My experience of religion began in 1947 when I started at a primary school in Sussex. It was as much a part of life as the very rain, but quite early on I perceived a yawning disparity between religious teaching and everyday life. This I have managed to convey in my short story SAINT JAMES THE LESS where the reader has to step into the shoes of a highly intelligent nine-year-old. My father always made a fuss about swearing (q.v. below) and my parents were obsessed with excretion rituals that seemed to be ordained by religious dogma. I was told NOT TO PLAY with "common little boys" and forbidden to associate with some children in our street. We were a cut above these people.
In 1953 three classmates of Lewes Grammar School dared me to commit trivial pranks that included saying to a schoolgirl "I want to shag you" which was absurd as saying "let me kittiwake you". For that and similar smutty remarks I was effectively expelled and flung into permanent disgrace. I feared swearing by accident and so developed a speech impediment and also a lifelong fear of human relationships that still persists whenever I am with Christian people or have dealings with the police, for every good reason as such people are generally "human land mines". Though I was popular at Red Hill Remedial School (q.v.) the good work done by the staff was immediately undone after I was sacked from my job at the Inland Revenue - the Sisyphean adding-up of salaries - for being too slow. My father forced me to attend Sunday school and that caused mounting strife in teenage years. As he became a town council "bigwig" he paraded his piety and attended church services without fail. He made an issue of the fact that as a boy he had been a choirboy and I had forgotten hymns and prayers (because Red Hill School was one of just 3 schools exempt from the 1944 Compulsory worship obligation).
20 years ago the London "Times" carried out a survey on the religious beliefs of adults. Nearly all respondents stated that they felt as children that religion was something nasty imposed on them by adults and they dropped religion as soon as they left school. I did NOT see fit to photocopy that report or send it to my father but I would heartily agree with its contents and findings. Religion is essentially spiritual blackmail imposed by the ruling elite on the population as a means of social control. Mainstream religions are locked in the past and have no idea how to contain wrongdoings now rife because of modern technology, such as internet paedophile pornography. In Christ's day Biblical Israel was a tiny country half the size of Wales with perhaps the present population of Fife and Jerusalem no bigger than Dunfermline.
Christianity is downright soppy and at primary school I underwent gross input overload when forced to sing hymns at assembly. I was always in trouble for being unable to sing. It was a besetting moral failing to be unable to sing yet I was never given credit for such demanding scholastic feats as my self-taught German or overcoming FEARS by persistence with a soldering iron to make model railway track. Christians rant on and on about LOVE and forgiveness whilst I was never forgiven for the Lewes pranks or indeed for acts of self affirmation like my self taught German. All this is mirrored in chapters of "The High Road to Bickulphstow" which I will gladly provide.
MARX attacked religion as "the opiate of the people" whilst FREUD did likewise in his treatises on mental illnesses. I had understood all this at Red Hill School and took it to heart as "gospel truth" alongside facts about the geography of distant countries. Conflict with my parents was inevitable but as I grew older I realised that there had to be some general consensus on how to behave which was entirely independent of any institutionalised religion (q.v. The Hither Green Row, below and what has flowed from it). Now I have speculated what might have happened if my Alan Wright has been a dissident Victorian vicar who had thought out his Contributionism and put it into practice to gain a worldwide following so when I came across it at Red Hill School it was as logical as the Metric System which I unilaterally adopted in 1958. HAD someone with the moral stature of Fox or Wesley invented such a rational code of behaviour, would it have been understood accepted and practiced by the pullulating multitudes of less intelligent people so as to give rise to a worldwide consensus on how to behave uncontaminated by any religious dogma and a general worldwide practice of self improvement so that generations later the moral and intellectual powers of nearly all people approached that of Alan Wright's loyal disciples? More than ever the world needs a universal rational code of behaviour that can deal with the opportunities for wrongdoing hat arise from modern society. Can Contributionism be that Code of Behaviour and my abiding legacy to mankind?
My father singled me out and favouritised my sister who became "Confirmed" in a showy ceremony whilst he remarked about colleagues' sons who were said to be paragons of virtue and I had besetting flaws. He held very Right-wing views, diametrically opposed to mine and maintained that Compulsory Worship should be enforced on children along with national service for boys. There is a very strange paradox about the religious instruction I received. from Canon Norwood at Red Hill School and I refer readers to my essay Canon Norwood's Legacy which explains this paradox.
On Nov 5th 1967 I had ridden from London to pass my old school and then to Tenterden, a town in Kent, and so back towards London where I paused at the National Trust showpiece Bodiam Castle to photograph it. The scooter refused to start and I pushed it wearily some 10 km to Robertsbridge, a wayside station on the Hastings to London line. There I recovered in a pub and the barman told me to run for the ten to eight train to London. I assumed that there would be a later train - MOST RASH because some trains did NOT stop at wayside stations - and enjoyed further snacks. I boarded a train at ten to mine and on the way the guard was emotional about some minor calamity at a place called Hither Green and then train would not go to Cannon Street but Victoria instead. When I reached my digs a resident said that there had been a major accident on the Hastings line and I flatly disbelieved him saying that I had just come from that direction. The following morning I learned that the 7.43 from Hastings that I should have caught had piled up at Hither Green with heavy loss of life.
I recovered the scooter the following Saturday and ride it to my parents' house at Seaford just half an hour's ride away. My parents had believed that I had been a victim of the crash when the stationmaster reported the scooter parked outside. My father then insisted that GOD had contrived for me to miss the doomed train and I was to REPENT and go to church regularly, go to the toilet regularly, go to BED no later than nine and stop associating with "Socialists". He earnestly believed in what I call "Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Christianity" which I define as Christian dogma in the language of the books about toy engines with silly faces. So did my mother who could NOT understand the everyday English of the London quality papers still less the content of my university essays or short stories. Apart from 1981-84 this was forced at me till I stopped seeing them in 1996 with great acrimonies and demands that I should cross the country to visit them. In teenage years I was sickened by the soppiness of the Christian religions especially Catholicism. In primary school years I was told that the Catholics were opposed to the lawful king and tried to blow up Parliament - I understandably confused Mary Tudor with the wife of King George the Fifth and I was told about the Martyrs of Lewes put to death in 1555 for being Protestants but got the date wrong as 1935 when King George the Fifth died. Catholic boys at successive schools sneaked on classmates and paraded their piety and I am uneasy in their company. Now after Catholics have burdened me with a CRIMINAL RECORD after they severely damaged my fine home I flatly refuse to have dealings with them or any other people who parade their beliefs.
