Memory Leaves

I don't really blog

2008-02-19T15:12:00.001-08:00

obviously, I cannot be trusted to keep up this blog. Or any blog. I just prefer to spread my wisdoms around the internets, filling up other peoples' blogs (opb) and working on the wikis. I am an incredibly humble and generous human being, if I am a human being.

You're welcome.

what I'm learning on the internets

2007-04-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

Stephen Colbert

has been teaching me how to google bomb

my next goal is to put it to the best possible use
for people like, hmmm....

Mitch McConnell
Elaine Chao
and other coal whores who cover up environmental disaster

Lung Recruitment

2007-02-26T11:21:00.001-08:00

Since I don't really use this blog for blogging anymore, I might as well use it for something, right? I thought this might be a good lung film to show during the upcoming live show of Catalogue of Ships.

almost a year

2007-01-07T21:47:00.000-08:00

Eleven months is not a year. No one would say it was.

I like to bring things into the world, give them a whole lot of attention for a brief period of time, and then abandon them. It's very true. I'm a terrible mother. I'm an excellent incubator, but that doesn't mean much amongst the human kind. Sorry, peeps. I never was very good at the people stuff.

My kid doesn't mind too much, though. He's not very good at the people stuff, either. He also likes to incubate, and doesn't mind the abandoning of 257 things for the completion of 6. If you'd like to see one of our collaborative abandonings, you can visit the pie pirates blog that is somehow linked to this one. I don't remember the name right now; I might come back and fix it. Anyway, it started as a project where I transcribed the stories that Judah and I were collectively making up each night (really he does all the work - I just suggest bigger words to see if he can incorporate them). But we have other things to do, always. So...

I don't know. I don't mean to be an abandoner of projects. I don't deliberately enter everything thinking "Oh, I'm going to quit this soon." There are some things that I start that way, sure - smoking, for one. But I have stuck by that, let me tell you! No quitting there.

Ahh... whatever.

black walnuts

2006-02-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

Walking the other day by a gulch, Bachelard's Water and Dreams tucked under my arm, I stopped to watch a squirrel. Some unrecognizable dark matter bulged from his mouth, and I was drawn and repulsed by this sight. What was that thing? I tried to make sense of it as a foodstuff for squirrels, but couldn't place what kind of nut that must be. The squirrel and I stared at each other for a moment -- perhaps he was wondering what book I was reading? -- before heading on in our separate directions (squirrel up, me only forward, as I'm unfortunately more limited in my ability to travel vertically).

After a few more feet, I realized what the squirrel had been schlepping. The ground here was covered with walnuts, their once-green outer coverings turned winter shades of darkest hummus, beginning the slow process of rotting off to reveal the lighter brown walnut shell. I am intimate with this nut, with the multi-layered and labored process of its exposure, not because I particularly like walnuts (I don't), but because they are bound to my memories of my grandmother, Pearl Price.

I remember her in an image: shoulder-length shock white hair and arms black to the elbow from shelling walnuts. Her name doubling the association with shelling and revealing as she herself linked it to the story of (the) Pearl (of great) Price. Like me, she was to some degree a shell-dweller as well as a shell opener. Her life remains a mystery to me, and something of a shell-game, too; I watch the pieces of her history move around the table, but when I look underneath I'm not sure I see her there. I think of Bachelard again, not Water and Dreams but his chapter on shells in Poetics of Space, where he writes that when we observe or examine shells “it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.”

that's all I can write for now, and it's not even the beginning, but I'm putting it up because I want something nicer at the top of the page.

an ugly one

2006-01-28T10:19:00.000-08:00

A Mentor’s Memento

Abjuring the ease that comes
from demurely accepting your
proffered avuncular spunk,

I refuse to let this roll down my backside.

I, too, can profess.
You took something of mine.
(the idea of rape)
(to pillage my idea is still stealing)

Looking for some numericity --
(how many invasions of body and thought must I assume?)

I am not up for grabs, nor grab-ass.

Familiar betrayal, friendly fire:
The wound where I wanted to like you.

not about water or caves

2006-01-27T04:58:00.000-08:00

Everything I do lately seems to reference water or caves. I don't know why. But this doesn't, at least not overtly. Share my continued nostalgic suspension? (Thanks to Matt and fair use for the sound.)

