Interview Three
On Autistic Longform
We were talking about your project the other day, and about this phrase from the future as disabled, autistic long form, which is also the title of your project. And you were saying, Oh, I don't really think I know what artistic long form is, even, which is interesting at the end of your project, nearing the end of your project. And then we said, Oh, well, maybe we will read that chapter again. And then we thought, actually, let's use one of these sort of interview talk sessions, to just try and borrow around a bit and be like, maybe you do know what it is, but maybe you don't have it to hand or you or maybe you do know things, but you haven't had processing space. So my question is, what is autistic long form to you? What do you know about it? Or what can you speculate that it might be?
I think I did feel I knew what it meant at the beginning of the project. And I think especially the definition from the book, it was really to do with anecdote and meandering and dialogue, and being loose and not being pinned down in certain ways. What I realized was that that is autistic long form for them. But then I realized that it doesn't translate into what autistic long form would be for me. Do you see what I mean? So I think in the early part of the early part of the research period, I tried to write freeform. Just like, Oh, I'm just gonna write freeform and see what comes out. And then I realized that that actually isn't, isn't me. It's not the way I work. You know? It doesn't free me from constraints. You know, and I think even the term because I'm a long form writer anyway, so I know how to do that and it's doesn't contrast. I think I had this sort of like, notion that I would be able to write in a kind of fragmentary way, you know, a little bit like the novel that you were reading, Blackouts, where it's like, oh, this is a picture, this is a quote, this is a thought. And then I think I got into a headspace like when I was a kid and they gave me a project book but I didn’t really know what to put in it. It feels like going through the motions. So I think what happened is I lost confidence in the simplicity of what I thought autistic long form was. Do you see what I mean?
What does long form mean to you?
So I would say that, for me, if you cannot write it, or cannot consume it in one session, then it's definitely long form. Do you see what I mean? So okay, something is definitely long if you both cannot write nor consume it in one reasonable session, and a reasonable session would actually be longer than I would consider my reasonable session to be. So it's kind of like, you know, you can consume a three hour movie, you know, some people can sit down and write for six hours. I would say, like, if you don't have to come back to it, it's not long form, that it's not definitely long form. So I would say anything that you write in multiple sessions, unless you're only squeezing out a sentence every time and something that is consumed in multiple sessions, I will say it's definitely long form. So every novel is definitely long form, you know, articles in newspapers, online, that you have to come back to, because it's already taking you an hour to read. Then I would say something that you can definitely write and definitely consume in one session is definitely not long form. But then you've got a grey area. Do you see what I mean? You've got a grey area in the middle? Because I would say, is a play long form, I would say yes. But then which play?
So Hamlet’s long form?
Yeah. But, you know, then I would say certain other plays are not long form, because they're in a booklet form, and you just read through them, you know, and it's a play that's meant to be performed in 22 minutes. There's a difference, like, you know, the difference between, short story, novella and novel. There's a blur in between those categories.
I guess, to clarify, I will say, then my understanding from that is that you're not excluding the performance writing work from long form?
No, I'm not. So I would one thing I would exclude from longform is diary writing. Because even though you can't consume or write a whole diary in one session, you know, by definition, each bite is wonderful is one session. So I would say a diary isn't long form. And I think also, I think long form will tend to be more considered a more edited and short form, will tend to not need to be as edited but of course, you can have unedited long form and carefully edited short form. Certain poems can be long form, you know, very long, you know, if someone writes a book length poem, it's long form. But back to autistic longform, I think I think I lost that confidence. I felt like Leah Lakshmi had this really beautiful, alluring, beguiling, attractive, proposal that you can just kind of let go of all of the forms of writing and write in an instinctive way, and be messy, and it will come out as this long form this autistic long form, and then realising that, why that may work for other people. And why it hasn't worked for me.
A question that then comes from that, for me, is there any kind of parallel in terms of the forms with which you write and present all kinds of masking?