As a result of the "Hither Green Row" I was impelled to write "The Socrates of Charford" where fictional schoolpal Alan Wright misses the doomed train, has the same row with his parents and his pregnant girlfriend declares "It's a mad god who derails trains to prove that he owns this world". Christians insist that GOD is omniscient, omnipotent and LOVING but God did NOT intervene to stop the train crash. In 1967 Baroness Wootton pleaded for a Secular Code of Conduct as acceptable and understandable as the rules of arithmetic. I have risen to the challenge and the outcome is "Alan Wright's Contributionism" which amounts to a religion as it embodies a concept of God but that is so far removed from mainstream religions as to be arrant heresy and thus to be suppressed as it makes organised religion "as obsolete as half-crowns". I can provide accounts of Contributionism's cardinal tenets and "theology" alongside Socrates of Charford stories written through Alan’s voice which explicitly illustrate how he is forced to act in moral dilemmas that could NOT happen in Biblical times. In my still burgeoning output of stories about moral dilemmas I may have the basis of a moral revolution and a way forwards for Mankind to resolve conflicts and advance to the level of spiritual maturity I call MOELWYNHOOD after Alan's middle name - where the universal goal for everybody on earth is to live an exemplary life - the ultimate beauty.
I anxiously await constructive feedback.
David Seagrave 13.4.2007
Saturday 10 October 2009
Friday 9 October 2009
Fair play in groups
This blog is very timely for me. I have been having a hurtful experience with group dynamics RIGHT NOW.
Its outcome is still hanging on one of the critical values of the aspie scene's whole genuineness about its cause and our needs, that applies to all parts of the scene. This is: will an aspie group (not Elas) observe a standard that few groups ever do in real life but all groups have a duty to fairness to observe, a standard that for aspies is basic to recognising what we are, that makes all the difference between caring for or doing a medical wrong to our needs. This standard is: that group will always, not sometimes, not selectively, always uphold personal fairness and put it top. It will care more about personal fairness than (1) any group dynamics or orders of dominance (that of course there should not be anyway), (2) any factor of the expediency for any group's life.
It is a commonplace aspie pain to come into conflict with groups over expediently wanting not to uphold personal fairness. That makes it a particular injustice if it happens in a group that is of or for aspies ourselves. Too often in my life I have come into conflict with either groups or folks personally, who have persisted in remaining noncommittal about an injustice until I'm banging my head against a wall. In groups where I can contact many of the members personally, when I reach this point my last resort is to send each member a message describing the problem and the serious ways the group is in the wrong unless it puts the problem right. I explain why they should not be upset and why if they do give their backing to the right outcome they should not feel their happy life in the group is disturbed in any way. Yet never once have I known this message to get through. I always find it does upset them, and this upsets me too.
So why would I still take this action? Because I can see no better alternative. As an aspie I can communicate more completely in a personal message than in a group, particularly when either the group or its most dominant voice are opposed to what I'm saying, in a written message I get to say everything I need to and they can't shut me up unfinished, and I place on each person a personal responsibility not to take the wrong unfair view on the offending issue, and I leave them with private space and time to absorb that. You see the logical sense it makes? It should never go wrong. So every time it does, it confirms something was fundamentally wrong with the group, that I had to discover sooner or later or else the pain would have been bigger and worse eventually. This then gives me a feeling of catharsis and of each offending group deserving its upset, practical points that that offset the pain over seeing fairweather friendships end at my time of need yet again. Every time, this hardens my determination to stick by the struggle and my reasoned belief that my tactic of circulating a message was correct. Every time.
Yet I don't want life to be punctuated by such experiences. I always find it devastatingly stressful to be forced into them. I want folks to be genuine enough about personal individual caring and fairness, never expediently double-crossing on it, so that these experiences should not arise. It is common sense to the ethic of support, in any supportive group set up as caring for our needs and problems, that any member of a group can raise with the others, for their thoughts, any problem with how fairly the group is working. This includes raising it personally with anyone on a contact list, and most obviously anyone who you are on confident enough terms with for it.Imagine if members were banned from spontaneously raising issues with each other about the group, telling each other there is any problem. Then the group's leadership, one person even, could cover up anything they liked about their reaction to any problem raised by any member. That would never be an ethical way to run any group, it would be a dictatorship.
Also, when a group compiles a policy or code about how it is going to cope with any sorts of difficulty, it needs to gather views from its members on what needs they need the code to reflect. That is responsible. Otherwise the policy can expect to run into unforseen problems and clashes. You can't have one centralised leader simply announce that s/he alone is going to write "a strict code of conduct" to favoured by him/erself and slap it on everyone.
If an announcement is taken literally, this is now the actual outcome of the case I have mentioned. We will see what degree of consultation there may be if any, when a code is presented. This illustrates, worldwide, why it is important to any aspie group's ethicality, its medical fairness to hearing all its members' needs, that a group must never be constituted as owned by one person who is the leader, who has final say over everything and can decree new policies alone. It must be constituted to consult collectively on all policies and codes, as Elas now does, so that they embrace all members' declared needs.
