SCREE

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

Consider, for example:

TMZ airing live from Gertrude and Claudius’ wedding. Of course we see all the pomp and circumstance, but they just can’t help themselves, they have to point out and mock Hamlet in his mourning clothes.

The ghost of Hamlet, Sr. (which, textually, could be either a hallucination or real) as an AI conversation

Hamlet’s soliloquies and monologues as above, and we watch them on his YouTube channel

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern installing tracker software on Hamlet’s phone and being stunned when he discovers it

And also.

Finally.

Ophelia.

The Problem Of Ophelia gets solved through this lens.

For those who never studied Hamlet in a class: The Problem of Ophelia is the way she died. Gertrude has this entire extremely detailed monologue about it, from the songs Ophelia is singing as she drowns to what her clothes looked like in the water. She indicates that Ophelia’s clothes, “mermaid-like,” kept her afloat for at least several minutes. And yet there’s zero indication Gertrude tried to help her, to seek assistance from anyone else, or even to call out to Ophelia and be like “girl what the fuck are you doing?!” Which raises the question: why? Why did Gertrude just…watch this young girl die? Metatextually, it’s because Shakespeare was drawing on the tradition of the Greek Tragedy Death (in which showing the death onstage was extremely gauche–not to mention sometimes logistically impossible–but the death itself was the point of the piece, so the chorus would give a big long speech about how the death occurred), but because that is a device designed for a different kind of theatre, it now creates this ambiguity where Gertrude might or might not have committed negligent manslaughter.

You could literally solve the problem one of two ways using this multimedia approach. If you want a sympathetic Gertrude, then I’d go with Ophelia drowning on a security camera. Gertrude can be shown frantically sending the security guard to retrieve Ophelia, watching the screen anxiously for his arrival…but it’s too late. If you want a self-absorbed fuck for Gertrude, I’d straight up go with her filming something for the royal TikTok on a balcony with the stream showing in the background below her. She doesn’t even realize Ophelia was in distress until she’s editing.

TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA

Behold, the digital artchery glove!

….but Wait…

…….!!!

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

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Autistic people assume the speaker is telling the truth unless we've been prepped by, eg, a friend warning us, or the speaker being obviously incorrect about something we're students of, and other outside factors. We rarely come to an internal conclusion that someone is lying based on empathic skills and metacognition.

Allistic people also tend towards assuming a lie when presented with information they have NOT studied, but "know" is true due to internal factors, such as whether the truth engenders a feeling of sorrow or anger. This is part of why the "does their own research" issue is more prevalent in allistic spaces (though obviously not limited to them; just look at the exceptionally autistic userbase of lessWrong): any research that creates discomfort is rejected as a lie. And yes, it takes allistic academics a long time to overcome that reflex, but they do learn to as part of academic training these days (this was not always the case).

Reasons an allistic may "know" something also include their higher sensitivity to allistic body language and facial expression, which often leads to misreadings of autistic (and other disabled) body language. If you've ever had an allistic tell you that you're lying about your own emotional state (and they weren't an abuser), this is almost certainly what happened.

They pattern-matched your body language to that of an abled allistic person, and when you said something else, the natural conclusion was that you are keeping the truth a secret and saying something untrue to maintain that secret, which can "count" as lying depending on your intimacy with the allistic person in question.

Again this can be overcome with practice: allistic queer people for example are pretty good about this because of familiarity with the closet and how it affects secrecy.

And then, yeah, there's also the fact that stuff which many autistic people perceive as lies are instead perceived by allistics as "basic politeness" such as answering greeting questions (how are you, what's up, etc) with positive platitudes, even when experiencing an extremely negative situation or emotion. In this case, the question itself was not intended literally but as a greeting ritual, and so it should not be answered literally either, but instead completed as a ritual.

In that sense, allistic people expect these ritualized answers to be "lies," because the ritual is the important part not the literal meaning of the question.

And, of course, this is an incomplete list.

A few years ago, I read an essay by a romance writer who openly admitted that her books were trashy, formulaic, and not Great Art. But what she said is that she gets fan letters all the time. From women with six kids whose only time for themselves is reading her books. From women in abusive relationships who read her books to give them hope that loving relationships exist. From women with depression who manage to eke out some pleasure reading her books. From women whose lives are awful and who read her books to give them the strength to live another day.

And– she points out– the writers of Great Art have many virtues, but they do not generally get fan letters from people whose lives are miserable and who seek out comfort and joy from the books. Because most of the time when our lives are awful, we don’t seek out Great Art. We seek out, well, literary fast food. We seek out emotionally manipulative hurt/comfort or fluffy coffeeshop AUs or Mutual Pining where there is Only One Bed.

The Loop - opening and closing the same three websites in succession for 15 minutes at a time before realizing that there’s not going to be anything new or worth doing on those websites (my three are Tumblr, Youtube and Wikipedia)

The Ack - seeing you have a new message and, though you have no evidence that it’s anything even remotely noteworthy let alone negative, feel intense dread and procrastinate looking at the message for 30 minutes/5 hours/a week

The Shimmy - changing sitting/laying positions every 5 minutes because god dammit i’m not going to be able to focus on whatever task i need to do if I feel any unwelcome physical sensation

The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle - making a hot beverage for yourself and then putting it down slightly out of reach and then not drinking it until 45 minutes later when it has already gone cold

The Bellwether - scrolling on Tumblr and getting the urge to google something/look up something on Wikipedia, but you keep scrolling and forget what you wanted to look up so you frantically scroll back to the thing that prompted you to think about looking the other (un)related thing up in the first place

The Bop - earnestly insisting that you’re not anxious because the other person sees your leg bouncing and thinks that you’re about to go postal

The Poison Dart - hearing someone say something problematic out loud and freezing because, while you want to correct them gently, you also feel intense dread and RSD that if you even so much as suggest dissent the person will immediately and commensurately stab you to death or snap their fingers and open a trapdoor to hell beneath you

The Ghost Breath - realizing you haven’t texted your friend back/at all/in 3 weeks and thinking “Hmmm, I need to do that” and then you don’t do it and much more time passes by 

The Stim Package - eating an entire family-sized bag of chips in one sitting because having something to chew on helped you concentrate, at least a little

The Bullfrog - going to get something that you don’t use often but you know exactly where it is and then it’s not there and you just keep going back to that spot 5 more times before realizing you lost it or it’s somewhere else completely different (like, not even in the same building)

The Morning Mist - regularly forgetting what recent life events actually happened and which ones were from extremely vivid dreams

The Seesaw Rivet - feeling like a wounded child who is about to get in trouble during every interaction you have even as you are entering your mid-to-late-20s and genuinely wondering when that pattern is ever going to stop if ever