I would say there is one very strict, very strong parallel in that when I read about unmasking, I was like, oh that sounds great! I can just unmask and then I’ll feel better. Do you see what I mean? And then I’ll find release and hopefully I’ll be less tired. But then coming to actually try to do it practically, I lost confidence and then thought, I don’t know what unmasking is, or I don’t know what unmasking is for me. So it’s like for Leah Lakshmi, there has been this long, involved process of discovery, of finding ways to work, and then at the end of that process, putting a label on it and calling it Autistic Longform. And then I picked up the lable and assumed that I could access this whole long process of self discovery, you know? It’s the same with unmasking. People go through this whole process of dropping the masking and then at the end of it all I just pick up the word ‘unmasking’ and expect to be able to do it. There’s a very strong parallel there. The artistic experience of this work has been a lot to do with certainty and uncertainty and confidence and losing confidence. Feeling sure, and then feeling like, oh, I don’t get it now. It’s a very mutable and confusing thing. But I think now, finally towards the end of this process, I do have a couple of ideas about what autistic longform means to me.
What are they?
The first is to do with telling the whole story. So whenever I tell a story, or whenever I try to explain something, one of the first things I have to do in my head is work backwards to the point where I can begin to see what I am talking about. Essentially, it’s like, OK, I want to tell you about this thing that’s here. Right in front of me. But before I can do that, I have to work back to where all the threads of that story have their origin. And I suppose that’s when you get what look like these weird, typical, autistic meanderings. So someone could ask me about when I learned to play the violin, but I have to start the story with a childhood holiday to Corfu one year. Do you see what I mean? There is a tracing back of the thread so the story can make sense in its entirety. And I think this for me is very much autistic longform in the sense of building a structure, and that in order to tell someone about something you have to tell them the whole pattern. You have to reach back into the past, or into the future, or from side to side to make the pattern make sense.
How is this different from what was described in The Future Is Disabled?
I think the misunderstanding I had came from the way that I interpreted the way the author described it as a kind of looseness. See what I mean? As a kind of letting go. So the meandering comes from that looseness and letting go. Whereas I think I often do the same thing, or it might appear to be the same thing to someone else, but it comes from me feeling like I’m being more rigorous. So, it’s like, sometimes you say to me to get to the fucking point, but the thing is I am doing that. For me, it’s the only way to get there. To do anything else would be to kind of expect me to be able to get to that house over there by tramping across the garden and running through the raspberry patch then bouncing over the neighbour’s trampoline. It might be the most direct way, but that doesn’t mean I can get there that way. So autistic longform for me is in one sense, not being able to just say things. Not simply being able to say what something is, or what happened. It’s having to contextualise those things, and having to arrive at those things, within the patterning how they arose. And I’d like to point out that it’s not a mania, or a stubbornness. It’s not a sort of kookiness or contrariness. It comes from the inability to understand phenomena other than reading them as patterns. Do you see what I mean? All I’ve got is the pattern. So it’s not I like I think I want to tell you about something but I’m going to give you all this really nice extra pattern stuff on top. I literally have to tell you about the pattern or I can’t tell you about the thing. It’s the only mode I have.
Does that relate to masking?
... I think it does, very much so. Because a lot of the time I feel like I’m taking too much time or like I’m coming around the houses and I feel an impatience that might not even really be there from whoever is listening. I feel like you ask me about some simple thing, but I feel like I need to get there by telling you about something that happened in a conversation three weeks ago. And that can be embarrassing or exposing. I think part of the unmasking is not caring about that. To be honest, I don’t think I do care so much, but I can imagine that some autistic people would care, and then they would choose not to speak or not answer, or, you know, work very very hard to hide half of what they are doing to answer the question.
So, this is a slightly different question, but how does this affect our performance work? Is this mode open to you when we are making performance work? Like telling the story the long way, or taking up more time for speaking than what might be expected?