Constraint on the way we can talk about problems, so that it does not itself turn into personal bullying, is sensible. But a group should discuss its constraints and make sure they don't amount to censorship of the expression of any problem at all. It's right that in a discussion message you circulate, you should not be allowed to identify a person and make attacks. It's right that you should have to try firstly, to get a personal problem solved in the gentlest and least disruptive way. But what happens when the "proper channels" for this don't work? e.g. because they let you down and don't solve or recognise the problem? This is a possibility anywhere, throughout life, it is why one of the safeguards of freedom is entitlement to speak out about it, as a failing of the system. It's why free speech matters instead of offices of the astate deciding everything and what is ever heard about it.
You must be allowed to describe the nature of the problem, keeping names anonymous, and the nature of how you think the system for solving it has let you down, and consequent ideas for change. Anything you can support factually you must be allowed to say, not gagged on the excuse that it is a libel risk - the whole point of speaking factually verified is it's not libel. This is basic to the freedom and uncorruption of any group, to keeping leadership cover-ups impossible, hence to any group's sheer medical ethicality. This is a standard for local groups' ethicality that needs campaigning for.
Suppose you are drifting into an emotionally abused position in a group, because there is an issue of it that the one overcentralised leader wants not to take a position on. Suppose there is a generous supply of private "proper channels", to raise it through, including through a link to a bigger support organisation, but all you get is noncommittality that by default changes nothing, evasion of direct comment on the case at all, and libel scares against calling it an abuse even thought you re backed by verifiable facts. It is a basic human right for your wellbeing in the group, to rasise the problem direct to other members.
If this is banned on the excuse it might upset them, and this by one leader just announcing her/his own rules about it without consultation, then members are censored towards each iother from discussing when there is anything is going wrong with the group. Then the wrong outcome on an issue of serious harm could be imposed as one person's final decision and all talking about it would be banned. Ever mentioning any problem to anyone except through the leader, even anyone you closely trust, will be banned in the code and will count as misusing their contact info. This would be like communism and AFF. No aspie should feel protected in, or want to stay loyal to, any group that functions like that. A code that openly calls itself strict: I mean you run a mile. I won't class myself or anyone else as safely protected under such a system. This is a campaign issue the whole aspie scene needs to watch out for everywhere.
Consider, it's like saying: the country needs placing under some strict codes to stop disorder upsetting folks, in which our leader must keep us feeling safe by never being told otherwise, so let's abolish parliament and ban news of anything the government disfavours. On occasions in history this solution really has been popular. It has never turned out well.
Bob Lawless
Its outcome is still hanging on one of the critical values of the aspie scene's whole genuineness about its cause and our needs, that applies to all parts of the scene. This is: will an aspie group (not Elas) observe a standard that few groups ever do in real life but all groups have a duty to fairness to observe, a standard that for aspies is basic to recognising what we are, that makes all the difference between caring for or doing a medical wrong to our needs. This standard is: that group will always, not sometimes, not selectively, always uphold personal fairness and put it top. It will care more about personal fairness than (1) any group dynamics or orders of dominance (that of course there should not be anyway), (2) any factor of the expediency for any group's life.
It is a commonplace aspie pain to come into conflict with groups over expediently wanting not to uphold personal fairness. That makes it a particular injustice if it happens in a group that is of or for aspies ourselves. Too often in my life I have come into conflict with either groups or folks personally, who have persisted in remaining noncommittal about an injustice until I'm banging my head against a wall. In groups where I can contact many of the members personally, when I reach this point my last resort is to send each member a message describing the problem and the serious ways the group is in the wrong unless it puts the problem right. I explain why they should not be upset and why if they do give their backing to the right outcome they should not feel their happy life in the group is disturbed in any way. Yet never once have I known this message to get through. I always find it does upset them, and this upsets me too.
So why would I still take this action? Because I can see no better alternative. As an aspie I can communicate more completely in a personal message than in a group, particularly when either the group or its most dominant voice are opposed to what I'm saying, in a written message I get to say everything I need to and they can't shut me up unfinished, and I place on each person a personal responsibility not to take the wrong unfair view on the offending issue, and I leave them with private space and time to absorb that. You see the logical sense it makes? It should never go wrong. So every time it does, it confirms something was fundamentally wrong with the group, that I had to discover sooner or later or else the pain would have been bigger and worse eventually. This then gives me a feeling of catharsis and of each offending group deserving its upset, practical points that that offset the pain over seeing fairweather friendships end at my time of need yet again. Every time, this hardens my determination to stick by the struggle and my reasoned belief that my tactic of circulating a message was correct. Every time.
Yet I don't want life to be punctuated by such experiences. I always find it devastatingly stressful to be forced into them. I want folks to be genuine enough about personal individual caring and fairness, never expediently double-crossing on it, so that these experiences should not arise. It is common sense to the ethic of support, in any supportive group set up as caring for our needs and problems, that any member of a group can raise with the others, for their thoughts, any problem with how fairly the group is working. This includes raising it personally with anyone on a contact list, and most obviously anyone who you are on confident enough terms with for it.Imagine if members were banned from spontaneously raising issues with each other about the group, telling each other there is any problem. Then the group's leadership, one person even, could cover up anything they liked about their reaction to any problem raised by any member. That would never be an ethical way to run any group, it would be a dictatorship.
Also, when a group compiles a policy or code about how it is going to cope with any sorts of difficulty, it needs to gather views from its members on what needs they need the code to reflect. That is responsible. Otherwise the policy can expect to run into unforseen problems and clashes. You can't have one centralised leader simply announce that s/he alone is going to write "a strict code of conduct" to favoured by him/erself and slap it on everyone.
If an announcement is taken literally, this is now the actual outcome of the case I have mentioned. We will see what degree of consultation there may be if any, when a code is presented. This illustrates, worldwide, why it is important to any aspie group's ethicality, its medical fairness to hearing all its members' needs, that a group must never be constituted as owned by one person who is the leader, who has final say over everything and can decree new policies alone. It must be constituted to consult collectively on all policies and codes, as Elas now does, so that they embrace all members' declared needs.