2006-01-25T19:28:00.000-08:00

The assignment: Remember someone or some place. Simultaneously log issues, problems, pleasures, frustrations, questions raised in and about the writing/remembering process. (for a prettier version of the same, here)

There is a spot, a dot I’ve seen on only one map (Kentucky Waterways), a place where the Little Hickman Creek runs into the Kentucky River. I love this place. I have fallen in and out of love there, in the mingling of waters where I have stood, or swum, or tread, or fought the current – depending on the season of the year or the stage of the relationship. That spot, where the tributary and the river embrace, marks my passage from youth to adulthood.

We used to go to this place when we needed to escape our so-small-in-retrospect world of classes and Mcjobs and youthful woes. Throwing our minor tribulations into the trib as we stripped the day off with our clothes. In the briefest of flirtations with L., I remember him referring to a similar spot as “outer space,” the place where you go when you don’t want to be anywhere you are. I don’t remember how I found this space, but I’m not surprised by the lacuna. I once knew every back road, old bridge, and barb-wire free swimming spot in a three-county radius from my home.

Maybe M. showed us this one. It certainly seems like her kind of spot. Follow the highway, so recently widened, for 10 or 15 miles; cross the large every-highway, high-tax-dollar bridge from which you could almost see it if you knew exactly where to look; turn onto the two lane road to the not quite town that you’ll pass without noticing, then onto the single lane stretch through hills that remind me of the entry to the Red River Gorge (or will, a few years later, when I first visit it). Getting close now, you’ll drive over the mildly frightening, rusty old bridge, hoping that your pre-crossing light flash can be seen at mid-day by any potential oncomer from the opposite direction. But you know you don’t really need to worry – you’ve never seen another car here. Once over the bridge, you’ll pull off the road into the worn-down grass, jump out of the car grabbing [keys, towels, drinks, music, drugs, nothing – all depends on the party’s membership and prior planning].

With the bridge on our right, we begin to scamper or slide past the thin rows of trees and scruff that shield the southern bank of the Little Hickman from view by (only ever imagined?) passing cars. I can always tell the history of recent rain from these banks. Sometimes the trib rises almost to meet us at the top of the hill, and sometimes we have to climb down rows of river rocks to get to it. It will never be deep enough for a dive on this side – too much slope, and in fall I have stood in the center of the creek with water only up to my waist.

I think spring was my favorite. The water always painfully cold, but deep. Shedding clothes [some or all, again dependent on party], we will quickly submerge, ducking heads to adjust homeostasis. I like to let go, to float the short, fleet distance to the river, to my favorite spot of my favorite spot.

It is among the strangest, most transcendent sensations I’ve ever experienced, to linger in the mingling of waters. Even as one flows into the other, they remain distinct: different pulses of current, different colors and translucency, different smells and tastes. But it’s the temperature shift that gets me every time. The Kentucky is always a good 10 degrees warmer than the Little Hickman, and it tickles me or turns me on or shocks me to feel the difference in the suddenly divided planes of my body, my front and back suddenly distinct, and all it takes to exchange their places is to face a different direction. For this, I think I liked fall best, because I could stand in the mingling as the tepid teal of the trib rushed around me to lose itself in the welcoming warm brown of the river.

In late spring and early summer, if I am not careful, I can float to this spot and get sucked into the river’s current before I am ready. Once – but only once – the undertow took me far down the river, and I had to kick like hell back to the bank. The walk back up to the trib was the first time I ever felt shame here.

Usually, though, I can swim across the river. The first few times each spring, I have to stop and tread for a while in the middle before flying on to the other side. Crossing the river feels good. It impresses us with ourselves; it impresses me with myself even now, to say that we swam across the river. But that’s only the spare change, the non-explanatory justification for those who weren’t here. Here, there’s no question of “why” – the water calls, and we answer.
On the opposite bank of the Kentucky, we like to lounge on the squishy, boggy, dead-leafed bottom, where we can sit while the water laps our shoulders. A. and I, who were trying to decide whether to date, sunburned our shoulders, sitting in the water talking about Nietzsche. Then a Great Blue Heron (one of my favorite birds, always a powerful omen), dropped down and swept up a fish beside us, and we put our words away for our first kiss.

T. and I went to the mingling spot at the height of our friendship, on the cold October night of a lunar eclipse. We skipped the trib altogether on this trip, walked its bank down to the river, stripped, plunged in, and omyjesusgawd it was cold. And dark, dark, dark, with the eclipsed moon’s small solar halo the only light in the world. Not like the summer nights when so many fireflies made the river banks looks lined with hundreds of twinkling Christmas trees, but infinitely better because both trees and lights were alive.

