Dead Horse Press

Thank you for so generously supporting my interns’ unauthorized goof-off project.

I’m lifting weights, listening to my buddy Marcus talk about judgement, decency, the place of mankind in the universe. I nod and think, my God, he’s talking to me. He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking, putting my own unspoken musings to words, to reality. My mind is connected to thousands of years of the tradition of human thought and wrestling with the divine. I put the weights down, look up. A 20-something young woman looks back at me from the gym mirror. In my ear, Marcus remarks on how glad he was that in his youth he resisted the urge to rape his slaves. Gee, Marcus, I guess I’m glad about that too. He says, “Consider the deformity of these characters, […]the effeminate, the savage, the beastly, the childish, the foolish, the crafty, the buffoonish, the faithless, the tyrannical.” I consider it.

I go on to read The Odyssey and The Illiad. I get invested in characters that periodically squabble about the women they’ve taken as war prizes. I open a random short story submitted to a fantasy fiction contest on Substack about a warlord raising the son of his enemy. The man’s going against tradition by not killing the child, and he’s venerated for it in the narrative. A passing sentence mentions his bedslaves. In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, I don’t resent this. I understand the context in which these stories written. I will not cancel Marcus fucking Aurelius, but nor will I ignore ideas in his work because they are inconvenient. I understand and interpret them as part of the whole.

So please don’t lecture me about all writers being “of their time.” Consider, instead, the simple and horrifying truth that every woman, and every slave, through all of history, has been exactly as human as you and I. They have been exactly as capable of intelligence, honor, strength, and creativity as any person in the modern era. No matter how “of their time” a writer was, this has always been true. Always. It is a difficult fact to comprehend, because comprehending it opens a vast pit beneath your feet into which you must fall, a pit of suffering — suffering, that is, of intellect, of creativity, of philosophical principle — on a scale you are not equipped to comprehend. But it must be comprehended. It is a logical truth.

When I read, despite all the castles of spiritual and natural wonder being built around me, I am periodically punted back into my own body with the realization that this is not about me. This is not for me. I am not a player in this. I am not the intended partner in this conversation. My engagement with these ideas on equal terms is explicitly precluded.

The best evidence available to me is my own experience, and I know that I am a woman, and I am human. I am thus aware, by my existence within my own consciousness, that women are capable of ambition, intelligence, and spiritual depth, such a large blind spot tends to call into question everything else that a work, fictional or otherwise, is trying to say about human nature or the natural way things are. If someone starts their treatise on meteorology by saying that the sky is green, one would naturally have some doubts about what follows.

Perhaps the great strength of womanhood is that it never, ever allows you to take things at face value.

And, eventually, I incorporated a lot of the ideas I discovered there into my own creative work. Peeling back the skin of a particularly bad story and pointing out all the flaws is a great way to teach someone how stories work. Eventually, this no longer suffices as creative education, and the student has to start looking for good examples to emulate, rather than bad examples to avoid (A Black Fox Running is one of those brain-stretching good examples).

However, once you actually start recommending a book, telling someone to actually seek it out rather than to avoid it, the question of spoilers comes into play. Now, this is a tricky subject, and I think my opinion on it differs from the mainstream one. Many people covet the unspoiled experience of a story, and I understand that. However, there have been multiple times in my life where the only reason I approached a story in the first place was because I stumbled upon a massive spoiler and thought hey, that sounds awesome, I’ll check it out! (this was the case with my favorite show, Black Sails, and one of my favorite books, Monstrous Regiment). Often, it’s knowing that there will be a big payoff to come that keeps me engaged with a work. It also helps to keep my attention when someone has already highlighted certain strengths of the book to me before I read — for instance, “the prose-style emphasizes the role of the environment in a really interesting way” or “I’m obsessed with this character.” That way, I know it’s worth continuing to invest my time and attention (I’ve been burned many times before).

Additionally, I think the best stories are able to hold up to multiple readings — ie, that they have more to offer as a whole even when the reader knows the linear events of the plot. Essentially, spoilers aren’t a major concern for me unless they make me think things are going to turn out shittily on a craft level, in which case I’m less likely to open the book at all.