Constraint on the way we can talk about problems, so that it does not itself turn into personal bullying, is sensible. But a group should discuss its constraints and make sure they don't amount to censorship of the expression of any problem at all. It's right that in a discussion message you circulate, you should not be allowed to identify a person and make attacks. It's right that you should have to try firstly, to get a personal problem solved in the gentlest and least disruptive way. But what happens when the "proper channels" for this don't work? e.g. because they let you down and don't solve or recognise the problem? This is a possibility anywhere, throughout life, it is why one of the safeguards of freedom is entitlement to speak out about it, as a failing of the system. It's why free speech matters instead of offices of the astate deciding everything and what is ever heard about it.
You must be allowed to describe the nature of the problem, keeping names anonymous, and the nature of how you think the system for solving it has let you down, and consequent ideas for change. Anything you can support factually you must be allowed to say, not gagged on the excuse that it is a libel risk - the whole point of speaking factually verified is it's not libel. This is basic to the freedom and uncorruption of any group, to keeping leadership cover-ups impossible, hence to any group's sheer medical ethicality. This is a standard for local groups' ethicality that needs campaigning for.
Suppose you are drifting into an emotionally abused position in a group, because there is an issue of it that the one overcentralised leader wants not to take a position on. Suppose there is a generous supply of private "proper channels", to raise it through, including through a link to a bigger support organisation, but all you get is noncommittality that by default changes nothing, evasion of direct comment on the case at all, and libel scares against calling it an abuse even thought you re backed by verifiable facts. It is a basic human right for your wellbeing in the group, to rasise the problem direct to other members.
If this is banned on the excuse it might upset them, and this by one leader just announcing her/his own rules about it without consultation, then members are censored towards each iother from discussing when there is anything is going wrong with the group. Then the wrong outcome on an issue of serious harm could be imposed as one person's final decision and all talking about it would be banned. Ever mentioning any problem to anyone except through the leader, even anyone you closely trust, will be banned in the code and will count as misusing their contact info. This would be like communism and AFF. No aspie should feel protected in, or want to stay loyal to, any group that functions like that. A code that openly calls itself strict: I mean you run a mile. I won't class myself or anyone else as safely protected under such a system. This is a campaign issue the whole aspie scene needs to watch out for everywhere.
Consider, it's like saying: the country needs placing under some strict codes to stop disorder upsetting folks, in which our leader must keep us feeling safe by never being told otherwise, so let's abolish parliament and ban news of anything the government disfavours. On occasions in history this solution really has been popular. It has never turned out well.
Bob Lawless
Sunday 4 October 2009
Contemporary Culture Is Empty
What sort of culture is mind-expanding? Would it be the earnest self-improving ethic of the upwardly mobile artisanate a century ago? Am I being unrealistic when I described the "Friarshill Culture" - the developing Souls, the pupils of Friarshill School who impress Distinguished Visitor Lincoln Steen so much that he settles in Wales?
I try to make a mark on each day. In a hoped for thereafter I will be judged by my dogged persistence to live according to the exacting Code of Behaviour which I myself, not Alan Wright, thought out. Yet whenever I have shown my good faith by sharing the fruits of my mind I get rebuffed. Philosophers like JS Mill have observed the chasm between popular culture and high-brow culture. Mill said that "poetry is superior to shove-halfpenny". American predatory capitalism devalues almost everything in life.
I have been in trouble for echoing Mill in some of my literary works, one of which is about a sunset I enjoyed. Now in one essay of mine I describe how in Avalonshire, successive generations of boys build Hornby type model trains and how model trains built by my generation are SACRED OBJECTS for the descendants of Avalonians. This led to successive generations of Avalonians becoming leaders and pace-setters as by their polymathy they engineer a worldwide moral revolution.
For the Avalonians, they hold that they are repeatedly incarnated to bestow ENDEOFACTS upon all whom they have dealings with. I coined the word ENDEOFACT to denote "a manifestation of God within someone" and that paramountly encompasses loyal service, freely given. The reward for struggling to live an exemplary life is the faculty to enjoy such gifts from God as a rowan in berry, every berry luminously red in the autumn sun.
I describe the ultimate joy through the voice of a proud father whose adult daughter teaches an EXTRATERRESTRIAL how to play a cathedral organ and the duo play with panache the sacred melodies of old Earth to the listening cosmos. I define wealth as the fully developed potential within each of us made manifest indeed, in joyful giving of oneself. Now as the hourglass of my life runs low I am very bitter that I am denied the means to give of myself, whilst contemporary culture scorns all that I value in myself.
David Seagrave, "Grosvenor", Shandwick Place, Edinburgh, 8.25pm, 26-9-09.
I try to make a mark on each day. In a hoped for thereafter I will be judged by my dogged persistence to live according to the exacting Code of Behaviour which I myself, not Alan Wright, thought out. Yet whenever I have shown my good faith by sharing the fruits of my mind I get rebuffed. Philosophers like JS Mill have observed the chasm between popular culture and high-brow culture. Mill said that "poetry is superior to shove-halfpenny". American predatory capitalism devalues almost everything in life.
I have been in trouble for echoing Mill in some of my literary works, one of which is about a sunset I enjoyed. Now in one essay of mine I describe how in Avalonshire, successive generations of boys build Hornby type model trains and how model trains built by my generation are SACRED OBJECTS for the descendants of Avalonians. This led to successive generations of Avalonians becoming leaders and pace-setters as by their polymathy they engineer a worldwide moral revolution.
For the Avalonians, they hold that they are repeatedly incarnated to bestow ENDEOFACTS upon all whom they have dealings with. I coined the word ENDEOFACT to denote "a manifestation of God within someone" and that paramountly encompasses loyal service, freely given. The reward for struggling to live an exemplary life is the faculty to enjoy such gifts from God as a rowan in berry, every berry luminously red in the autumn sun.
I describe the ultimate joy through the voice of a proud father whose adult daughter teaches an EXTRATERRESTRIAL how to play a cathedral organ and the duo play with panache the sacred melodies of old Earth to the listening cosmos. I define wealth as the fully developed potential within each of us made manifest indeed, in joyful giving of oneself. Now as the hourglass of my life runs low I am very bitter that I am denied the means to give of myself, whilst contemporary culture scorns all that I value in myself.