I feel like I have a very clear answer to that and it’s to do with form and function. First of all, I think our work is often very very much about presenting the pattern and then allowing conclusions to arise for the audience. We talk about it in a different way, you know? We talk about making a constellation. So the idea of making a constellation artwork is to present the pattern and then the information part rises up out of the pattern on its own. And that’s just a different way of describing the same thing. Do you see what I mean? So I think in some senses, the work we make is very unmasked. You remember when I got very excited about using narrative structures to tell non-stories? You know? Wanting to activate those parts of the brain that respond to narrative but without actually giving the audience a story. Using the tricks of narration to get those stores to arise in the mind of the audience when they are not really ‘there’ in the sense that we defined them beforehand. This is where I think the masking comes in. I think our work is often packaged so people don’t notice what is happening. I think we will often package our work so it feels less strange. I get the feeling our work is often a lot stranger than it looks on the surface. Someone can go into watching something and just feel like, oh, OK, it’s a play and it’s about a house. But then when you actually analyse it, it’s massively nonlinear, and maybe the audience comes away not really knowing what was actually told to them, but still came away with a really strong feeling. Then we say, oh yeah, that piece is an examination of queer rurality and how to feel safe in rural communities as a Queer person. But we never talk about that on stage. Well, actually we do. We talk about it by building a pattern where the possibility of answering those questions arises naturally. Then you can just pick the answers or the thoughts off the surface.
I see.
So I think our work and the performances that we make, and the whole idea of the constellation play, is a manifestation of that. It’s a bit like one of those Magic Eye things where you have to blur your eyes to see the dolphin. And what’s interesting is I think that this is also a very native form for you, regardless of how you, you know, make assessments of your neurotypicality or otherwise. It may just be that you find it artistically interesting. It may be that you can ‘gear change’ between this form and other forms, but whatever, I think you’re very comfortable in this form of telling and that you find it very very stimulating. I think when I write novels it’s the same thing. You know? The story arises and the theme arises. It’s not told. You have to create the entire pattern and then the answer comes out of the middle of that.
So if this is what your version of autistic longform is, how do you think we might be able to continue to work with it? Do you think it could change the work now, or take us in other directions if we just followed the instincts of it?
I think I just had a little realisation moment about what masking is and what masking isn’t! So I think there is this idea of masking that it’s when an autistic person can behave like a neurotypical person. And that is kind of tiring. And then they stop behaving like a neurotypical person, and it feels like a big relief because it’s easier. But I think the actual point is that an autistic person cannot behave like a neurotypical person. So what I’m realising through this conversation, which I think is really interesting, is that masking is not ‘behaving like a neurotypical person’. It’s behaving in such a way, through editing and silence and trickery, that neurotypical people think you are behaving like a neurotypical person. This might feel like a basic point, but it’s important. It’s really really interesting because it means I’m not actually capable of doing anything other than autistic longform. Do you see what I mean? So, every single time I express myself, I express myself in an autistic way. I don’t get to do the gear change. You might — maybe you do. Or maybe you don’t? I don’t know. That’s a separate conversation. But I don’t get to do it the normal way, or the easy way. Masking is about presentation and it’s about doing one thing but trying to make it look like something else. So I think for our work the point is, we can do it the autistic way — at least as far as my parts — and try to make it look like something else, or we can just gove that extra task up.
So it might be more to do with how we explain the work?
It also occurs to me that this very much relates to everything we have talked about about ‘the frame’ — about making work that feels like it conforms to an expectation of what the work should be and is therefore somehow smaller. It’s like when I wrote radio ads for a living and one of the reasons I was good at it was because I usually came up with really weird ideas. If I tried to write within the frame, you know, write a radio ad that sounded like a radio ad was supposed to sound, then I could manage it, but it was like putting on a voice. You know like Buy our windows, they’re great. You can see right through them! And it becomes like a tune, or a joke. And I can sing that tune. It’s like, you know, like doing an accent. If you do a Glasgow accent, you sound like someone from Glasgow for a minute. Maybe exactly like someone from Glasgow, if you’re very good at it, but you’re not actually from Glasgow. You know? You didn’t grow up there. You don’t know what the names of the places in Glasgow are if someone asks where exactly you’re from. Where in Glasgow are you from? Uh, the middle bit. It’s the same thing with masking. You sound like you come from Glasgow, but not for very fucking long. There’s nothing behind it. So I think this thing about working outside the frame has actually been a way we have been talking about unmasking, in a way.