Autistic people have no shared history, class, or culture. They barely share a common experience, since each person sees autism differently. It would be impossible to create an Autistic Party.

From Can Pariahs Change the World?

Our culture is built around a dualism, the contradiction between the Subject and the Object. When a human being embodies the Object, they will be called “the Other.”

What interests me is a Foucauldian concept of the Subject, where it is relational and defined by the power it wields within a modern capitalist society. This Subject is formed through a vast network of institutions that need to control the population and knowledge, classifying them into binaries (this is how the power of psychiatry over mental illness, medicine over bodies, etc., is maintained).

The Subject is the protagonist of reality, the model with which the individual must identify. The Other is something strange and unknown, but the Subject can only exist insofar as this Other exists. The Subject needs the Other to constitute itself, and, moreover, it needs to be able to dominate this Other.

The existence of the Subject is proven by its capacity to think and to form society through thought; therefore, the Other is irrationality, the lack of thought, Nature.

From each individual’s perspective, everyone is a Subject. But not all Subjects are equal: certain categories of individuals receive greater subjectivity, one might say, they are more recognized as Subjects by society.

Certain categories of individuals embody the Other in particular: women, Black people, homosexuals, etc. This division begins with the division of labor and expands throughout history, crystallizing within the framework of a class society. That is to say, depending on one’s position in the social division of labor, one can more fully embody the position of Subject.

In truth, the Other-Subject is the internalization of the oppressors and the oppressed. The Other does not have the benefit of thinking about their own reality; they are a subaltern, their consciousness is that of a failed version of the main Subject: women think through the man (and spectator) they have introjected, proletarians vote like bourgeois, etc.These ingrained habitus cause people to act based on this pattern, mostly remaining within their categories.

In other words, the Subject-Other is the conceptualization of the two sides of a social relation. These social relations are governed by the commodity fetishism which subordinates every aspect of society to a fixation on things, to the objectification of the human being. And for this reason, the Other is assimilated to the Object.

In today’s world, it is not possible to literally possess another human being, but the flip side of this is that it is possible to possess a human being in all other aspects of life by conceptualizing them as mere commodities to be possessed, which is what allows the status of the Other.

This means that when the Subject relates to the Other, it is based on wanting to obtain something, to acquire possession. In their interactions, the Subject seeks to mold the Other into a commodity.

What does this have to do with autism?

The autistic individual is particularly compelled to assume the position of the Other, literally failing to interact socially in a normal way. The Species decrees that certain individuals cannot easily assimilate into the social fabric. There are two layers to autistic alienation: original alienation and social alienation.

Mexican author Berenice Vargas García refers to the cultural artifacting that serves to place autistic individuals in a position of being seen as “pseudo-human mentally ill” as the “autistic reason”. The author points out that we should be critical of stereotypes that autistic people are inherently unempathetic and isolated, noting that this construct is part of a certain conceptualization not only of the subject itself, but of the idea of ​​humanity.

But for the moment, autistic people cannot even form a group to create their own subject parallel to the hegemonic one of society: autistic people have no shared history, class, or culture. They barely share a common experience, since each person sees autism differently. It would be impossible to create an Autistic Party.

Under these circumstances, How can autistic people free themselves, break free from the mold of the Other, without being able to constitute themselves as a group?

To assimilate to an oppressive and decadent society is, to an extent, to accept such oppression and decadence. This “inadaptation” must be cultivated and refined for social change.

The fae are inhuman. They laugh at sad times, they cry at joyous ones. They have their own rules for what is appropriate. They are offended at strange things because the gesture carries a different meaning in their eyes. They see things you do not, hear things you do not. “Normal” food is ash in the mouths of those acclimated to them- who’s to say that food outside the traditional offerings of honey and similar is not the same (in the realm of metaphor, anyway)?

To be outside the established social mode- - is no walk in the park. But the outsiderness gives you something valuable in the way you see and understand the world, even if you aren’t recognized for it. When you find others like you, you can build something new. You can even, at times, break the social mode open.