aspergian. Newton? Einstein? Aspergian, Aspergian. Napoléon, Cleopatra, and so on. The fact that Hitler and the Emperor Tiberius also fit the profile is less widely acknowledged.

To my mind however, the best portrait ever drawn of high-functioning autism in operation is a fictional one: Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft. Although writing while psychoanalysis was in its infancy and sixty-odd years before Hans Asperger first described the syndrome, I’ve often thought Conan-Doyle must have been drawing from personal experience. That strange, mannered, misanthropic creature hiding out in Baker Street until something captured his interest, whence no earthly consideration could divert him from his object, could have stepped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (IV). Oh, and it runs in families – “art in the blood”, Holmes tells us in The Greek Interpreter, “is liable to take the strangest forms”.

Which brings us to Mycroft: even more hidebound and misanthropic, and possibly more brilliant, than his little brother. Mycroft lives like he’s on a rail. To find him you need look only at Whitehall, around the corner in his Pall Mall rooms, or across the road at the Diogenes Club, founded by Mycroft to accommodate “the most unsociable and un-clubbable men in town”. “The Diogenes Club”, Holmes relates, “is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft, one of the queerest men [different times, people, different times]. He’s always there from a quarter to five ‘till twenty to eight”.

Amongst the agglomeration of quirks, rituals and eccentricities that pass for a personality in your average Aspergian there is, more often than not, a remarkable gift or two hiding away. Given that the aforementioned eccentricities generally preclude squeezing into a “normal” occupation, the only shot we have at being either happy or useful is to discover and develop these gifts – as early as possible. These days the inborn titanic attention span is an asset. Sadly, it comes with an inability to take any notice whatsoever of that which doesn’t interest us: when we first met Sherlock he was capable of delivering a lecture on the subtle differences between two hundred and forty types of tobacco ash, but ignorant of the earth’s movement around the sun; the ash was more useful to him.

At least as important as the gift seems to be the environment in which it is developed – or not. Einstein didn’t speak for his first few years, but when it became apparent that his silence concealed an extraordinary, inquiring mind, his family moved mountains to ensure his unhindered maturation. We most of us know the Mozart story; Freud is another example. Newton, whose mother didn’t see the value of school beyond basic literacy, was fortunate in coming to the attention of a benefactor who not only gave him access to scientific books and equipment, but also argued the old girl around. Napoléon’s upbringing was harsh – sent to military school in a foreign country aged nine – but he found himself in a situation where he could exercise his Aspergian resentment of authority while still learning discipline, and his analytical and mathematical gifts were channelled into a productive arena; being the right man in the right place at the right historical moment helps too, of course.

Gifts are funny things. My intuition can be extraordinary: I’ll often flash on the personal traits of a new acquaintance at the first meeting, to be proved right later on; it’s not unusual in the first twenty minutes or so of a movie for me to blurt out the ending. I don’t know how this works – it’s Rain Man seeing a pile of matches on the ground and telling you at a glance how many there are. It doesn’t render me any more capable in interpersonal relations. Where Beethoven, Einstein, Sherlock and I intersect is that this gift is useful in my chosen field; each of these make mention of the intuitive flash. Newton and Einstein certainly made use of them: Einstein famously said that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. And remember Sherlock: “I’ve devised seven separate explanations, each of which would fit the facts”. The hard work comes later, when you have to make sure your intuition matches up with the real world.

I say “chosen field” and “gift”, but they’re both double edged. I’m a writer, a poet. I didn’t choose to be, I was born one. As a child my family thought I was an artist; but I liked writing stories. Even as a teenager who wanted to be Mike Patton or James Hetfield when I grew up, I wrestled with the question: “can rock stars publish serious literature?” Compulsive behaviour is a big part of this syndrome, and there’s no compulsive like a writer.

Most gifts come with their antithesis. As a poet, it’s useful having a brain wired up to see and think differently to the majority of people. However, I’m also wired up to be unaware that everybody else isn’t thinking the same thing as I am – this accounts for what is mistaken for arrogance in some Aspergians. So, even if I do think of something I think is remarkable, the next thought is usually “if I’ve thought of that, surely everyone else has, therefore why bother writing it?” Compulsivity can be a wonderful antidote.