So a neurotypical person can’t use that method, you mean?
No, the truth is, of course a neurotypical person could do that as well. You know, try to release into what they really think rather than using expectation. And artists do that all the time. But that brings up the whole question about the artist’s brain. Are any artists neurotypical? Do you see what I mean? Is an artist neurotypical? You could say no, because, by definition, they’re an artist.
So how about our work?
I think it could change the work in the fact that we acknowledge that the bits I make are completely and always autistic. And so is the way I explain and understand. It has to do with the degree to which we free ourselves into that knowledge by recognising that masking is fakery. Do you see what I mean? So I could go through a process of trying to undo all the fakery and getting expert at recognising when I’m putting on my Glasgow accent, even a little bit. Talking in someone else’s voice and making shit up so the surface looks a certain way. I think there are so many things we already do that are about that, but we can name it and really look at it. We’ve done it since long before we knew I was autistic, but it was articulated as like, oh, how do we get out of this muddy feeling? I think this whole idea can take us a bit further and a bit deeper, and in a way that’s maybe even a little bit easier and less exhausting. Even if we get to the exact same place. And it could be that we accept that there are moments when you go to a place and I can’t follow you there. Or places I go to that you can’t follow and that’s OK. I think that could take the work into very, very interesting territory. So we accept that I can’t just do the same steps as you always and end up in the same place. So what we might have interpreted before as failure, or stupid, or a communication problem, or a fight, even, now with the neurodiversity model we see it in another way. Like, imagine you have a monkey friend and they say to you, follow me! And then swing off through the trees. You can’t. You have to run along the ground in a person way. This could be very very interesting. I mean and of course we take turns being the monkey. That’s just the way it is. And instead of being a failure, it can become a part of the work. We do that naturally already. You know like, you’re colourblind and there are things in our work you see differently to me. Like we make a textile and you can’t tell one colour from another, you trust me to tell you which is black and which is green. It would be no different to that really. It’s not a big thing. It’s very prosaic. It’s the way we work together already.
And how about the second form?
Well, that’s what I call the Poetics. But we’re out of time. Which is good. We can talk about it in more depth next time.
I think I did feel I knew what it meant at the beginning of the project. And I think especially the definition from the book, it was really to do with anecdote and meandering and dialogue, and being loose and not being pinned down in certain ways. What I realized was that that is autistic long form for them. But then I realized that it doesn't translate into what autistic long form would be for me. Do you see what I mean? So I think in the early part of the early part of the research period, I tried to write freeform. Just like, Oh, I'm just gonna write freeform and see what comes out. And then I realized that that actually isn't, isn't me. It's not the way I work. You know? It doesn't free me from constraints. You know, and I think even the term because I'm a long form writer anyway, so I know how to do that and it's doesn't contrast. I think I had this sort of like, notion that I would be able to write in a kind of fragmentary way, you know, a little bit like the novel that you were reading, Blackouts, where it's like, oh, this is a picture, this is a quote, this is a thought. And then I think I got into a headspace like when I was a kid and they gave me a project book but I didn’t really know what to put in it. It feels like going through the motions. So I think what happened is I lost confidence in the simplicity of what I thought autistic long form was. Do you see what I mean?
What does long form mean to you?
So I would say that, for me, if you cannot write it, or cannot consume it in one session, then it's definitely long form. Do you see what I mean? So okay, something is definitely long if you both cannot write nor consume it in one reasonable session, and a reasonable session would actually be longer than I would consider my reasonable session to be. So it's kind of like, you know, you can consume a three hour movie, you know, some people can sit down and write for six hours. I would say, like, if you don't have to come back to it, it's not long form, that it's not definitely long form. So I would say anything that you write in multiple sessions, unless you're only squeezing out a sentence every time and something that is consumed in multiple sessions, I will say it's definitely long form. So every novel is definitely long form, you know, articles in newspapers, online, that you have to come back to, because it's already taking you an hour to read. Then I would say something that you can definitely write and definitely consume in one session is definitely not long form. But then you've got a grey area. Do you see what I mean? You've got a grey area in the middle? Because I would say, is a play long form, I would say yes. But then which play?