David Seagrave, "Grosvenor", Shandwick Place, Edinburgh, 8.25pm, 26-9-09.
Saturday 3 October 2009
Arthur Gascoyne school
This is a satirical false name, in deference to the group's wish not to use real names on this blog. But this school eventually closed down discredited 10 years after this scene, after a slow decline that began from the time described here. Its harmfulness and wrongness as a school is a well-established fact, there would be no libel whatever in using its real name. Not a shred. Speaking out factually about inconceivable savagings of aspies' childhoods and prospects like this is, and getting heard, is of urgent importance and has been for a generation. But here all the names here are false, including mine.
Bob Lawless is actually a character in some century-ago children's literature that my grandma introduced me to. When I was unwisely forced to resit O-level chemistry after getting a C in it I chose this name for the fictional alterego who I used to claim to be in chemistry lessons, I made up a story that Bob Lawless was an old man who wanted to learn chemistry and had to come wearing a mask of my face. I needed to avoid admitting to classmates the visible fact I was resitting, because I was under great stress as to its outcome, actually spending a year in fear of a humiliating fail in the headmaster's favourite subject, which was a bad subject for me, after the mercy of just passing it the first time. In fact I just got another C, so the resit was an ill-treating waste of time and stress that kept other O-level grades worse than expected too.
Right, here is the worst point in the long story of what happened, at a school whose belief in a hard work pressure and in teachers deciding what you can do and insisting you can do it, was utterly unsuitable and devastating of all my life chances. The date is early 80s, a period when when the right wing backlash forces in education felt very keen and confident they were going to win. The place is elswhere in Britain, as the mention of O-levels shows: I'm a returner to Scotland from growing up in exile, which adds another item to the pain of what being killed by this experience would have meant. The school's key mistake was this: they had interpreted some of my aspie strengths at holding simple information, as meaning I was "gifted", but I have an aspie weakness about solving puzzles and finding hidden clues in multilayered puzzles - including the homework questions asked in more advanced schoolwork !!!!!
**
Unresponsive catatonia, retained on a holding scale each morning, was escalated, winning the next day off. Its only effect was to make my mother desperate not to let our cultic utopia get brought down by these weird symptoms. Having played it cautiously on the original asleep over homework day, she now dutifully explored the limits of consistency of my responsiveness or unresponsiveness, and couldn't be stopped by angry answers because these just constituted a good sign of me keeping awake. Though she was thoroughly legally terrorised by school attendance, it shows how strong Fred's hypnotic appeal was, how schools' promises grip minds, for keeping on getting me to school to loom as such a priority in the face of such an obvious crisis.
There was no rational reason to try so hard: school attendance allows for illness. Why didn't she take me to the doctor at this point? Clearly it was fear of possibly being told to stop sending me to school. I was caught in a plausibility trap. Unless she stopped fighting my symptoms it could get me into a predicament of unresponsiveness to other, more official, people's faces. If I kept unresponsive through obvious infallible ways of waking a person up, my symptoms would just count as deliberate, with no allowance for exhibiting sheer terror because no good cause for it was officially supposed to exist, even psychosomatically. With the whole point of them as health symptoms defeated, I would be back in the trap of overwork or die, without having forced the world to recognise major stress.
You may wonder how I managed to stay entranced after a lifetime of inability to keep still. If anything shows how seriously and physically school was crushing my health, this does. I was like a catatonic limp rag all day, all usual vitality was gone.
So I couldn't remain totally unresponsive beyond common sense on the way to school, just repeatedly drowsy. If despite this I reached school, the problem could just get passed on to Fred with relief to see if he could cope with it, obliviously to what this really meant, which I couldn't confide at the risk of myth motivated underestimation if I was going to hold on to any leverage at all against a world clutching at straws, to actually make it stop. If I could still get delivered to school in the morning, my symptoms would only be accepted as making it impossible to function there if it turned out so in practice. This time was inexorably quick in coming.
On the second day, I reached school in the afternoon, for chemistry practical. I let myself get seen lying cold over in the lab bench before it started, but it was homework, not practical, that had to be forced as the crunch issue. I had to wake up and do my practical groggily, under jibes from Fred to buck up because "you've only got a cold". This was how seriously he had not taken my asleep over homework event. He put up a casual front at its aftermath, that homework mustn't retreat, and just pressurised me to pull myself together. Remember his bit in the newspaper about jogging his bright prospects' senses of humour?
The next day September 24 was the last, the most frightening day of my life. Unable to keep consistent blackout against it while showing a consistent fake effort to fight the sleep, under a constant jogging for wakefulness that was stressful in its own right, I reached school. It was the homework deadline, and the day both began and ended with chemistry lessons. I now had no alternative but to scare an angry dictator into taking my health scare seriously, to his face in the heart of his power.
Entering the dragon's lair, I could only keep as drowsy as possible, and made no impression at all by it. But I had positioned myself, when Fred asked for my homework, to descend in a way resembling a kind of autistic trance - remember this is long before I had ever heard of aspies -until my head was inside my bag, and keep it there, right in front of him, with my heart at fever pitch. Try to imagine doing this with the horror pressing close. "Robert?" he asked, softly at first, and I did nothing. Then "ROBERT!" It was his heartstopping bellow. he was willing to use it on me, and still take my eternal loyalty for granted regardless of it. It was the most vital moment in all my resistance to him, that I must not crack now. This was the pivot of far crisis.