That night, the water level was surprisingly low, and the temperature shockingly low, and the light uncannily low, so we raced across the river and back and rushed out and into clothes and car and shivering laughter at the perfect, wonderful stupidity of that plan. On warm days, on warm nights, we would sometimes lie (to dry) on a pile of logs (fallen trees? abandoned dam?) that jutted out from the bank to hang over the river. You could almost slip through the tangle into the water. That’s where most of the party sat and watched, not risking the current, the day I couldn’t cross and had to walk up beside the river.

S. and I came to my spot on the outs. We knew we were nearing the end, but still trying to escape that conclusion. I knew he would like this place, given our history of outdoor love-making and seeming particular proclivity for bridges. But I was wrong. It was too far to go – not the 20 minute drive it had been from my once-home, but more like an hour from where we lived then (we slept every night almost in sight of the Kentucky River, but a more northern, industrially polluted, unswimmable stretch). On the way here, I got pulled over for speeding. He got pissed because he had an ounce in his pocket and why would I take that kind of chance? (I didn’t know).

The road had changed because the bridge was out, and it took forever to find my pull-off parking place coming from the direction that no one ever came from. We staggered out of the car in the now dark, ugly night. The bank of the trib was so sharp from erosion that we couldn’t even get to the water. What happened here? What flood or storm had I missed? How could I not have seen it go? I was still willing to try to make the river, but he was pissy and insistent that his favorite spot, closer to home, would have made a better destination. His was a beautiful spot, I admit – I enjoyed looking down from the low mountain we climbed there to the water below (another tributary to the Kentucky: Elkhorn Creek, just 1 mile too short to be called a river itself).

But that was not my water, not really. This was. This is. We both felt defeated as we climbed back in the car to head home. We were beginning to realize the end. He didn’t love my spot. On that painful drive away, I just kept thinking about the washed-away banks and the water, now inaccessible to me.

~~thoughts in process (until I figure out how to do columns, all hidden away down here)~~

disclosure. fidelity. purpose. I’ve already shut down three memory writings and mentally edited this one to shreds. stopped before starting. is this for me? for Della? for the class? and now, for my blog? It matters, you know – mysterious “you” from whom I’m writing this memory.

I like writing memory to make a point; As most of my writing makes clear, I frequently connect with concepts through memory. But I’m a bit baffled here, treading and dreading the “why” of the writing. To remember, remember?

I feel like I am cheating, on the writing or the place, as I’m remembering water. I’m exploring for Della and Soyini simultaneously. But I’m also a bit amused or pleased at the emerging metaphor of mingling and cheating: classes, lovers, functions, ages, waters. Where am I? More in the river, or more in the trib?

Should I use people’s names? Again, the audience question. I don’t know why, but I’m feeling shy with this one.

The second person shift – I want to avoid it, but I can’t seem to give myself directions otherwise.

How many places, how many details am I conflating? What is “accuracy” in memory? Does it matter? I’m reminded of Lucy Grealy, asked repeatedly how she remembered all those details for Autobiography of a Face, and her reply: “I didn’t remember it. I wrote it. I’m a writer.” That’s probably a paraphrase, but I’m quoting from memory, too.

Ahh – tense shifts. Like the 2nd person, seemingly unavoidable. I remember making active choices in other memory writings, but am just feeling compelled here.

I don’t know how to say this. It’s so visceral, such a completely embodied moment of memory that even now, seven or eight years since I last was there, I can feel in my stomach the magic of this place. But I could never describe it, not really. I’m nowhere close.

Or 2°. Or 20°. How could I gauge the precision of my skin’s thermometer?

“tickles?” not exactly. What is this sensation? What word could describe it?

I’m beginning to worry about narrative coherence. This story doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s not really a story, though, is it? This memory doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Still hung up on the names thing. Initials are too weird, but I can’t bring myself to make up fake names. Why can’t I just use theirs? I don’t know yet.

Does this anecdote feel unnecessary? To me, to you (dear undecidable reader), to my spot? Am I cluttering up the place / memory by talking about too many events? If I have to share this, should I leave these parts out?

I replaced “frighteningly” with “uncannily.” For D., who has now become implicated as reader, though only initial(ly) here.

I feel like I’m telling too much. I feel like I’m leaving so much out. Revealing too much, and not saying anything at the same time. And a little embarrassed to reveal so much/little of myself.