I’m sure you’ve all thought of a lot of the things I write here, but I flatter myself that occasionally I light upon a different or arresting way of expressing them. I’ll keep doing my job if you keep doing yours and read the stuff. Let’s face it, I don’t have a choice.

VALE, VIDAL

I shouldn’t really have been surprised to hear of the death of Gore Vidal, he was after all in his eighties; but he was one of those people you get used to thinking will be around forever. There are many, I’m certain, wishing he’d gone years ago.

Gore wasn’t a likeable fellow. In fact, he was something of a bitch; but he was funny, and he was brilliant (although probably not quite so brilliant as he himself was convinced he was). As a novelist and essayist he was prolific, but his true metier was as a raconteur. His tool was the word, but his art was provocation; the iconoclasm was merely a hobby. A shameless name-dropper – considering his patrician background, a tendency less irksome than it was in his friend Truman Capote – his memoir was barely three pages gone before he gave us the spectacle of his step-sister Jacquie Kennedy, upstairs at a wedding, one foot on the bathtub, showing the bride how to douche.

I first stumbled upon him as a teenager via the movies he scripted: The Left-Handed Gun, The Best Man, a tele-movie, Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid; then there were those scripts he wrote or re-wrote without being credited, Advise and Consent and Ben Hur among them; and of course the appalling Caligula (he never, he often said, saw his movies – his blood pressure couldn’t stand the director’s vision. They were a means to a pay cheque).

After a decade in Hollywood - deliberately getting rich enough to never again have to do anything he’d find disagreeable – and following a failed tilt at a New York congressional seat in 1960, Vidal returned to his first mistress, the novel. Over the ensuing two decades his output was little short of staggering. He was still drawn to the small novel of ideas, knocking one out – seemingly in his down time – every year or so; some of these were truly thought provoking, standouts being Messiah and Kalki, with which he bookended the period, dual explorations of humanity’s sad tendency to follow charisma into the abyss; and of course the iconic (ironic?) Myra Breckenridge.

His reputation as a novelist rests, however, with the historical works. Beginning with Julian, a re-telling of the story of Rome’s last pagan emperor, he very cleverly, and with inimitable style, set about questioning not only history but the way it’s written and passed down. Although never quite achieving the heights of Graves’ Claudius novels, these books are accomplished, witty, and leave for dead the pulp that passes for “historical fiction” nowadays. In this genre he overcame the one serious shortcoming that hamstrung his other novels: his monumental ego. Never quite out of sight in his fiction, in the histories it became a veritable asset, since most of our first-hand accounts, from Cicero onwards, are left by tendentious egotists bemoaning the fact that posterity will have to pay them the notice due but unpaid by their contemporaries.

The histories also gave him scope to slash at his country’s sacred cows, as in Burr, where the narrator describes General Washington: “[he] was cold and grim [. . .] He spoke the way one imagined a statue would speak”. The same book gives us one of the first portraits of Jefferson as cold-eyed pragmatist cloaked in idealism, unable to keep his hands off the female slaves. His Lincoln, criticised at first, knocks the plaster off the saint and gives us a convincing portrait of a great man with a great man’s mixed motives.

As he got older we saw more of him as an essayist and talking head, poking at the America he said had always been “a sanctimonious society of hustlers”. Here he is on the last days of the 1992 presidential race: “Clinton’s greatest asset is a perfect lack of principle. With a bit of luck, he will be capable, out of simple starry-eyed opportunism, to postpone our collapse. After all, [FDR] was equally unprincipled”. He meant it as a compliment. And four years later: “The American takes it for granted that his moral fibre is never to be weakened by healthcare, education of the people at large or, indeed, anything at all except Social Security [. . .] Unfortunately for the American [. . .] the fund is for all practical purposes empty”. Congress “has, since 1992, been in the hands of zealous reactionaries in thrall to the foetus and the flag as well as at angry war with those who do not have money”.

Always dubious about the erosion of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorists (even back when they were American), he once compared the actions of Lincoln during the Civil War with those of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al: “A war against terror is like a war against dandruff; I mean, it’s a metaphor, it’s not about anything. Civil war is a little more serious”. He was convinced the US was an empire in decline, with all the historical perquisites – increasingly authoritarian executive government, a decaying polity, et cetera. Interviewed by Bob Carr a few years ago and asked where he saw the US in fifty years, he answered: “somewhere between Argentina and Brazil, with maybe a good soccer team”.