I couldn't have done it without being religious, without knowing my existence wasn't utterly in Fred's hands. Contemplate that. This was the classic moment when the voice of authority goes for your split second instincts, to crack you like an egg because by long habit of earthly circumstance you crumple to placate the authority's usual power. It takes an effort of logic over fear to escape getting cracked like this, in a situation where you know that crumpling to a power beyond toleration is worse than keeping your head, with your feet solidly on the ground of eternity. I achieved this in a predicament where I could no more get away with directly defying the bellow than I could afford to obey it, so had to sustain a fudged disobedience of acting a groggily incoherent burble of incomplete arousal and darting my hands around in a half tranced panic act without rising from my tactical position slumped over my bag, able to switch myself off again. I kept this up, careful neither to produce any results nor express any desperation before his presence, to bluff him whether he would visibly attack me in this condition and discredit himself. I kept over that bag and waited, terrified.
He didn't. In our macabre contest of escalating mutual frights, each by our own destruction to destroy the other's destruction of our ideals, I had caught my dictator overreached.
He tried a quieter, though still bad tempered and cold, tone of beratement to nag me back to coherence, or "if you're ill, go home", as if I was in any state to get myself home. I was in no more state to leave than I had been in to arrive, in fact. It was utterly irrational for any adult to expect me to be in school. When this didn't work he tried to start the lesson, as if that would help. I got out a pencil, in crazy blurry movements, and visibly failed to hold it coherently, scrawling in pained jerks with foggy eyes and a bleary vacant face. This forced Fred to send me out of the lesson as ill. As soon as I was out I started an unresponsive sleep at the bench outside his office, there to be found at it by JR and later by the sixth form.
The scene in his office achieved forcing him to accept the serious existence of a problem stopping me functioning at school. It meant I could now force my complete removal from school without fearing any plausibility crises. All the plausibility was now established that I needed to causally link the homework pressure to my disintegration. I had pulled off the tricky task I had embarked on my breakdown for, to soundly derail my gifted myth career and through it Arthur Gascoyne school, and to force the world's forcing of me to beach at a limit, so I could continue to operate in this world to undo my old life's benefit to the cause that could create such an evil predicament.
Between all this being possible, or dying a helplessly permanent figure of believed credit to Arthur Gascoyne's methods, this confrontation of bluff with Fred's wrath that day was the branch point.
The day was still not over yet. I caused bemusement by slumbering catatonically through the private study period in the late morning, in the sixth form room. That it aroused no wave of ribaldry to bait me awake was an important barometer that the sixth form were having to take my breakdown seriously as officially recognised. I glanced idly at the prefects' report book for offences, which was lying around near me. 3 folks were named in it so far, all for using the wrong door. As a barometer of these prefects' bottomlessly unabashed enjoyment of serving the regime's absurdities, which carried on cyclically as class upon generation of hearts corroded by ribaldry reached the privilege and power lust of the sixth form, it sank me into cosmic despair at the whole world where it was possible for reasoning and scientific people to fall for the monstrosity of school, the destruction of dupes like me ensuring they would never realise the truth. The authoritarian will to dictate what a special class of master brains must be engineered to turn out like, genius off a production line, even had eugenic overtones.
Through the rowdier atmosphere of dinner hour, as I spilt blearily spluttering crumbs all down my tie, the classmate who had always been better at chemistry kept calling me "a great actor", with the censure all against me not Fred. Even if I was beyond physical violence, they didn't want to miss the chance to catch me out if possible. Neither did Fred.
Heath did not send me out of maths for going into a catatonia at the beginning, but kept me sitting listening quietly. There was no confrontation to panic Heath - and Fred took advantage and sent JR to interrupt the maths lesson and ask for my homework. He was a savage. Even after the morning, he wouldn't give up, but he was obviously rattled out of any more scenes with himself directly. Despite all the past week's warnings that he had a catastrophic meltdown on his hands, after all they had seen of his vicious crazy twisted persistence, he had taken the trouble to hunt me down through an intermediary, to catch me at a less unfunctioning time. Great guy?
Thinking fast, I had to get out of the classroom before I was caught in a contradiction between wake and trance, and awake enough to be valid to punish, in a sudden lurching moment. I got straight up and came out, past JR saying it wasn't necessary, and made for Fred's office, decoying her after me along the top corridor, to escalate the appearance of something anomalous being the matter that must already be implied by her use as an intermediary like this, and after finding me in an unresponsive sleep earlier. It had made key sense to have her find me, because as secretary she was in the front line of Arthur Gascoyne's public relations with parents, and handling the rapport with mine including my recent reasons for absence. Having had time to grow more drowsy again, I thus had her worried enough that Fred shouldn't show himself up as the obvious cause, that I could give her these events as the excuse for not having my homework sorted out and present. Now what she'd seen happening to me was correlated with Ned being up to something with my homework, and it was not making him look good.
JR went and checked on Fred's mood as an intermediary, giving me backing for the public image necessity of recognising my weird crisis as something serious. Fred was politically forced to back off for the day. It wouldn't have made any difference to me no longer coming to school after this day if he had had a disciplinary tantrum on me now, but it was important to keep the pressure on his image cranked up as high as possible, just as he was doing to me, to sustain the political ground I was gaining and make the day less dire to cope with.
He still asked to see me directly, but he didn't dare try a bellow again. He asked me questions about why my symptoms were happening, and how much sleep I'd had recently. Here too it was important not to have an instinct to placate him with self-justifying lies. It would draw suspicion on my breakdown if I knew a handy reason why it was happening that justified me to stop doing homework. I had to act as puzzled as everyone else, to keep Fred on dangerous ground.
Once I had stood up to these questions and convincingly wriggled out of having anything substantive to say, the trauma of this day was over. Fred laid it on thick about the kindness of his heart (sicK) in giving me an extra day for my mysterious condition. I knew there was never going to be an extra day.
I sat unobtrusively through the last chemistry lesson, writing marginally better in visible synchrony with the pressure of the morning being off. Gregory, present due to getting a low sub-Cambridge grade in his first sitting of Fred's wonder subject, played the vulture, necrophilially interrogating and discomforting Fred for still not having got my homework. I listened quietly glowing in the divine warmth that my life was one Fred no longer had the power to make misery. [ refers to an earlier scene where he told a homework offender in front of us, "I have the power to make your life misery."] This turning point, on the imminent edge of impossibility to survive, had reclaimed for liberty a chink of hope to turn the tables on Fred's awful plans and scupper his sensation program to subjugate more lives in his dismal misery factory.