Did I ever go back again after that? Before I moved away forever? I can’t remember.

I don’t know how to end. Saying goodbye to my water seems so hard. not something I want to do. I’m maintaining a melancholy suspension~

Autistic Memory (Kristeva Amoebaen)

2005-12-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

In recent decades, different conceptions of autism have appeared, which highlight sensory perceptual abnormalities as the basis of core features of the disorder. Some researchers describe autism as a disorder of the senses rather than a social dysfunction, where each sense operates in isolation and the brain is unable to organize the stimuli in any meaningful way […].[i]

The psychic and technical complexity of autism impels us to expand our philosophical paradigm and to posit what must be called another cave, one even more profound and inexpressible than Plato’s. Indeed, since this cave is deprived of the intelligible and evaluative Fire-Sun, it is a sensory cave without any symbols (without “shadows,” as Plato would say). In this sensory cave, a lived Experience (Erlebnis) that has not yet been given form by cognitive experience (Erfahrung), and that often resists it, can nevertheless encounter thing-presentations that endow its inner workings with form and signification. Sensory experience, which is indicated by thing-presentations, plays an important role in the psychic experience of the speaking subject. Word-presentations do not necessarily convey this experience.[ii]

April, 1978. I am four-and-a-half years old. I am in the basement of a church in Frankfort, Kentucky. The basement is a long, gray, cinderblock hallway, with perhaps ten rooms off the central corridor: five on each side, their evenly spaced openings turning this dull piece of American institutional architecture into an arcade, a covered bazaar. Pale light leaks from the windows at the top of the stairs, which descend unceremoniously straight down into the basement, landing immediately before the first door to the right. Another window, at ground level, opens at the very top of the ceiling at the end of the long hall. It is grated, although it seems clear that if anyone were to breach it, he or she would break a limb in the fall to the basement floor. The drippy sunlight cannot compete with the strong white fluorescents overhead.

Somehow, no illumination ever seems to make it to the bottom of the floor, which is darker gray than the rest of the hall. It is cooler, too, and I like to press my back against this low, dark coolness. Especially under the stairs. The wall there is moist with the basement damp of earth pushing against concrete, trying to fight its way back to fill this now hollowed, now hallowed home. I imagine myself in a cave here, and I believe it, and I want to stay.
Right now, I am not against the wall, nor in my cave, but standing in a group of excited, jostling children. We are clumped together behind a line drawn in chalk across the basement floor. I’m excited, too, because my brother has explained the game to me. We are awaiting the annual Easter Egg Hunt, my first. The sky is overcast – it has rained, or it will rain – so we are having the hunt in the basement.

The other children push against me, amorphous and stinging like anemones I’ve seen on Jacques Cousteau. It sounds, too, like I am underwater – I hear no words in the chatter of these hunters, just a warbling, swelling din.

I will fill my basket with brightly colored, loosely jointed fake plastic eggs; I will have more jelly beans than I can eat. I might even find the most eggs, I might win the chocolate bunny. I am good at finding things. I notice every small thing: pebbles, pennies in the parking lot. I am bad at finding things. My mother sends me to the laundry room after my favorite pair of socks. I search and search through the basket, but I cannot see them. She returns with me, and they are there, on the very top. How could I have missed that? I see a spider in the corner, beg my mother to take it outside.

Someone yells “Go!” and the other children are yelling, scrambling, running and climbing over everything, rushing in and out of the rooms along the corridor. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. I may be responding, as I sometimes do, to their proximity – my sense of “me” isn’t firmly linked to this body, and I am easy to assault.

All of these children seem to have too many limbs. They are arachnids, raising their legs to show off their prey, triumphant, displaying the shiny plastic jewels to an accompanying thunderous “FOUND ONE.” I stand still, frozen. “You’d better hurry,” some adult advises, “or they’ll all be gone.”

Suddenly I am under the stairs, my back pressed desperately against the wall, my knees tight up under my chin. I am weeping, shaking, clutching my basket in front of my legs. I try to bury my face in my knees, but there are people there, perhaps my mother?, asking me what’s wrong, asking me what happened, talking talking talking and the children are yelling and running up and down the steps above and the light is burning into my cave now and it’s just too bright and too loud and too awful.

My mother collects me, carries me to the car. My brother has won. He teases me for being such a big baby, and jokes about how much fun I must have had at the egg hunt. He hugs me, and promises one of his prize bunny’s chocolate ears when we get home.
I cannot speak for several hours.

