What Do I Have In Common With James Joyce And Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Well, first of all, obviously, they could write their asses off, like I can. They were autistic, I'm autistic. Joyce (1882 -1941) and Wittgenstein (1889-1951) didn't win the Nobel Prize in Literature (and it's not awarded posthumously), and I haven't won it yet. I'm not dead, but I'm freakin 54. Dead, no, grumpy, yes.

Doeblin, Musil, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, -- didn't win Nobels. All those Scandanavian writers nobody's ever heard of who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you know who didn't? August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

Today they announced the 2015 Literature Nobel, and as you can see, I'm not taking it well. They awarded it to some Belorussian lady, I'm sure she's a wonderful person and very deserving, yada yada, and that her books are magnificent, blah blah blah.

So. Maybe I'll have a great year between now and next October, a huge year, become rich and famous. If I do, of course, it will greatly increase my odds of winning a Nobel ("for his hilarious, poignant and profound blog posts about why he deserves it"), and of course, because of the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards Law of Microeconomics, it will also mean that I will no longer NEED one.

James Joyce really could've used one, that guy dedicated himself to his art, and his art didn't sell during his lifetime. Vincent Van Gogh all over again except that Joyce handled the commercial failure and lack of fame much better. (And better than I am at the moment, yeah, yeah.) I don't know whether Wittgenstein really needed a Nobel, he had a day job as a Cambridge professor.

But it still woulda been nice.

Still. Most Nobel laureates have been magnificent writers, that's why I feel I'm not going out on a limb to say that Svetlana Alexievich probably is too. Who knows, maybe she's so magnificent, and the prize will give her enough recognition, that it will be she who finally turns human life away from its nightmarish aspects, and then I won't need a Nobel even if I don't make a huge splash.

Whatever.

Asperger's Syndrome

I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2007. That's not very long ago. It's not as if I've been studying Asperger's or autism for decades, as have many other people. I don't consider myself an expert on Asperger's just because I have it. I certainly don't wish to present myself as some highly-qualified spokesperson for people on the autistic spectrum. But since I learned that I have it, it's been on my mind a lot.

Some people, myself included, think that Asperger's is autism, and that the difference between those of us who are diagnosed as Aspergers, and those who more traditionally would be called autistic, is a matter of degree in some symptoms, some of the differences in behavior between us and the neurologically typical (NT for short). So when I say I'm an Asperger, in my opinion, I'm saying I'm autistic. But again, I'm no expert. I'm trying to keep an open mind about all of this.

As I understand it, the best current research says that autistics and Aspergers differ from NT's in the structure and chemical processes of our brains. Most people seem to think that this difference constitutes a disorder, a malfunction.

Maybe so. But what bothers me about this view, by all appearances very much still the majority view, is that it seems not to account for the fact that many Aspegers and autistic people have very unusual talents and abilities. The most famous autistic person is a fictional character, the tittle character in the movie Rain Man. But the character is based on a real person, Kim Peek, and aw crap, as I learned just this minute surfing around looking for some info him, apparently Kim Peek may not actually be autistic!

You know, I feel like I'm opening so many cans of worms with this post...

Okay, forget Kim Peek, forget Rain Man. I gather that many Aspergers and autistics have unusual abilities, up to and including savant-level mathematical abilities comparable to those of the fictional Raymond-Rain Man. If a certain condition brings with it not just difficulties but also extraordinary abilities, is it accurate to call it a disability? Is it really inherently a problem? or a good thing, which only looks like a problem because it's misunderstood? Maybe more of us than is currently realized have unusual abilities, and maybe these abilities would be recognized more often if people looked for them more often. As opposed to treating us as if we had a disease. (Let alone a disease caused by vaccination, as Jenny McCarthy and other celebrities maintain, in a depressing popular attempt to set medical science back a century or two.)

It is said that Einstein and James Joyce may have been autistic, that Wittgenstein may have had Asperger's. If it's possible that those three, and some others of us, have unique talents wholly or in part because we have autism or Asperger's -- if that's the case, is it appropriate to want to cure us of our condition?

I wish merely to raise the question. I don't claim to have the answer.