My future status as a failiure for him was now secure. I had saved myself from being trapped on the wrong side of history. My most urgent desperate concern, with my whole identity at stake, had now been overcome, and there had been no certainty of that.
Bob Lawless
Bob Lawless is actually a character in some century-ago children's literature that my grandma introduced me to. When I was unwisely forced to resit O-level chemistry after getting a C in it I chose this name for the fictional alterego who I used to claim to be in chemistry lessons, I made up a story that Bob Lawless was an old man who wanted to learn chemistry and had to come wearing a mask of my face. I needed to avoid admitting to classmates the visible fact I was resitting, because I was under great stress as to its outcome, actually spending a year in fear of a humiliating fail in the headmaster's favourite subject, which was a bad subject for me, after the mercy of just passing it the first time. In fact I just got another C, so the resit was an ill-treating waste of time and stress that kept other O-level grades worse than expected too.
Right, here is the worst point in the long story of what happened, at a school whose belief in a hard work pressure and in teachers deciding what you can do and insisting you can do it, was utterly unsuitable and devastating of all my life chances. The date is early 80s, a period when when the right wing backlash forces in education felt very keen and confident they were going to win. The place is elswhere in Britain, as the mention of O-levels shows: I'm a returner to Scotland from growing up in exile, which adds another item to the pain of what being killed by this experience would have meant. The school's key mistake was this: they had interpreted some of my aspie strengths at holding simple information, as meaning I was "gifted", but I have an aspie weakness about solving puzzles and finding hidden clues in multilayered puzzles - including the homework questions asked in more advanced schoolwork !!!!!
**
Unresponsive catatonia, retained on a holding scale each morning, was escalated, winning the next day off. Its only effect was to make my mother desperate not to let our cultic utopia get brought down by these weird symptoms. Having played it cautiously on the original asleep over homework day, she now dutifully explored the limits of consistency of my responsiveness or unresponsiveness, and couldn't be stopped by angry answers because these just constituted a good sign of me keeping awake. Though she was thoroughly legally terrorised by school attendance, it shows how strong Fred's hypnotic appeal was, how schools' promises grip minds, for keeping on getting me to school to loom as such a priority in the face of such an obvious crisis.
There was no rational reason to try so hard: school attendance allows for illness. Why didn't she take me to the doctor at this point? Clearly it was fear of possibly being told to stop sending me to school. I was caught in a plausibility trap. Unless she stopped fighting my symptoms it could get me into a predicament of unresponsiveness to other, more official, people's faces. If I kept unresponsive through obvious infallible ways of waking a person up, my symptoms would just count as deliberate, with no allowance for exhibiting sheer terror because no good cause for it was officially supposed to exist, even psychosomatically. With the whole point of them as health symptoms defeated, I would be back in the trap of overwork or die, without having forced the world to recognise major stress.
You may wonder how I managed to stay entranced after a lifetime of inability to keep still. If anything shows how seriously and physically school was crushing my health, this does. I was like a catatonic limp rag all day, all usual vitality was gone.
So I couldn't remain totally unresponsive beyond common sense on the way to school, just repeatedly drowsy. If despite this I reached school, the problem could just get passed on to Fred with relief to see if he could cope with it, obliviously to what this really meant, which I couldn't confide at the risk of myth motivated underestimation if I was going to hold on to any leverage at all against a world clutching at straws, to actually make it stop. If I could still get delivered to school in the morning, my symptoms would only be accepted as making it impossible to function there if it turned out so in practice. This time was inexorably quick in coming.
On the second day, I reached school in the afternoon, for chemistry practical. I let myself get seen lying cold over in the lab bench before it started, but it was homework, not practical, that had to be forced as the crunch issue. I had to wake up and do my practical groggily, under jibes from Fred to buck up because "you've only got a cold". This was how seriously he had not taken my asleep over homework event. He put up a casual front at its aftermath, that homework mustn't retreat, and just pressurised me to pull myself together. Remember his bit in the newspaper about jogging his bright prospects' senses of humour?
The next day September 24 was the last, the most frightening day of my life. Unable to keep consistent blackout against it while showing a consistent fake effort to fight the sleep, under a constant jogging for wakefulness that was stressful in its own right, I reached school. It was the homework deadline, and the day both began and ended with chemistry lessons. I now had no alternative but to scare an angry dictator into taking my health scare seriously, to his face in the heart of his power.
Entering the dragon's lair, I could only keep as drowsy as possible, and made no impression at all by it. But I had positioned myself, when Fred asked for my homework, to descend in a way resembling a kind of autistic trance - remember this is long before I had ever heard of aspies -until my head was inside my bag, and keep it there, right in front of him, with my heart at fever pitch. Try to imagine doing this with the horror pressing close. "Robert?" he asked, softly at first, and I did nothing. Then "ROBERT!" It was his heartstopping bellow. he was willing to use it on me, and still take my eternal loyalty for granted regardless of it. It was the most vital moment in all my resistance to him, that I must not crack now. This was the pivot of far crisis.
I couldn't have done it without being religious, without knowing my existence wasn't utterly in Fred's hands. Contemplate that. This was the classic moment when the voice of authority goes for your split second instincts, to crack you like an egg because by long habit of earthly circumstance you crumple to placate the authority's usual power. It takes an effort of logic over fear to escape getting cracked like this, in a situation where you know that crumpling to a power beyond toleration is worse than keeping your head, with your feet solidly on the ground of eternity. I achieved this in a predicament where I could no more get away with directly defying the bellow than I could afford to obey it, so had to sustain a fudged disobedience of acting a groggily incoherent burble of incomplete arousal and darting my hands around in a half tranced panic act without rising from my tactical position slumped over my bag, able to switch myself off again. I kept this up, careful neither to produce any results nor express any desperation before his presence, to bluff him whether he would visibly attack me in this condition and discredit himself. I kept over that bag and waited, terrified.