I spent the largest percentage of my life trying to cope with what the world around me had bombarded me with, with little or no extra processing time for the luxury of having any conscious thoughts about that world. If anything, my ‘autism’, like that of so many others like me, was often an example not of a kind of ‘self-ism’ but of a kind of ‘other-ism’ where any conscious and conjoined or consistent sense of selfhood doesn’t come easily at all.[iii]

[Some] sensations are “cognitively impenetrable,” such as akrasia (the term used to describe the phenomenon by which sensations tend either to be delayed or to linger even after our affective judgment has changed). In other words, the rational control of sensations is not enough to change them.[iv]

December, 1994. I am twenty years old, recently turned. I am standing on a street corner in Zagreb, Croatia. I have pneumonia, there’s a war on, and it’s two weeks till Christmas. I have come to Croatia after a semester’s study in Hungary. I’ll spend my next semester in U.K., but I’m not due in London till February. I’m supposed to meet a friend in Munich for the holiday, and then to Berlin for New Year’s. I’ve been all over Eastern Europe, although this is my first trip to a new country entirely alone. I have arrived in Croatia just in time for a transportation workers’ strike, so buses and trains aren’t really running and I’m not sure when or how I’ll get out of the country.

This corner opens onto a street-bounded public square, fairly common in its landscaping, the ubiquitous fountain hedged in this season by four giant Christmas trees decorated with white lights and huge red ribbons. Croatia was more prosperous than most of the former Yugoslav countries, and it shows. Zagreb is lovely, and the town center is nearly as well-heeled as its bigger baroque brothers Vienna and Budapest. But there’s something strange, here, too. After three-and-a-half years of fighting, and with Serbian occupiers closing range on the capital, Zagreb is holding its collective breath. Although people and cars move about, there is not much noise, and almost no one seems to converse on the street. The few men I’ve seen in my time here have been elderly, disabled, or in uniform. The one exception I can remember, a middle-aged man in business attire, spat at me when I passed him.

There is nothing for me to do here. After the war, Zagreb will regain its attraction for tourists – it’s really a lovely town, with an amazing cultural history. With the exception of the spitter, everyone I meet is welcoming and kind, though clearly on edge because of the ongoing war. The family I am staying with has shared with me their home, many fascinating stories, too much tar-like Turkish coffee, and their daughter’s unused antibiotics. I am grateful beyond expression, which is largely why I’m wandering around today. I know that as long I’m in the house, their attention is with me, and I suspect they have other things they’d like to do with their time.

So I’m standing here on this corner, sick and anxious, feeling very much the Ugly American as I try to decide which sidestreet I’ll explore. The air has taken on that quality of shimmering density that I’ve come to associate with the sense of “not quite right.” I see two young men in fatigues and berets walking their guns up and down the opposite street. I see the traffic light change, signaling me to cross. Just as I start to step into the crosswalk, three young boys, eight- to ten-ish, run past me, laughing and yelling. I am pushed aside, although I am not sure if any other bodies have touched mine. Suddenly I hear a series of small explosions that sound, to my untrained ears, like gunfire. I scan the street to find the danger, and see that everyone else, while startled, is moving about as before. I see in the street the remnant ropes and paper of some firecrackers the boys have lit -- and I see the boys, much further away now, pointing at me and laughing at the obvious fear in my face.

I do not cross the street. Instead, I wander for several blocks, away from the open square onto some street, I don’t know, just anywhere. At some point, I stop, walk backwards, and press myself against the brick façade of a dumpy-looking apartment building. The Easter Egg Hunt, which hasn’t entered my memory in so long that I can’t remember remembering it, is replaying over and over in my head. “Have I always been a coward?” I wonder. “What is wrong with me?”

By the time I meet my friend in Munich, I can quickly answer a direct question.

It came as a kind of revelation, as well as a blessed relief, when I learned that my sensory problems weren’t the result of my weakness or lack of character.[v]

The process of naming sensations requires an identification […] that mobilizes my entire psychic apparatus. I identify with his biography, his presumed and even transgenerational memory, and his presumed sensation. The resulting display of countertransference is an imaginary operation, yet it is also a real one. It is a sort of transubstantiation (Joyce, another extremely sensitive author, used this Catholic liturgical term to describe the subjective economy of writing as the advent of new signs and a new body).[vi]

August, 2002. I am twenty-eight years old. I have been sitting in a circle in a garage-turned-studio in some big suburban house in Chapel Hill. I am surrounded by ten other mothers and their three-and-under children. Judah is about to turn three, and I have enrolled us in a music class. He loves music. Before he could walk, he would crawl over to his father’s guitar and bang or rake the strings to produce sound. “Guargar” (“guitar”) was one of his first words. He has amazed us since before he could really talk by his ability to hum back tunes he’s heard once or twice.