So Hamlet’s long form?
Yeah. But, you know, then I would say certain other plays are not long form, because they're in a booklet form, and you just read through them, you know, and it's a play that's meant to be performed in 22 minutes. There's a difference, like, you know, the difference between, short story, novella and novel. There's a blur in between those categories.
I guess, to clarify, I will say, then my understanding from that is that you're not excluding the performance writing work from long form?
No, I'm not. So I would one thing I would exclude from longform is diary writing. Because even though you can't consume or write a whole diary in one session, you know, by definition, each bite is wonderful is one session. So I would say a diary isn't long form. And I think also, I think long form will tend to be more considered a more edited and short form, will tend to not need to be as edited but of course, you can have unedited long form and carefully edited short form. Certain poems can be long form, you know, very long, you know, if someone writes a book length poem, it's long form. But back to autistic longform, I think I think I lost that confidence. I felt like Leah Lakshmi had this really beautiful, alluring, beguiling, attractive, proposal that you can just kind of let go of all of the forms of writing and write in an instinctive way, and be messy, and it will come out as this long form this autistic long form, and then realising that, why that may work for other people. And why it hasn't worked for me.
A question that then comes from that, for me, is there any kind of parallel in terms of the forms with which you write and present all kinds of masking?
I would say there is one very strict, very strong parallel in that when I read about unmasking, I was like, oh that sounds great! I can just unmask and then I’ll feel better. Do you see what I mean? And then I’ll find release and hopefully I’ll be less tired. But then coming to actually try to do it practically, I lost confidence and then thought, I don’t know what unmasking is, or I don’t know what unmasking is for me. So it’s like for Leah Lakshmi, there has been this long, involved process of discovery, of finding ways to work, and then at the end of that process, putting a label on it and calling it Autistic Longform. And then I picked up the lable and assumed that I could access this whole long process of self discovery, you know? It’s the same with unmasking. People go through this whole process of dropping the masking and then at the end of it all I just pick up the word ‘unmasking’ and expect to be able to do it. There’s a very strong parallel there. The artistic experience of this work has been a lot to do with certainty and uncertainty and confidence and losing confidence. Feeling sure, and then feeling like, oh, I don’t get it now. It’s a very mutable and confusing thing. But I think now, finally towards the end of this process, I do have a couple of ideas about what autistic longform means to me.
What are they?
The first is to do with telling the whole story. So whenever I tell a story, or whenever I try to explain something, one of the first things I have to do in my head is work backwards to the point where I can begin to see what I am talking about. Essentially, it’s like, OK, I want to tell you about this thing that’s here. Right in front of me. But before I can do that, I have to work back to where all the threads of that story have their origin. And I suppose that’s when you get what look like these weird, typical, autistic meanderings. So someone could ask me about when I learned to play the violin, but I have to start the story with a childhood holiday to Corfu one year. Do you see what I mean? There is a tracing back of the thread so the story can make sense in its entirety. And I think this for me is very much autistic longform in the sense of building a structure, and that in order to tell someone about something you have to tell them the whole pattern. You have to reach back into the past, or into the future, or from side to side to make the pattern make sense.
How is this different from what was described in The Future Is Disabled?