He didn't. In our macabre contest of escalating mutual frights, each by our own destruction to destroy the other's destruction of our ideals, I had caught my dictator overreached.
He tried a quieter, though still bad tempered and cold, tone of beratement to nag me back to coherence, or "if you're ill, go home", as if I was in any state to get myself home. I was in no more state to leave than I had been in to arrive, in fact. It was utterly irrational for any adult to expect me to be in school. When this didn't work he tried to start the lesson, as if that would help. I got out a pencil, in crazy blurry movements, and visibly failed to hold it coherently, scrawling in pained jerks with foggy eyes and a bleary vacant face. This forced Fred to send me out of the lesson as ill. As soon as I was out I started an unresponsive sleep at the bench outside his office, there to be found at it by JR and later by the sixth form.
The scene in his office achieved forcing him to accept the serious existence of a problem stopping me functioning at school. It meant I could now force my complete removal from school without fearing any plausibility crises. All the plausibility was now established that I needed to causally link the homework pressure to my disintegration. I had pulled off the tricky task I had embarked on my breakdown for, to soundly derail my gifted myth career and through it Arthur Gascoyne school, and to force the world's forcing of me to beach at a limit, so I could continue to operate in this world to undo my old life's benefit to the cause that could create such an evil predicament.
Between all this being possible, or dying a helplessly permanent figure of believed credit to Arthur Gascoyne's methods, this confrontation of bluff with Fred's wrath that day was the branch point.
The day was still not over yet. I caused bemusement by slumbering catatonically through the private study period in the late morning, in the sixth form room. That it aroused no wave of ribaldry to bait me awake was an important barometer that the sixth form were having to take my breakdown seriously as officially recognised. I glanced idly at the prefects' report book for offences, which was lying around near me. 3 folks were named in it so far, all for using the wrong door. As a barometer of these prefects' bottomlessly unabashed enjoyment of serving the regime's absurdities, which carried on cyclically as class upon generation of hearts corroded by ribaldry reached the privilege and power lust of the sixth form, it sank me into cosmic despair at the whole world where it was possible for reasoning and scientific people to fall for the monstrosity of school, the destruction of dupes like me ensuring they would never realise the truth. The authoritarian will to dictate what a special class of master brains must be engineered to turn out like, genius off a production line, even had eugenic overtones.
Through the rowdier atmosphere of dinner hour, as I spilt blearily spluttering crumbs all down my tie, the classmate who had always been better at chemistry kept calling me "a great actor", with the censure all against me not Fred. Even if I was beyond physical violence, they didn't want to miss the chance to catch me out if possible. Neither did Fred.
Heath did not send me out of maths for going into a catatonia at the beginning, but kept me sitting listening quietly. There was no confrontation to panic Heath - and Fred took advantage and sent JR to interrupt the maths lesson and ask for my homework. He was a savage. Even after the morning, he wouldn't give up, but he was obviously rattled out of any more scenes with himself directly. Despite all the past week's warnings that he had a catastrophic meltdown on his hands, after all they had seen of his vicious crazy twisted persistence, he had taken the trouble to hunt me down through an intermediary, to catch me at a less unfunctioning time. Great guy?
Thinking fast, I had to get out of the classroom before I was caught in a contradiction between wake and trance, and awake enough to be valid to punish, in a sudden lurching moment. I got straight up and came out, past JR saying it wasn't necessary, and made for Fred's office, decoying her after me along the top corridor, to escalate the appearance of something anomalous being the matter that must already be implied by her use as an intermediary like this, and after finding me in an unresponsive sleep earlier. It had made key sense to have her find me, because as secretary she was in the front line of Arthur Gascoyne's public relations with parents, and handling the rapport with mine including my recent reasons for absence. Having had time to grow more drowsy again, I thus had her worried enough that Fred shouldn't show himself up as the obvious cause, that I could give her these events as the excuse for not having my homework sorted out and present. Now what she'd seen happening to me was correlated with Ned being up to something with my homework, and it was not making him look good.
JR went and checked on Fred's mood as an intermediary, giving me backing for the public image necessity of recognising my weird crisis as something serious. Fred was politically forced to back off for the day. It wouldn't have made any difference to me no longer coming to school after this day if he had had a disciplinary tantrum on me now, but it was important to keep the pressure on his image cranked up as high as possible, just as he was doing to me, to sustain the political ground I was gaining and make the day less dire to cope with.
He still asked to see me directly, but he didn't dare try a bellow again. He asked me questions about why my symptoms were happening, and how much sleep I'd had recently. Here too it was important not to have an instinct to placate him with self-justifying lies. It would draw suspicion on my breakdown if I knew a handy reason why it was happening that justified me to stop doing homework. I had to act as puzzled as everyone else, to keep Fred on dangerous ground.
Once I had stood up to these questions and convincingly wriggled out of having anything substantive to say, the trauma of this day was over. Fred laid it on thick about the kindness of his heart (sicK) in giving me an extra day for my mysterious condition. I knew there was never going to be an extra day.
I sat unobtrusively through the last chemistry lesson, writing marginally better in visible synchrony with the pressure of the morning being off. Gregory, present due to getting a low sub-Cambridge grade in his first sitting of Fred's wonder subject, played the vulture, necrophilially interrogating and discomforting Fred for still not having got my homework. I listened quietly glowing in the divine warmth that my life was one Fred no longer had the power to make misery. [ refers to an earlier scene where he told a homework offender in front of us, "I have the power to make your life misery."] This turning point, on the imminent edge of impossibility to survive, had reclaimed for liberty a chink of hope to turn the tables on Fred's awful plans and scupper his sensation program to subjugate more lives in his dismal misery factory.
My future status as a failiure for him was now secure. I had saved myself from being trapped on the wrong side of history. My most urgent desperate concern, with my whole identity at stake, had now been overcome, and there had been no certainty of that.
Bob Lawless
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