Vidal’s positions were often simplistic, bordering on paranoid, and always calculated to outrage. His arguments however were unfailingly intelligent, nuanced, and backed by his encyclopaedic reading. He might draw outlandish conclusions, or just ignore those facts that contradicted his thesis, but facts there always were. You might well disagree with him – I often did – but doing so required getting your own facts straight, and engaging in actual thought rather than relying on hackneyed opinions. He was an irreverent, prickly, prophetic soul of a type becoming sadly rare. In an age of noisy and ill informed punditry his style and erudition will be sadly missed.

We can only hope to see his like again.

SMASHING PUMPKINS IN SYDNEY - An Excercise in Mass Indifference

It was weird. Maybe it’s the proliferation of poker-machine emporia, I don’t know, but it appears that Sydney is losing the art of seeing a band play live; we just don’t seem to know how to behave. Let me tell you about it . . .

The Lady and I arrived a little late, the support act getting into their penultimate number by the time we were shown to our seats. It was a pity to miss most of Wolfmother (I later learned that we’d also missed a Stockdale rant against those Triple J bastards who helped build his career) but it couldn’t be helped, and at least we wouldn’t have long to wait for Smashing Pumpkins. Smashing Pumpkins: this was a life-long dream for both of us; which is why we were so surprised. It was the crowd.

We began to notice outside: this just wasn’t like any crowd we’d ever seen at a rock concert, they were so subdued. It was eerie, like something from a Hitchcock film, or that scene at the end of I, Claudius, thousands of them milling around the exits, shuffling quietly in and out, the ghosts of audiences past.

And so many of them were old. The Lady was first to remark that quite a few were even older than me. I began to suspect that those sitting near us had come to see Neil Diamond and mixed up the dates.

A third of the seats stood empty as the band took the stage; not that there weren’t punters enough to fill them; they just couldn’t apparently be bothered with being inside for the first few numbers.

 The acoustics in the Sydney Entertainment Centre are notoriously bad, but Billy Corgan is a perfectionist and a tech-head, and after he’d instructed the roadies to shift some speakers around it was as though we were sitting in front of the stereo at home. Literally. If you closed your eyes you could forget there was anybody sitting near you. And that was another thing: the sitting. Even though our seats were in the tiered section, I hadn’t expected to spend much time sitting.

Now, for any band that’ve enjoyed some success and managed to stay around a while, there’s a balance to be struck between old and new material when playing live: the punters expect their favourites, and the band wants to feel as though they’re still, you know, a band. Sure enough, three or four numbers in Mr Corgan announced that he was going to take us through their new album, Oceania. Had he not announced it, I would never have noticed – the music was that good.

The rest of the crowd, evidently, didn’t share our appreciation. With the exception of a couple at the end of our row, with whom we exchanged several puzzled glances, these people could barely manage a polite smattering of applause. It was embarrassing.

Eventually, after a sonic joyride lasting an hour or so, we were regaled with the opening bars of Disarm. At last, some movement; but only on the dance-floor, not upstairs near us. There followed a cavalcade of the Pumpkins’ hits, which the kids in the mosh pit responded to by getting themselves removed in large numbers by security for crowd-surfing and attempted stage-diving. Upstairs, they clapped as though they were at the Royal Garden Party. I’ve heard louder applause at a golf tournament. I can only hope it sounded louder from the stage.

After a searing rendition of Bullets with Butterfly Wings I finally lost it, shouting at the top of my lungs: “Jesus, will you sad bastards make some fucking noise!!” The fact that heads turned fifty yards away should give an indication of what I’m talking about.

They played their hearts out for the better part of three hours. I seriously doubted we’d generated enough enthusiasm to warrant an encore, but when they came back out and Billy Corgan humbly thanked us for letting them play the new album through, my heart came close to breaking. A musician of his stature shouldn’t have to grovel before ingrates.

 We dwell at the “arse end of the world”, but big name acts have always braved the long journey because our rock audiences have rivalled any in the world for raw energy and enthusiasm. I came away from this experience ashamed for us, and worried for the future. Maybe it’s the death of the live-pub scene, maybe we’re spoilt by festival overload, but if what I saw at the Entertainment Centre is any indication of how we reward international acts these days I can’t see why they’d keep making the trip.

If we keep this up, get used to seeing your live music on YouTube.