I think the misunderstanding I had came from the way that I interpreted the way the author described it as a kind of looseness. See what I mean? As a kind of letting go. So the meandering comes from that looseness and letting go. Whereas I think I often do the same thing, or it might appear to be the same thing to someone else, but it comes from me feeling like I’m being more rigorous. So, it’s like, sometimes you say to me to get to the fucking point, but the thing is I am doing that. For me, it’s the only way to get there. To do anything else would be to kind of expect me to be able to get to that house over there by tramping across the garden and running through the raspberry patch then bouncing over the neighbour’s trampoline. It might be the most direct way, but that doesn’t mean I can get there that way. So autistic longform for me is in one sense, not being able to just say things. Not simply being able to say what something is, or what happened. It’s having to contextualise those things, and having to arrive at those things, within the patterning how they arose. And I’d like to point out that it’s not a mania, or a stubbornness. It’s not a sort of kookiness or contrariness. It comes from the inability to understand phenomena other than reading them as patterns. Do you see what I mean? All I’ve got is the pattern. So it’s not I like I think I want to tell you about something but I’m going to give you all this really nice extra pattern stuff on top. I literally have to tell you about the pattern or I can’t tell you about the thing. It’s the only mode I have.
Does that relate to masking?
... I think it does, very much so. Because a lot of the time I feel like I’m taking too much time or like I’m coming around the houses and I feel an impatience that might not even really be there from whoever is listening. I feel like you ask me about some simple thing, but I feel like I need to get there by telling you about something that happened in a conversation three weeks ago. And that can be embarrassing or exposing. I think part of the unmasking is not caring about that. To be honest, I don’t think I do care so much, but I can imagine that some autistic people would care, and then they would choose not to speak or not answer, or, you know, work very very hard to hide half of what they are doing to answer the question.
So, this is a slightly different question, but how does this affect our performance work? Is this mode open to you when we are making performance work? Like telling the story the long way, or taking up more time for speaking than what might be expected?
I feel like I have a very clear answer to that and it’s to do with form and function. First of all, I think our work is often very very much about presenting the pattern and then allowing conclusions to arise for the audience. We talk about it in a different way, you know? We talk about making a constellation. So the idea of making a constellation artwork is to present the pattern and then the information part rises up out of the pattern on its own. And that’s just a different way of describing the same thing. Do you see what I mean? So I think in some senses, the work we make is very unmasked. You remember when I got very excited about using narrative structures to tell non-stories? You know? Wanting to activate those parts of the brain that respond to narrative but without actually giving the audience a story. Using the tricks of narration to get those stores to arise in the mind of the audience when they are not really ‘there’ in the sense that we defined them beforehand. This is where I think the masking comes in. I think our work is often packaged so people don’t notice what is happening. I think we will often package our work so it feels less strange. I get the feeling our work is often a lot stranger than it looks on the surface. Someone can go into watching something and just feel like, oh, OK, it’s a play and it’s about a house. But then when you actually analyse it, it’s massively nonlinear, and maybe the audience comes away not really knowing what was actually told to them, but still came away with a really strong feeling. Then we say, oh yeah, that piece is an examination of queer rurality and how to feel safe in rural communities as a Queer person. But we never talk about that on stage. Well, actually we do. We talk about it by building a pattern where the possibility of answering those questions arises naturally. Then you can just pick the answers or the thoughts off the surface.
I see.
So I think our work and the performances that we make, and the whole idea of the constellation play, is a manifestation of that. It’s a bit like one of those Magic Eye things where you have to blur your eyes to see the dolphin. And what’s interesting is I think that this is also a very native form for you, regardless of how you, you know, make assessments of your neurotypicality or otherwise. It may just be that you find it artistically interesting. It may be that you can ‘gear change’ between this form and other forms, but whatever, I think you’re very comfortable in this form of telling and that you find it very very stimulating. I think when I write novels it’s the same thing. You know? The story arises and the theme arises. It’s not told. You have to create the entire pattern and then the answer comes out of the middle of that.
So if this is what your version of autistic longform is, how do you think we might be able to continue to work with it? Do you think it could change the work now, or take us in other directions if we just followed the instincts of it?
