“Sustaining a sense of the solidness of a reality composed of multiple contradictory definitions takes unremitting effort... (B)ecause the most effective balance depends on many unpredictable factors, it is difficult to routinize the balance into formulas that prescribe a specific behavior for given conditions.”
(OK257)

And a sense of emotional risk heightens an autistic person’s stress at trying to emulate/calculate the above.

In Robert Pirsig's “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, there is a scene where the main character, a university student, rapidly considers response after response to an instructor's argument, scaring the professor with a series of changing facial expressions which suggest internal upheaval.

The emphasis seems to be on how situations are navigated; on one’s “style”. There may be charm to be found in style, but of what actual use is it? Quite possibly if autistic folks set aside others’ exhibitions of style as irrelevant, we are losing the opportunity to analyze what useful functions all that stuff might help perform. Maybe we just see it all as too much of a bother...

And the use of the word “formulas” suggests an analog process rather than the discrete, “table lookup” process I find myself using. Thing is, the tables are sparsely populated in some areas, and there’s a lot of uncharted territory too. So if the table lookup fails, have to drop to painstaking, slow calculation, like trying to derive the formula instead of already having it. Building “sand bridges” - fragile, ephemeral structural linkages of understanding, as vulnerable as sand castles - is bothersome too...

Last revised: June 19, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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