Although he’s not coordinated enough to mesh the motions with the music himself, Judah loves sing-alongs like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” He asks for me to sing it to him over and over; he flaps excitedly while I sing and do the hand movements. “AGAIN!” he yells each time I near the end – my spider never quite gets to go “up the spout again” before he has to go “up the spout—“ “AGAIN!”

At this point, we’ve been through a number of evaluations, and I’ve done a good bit of reading, and it’s pretty clear that Judah’s got some “sensory issues,” although we’re not sure exactly what that will mean. He is smart and very verbal, and he clearly has some motor delays (he doesn’t really negotiate stairs or catch a ball. He does bump and crash constantly). He is easily over-stimulated, which shows itself in his spinning, his voicing, his tantrums. It is difficult to imagine Judah in a group setting like a classroom, although Matt half-jokes that he’ll be fine if we can find a way for him to go to school riding in the car – the motion and vibration do often seem to chill him out.

I cringe, remembering our prior, wrecked attempts to participate in “Toddler Time” at the local library. I have joined this music class, thinking it will be a good way to get Judah involved in something social in preparation for starting daycare next month. Here, I hope, he will be able to focus on what he likes (the music) while getting used to having other people do the same in close proximity.

Judah began our second class today by running around the circle, screaming “A-E-A-E-O!” (his latest take on “Old MacDonald”). He “settled down” for the welcome song, which meant that he hummed while crawling all over me. As he yanked my hair for the third time, I had to remind myself that I should have expected this, I know what can happen when we go out in the world.

At this moment, mid-way through the class, Judah is sprawled out on the floor, face down, howling. We were just singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” as a group, the other moms happily showing their cooing, crooning tots how to make their spiders go up the spout, when he lost it. When I lost him.

I tell myself not to worry about the other adults’ judgments of Judah and me, which I feel, even when they are not openly expressed. I worry, too much, that they see us -- Judah, me, our family -- as failed, as freaks. Looking at him lying there on the floor, I feel worlds away from him. I know that I cannot help him. I feel intimately, frighteningly connected to him. I know that I have been where he is.

He looks like he is trying to make his body as flat as possible. He looks like he is under attack. He looks like he has been pushed down, although no other bodies have touched his.

I will do my best, I will expect nothing. I will rub his back. I will pick him up and carry him to the car. I will hold him very tightly, very close to my body. I will talk to him in as even, as unemotional a tone as I can manage. I will not cry. I will not get upset. I will not join him there on the floor. We are both responding to the stress of this situation. Although I think I’m managing to control my freak out, my internal river is rising. Threats of flashfloods broadcast across my field of vision, and I know this will be our last class, at least for a while. “This is not his problem,” I think to myself, hoping the dam will hold. “It’s yours.”

Matt arrives home from work, asks how was our day.

“Hard,” I answer, finding—AGAIN!—my voice.

By hypothesizing that the sensory cavern is ubiquitous and for the most part irreducible to language, am I subscribing to the notion that autism is universal, endogenous, occurring before what Melanie Klein calls the ‘depressive position,’ and at the fringe of psychic life? Not exactly. If we borrow the terms of what Freud calls an ‘economic’ conception (as opposed to a model that relies on chronological or developmental stages), we may consider the sensory cavern to be an essential part of the psychic apparatus, which is heterogeneous. The psychic apparatus is a stratified significance that excessively rigid linguistic and cognitive discourses sometimes conceal or restrict to the dimension of language modeled on the Idea.[vii]

[i] Olga Bogdaschina, Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome. New York: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003, p. 25.
[ii] Julia Kristeva, “Is Sensation a Form of Language (abridged),” The Portable Kristeva, Second Edition. ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (1997), pp. 122-123.
[iii] Donna Williams, Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism, Los Angeles: Three Rivers Press, 1995, p. 14.
[iv] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 121.
[v] Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, and Other Reports from My Life with Autism, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 78.
[vi] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 124.
[vii] Kristeva, “Sensation,” p. 123.