I think I just had a little realisation moment about what masking is and what masking isn’t! So I think there is this idea of masking that it’s when an autistic person can behave like a neurotypical person. And that is kind of tiring. And then they stop behaving like a neurotypical person, and it feels like a big relief because it’s easier. But I think the actual point is that an autistic person cannot behave like a neurotypical person. So what I’m realising through this conversation, which I think is really interesting, is that masking is not ‘behaving like a neurotypical person’. It’s behaving in such a way, through editing and silence and trickery, that neurotypical people think you are behaving like a neurotypical person. This might feel like a basic point, but it’s important. It’s really really interesting because it means I’m not actually capable of doing anything other than autistic longform. Do you see what I mean? So, every single time I express myself, I express myself in an autistic way. I don’t get to do the gear change. You might — maybe you do. Or maybe you don’t? I don’t know. That’s a separate conversation. But I don’t get to do it the normal way, or the easy way. Masking is about presentation and it’s about doing one thing but trying to make it look like something else. So I think for our work the point is, we can do it the autistic way — at least as far as my parts — and try to make it look like something else, or we can just gove that extra task up.
So it might be more to do with how we explain the work?
It also occurs to me that this very much relates to everything we have talked about about ‘the frame’ — about making work that feels like it conforms to an expectation of what the work should be and is therefore somehow smaller. It’s like when I wrote radio ads for a living and one of the reasons I was good at it was because I usually came up with really weird ideas. If I tried to write within the frame, you know, write a radio ad that sounded like a radio ad was supposed to sound, then I could manage it, but it was like putting on a voice. You know like Buy our windows, they’re great. You can see right through them! And it becomes like a tune, or a joke. And I can sing that tune. It’s like, you know, like doing an accent. If you do a Glasgow accent, you sound like someone from Glasgow for a minute. Maybe exactly like someone from Glasgow, if you’re very good at it, but you’re not actually from Glasgow. You know? You didn’t grow up there. You don’t know what the names of the places in Glasgow are if someone asks where exactly you’re from. Where in Glasgow are you from? Uh, the middle bit. It’s the same thing with masking. You sound like you come from Glasgow, but not for very fucking long. There’s nothing behind it. So I think this thing about working outside the frame has actually been a way we have been talking about unmasking, in a way.
So a neurotypical person can’t use that method, you mean?
No, the truth is, of course a neurotypical person could do that as well. You know, try to release into what they really think rather than using expectation. And artists do that all the time. But that brings up the whole question about the artist’s brain. Are any artists neurotypical? Do you see what I mean? Is an artist neurotypical? You could say no, because, by definition, they’re an artist.
So how about our work?
I think it could change the work in the fact that we acknowledge that the bits I make are completely and always autistic. And so is the way I explain and understand. It has to do with the degree to which we free ourselves into that knowledge by recognising that masking is fakery. Do you see what I mean? So I could go through a process of trying to undo all the fakery and getting expert at recognising when I’m putting on my Glasgow accent, even a little bit. Talking in someone else’s voice and making shit up so the surface looks a certain way. I think there are so many things we already do that are about that, but we can name it and really look at it. We’ve done it since long before we knew I was autistic, but it was articulated as like, oh, how do we get out of this muddy feeling? I think this whole idea can take us a bit further and a bit deeper, and in a way that’s maybe even a little bit easier and less exhausting. Even if we get to the exact same place. And it could be that we accept that there are moments when you go to a place and I can’t follow you there. Or places I go to that you can’t follow and that’s OK. I think that could take the work into very, very interesting territory. So we accept that I can’t just do the same steps as you always and end up in the same place. So what we might have interpreted before as failure, or stupid, or a communication problem, or a fight, even, now with the neurodiversity model we see it in another way. Like, imagine you have a monkey friend and they say to you, follow me! And then swing off through the trees. You can’t. You have to run along the ground in a person way. This could be very very interesting. I mean and of course we take turns being the monkey. That’s just the way it is. And instead of being a failure, it can become a part of the work. We do that naturally already. You know like, you’re colourblind and there are things in our work you see differently to me. Like we make a textile and you can’t tell one colour from another, you trust me to tell you which is black and which is green. It would be no different to that really. It’s not a big thing. It’s very prosaic. It’s the way we work together already.
And how about the second form?
Well, that’s what I call the Poetics. But we’re out of time. Which is good. We can talk about it in more depth next time.